Instituting memories - A conversation with virgil b/g taylor

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of The Critical Practices Program in fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

In this conversation I am very happy to welcome virgil b/g taylor. With a background in public history and fine arts, Virgil's interest focuses on time and history and especially on moments of transition and histories of crisis and care through the use of various artistic media, including printmaking, film and installation. Virgil is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement VI with a collective research focus on modes of governance through the lens of institutions. Today, we discuss, among other things, about the notion of exclusion and access in instituting otherwise.

Virgil, welcome to Pali-Room!

Thanks Myrto. It's nice to be here.

I am very glad to be sharing the room with you today and I would like to start our conversation by introducing a bit your practice. You are making a lot of things. You make zines, posters, as well as videos and installations. You also write a lot and you are involved in various communities that foster practices of sharing, studying, exchanging, and thus strengthening from within. My question is, what is the thread that binds all these different practices together?

Well, that was very generous, because I don't know if there is a thread. But if there is one, it's probably studying —or studies or study— as an activity. That's something that really emerged with my collaborative practice with Ashkan Sepahvand, which we have named sssssssSssss or 13 's', one arbitrarily capitalized, where we really focus quite intently on the question of study. But in general, as someone who moves between installation and images and video, but also writing and research, the question of study and creating the conditions for reading more broadly, but study in particular, is something that I try to organize my practice around.

After my bachelor's, I was living in New York and I ended up working with a community called What Would an HIV Doula Do?, which is a community of a wide variety of practitioners. All of us are organized around this question, which we use, of what would an HIV doula do to think about and focus on questions of care in the context of an ongoing epidemic? But a lot of what I took from that experience was this studying of history and really being a student of history and learning not only from history as a thing in the past, but as something that's around us in the present, and that it's something that people who you can be close with and speak to have experienced directly and something that has marked the spaces that we move through. And so, I really learned to study in a really broad sense when I was living in New York and working with WWHIVDD?. So I would say study is something I do a lot with my design projects where I'll take some broader topic or very, very minor topic and study it and visit archives online or in person and collect images and reflect on it and build a text. Or in my recent project in New York where I created an exhibition space dedicated to having a spot for people to stop and study a text that I prepared as a reflection on the materials I had studied to produce the exhibition.

Or like the Study Object Room that you made at Studio Voltaire.

That's a perfect example where I was invited to organize what was —I think initially intended to be— a pretty straightforward reading group, and instead I created it as a series of invitations where I asked friends and colleagues who I already, so to speak, study with, maybe in informal settings, to formally bring a text they are interested in, read it together, and then discuss it with a group of online audience members. And there the title of Study Object Room is both a list of the activity, the thing and the space. But also this idea of like a study object I think is really important to me. Basically, everything that I do is around the question of a study object, whether it is making one or engaging with one.

I am glad that you bring up these examples on the notion of study, because that takes me to my next question that has to do with language. I think that language plays a pivotal role in your practice, either through your own writings or through the set-up of these collaborative situations or reading groups. Language for me is a primary way of constituting ourselves and constituting the way that we relate to the world that surrounds us. And by constituting we are also instituting a way of relating. So for me, language is an institution and I am wondering how do you perceive your relation with language?

I am interested in both the way that language can communicate and can contain information or present information or move information through a text and how that process is not necessarily a purely nice thing, that it also can be implicated in a process of extraction or other forms of violence that happen when you move a thing from one place to another. But also how language is a thing in itself and that words —both in their written form and in their spoken form— have a shape and a color and a texture of their own and can be treated like material, like paint or in their musical qualities. Working as an artist who works with language you have this rare opportunity of something that's always working on multiple registers already. Language is always already communicating, but also always already a material. And so you can think about it. The way of moving between different registers is something that happens really naturally with language. And I think that has become really exciting for me. And so I thought about it in terms of explaining my practice because also when you really begin to think about language as a material, then even the act of articulating oneself becomes like a space of artistic activity. And I think that's really exciting.

Thinking of language as also a mode of representation, I am also thinking about its restrictions, like whose voices are being heard, or how can we speak for those whose categories we do not inhabit, and speaking of institutions, how do we institute otherwise? I am wondering if you have encountered these questions in your practice, especially about the voices. I remember that in your application, you talked a lot about the notion of exclusion or being included and how Ahmed inspired you.

I think one issue that's been really important to me and something that I've been thinking a lot about in terms of my own subjective position within it is basically the treatment of Palestinians in Germany as part of Germany's broader self-understanding of its response to antisemitism and anti-Zionism and its conflation of these things. In May 2022, there was a series of events in Berlin that were canceled by the authorities because the authorities said that it was not possible for a coalition of Palestinian groups to commemorate the Nakba or for a Jewish group to commemorate or to honor the life of a journalist who was murdered in Palestine. You know, what I appreciate about Sara Ahmed's work and why I think I quoted her in the application and I continue to think about her writing is that she moves really helpfully between the registers of the spectacular and political and the intimate and personal. So the text that I was referencing in the application is her writing about what happens when you push back against forms of exclusion that happen in the professional space, but that experience is deeply related to broader systemic things in her writing. So I think that as a Jewish person who's moved to Germany from the US, I experienced simultaneously these forms of active inclusion in the German context as well as experience forms of exclusion, but also at the same time see exclusion from Germany and from German society carried out, so to speak, in my name, but in a way that often, even though the people who are seeking to include me by excluding others and excluding me. So I think that's why I brought up this thing that both events organized by Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews were banned on the same weekend in Berlin, because you see this complex layering of exclusion and inclusion and understand that those sorts of actions are always bound up in each other.

But I think it's important to keep this question that you had posed before "what is made exclusive in the project of inclusion". I think that resonates a lot with what you just described from the recent events that happened. Speaking of this notion of inclusion and exclusion, I'm thinking also about the inside and the outside of the institution that we tend to refer to. And I feel that if we want to institute the change, this change needs to happen from a space in between instead of, you know, either the inside or the outside. And I am wondering if you see this transformative potential and if so, where does that leave for you?

I think... You know, the thing that comes to mind is that the space between is also neither. It is neither and both. And I think that a lot of time change doesn't happen when people hold on to a position, when people become attached to being either inside or outside. I think the potential of the in-between is also recognizing that one might end up losing that previous position or embracing the reality of not having either of those positions and finding power in that position. So I think right now where I go to is really the position of neither of losing the institution entirely, not in the sense of even actively working to end the institution per se, but also beginning from a place —beginning already from a place— where that institution does not exist in its current form in that in-between, and then working from there to produce that vision for the world from a position of vision to already be looking beyond it, to already have an abolitionist orientation towards that if it's an institution of oppression —to have an abolitionist approach of kind of believing firmly in its non necessity and nonexistence and moving from there. That's the potential of the in-between. What I like about the in-between is that there's also this other in-between if they are both and neither. And you know it can be the bringing together of both inside and outside, but also then working together on this neither position of this new thing being a real revolution or a revolutionary possibility.

I like this neither and both. It is a paradox to bring them together.

Yeah, but you have this dialectic and this oppositional potential. I don't know. It feels as I was talking that this is a very lovey dovey version of nihilism, basically, but not really nihilism because there is also the potential. There is not that there's no potential in both, but it is like recognizing the proximity of both inside and outside to neither and I think that is really where, as you said, the transformative potential comes from.

I would like to close our conversation with a quote by Sara Ahmed that is also an inspiration for you, as you mentioned, where she says that "the very labor of transforming institutions or at least aiming for transformation, is how we learn about institutions as formations." I think that in your recent exhibition at Artists Space in New York, titled 'Minor Publics', you attempted that by revisiting a work by Sol LeWitt and further explored the boundaries between art and memorial. To sum it up, I think that the constitution of memory is also part of the process of instituting and I'm wondering how does this notion of memory resonate with you?

My exhibition project in New York was focused on this work by LeWitt, called Black Form-Dedicated to the Missing Jews, which was originally commissioned as a temporary sculpture for the Sculpture Projects Münster in 1987. And then, when LeWitt was preparing the work for the exhibition, he decided to change the title to its current title, which in that linguistic change transformed the function of the artwork from being simply a temporary public artwork to being what was then understood as a potential memorial, which meant that the community in Münster of both the citizens, but also the different institutions who had control over this sculptural object — changed the way they reacted to it, and it ended up being deinstalled and then purchased by a different German city, Hamburg, as a memorial where it still stands today. I am thinking about your question. What comes to mind particularly is the title of the work and the way it uses this formulation of dedicated to the Missing Jews, which in interviews and looking at other works that he made on this topic is referring to the generations who didn't come after, whether because the families were murdered by the Nazi Party during World War II or they left Germany. And so there's this absence that he is referring to.

So it's like he is using the language, to go back to our previous discussion, to fill in these gaps.

Yeah. So, you know, what's interesting is that the artwork doesn't change its form, when he changes the title. He had already been planning this sculpture as it was constructed. He just changed the title. And you see all these institutional practices that try to handle this change. Most notably, the catalog for the Sculpture Projects Münster doesn't acknowledge the title, the catalog essay doesn't acknowledge the title of the work. It's mentioned in the captions of the images, but the body of the text doesn't address the title or the topic implied by the title. And I've seen a letter from the author of that essay apologizing that no one told him that the title was changed. Unfortunately the author passed away and the curator who is still living didn't answer my requests for more information. So, I'm not quite sure about the truth of that misunderstanding. But I think for me, the gist of what is interesting about also this gesture of the particular language of absence that you see in LeWitt's work and what it says about how memory is a part of the process of instituting is that memory is something that's oriented to the past, but it's also really an aspect of the present. And so, when memory is absent in the present, what can be instituted from memory is different. So the absence of a memory is also something. It's not only what memory brings in the past to the present. But it's like what memories are even there to bring things forth is really, I think, a critical part of the question of the relationship between memory and institutions. What I really learned from doing this project in New York was how important it was that LeWitt was pointing to this absence.

One happy thing that happened as I was preparing the exhibition is that I was able to borrow a sketch of LeWitt's sculpture from the LeWitt Estate, which was really amazing to have that piece of the archive present in the exhibition. I was gifted really generously a new book about LeWitt by the Estate, which is this book called Locating Sol LeWitt, which was edited by the scholar David S. Areford. David Areford, wrote an essay in 'Locating LeWitt'. That essay, I think, said a lot of the things that I suspected about his attention to absence and how even though LeWitt had spent many decades explaining that his art had nothing to do with content and was a purely formal thing, that what he did addressed this quite intense contextual subject matter that he felt it very deeply. I can really recommend that essay in "Locating Sol LeWitt".

Thank you, Virgil. Can you walk us through the exhibition and talk a little bit about the works?

So, the exhibition Minor Publics is structured around what I call a script, which was this text called "Bima", which was a 4000 word essay that I wrote in part in Athens at Onassis AiR. The title "Bima" is actually something I learned when we did a trip to —or learned more about or reencountered— when we did a trip to Thessaloniki and I learned that the Greek word for altar (βήμα) is the same word originally as the Hebrew word bima for stage or altar. And I really began to think about LeWitts' sculpture in terms of being a tribune or a stage upon which one speaks or reads or engages. And so, for the exhibition, I took this text that I prepared and made it the center by putting it on a table with chairs for people to read at. And then, I created a series of graphic interventions, some of which were these quite large-scale vinyl billboard size prints, and some were smaller inkjet and offset printed objects that surrounded the space for reading, when pulled quotes from that text, to create a condition where the text can be encountered both in its full form, as a linear thing to be read, but also fragments of it were available in different ways. And then, as a thread through those works were a series of images, this drawing by LeWitt of the sculpture, a photograph of its demolition from the 1980s, a photograph I took in 2021 of the sculpture from a point of view that it's often not depicted, where it looks quite diminished and small, and last, a small archival postcard of the Kaiser Wilhelm Monument that sit on the site that LeWitt selected for his installation in the 1980s. It was this space for study and there were different ways to access it.

And then, the exhibition also extended to the outside of the gallery where we pasted some of the posters onto the outside wall of the gallery and other aspects of it faced the window. So I wanted to create different levels of intensity with which one could encounter it so that the expectation wasn't that the only way to understand the work is to read all 4000 —to be honest, quite fragmented and strange— words that I wrote. But also there were other ways to approach it. The texts and images are all available at the Artists Space website. You can download the PDF and it's formatted in two ways. One is in this large A3 sized gray format and one in an A4 format that's a little bit more legible or easier to read if the larger scale formatting is a bit awkward for you. So yes, there are different ways of accessing it there. And there is also a book that we produced called Fag Tips for Artists Space, where I commissioned around ten different essays responding to a prompt that emerged as I was doing the writing for my own text. My text is really trying to think through the difference between an artwork and a memorial and I realized running that, that I had a question, which was "what is an artwork?" And I proposed that in a somewhat abstracted way to colleagues and people I work with and friends and asked them to think about what constitutes an artwork. That book is available from Artists Space as well.

Well, it seems that you created a lot of entry points for the audience to fill in these absences that we were talking about. It's been a pleasure to talk with you today. Virgil, thank you so much for our discussion.

Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure and an honor.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.