Charles Gaines: “Notes on Social Justice”

Exhibition review for Art in America, December 2013

Excerpt

Gaines, a Los Angeles artist who has employed rule-based methods to generate erudite Conceptual works since the early 1970s, chooses to minimize his own subjective intervention into the creation and reception of his pieces. Yet, as with Conceptual artists from Hans Haacke to Adrian Piper, his systematic approach, aimed at withdrawing authorial presence, is paradoxically applied to political content that appears to stem from personal commitment. The result here was a productive tension, reminiscent of John Cage’s poetic pamphlet Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), 1966, a paratactic accumulation of utopian proposals, social inquiries and quotidian anecdotes that never prescribes or prophesies but rather opens a space for deeper attentiveness to the mundane and the profound alike. Gaines, like Cage, assimilates the language of upheaval to an aesthetic of equilibrium. But his moves to reframe historic material also entail significant loss: one work from “Notes on Social Justice,” for example, juxtaposes statements from Kant, Hugo Ball and the Black Panthers in lieu of the original lyrics to “Dey’s All Put on De Blue,” an 1880 Garfield campaign song by Thomas Westendorf expressing cynicism about most politicians’ feigned dedication to African-American rights. Today, the song’s biting lyrics, written from the perspective (and in the vernacular) of a formerly enslaved man, are more linguistically rich and politically potent than canonical texts combined through a tried-and-true idiom of bricolage.