“But I didn’t put a sign”: poetics of the unseen gesture in the work of Beverly Buchanan and Park McArthur

Part I. Lyrical Gestures

Recently I applied to the PhD in Performance Studies program at Northwestern University. In building out my materials I struggled to figure out what it was that my writing sample should be. Thinking around and looking over my writing of the a little less than the last decade I remembered an encouragement of an essay I wrote in my final year of Grad School given to me by my teacher at the time Sampada Aranke. I have had many important teachers but Sampada consistently has stood out over the years, and I took seriously the encouragement: that the essay I had written would be ideal for applications to Performance Studies, and 6 years later I returned to that essay for the third time. It exists now in 4 sections, and I’ll be slowly putting them up here. The shifts and changes from its original version that this essay tracks feel important. Gesture as something crucial within artistic practices, and a fruitful direction to follow within the field of Performance Studies, has become clearer to me over these last few months especially. I hope you enjoy it.

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Beverly Buchanan, “Beverly Buchanan,” in Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, exh. cat. (New York: A.I.R. Gallery, 1980). Courtesy of A.I.R Gallery [id: a two page spread where on one side there is the artist’s name at the top and below in a poem-like format there is a text that reads Notes on wall column / Each piece of the sculpture is cast / separately and placed individually, one at a / time. Placing each piece involves a long / time of looking and moving— shifting— / replacing and looking some more. The / slight weight shift and emphasis on my right / to left orientation continues in this piece. / The small front half slab was placed first. On the right side there is a black and white image of the various cast cement pieces with various evidences of degradation, three standing block like in a row and one smaller, almost brick like sitting in the front. It’s clear the works are smaller and they sit on the ground. The one all the way to the right has vertical grooves.]

Beverly has strong recollections of two things that are connected, here, in my book: one, you loved to collect rocks and you’d put them in your pockets and go home and you’d hold them out to your parents and you realized they saw nothing of the unusual or wonderful things about them that you saw. But, they didn’t dissuade you. And two, you would draw pictures in the ground with sticks.

- Jane Bridges in a personal conversation with Beverly Buchanan and Park McArthur, September 2013

In September of 1980, Ana Mendieta, Zarina, and Kazuko Miyamoto curated an exhibition titled Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States at A.I.R. gallery featuring the works of Senga Nengudi, Selena Whitefeather, Judith Baca, Howardena Pindell, Janet Olivia Henry, Lydia Okomura, Zarina, and Beverly Buchanan. In the exhibition statement for the show Mendieta wrote, “This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being ‘other.’”¹ For Mendieta and by extension her co-curators and the artists found in the exhibition, the “other” of which she speaks is the use of that category as refusal, or as Sadia Shirazi puts it “a refusal of the politics of inclusion by staking a claim not only in anti-colonial and postcolonial movements of decolonization but also through what Édouard Glissant describes as the ‘right to opacity.’”² It was a refusal to exist within an imperial imaginary, a space of tokenization, that was usually the conditions in which women of color artists were categorized. As Edward Said writes in his late work on the late work of Jean Genet,

Identity is what we impose on ourselves through our lives as social, historical, political, and even spiritual beings… Above all, given Genet’s choice of sites like Algeria and Palestine, identity is the process by which the stronger culture, and the more developed society, imposes itself violently upon those who, by the same identity process, are decreed to be a lesser people. Imperialism is the export of identity.³

Accounting for both the personal and the political intensities of how identity forms, Said articulates a relationship between imperial desire and identity’s place within it. Not only that, but in articulating this personal impositions of identity, the potency of refusal in Dialectics of Isolation is extended. This notion of the contrapuntal reading, that submerged underneath, in his case, the works of western literature was the colonial projects which undergirded their possibility, aligns with the work done in the exhibition. As opposed to its origination in Culture and Imperialism I look to this late work of his for the complexity his phrasing here brings, which is in line with Mendieta’s similar phrasing decision as it opposes simple subsumptions of the declaration she makes by a white, liberal feminism that this exhibition wished to push against.⁴ This idea is made most explicit in the work Howardena Pindell made for the show titled Free, White, and 21 in which the white character Pindell plays opposite herself states “you won’t exist until we validate you.”⁵

In a review for The Village Voice Carrie Rickey could not resolve what she saw as “Mendieta’s avowal of otherness” and “the phenomenological, the lyrical” which pervaded the works shown despite her otherwise favorable review.⁶ She was content to enjoy it, so long as that which challenged her worldview was relegated to a dismissal of Mendieta’s curatorial proposition through an exoticization exemplified by her choice of title “The Passion of Ana.” Amongst the show’s artists it was Buchanan and her works that became representative of this incompatibility. Rickey writes,

Witness Beverly Buchanan’s cast cement bricks, which are tinted with an admixture of iron oxide and acrylic paint, exuding the red earth color of Buchanan’s native Georgia. Her’s is a very sophisticated procedure for making what appear to be primitive artifacts, her sculptures having the excavated look of brick shards arranged evocatively, like the rocks at Stonehenge.⁷

This inability to reconcile an identitarian politics with a material poetics—and a further inability to engage the work without a recourse to calling it so-called primitive art—is highlighted in this short passage, or as Park McArthur and Jennifer Burris Staton put it in Beverly Buchanan: 1978-1981, “In other words, this review articulates via negation the subtle power of Buchanan’s work.”⁸ It’s this subtle power I wish to follow down into the material, for as McArthur and Burris Staton also note earlier in that paragraph, this show and Buchanan’s work extradite “the phenomenological… away from mythologies of objectivism and towards social constructions of gender, race, and class.”⁹ Gesture residing in its poetics, that “lyrical” element which literally comes out of how these works are put together.¹⁰

Lyrical here is to be directly understood in regard to the imaginative. Gesturing toward that which goes beyond the simply material conditions of a world, thinking instead towards a world-building. Artwork’s visuality challenged, thinking towards a poetics not of visibility but of opacity, Glissant’s poetics of relation as Shirazi reminded us earlier. It is in the imaginative nature of these works which will follow that the intersubjective is returned to the space of the imaginative not as an individual expression of one’s internal world, but rather that of the collective imaginative. It is Moten’s riff on Shakespeare’s lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the conversation at the end of his and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,

It’s that shit that Shakespeare says: the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact. Just edit it: the lunatic, the lover, and the anti-colonial guerilla, right?, are of imagination all compact. And that’s an aesthetic formulation that Shakespeare’s making. But it has massive social implications, which need to be drawn out, which in a certain sense Fanon is gesturing towards, something that we’re associating with blackness and the undercommons, something he tries to reach, something we’re trying to learn how to try to reach or reach for.¹¹

It is the intensity of those gathered therein where we come together in the other than normative space of an underneath, an undercommon. Remembering the gesture, and a gesturing towards, is both of a kind of bodily performative utterance, while at the same time an action towards that which cannot be spoken, or perhaps even articulated for the moment with the language we have which comes during the social gathering. Assumed on occasion to be empty, it is actually the gesture’s constitutive fullness that will become evident.

Park McArthur Overlook Park 3 chromogenic print, series of 5 photographs, 2017. image courtesy of Brooklyn Museum [id: a low view of a bench set on a concrete rectangle with grass surrounding it. The shadow of the bench extends down into the grass, only a hint of it is seen in the upper right corner. McArthur photographed this herself seated in her wheelchair, camera situated in her lap. The bench is located near the site of Beverly Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins.]

It is the viewpoint of the lap of McArthur in her Overlook Park 1-5¹² series of photographs of an ADA non-compliant picnic bench located near Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins (which will be returned to later) seeing the down low and the underneath which attunes us to who is left out in the otherwise public space of unimaginative Departments of Planning and Development.¹³ Lyrical imagination is what will imbue the gestures I discuss, not despite but in concert with their seemingly abstract and stark forms, “According to my mother, I have always been interested in rocks. Always ‘seen things’ in them that other people didn’t see.”¹⁴

1. Ana Mendieta, “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States,” Sep 2-20, 1980. A.I.R. Gallery, New York.

2. Sadia Shirazi, “Returning to Dialectics of Isolation: The Non-Aligned Movement, Imperial Feminism, and a Third Way,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Spring 2021, https://journalpanorama.org/article/asian-american-art/dialectics-of-isolation/

3. Edward Said, “On Jean Genet,” in On Late Style ed. by Michael Wood (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 85.

4. That Genet can arrive here as another figure, controversial in his own works, reinforces this refusal as one of theatricality. Not an exaggerated theatricality, but rather one which emphasizes the gesture as that which carries meaning. Writing of his “sad gloom of a theatre which reflects too exactly the visible world” he insists instead for an abolition of characters, it’s just that “[he] would certainly also have to invent a tone of voice, a bearing, a gesture… There’s the rub!” It is this gesture, or rather its multiple iterations within the work of art which I am interested, especially the examination of those which only appear when our attention is turned toward them. Much like the footnote or endnote, it asks that the viewer become active in their engagement, as opposed to simply a passive “tourist” to use a word we will see again later.

Jean Genet quoted in Thomas B. Markus, “Jean Genet: The Theatre of the Perverse,” Educational Theatre Journal 14, no. 3 (1962): 209–14. https://doi.org/10.2307/3204460.

5. This paragraph and many of the others are, will be, and always will have been indebted to Park McArthur and Jennifer Burris Staton whose book Beverly Buchanan: 1978-1981 was the point at which myself and, as Amelia Groom notes in her book Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins which I am also indebted to, so many others got a proper introduction to the intensities of Buchanan’s early practice outside of her later works. My initial point of introduction was Gordon Hall’s Orange or Salmon in which he states after looking over her work as a part of this informal and improvisational lecture, “I wanted to have her here with us too.”

6. Carri Rickey quoted in Beverly Buchanan, Park McArthur, Jennifer Burris Staton, Lowery Stokes Sims, and Alice Lovelace, Beverly Buchanan: 1978-1981, (Mexico City: Athénée Press, 2015), 15.

7. Ibid. 15.

8. Ibid. 14.

9. Ibid. 16.

10. I start with this exhibition for the ways in which its subsumption into general discourses within the art world has focused on the contributions of Mendieta in particular, and have, like Rickey, insisted on this separation of an identity politics and a material poetics. Writing nearly 40 years on about this Sadia Shirazi argues, “These liberal narratives valorize individuality over collectivity, smooth out difference, and hierarchize the work these artists shared between them—with writing considered the highest intellectual labor, graphic design next, and physical installation last.” In that essay Shirazi articulates the importance of understanding that exhibition as a truly collaborative effort borne out of the friendship of the three curators. This is the first of many articulations which undergird this essay, living within the footnotes as if mycelial nodes extending out from its general body.

Shirazi, “Returning to Dialectics of Isolation.”

11. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 138.

12. The object label provided by the Brooklyn Museum on their website: Taken at Overlook Park in Glynn County, Georgia, these photographs evoke Park McArthur’s temporal and spatial relationship to the artist Beverly Buchanan, whose site-specific sculpture Marsh Ruins was permanently installed in the park in 1981, more than 30 years prior to McArthur’s visit. Marsh Ruins is located near both the commemorated site where the Confederate poet Sidney Lanier wrote his elegiac ‘‘Marshes of Glynn’’ (1878), and Saint Simons Island, where in 1803 a group of Igbo people sold into slavery collectively committed suicide by drowning. No historical marker commemorates that event.

The five photos, each taken with a camera placed on McArthur’s lap as she circled the wooden picnic table in her wheelchair, meditate on the dual meaning of the park’s name—“overlook”—as both an act of forgetfulness and a place from which to survey a landscape. Several of the photographs also enact McArthur’s own spatial relationship to the site through the use of low camera angles.

13. This can be extended to other institutions in charge of various public artworks and spaces, in particular Groom notes in her book how both Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins and Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures were incorrectly marked as lost by their preserving institutions.

14. Beverly Buchanan quoted in Amelia Groom, Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins, (London: Afterall Books, 2020), 72.