The exhibition “ONE DAY” featured eighteen black-and-white photographic prints developed from Polaroid slides made during a twelve-hour photo shoot that took place on Long Island, New York, in 1992. The artists who arranged the shoot—and the works’ subjects—were Marlene McCarty, known for her provocative text paintings and mural-size series of “Murder Girl” drawings (1995–2014), and Donald Moffett, a painter and sculptor who created iconic agitprop posters such as He Kills Me, 1987. ACT UP used those posters to denounce Ronald Reagan for his apathy and negligence around the AIDS crisis. McCarty and Moffett are longtime activists: From 1988 to 1995 they were members of Gran Fury—ACT UP’s ministry of propaganda, if you will—and founded the design firm Bureau, which operated between 1989 and 2001.
Across two galleries in the Alice Austen House, a nationally designated site of LGBTQ+ history on Staten Island, their untitled prints were hung semi-chronologically, each mounted, framed, and labeled with a time stamp. In two photographs taken at 8:16 AM and 8:39 AM, respectively, the artists, role-playing as American pilgrim women, are in a field, pretending to plow and sow. One of them—McCarty and Moffett were virtually indistinguishable here—crawls before the other like a draft animal. An hour later, the pilgrims are on a pebbly shore, where one, standing, appears to urinate on the other, who is, again, on all fours.
McCarty and Moffett seemed to be overtly referencing the conjugal and political subjugation endured by female members of the seventeenth-century Plymouth Colony settlers by erasing their own identities with various face coverings, from crumpled paper bags to grinning jack-o’-lanterns. Yet whether the subjects they portrayed, isolated in their self-made world, were liberated and libidinous or exiled and condemned remains delightfully ambiguous. Four photos taken between 11:11 AM and 11:14 AM depicted one of the figures dragging the other’s limp body through a bed of leaves in a wooded area. At 1:27 PM, the pilgrims wade into the ocean in their dresses, like castaways longing to spot a ship on the horizon. At 2:09 PM, one goes limp as the other attempts to pull their body ashore with a rope; a photo taken five minutes later shows the rescue from a higher angle. By 4:17 PM, the two have taken shelter, crouched beneath the lintel of an outdoor fireplace overlooking the water, as though they were Hansel and Gretel, suicidally waiting for the wicked witch to appear and strike a match.
This exhibition placed McCarty and Moffett in conversation with other artists who have employed costuming as a form of critique (e.g., Tseng Kwong Chi, Samuel Fosso, Cindy Sherman). The show’s temporal conceit also called to mind Kitagawa Utamaro’s “Seiro juni toki tsuzuki” (Twelve Hours in Yoshiwara), ca. 1794, a dozen wood-block prints depicting courtesans at different times of day. But this show offered neither clear-cut social commentary nor pseudo-ethnographic, voyeuristic pleasure. The artists seemed more interested in exploring the hypotheticals of nonsequential action and nonproductive labor, i.e., the types of spontaneity and invention that can occur between two clever and creative friends playing an exuberantly perverse game of dress-up. In the evening, we see our pilgrims hanging from a tree, as though executed; floating either belly-up or face-down in the sea; or miraculously alive and well, perched at the edge of a fireplace with heavy gourds in lieu of heads.
The intimacy shared by the figures and the solace they seem to find in one another’s company, whether dead or alive, was palpable even though their facial expressions were almost always concealed. What McCarty and Moffett enacted in this photographic series was a theater of gestures, an exercise in nonverbal communication. What resulted was a loose visual inventory of social and sexual insinuations traversing a gamut of emotions that eschewed more obvious displays of desire, violence, vanity, and abjection through a sly and unnerving subtlety.
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Read full review at artforum.com.
