Patty Chang’s spartan BANK NYC exhibition, ‘Contact Archive’, proves fairly touching, if not at all times within the supposed methods. Its centrepiece, We Are All Moms (2022), is a ruminative 20-minute video essay based mostly on a collaborative analysis challenge, Studying Endings (2022–ongoing), that the artist undertook with veterinary pathologist Aleksija Neimanis and cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis. On a close-by desk sits Reminiscence Recreation (2022), a grid of 16 facedown images depicting the veterinarian’s gloved hand touching deceased harbour porpoises; the exhibition didactics encourage guests to flip over the pictures, two at a time, to disclose and attempt to match the photographs. The interactive paintings instantiates the video’s haptic theories, however the video itself means that artwork’s energy truly derives from the mental distance that mediation affords.
A considerable quantity of the contact depicted in We Are All Moms happens at a bodily or aesthetic take away. Its necropsy scenes, recorded over Zoom through the COVID-19 pandemic, are framed by the Apple toolbar on Chang’s MacBook; the artist and her author collaborator seem as tiny rectangles within the display screen’s nook. The veterinarian, who often breaks with scientific protocol to carry out contact rituals on the corpses she dissects, wears gloves all through. Different scenes painting human moms expressing breast milk via plastic pumps; this leitmotif, impressed by Neimanis’s surprising discovery of breast milk in a porpoise’s abdomen, alludes to Chang’s 2021 challenge, Milk Debt, about moms’ must purge literal and metaphorical toxins. Even We Are All Moms’s closing scene – shot from an underwater perspective as Chang’s baby, Leroy, swims in a pool – has a muffled really feel, echoing the artist’s earlier remark that porpoises’ ‘life under water is saved to themselves’.
Chang is a grasp at weaving disparate autobiographical threads into lyrical artworks with collective resonance, together with Milk Debt’s lists of her personal and different moms’ fears (proven right here as images, Issues I’m Afraid of Proper Now, 2018). We Are All Moms’s meditations are not any much less profound, as when Chang contemplates how ‘many artist-mothers discover disaster of their work once they give delivery’, and affirms that ‘artwork will not be extra vital than nurturing, or having and elevating a toddler’.
The curious factor about ‘Contact Archive’ is that its video offers a much more convincing aesthetic expertise than the interactive paintings meant to embody the theories that underpin the video – akin to how some sports activities followers would quite watch a sport on tv than attend it in individual or play it themselves. Within the video, Chang speculates, ‘maybe the archive [lives] in every particular person act of touching’, changing into ‘transferred, at [that] very second, into the physique of the scientist’. But nothing so mystical or transferring happens when the customer handles Reminiscence Recreation’s images; if something, the exercise feels gimmicky.
In that very same video passage, Chang asks how the scientist’s contact rituals is likely to be prolonged ‘to a wider diploma’, on condition that contact is ‘such a one-on-one intimate gesture’. We Are All Moms stands as one reply to that query: it teems with poetic photos and concepts that not solely painting contact but additionally contextualize it. Whereas contact can’t simply be skilled at scale, artwork can nonetheless convey its impression, even from a second- or third-hand distance. This dynamic chimes with theorist Anna Kornbluh’s much-discussed 2024 guide Immediacy, which values aesthetic mediation as a approach to withstand modern capitalism’s cultural drive towards pace and immersion. Chang has grappled with associated considerations all through her profession, notably in her feminist performances which might be grounded within the physique however characteristic discursive reflections. Such work touches audiences in a figurative quite than literal approach, which, in the case of artwork, may be simply as efficient – if no more.
Patty Chang, ‘Contact Archive’ is on view at BANK NYC, New York till 26 April
Foremost picture: Patty Chang, Reminiscence Recreation (element), 2022, tables and inkjet prints, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist and BANK NYC; {photograph}: Inna Svyatsky / @installshots.artwork
