Introducing... Park McArthur and Jason Hirata
Artists breaking the myths of Autonomy
Welcome to Introducing…A column where we introduce Artists we think you should know about. To inaugurate the column, We’re introducing the work of two artists, Park McArthur and Jason Hirata who have lived and worked together since 2016.
Park and Jason met in 2014 at Yale Union, which was an art space in Portland, Oregon. As a way to introduce them, I’d like to stage a series of encounters between their respective exhibitions since then.
At the end of 2013, Jason presented the exhibition “Optium LH-3M” at The Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington. White melamine sheets covered the floor producing an all white exhibition space - the beloved and dreaded “white cube”. On the floor, in the center of the room were four LCD TV monitors lined in a row, inches apart. Videos ranging from clips of Miyazaki’s 1992 animated film Porco Rosso, to semi-instructional videos on how to operate high end lenses circulated consecutively from screen to screen, one after the other, eventually reaching the outer screen and fully viewable, creating a snake-like flow of moving images. Two speakers, also in a line, were adjacent to the televisions, and next to those were two security floodlights pointed at the floor, looking like illuminated visors suggesting that perhaps the space of white light and white walls be thought of through the lens of surveillance, security, and property. Lining the walls were paintings from the collection hung salon style as they normally are. Hirata’s intervention harkened back to the so-called invention of the white cube at the Munich Secession in 1893, where, in contrast to the salon style exhibitions in variously colored and patterned spaces, their first exhibition had lightly colored walls and sparsely hung paintings. It became the grandfather of what we might call “optimal viewing conditions.”
Perhaps Jason was attempting to shift what feels like a necessary condition into a questionable one. The landscapes in Porco Rosso have been commented on in such a way that suggests that the European landscapes depicted were here meant to feel distant, as if through the lens of a tourist. Miyazaki was arguably trying to provincialize the European landscape, making it quaint and contingent, rather than the necessary backdrop for serious art as it might often be thought as. Likewise, Jason might be rightly trying to provincialize the white cube and the circumstances it manufactured.
In 2014, Park McArthur presented her exhibition, Ramps, at Essex Street Gallery. Against the black floor of the gallery were twenty wheel chair ramps previously used for galleries or residencies, many of which were made specifically for her. The effect was unsettling and quiet. It took a moment to realize what this near anthropological survey was marking. Some ramps were completely intact, grip tape strips and all. Others were literally crumbling and battered remnants of ramps past. It was the kind of exhibition where you might quickly read, look, and leave, unaware of how the exhibition was about to affect you
.I remember seeing that exhibition, unsure how long to stay, and finally walking out, unable to fully satisfy the feeling of how to do right by the exhibition. How long is long enough? It didn’t matter, Park’s exhibition has stayed with me to this very day. Since then I’ve thought about Park’s ability to access spaces, art spaces, any spaces. I’ve thought about the spaces that included her and inadvertently or intentionally excluded her. I’ve thought about Minimalism’s supposed autonomy and the exclusions afforded and necessitated.
High above the ramps was an evenly spaced line of empty blue signs, the same scale as one that appeared out front the exhibition, noting “Ramp Access Located at Essex Street”. Without information, the signs became a rhythm of blue monochromes, like windows, reminiscent of Robert Gober’s windows but with no bars. Here was an emotional contradiction bound by political and visual knots - without text, the signs were just about useless, pointing to a kind of political futility. The freedom of the open window, insists - to where? For whom? Bars or no bars, accessibility remains an open question. The condition of autonomy, of the optimal body or a universal subject are not heroic here - they are neoliberal pathologies.
In 2016, Jason presented The Brink at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington, and Park presented Poly at Chisenhale Gallery in London. Whereas before their exhibitions spoke to local conditions that unfold as global and philosophical problematics, these appeared to examine the global conditions in order to reach intimate ones.
At Chisenhale, Park installed three massive black polyurethane foam blocks in the corner, each roughly eight feet tall. Riffing off the sedate autonomy of Minimalist sculpture, Park’s appropriated ready-made chunks of polyurethane appeared much more bodily - wonky, uneven, and soft. As a material, they are meant to absorb sound and impact for various domestic and industrial purposes. In another series of sculptures, entitled “Contact”, Park looked to how differentiated plastics of all kinds are used to absorb, contain, and distribute liquids and substances across bodily borders. Stacked high on top of metal surgical trays were “dental dams, catheters, condoms, surgical masks, heel pads, baby oil, barrier cream, latex gloves, cannulas, and tissues,” as Colby Chamberlain indexed in Artforum. Chamberlain goes on to note that although these objects may perhaps be metonymic stand ins for Park as their “disabled author,” “identity is particularly unstable in the context of disability, since as Eva Feder Kittay observes, the realities of accidents, diagnoses, and old age ensure that everyone is only ever ‘temporarily-abled.’
If the guiding metaphor and reality of Park’s exhibition was absorption, Jason’s at The Henry Art Gallery might be consumption. How do we consume and how are we consumed in a global economy that is only thinking about how to optimize labor output without thinking of the living cost of such a transaction. Sutured together are two disparate sources with nearly two centuries between them: Goya’s Disasters of War and a 1981 speech by Jack Welch, the CEO of GE at the time. I excerpt the gallery’s text here:
“In one gallery are Hirata’s oil pastel drawings recreating Goya’s scene of desperation, and an industrial light fixture that partially illuminates the room, inviting questions about what power structures make visible and what they hide. Another gallery installed with box fans, air filters, and word drawings referred to as “restaurant specials”—Chicken Tikka Masala Pizza and Plumpy’Nut, for example—Hirata makes palpable the forces of our globalized economy and networked society. Plumpy’Nut, a therapeutic food used to combat malnutrition in famine and disaster stricken areas, is manufactured by a French company that strictly defends its patent and restricts the licensing of this life-saving remedy, even though it is unable to meet demand—limiting access to potential beneficiaries.”
Seen altogether, Jason’s attempts to bring to light the grotesque reality of bio-power as formulated by Michel Foucault where sovereignty shifted from “to make die and let live” into “to make live and let die.” Speaking from London to Seattle, Park and Jason’s exhibitions each harness their own means of elaborating this contemporary immiseration.
I’d like to note a final pair of exhibitions, Park’s at the Kunsthalle Bern in 2020 and Jason’s, presented in 2022 at the New York gallery, Ulrik. At the Kunsthalle Bern, Park’s audio guide for the exhibition was in many ways the work itself. It gives insight into the way disability communities were already ahead of Covid mandates, understanding the value and importance of remote access well before the world was forced to. Park’s exhibition was titled: Kunsthalle_guests Gaeste.Netz.5456, after the name and password of the wireless router for the museum. The signal for this router was boosted at Park’s request so it now reached the entire institution’s footprint. The audio guide announces early on the role and purpose of Park’s work:
“Kunsthalle_guests Gaeste.Netz.5456 is a series of visual and material descriptions of the interior and exterior spaces of Kunsthalle Bern as well as the artworks installed therein. It moves through the Kunsthalle’s seven galleries, the building’s elevator, courtyard, and nearby transportation stop. The exhibition reflects McArthur’s inquiries concerning the venue’s existing conditions, the people linked to it, the building and its history. More broadly it explores various possibilities for sharing and experiencing an art exhibition.
One of the infrastructures that this particular exhibition relies upon is the building’s wireless network. McArthur asked to permanently expand the building’s existing wifi so that the network reaches all of the seven galleries as well as its courtyard, bar, and adjacent park. Park McArthur named the exhibition after the existing Kunsthalle_guests network and its Gaeste.Netz.5456 passcode.
The exhibition was realized with great intimacy as McArthur did not travel to Bern, Switzerland in order to make or install it. The exhibition comes from questions raised about the particular possibilities that distance provides. After all, Kunsthalle Bern’s audience has always included people who do not travel to Bern, Switzerland. This exhibition’s approach to such a constellation of individual and social realities might be understood as an invitation to reflect upon the confrontation of presence, and upon whom presence relies, wherever one might be. What is presence if not a response to what and who is not there, to the objects and objectivities that are absent and may to a limited extent be our influence.
Welcome to Kunsthalle_guests Gaeste.Netz.5456. The guests are here. The guests are online and in the galleries. The guests are at Kunsthalle Bern. The guests are elsewhere.”
Like a shared shadow, Jason’s exhibition at Ulrik felt like a subtle meditation on guests being both present and elsewhere, transforming the everyday gallery goer into a ghost of themselves. Photographs of candles whose flames cast shadows were caught in a field of real shadows cast by those in the room. Jason had deinstalled the overhead lighting and instead plugged in bulbs into the wall outlets, again using light as both a surveilling affect as well as in this case, creating a host of shadows that enabled viewers to find the relation between their flickering shadows and those of the candle’s. After documentation, these shadows are arrested and the ghosts of so many become present. Never one to shy away from the intimate and the corporate, the show was aptly titled: MINUTES.
As I close, I’m reminded of Elena Ferrante’s brilliant series of Neapolitan Novels because they reformulated what a Bildungroman, a philosophical coming of age story, could look and feel like. By and large, I had considered it the territory of the singular white man, achieving greatness through his apparent autonomy. Lenu and Lila were best friends, constantly chasing after one another, orbiting the greatness one saw in the other, believing that qualities of one another were both seizable and out of reach. Their orbit created a new way of approaching the Bildungsroman for me, where it was not the singular growth of an artist, but two. This “two” allowed for a totally different kind of capaciousness, where you knew it was always others that made you, always others that carried and kept you, always others that you would need to hold in order to make this life in any way meaningful. That our story is never our own but of so many orbits of care.
Jason and Park’s ongoing conversation and relationship belies the larger condition of their respective bodies of work - that they have always been working and thinking with many, of the many. They have never been singular, in fact they refuse it. When they write, when they think, when they love, and live, it is always with one another and with others. Together they are helping us devise new ways of being for one another and to route out the awful and alienating sense that we are meant to do this alone.
I’d like to end with a quote from a text co-written by Park and Constantina Zavitsanos, a frequent collaborator with Park:
“In our conditions we aren’t alone: both in the ways that our conditions form solitaires around what might be called shared experience, and also in the ways that our conditions necessitate being together. These needs constitute the we - the depending, deep-ending parabolic droop, bottomed in the catenary, merged in the swerve, and singing:
If there’s a cure for this
I don’t want it
(Don’t want it)
If there’s a remedy
I’ll run from it
(From it)