INTRNATIONAL ART AND CULTUR

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THASTR GATS: HOW TOUILD A HOUS MUSUM

MIRA DAYAL — SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

Theaster Gates: How to Build a House MuseumArt Gallery of Ontario317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, ON, Canada M5T 1G4 July 21, 2016 – October 30, 2016

Though gaudy, the shimmering gold curtain that faces visitors to Theaster Gates’s How to Build a House Museum is anear­perfect introduction to the show. Curtains are suggestive of theater, foreshadowing a big reveal or an experiencefree from societal constraints. This curtain hangs from the rafters of the fifth­floor gallery, the crown of the institution,and conceals the gallery wall by foregrounding its own secondary surface. Best of all, it is not explicitly treated as awork in itself.

Theaster Gates, House Heads Liberation Training, 2016. Still from color video footage © 2016 Theaster Gates. Photo: Chris Strong

Photography

Theaster Gates: How to Build a House Museum, installation shot (detail) ©Theaster Gates, 2016

Now that the visitor has noticed that they are indeed inside a gallery, the fact that it is segmented by a series of wallsand smaller structures should be of no surprise. Rather, the visitor should be acutely aware that some traditionaldivisions have been removed—such as the wall behind a vitrine that once concealed the storage room beyond—andthose divisions that do exist do not function traditionally. Even sound travels differently through the body as it walksthrough this series of spaces.

Attention to structures is crucial, for this show considers that of the House Museum. Gates has built several structuresand spaces within the AGO that are museums in themselves, “dedicated to the potential of Black creativity andfreedom.” After first obscuring one type of infrastructure, Gates begins building another. Appropriately, the show openswith one house dedicated to house (music). Stacks of speakers and recording equipment line the far wall of the wood­paneled building, and a plaque blocks the entryway. Frankie Knuckles is the evoked icon, and his music is the firstsonic experience through which one walks; because the actual Shrine is much smaller than its encompassing gallery,one naturally encircles it.

Theaster Gates: How to Build a House Museum, installation shot (detail) ©Theaster Gates, 2016

Surrounding this monument, hanging on the walls of the gallery, are paintings of colorful forms on white grounds. Theviolence of these abstractions is revealed only in the next room, where one discovers that their shapes and patternswere derived from representational graphs of the relative “progress” made by black people in America, originallycharted by W.E.B. Du Bois. Such figures as illiteracy rates, business ownership, and “Crime among AmericanNegroes” become darkly playful compositions: the rise and fall of a black line on a red grid, the easy rhythm conveyedby a series of variable­width bars, or the aesthetic harmony of a stacked pyramid.

But apart from their physical proximity, how do these canvases relate to the house of the “Godfather of House”? AsKnuckles’s DJ sets play, the red waveform of the recording blinks in red LED lights from the mixer monitor. Itsmovement visually resembles that of the bar graph, aurally echoes the idea of “progress.” In the same roomcontaining those nineteenth­century charts from Du Bois, two contemporary letters in a display case againcontemplate this elusive theme. One, from Gates, is addressed “Dear Friend,” and invites the recipient to respond with“a personal letter to me on your black progress, especially in relation to your artistic practice.” The other is one suchresponse from Kerry James Marshall, who invites criticism of the terms “Black,” “Negro,” and “progress.” All responsesare compiled in the accompanying publication, Letters of Negro Progress.

Theaster Gates: How to Build a House Museum, installation shot (detail) ©Theaster Gates, 2016

These orbiting conversations on art, identity, and progress also inevitably invoke art history, whose canonical texts andexhibitions have routinely excluded black artists from major exhibitions (perhaps most recently Art Aids America,criticized by black activists in person and Julia Bryan­Wilson in print). Indeed, Gates was clearly referencing the often­jarring juxtapositions that make up the foundations of academic art history when he arranged this gallery. Nineteenth­century landscape paintings by a self­taught black artist hang on the walls, Baroque sculptures of dancing figures faceeach other in an otherwise sterile vitrine, and baseball caps from Knuckles’s collection are displayed commercially in arow within that nearby open­ended vitrine. A model house, wooden crates, and an insulation blanket are visible in thestorage room behind the caps. These materials represent what is needed to construct any house or museum andallude to the other house museum dedicated to brickmaker George Black. In these anachronous displays, Gatesseems interested in how culture is nonlinear, approaches to institutional critique double back, and embracingdecontextualization as art may be another type of progress.

Theaster Gates, House Heads Liberation Training, 2016. Still from color video footage © 2016 Theaster Gates. Photo:Chris Strong Photography

Decontextualization may be a form of movement or insurrection (Gates uses both verbs in his “Mission” statement ona black slab near the entry), but the more obvious core of this show is literal song and dance. In the space of thedeepest gallery, the video House Heads Liberation Training depicts bodies in states of musical rapture. Its luminousprojection casts a purplish hue across the walls. The mirrored surface of the rotating, body­sized sculpture Housebergcreates the visual effect of lights dancing towards the viewer. It is not surprising, then, that How to Build a HouseMuseum opened with a house party in this room, which was then initiated as art by sound and movement.

But like all exhibitions, and like all progress, this show must eventually end here, to be reactivated elsewhere if all goeswell. The show is perhaps the least permanent of Gates’s monuments, but the metaphors of reconstruction throughoutthe show are perhaps more potent than any single house museum the artist could have built.

AGO BLACK ACTIVISM BRICKMAKER FRANKIE KNUCKLES GEORGE BLACK HOUSE MUESEUM HOUSE MUSIC

INSTALLATION KERRY JAMES MARSHALL LIBERATION PROGRESS THEASTER GATES THEATER W.E.B. DU BOIS

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Theaster Gates: How to Build a House Museum, installation shot (detail) ©Theaster Gates, 2016

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Aout the Author

Mira DaalMira Dayal is an artist, critic, and curator based in New York. She is interested in performance, fiction, outer space,and how value operates within art. This year, she launched the first undergraduate journal of art criticism, JAC.