The Politics of Cool: On the Curatorial Practice of Astria Suparak
Published in C Magazine, Issue 96, Winter 2007
Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby
Astria Suparak is a young curator originally from Los Angeles who started curating during her undergrad years at Pratt in Brooklyn--when she was in her late teens. She was a contemporary of Miranda July\'s and collaborated with July on the JOANIE 4 JACKIE film and video series. In April, 2006, she was hired as the Director of The Warehouse, a gallery affiliated with Syracuse University and under the auspices of something called the Coalition of Museums and Art Centers (CMAC). In September of this year, she was unjustly fired from her position there. It\'s a long, rather baroque story, and if you are curious you can find more information at Syracuse Loses Again (syracuse-warehouse.blogspot.com).
This has been much on my mind while I try to write about this astonishingly bold, smart curator. Suddenly, the stakes became different and I\'ve had to make some decisions about how I can best use this platform to both support and critically discuss her practice. But again and again I return to the central question I\'ve always had about her sensibility, and that has to do with the way she deploys the aesthetics of \"cool\". In my mind, this has worked both to reinforce and undermine her work.
Her curatorial ideology (and I use that word without negative connotation--without guiding ideologies we are vague and dull) is built around a politics of inclusion and empowerment. Miranda July put it like this when writing about Suparak\'s early work:
\"At age twenty-four Astria has curated all over the U.S. and Europe, testing out new programs at NY\'s best venues and then touring with them like a kid with a band. She comes to you: museums and galleries, universities, independent/underground film festivals and micro-cinemas, as well as public places like bars, community centers, and living rooms. Just imagine what the young girls who watch her shows think - hunger, desire and the power to choose are suddenly instruments like guitars and video cameras.\"
She comes from the DIY culture of Riot Grrrl and zines, and she carried this through to her work at the Warehouse, both conceptually and aesthetically. Her use of cool aesthetics is perhaps the most consistent thing about her practice, rivaled only by an unrelenting (and for me very satisfying) focus on ethics. These are her lodestars: moral utility and coolness.
Some examples: in her time at The Warehouse Gallery, she curated a total of five exhibitions. For my purposes here I will discuss only the last three.
In February 2007, she mounted an exhibition called Embracing Winter which addressed environmental degradation. Suparak doesn\'t describe the way the show deploys the aesthetics of cool. I think it\'s a forest-for-the-trees situation: she is so immersed in a particular species of cool that she isn\'t aware of the stamp it impresses on the stuff she makes. On the other hand, she is keenly aware of her responsibility to curate shows that are “about” morality and how to apply it. She writes:
“As technology advances, our concept of physical comfort becomes increasingly narrow and artificially mediated. We can program thermostats to the degree, swim in heated pools in the winter, and ice skate in tropical regions. We prefer to encounter the seasons as an aesthetic experience, when convenient, within the self-created \'myth of a weatherless society\'...Embracing Winter is the third exhibition in a series at The Warehouse Gallery referencing the natural world and encouraging environmental consciousness.”
Cool aesthetics emerged in this show in two ways. First, Suparak selected works by two artists who\'s work circulates through the coolest of all cool art scenes. Rudy Shepherd is a photographer who\'s work shows at galleries like PS1, Mixed Greens and The Studio Museum in Harlem and is written about in publications like Art Forum and The Village Voice. Takeshi Murata is a digital artist with a similar profile, working with Eyebeam, featured in Artforum and hanging out with Paper Rad, who epitomise for me the irony-laced hipsterism of the contemporary art world.
Somehow this sounds, despite the fact that I\'m merely listing the impressive accomplishments of these artists, like I am trivialising their work. I want to make it clear that that is not my goal. These artists are serious and skilled. They just happen to have also been marked as cool.
Second, Suparak intervened in the show in a way that flies in the face of conventional curatorial practice. She mounted several snowshovels on the wall of the gallery which were available to be borrowed, and she created two large piles of non-toxic de-icer (a salt alternative) reminiscent of Gonzales-Torres\'s candy spills. Visitors were invited to take small bags of the material with them. This speaks in the vernacular of cool in that it flouts convention with elan.
The next show Suparak mounted was Networked Nature, curated by the famously cool new media outfit Rhizome, first shown at the equally famous and cool Foxy Production in New York. This show deals again with ideas of nature and technology. One of the artists from the Networked Nature show was chosen to represent Taiwan at this summer\'s Venice Biennial.
Her final exhibition at the Warehouse Gallery was titled Come On: Desire Under the Female Gaze.
Interestingly, this show took cool as part of its core. It evolved in part out of discussions Suparak had with her assistant director, Frank Olive, about the ways they had negotiated sexual identity construction as adolescents. For both of them, this had to do with ideas of cool and glamour, specifically around glam rock, punk and heavy metal.
The show includes a video by Rachel Rampleman called Poison, which I loved. In the piece Rampleman\'s sister Sarah tells the story of her obsession with Poison front man Bret Michaels and the circumstances that took her to his house to have passionless, limp-dicked intercourse. Also notable for are a series of exquisite large scale graphite drawings by Juliet Jacobsen which depict nude men with erections and two works by Montreal artist Jo-Anne Balcaen. In the first, entitled Blow, Balcaen affixed about 120 long, penis-y looking balloons to the wall in the shape of a heart. Over the course of the exhibition, the balloons gradually deflated, coming to more and more closely resemble Brett Michael\'s penis in his encounter with Sarah Rampleman. The second piece is the words “Aw, C\'mon” cut from mirrored plexiglass presented in the familiar typeface and curved form of the Metallica logo. This was for me the most poignant work in a show about feminist responses to phallocentric heteronormativity. In the context of the exhibition, I saw it as both girl\'s plea for relief from said conditions and, painfully, boy\'s whining bid for sex.
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I\'d better do a bit of unpacking. Both the concept of moral utility and the concept of cool (Suparak\'s aforementioned lodestars) are pretty contested and overdetermined, so I\'l try to explain how I\'m using them here. Art that is morally useful, as I\'ve discussed elsewhere, is art that reduces suffering. In the case of Suparak\'s practice, the kind of suffering that\'s reduced is generally identity related--the pain of feeling outside and alone.
There\'s been some interesting scholarship on the subject of cool in the past 20-odd years. Dick Hebdige\'s book Subculture: The Meanings of Style is an excellent example. More recently Dick Pountain and David Robins\' Cool Rules: Anatomy of a Style, while problematic in terms of its discussion of cool and gender relations, has some useful insights. More satisfying in those terms is Susan Fraiman\'s collection of essays Cool Men and the Second Sex. But the place I found the most lucid discussion of cool was, perhaps not surprisingly, Wikipedia. Wikipedia represented cool as a clear and fascinating plumb-line running through historical eras and geographical locations with the democratic elegance that makes it so fucking awesome. Its worth a google.
But what stood out for me--both from the research I did and from my personal history of trying to understand how to be cool--was the incredibly flexible nature of the relationship between cool and politics or ethics. True, cool has always been countercultural and disruptive to the status quo, but its edges have stretched to include socio-political groups as diverse as Valerie Solanis\'s Society for Cutting Up Men and the child-sodiers of Western Africa (if you\'re skeptical bout the latter, take a look at some images of these boys, posing with their Kalishnakovs and marijuana cigarettes, their names borrowed from the idiom of American hip-hop and their classically cool contra-posto stance).
So yes, I am suspicious when cool is used to stand for political radicalism or moral utility. But what Suparak has done for me is to restore my sense that cool can work as a powerful rhetorical device. Because as Miranda July pointed out almost ten years ago, Suparak curates to empower those who feel less than powerful. Suparak\'s practice is remarkable partly because although she speaks in the vernacular of the DIY culture on which she cut her teeth, the exhibitions and programs she puts together speak about a range of issues, and her sense of social justice is comprehensive and critical. She uses her personal voice and her institutional power to give permission to speak to those who might not believe they had it.