Meaningful Shapelessness

If 2021 were an artwork, what kind of artwork would it be?

Willie Cole, The Elegba Principle, 1995

In 2019, painter Amy Sillman was invited to curate a show from MoMA’s collection as part of the museum’s series “Artist’s Choice.” She chose to focus on the subject of shape— one that, as she rightly pointed out in an interview, is somehow set aside in the artistic discourse. The topic is rather relegated to internal discussions of formalist aesthetics in academic settings (I remember those concerns from my painting student years in Chicago, where my professors, many of them from the Imagist generation, were particularly keen in having us make “interesting shapes”).  But because of its very ubiquity in painting, shape as a thematic focus seems ungraspable. As Sillman wrote, “I wondered if shape, as the basis of everything you see, was too vast a topic for people to even address, too big for a theory.”

The topic of shape came back to my mind when New York Times columnist David Brooks said in his weekly conversation with Jonathan Capehart on PBS that 2021 felt like a “shapeless” year to him.

This led me to think that, due to its stubborn shapelessness, 2021 would pose a supreme curatorial challenge to Sillman were it a painting. So, just for the sake of partaking in some form in this end-of-year game of annual reviews, let’s see if we can determine what kind of artwork 2021 might be (or might have been, depending on whether you are reading this after 2021). I will not present an arbitrary “best-of” list but will instead mention a few artists and artworks that I feel contain qualities akin to the year we have just lived through. To be clear, I don’t seek to argue that the works I am about to mention literally represent 2021; instead, they contain characteristics that could belong to 2021 if that year were to be considered an artwork.

In the United States, the psychological effects of the pandemic and the political climate created by the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol insurrection, the feeling of foreboding about the next political chapter and the social fragmentation and division we are living in reminds me of two works in particular: first  Mircea Cantor’s 2005 Deeparture,  a disturbing video of a deer being circled by a wolf inside a white cube; and second, George Tooker’s 1950 painting The Subway.  

Mircea Cantor, Deeparture, video, 2005

George Tooker, The Subway, 1950

At times 2021 has felt like Venezuelan artist’s Ivan Candeo’s 2009 video work Inercia, of a cyclist in a stationary bike endlessly cycling toward an image of a path with the image of Simón Bolívar to the side— a clear indictment of Venezuelan Chavismo and a specific metaphor for the never fulfilled promise of economic and social progress in Venezuela — one that can also extend to many other countries in Latin America.

Ivan Candeo, Inercia, 2009, video

Mask-wearing and vaccine-taking rules have made us become aware of how our fates are inextricably linked to one another and have also made us become very sensitive about lockdowns and isolation. For that reason, 2021 shares characteristics with Tehching Sieh’s and Linda Montano’s 1983  One Year Performance where they lived tied with an 8 ft. rope for 12 months. Given also our back and forth with lockdowns and entrapment I thought of Graciela Carnevale’s Acción de Encierro (Lock-up Action) from 1968, where she locked up the gallery on the day of the opening with all the opening guests inside.

Tehching Tsieh and Linda Mary Montano, Art/Life, One Year Performance, 1983-84

Graciela Carnevale, Acción del encierro, 1968

However, 2021 was less The Exterminating Angel and more of a constant maze of supposed exits that lead to more enclosures with exits that lead to more enclosures and so forth. In that sense, 2021 had the labyrinthine quality of  Willie Cole’s 1995 installation titled The Elegba Principle, a maze of 72 rotating doors built in groups of four, each inscribed with a word that, when pushed, leads one to another set of doors: a symbolic piece about the way we make choices but how the seeming progress we make only brings us further into a never-ending sets of doorways.

Other times I have felt that 2021 as an artwork could/should have the bite of Sonja Ivekovic’s "Lady Rosa of Luxembourg" from 2001, where she made an altered replica of Luxembourg’s national symbol known as the Golden Lady or Gëlle Fra, making her look visibly pregnant in the new version— not only a game of words making the sculpture as a memorial to the German revolutionary leader but also making it a feminist statement about violence against women.

Sanja Ivekovic, Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, 2001

And, finally, perhaps most fittingly, I feel 2021 as an artwork feels quite a lot like Martin Kippenberger’s The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, referencing the end of Kafka’s famous novel where the main protagonist, Karl Rossman, applies for a job at the “biggest theater in the world” where “whoever wants to become an artist should sign up.” The installation of several seemingly random tables and chairs laid out on a green, painted sports field, portray a nightmarish bureaucratic job interview scenario. Kippenberger’s work, in its representation of sluggish bureaucracy and the dominance of the pedestrian administrative sopor over our lives feels particularly representative of the period we have just lived, between the bureaucracy of Covid tests, the apparent inability of governments to respond to increasingly urgent and life-threatening problems, the massive layoffs followed by The Big Resignation and the existential alienation that we currently experience, supposedly in close proximity to others through social media and yet more separated from each other than ever.

Martin Kippenberger, The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika”, 1994

So, 2021 might have been a shapeless year, but for all its shapelessness as well as the disappointments it carried it was not a meaningless one. On the contrary, in many ways it was charged with feelings of anticipation, deception, containment, promise and, perhaps ultimately Sisyphean frustration— all from which we have learned a great deal. It was not a year spent in vain, and for those of us who consider ourselves optimists, we must believe that there was also good in it. If it all started in uncertainty and even violence, I want to believe that it ends with a certain degree of hope.  We will continue fighting in 2022 toward that goal, but as we toast for the new year, like the reassuring series  of film stills compiled by Allan McCollum, we have to hope that everything will be ok.

Allan McCollum, An Ongoing Collection of Screengrabs with Reassuring Subtitles , 2015-present