Essay by Maria Elena Buszek
“It's not easy to proceed politically when we take seriously how difficult, deep and personal are the changes we seek. But pleasure, passion, and patience can bring real progress. Remember, the Americans you scorn today must be your allies tomorrow if you are serious about changing life!” Chris Carlsson
When I first met Andrea Bowers, I asked her about a crucial element in her work: researching, finding, interviewing, and collaborating with progressive activists of different stripes, often of much older generations, many at odds with their movements or comrades, too-often marginalized by the humble, grass-roots nature of their work in a historical narrative that likes its figureheads. As a scholar similarly engaged with activist art history, I was very curious about her experiences; I divulged my occasional exasperation with artists whom I go to great lengths to track down, and whose oft-neglected histories I am eager to document, only to find myself the target of the subject’s invective over the very neglect that my work seeks to remedy. Bowers generously commiserated, but she pointedly changed the tone of our conversation by sharing with me her approach to such collaborations—learned from the historian, educator, and co-founder of the Critical Mass movement, Chris Carlsson—which not only made me ashamed of my exasperation, but struck me as profoundly reflective of her entire oeuvre: “I practice radical patience.”
Bowers’s “patience” is clearly on display in her dedication to the causes of social justice and environmental protection that have driven her work for over two decades, which have been continuously waged, with frustratingly-slow, back-and-forth progress in the United States since at least the Industrial Revolution. Yet, Bowers’s work refuses to give up on the righteousness, logic, or ongoing pertinence of the movements that fuel her creative practice. Indeed, even when tackling dark subjects—the AIDS pandemic, deportation, abortion—Bowers’s work reflects an unfailing optimism in humanity’s potential to overcome our inequality and suffering through imagination and action. It is a sensibility summarized in her 2012 drawing Pass the DREAM Act, whose seemingly didactic title belies the brilliant distillation of her activist philosophy in the textual image therein: DREAM. ACT.
This patience has certainly been a virtue in the collaborative nature of much of her work. Whether engaging environmental activists in the video Vieja Gloria, documenting the “continual maintenance and mending” of the AIDS Memorial Quilt’s volunteers in The Weight of Relevance, or celebrating the women who fought for reproductive rights before Roe v. Wade in Letters to the Army of Three, some of her most powerful projects are rooted in an investigation of the forgotten or invisible activism of individuals whose labor Bowers studies, represents, and reveals. Most recently, this notion of collaboration has extended to not only other artists—from legendary performance pioneer Suzanne Lacy to the emerging realist painter Shizu Saldamando—but also audiences, in works that invite viewers to become co-conspirators in the works’ making and meanings.
Her ongoing TRANSFORMer project with Olga Koumoundouros exemplifies this strategy: in it, Bowers and Koumoundouros enter a city and join with regional activist groups where the piece will be shown, creating found-object sculptures that are covered with a “skin” of printed posters, informational handouts, and other such consciousness-raising material from the groups, effectively “transforming” trash into treasure. The exhibition’s run also includes performances, speak-outs, and other such happenings, coordinated by the participating community groups. And, once inspired by the work in the show, audiences are invited to create their own posters and t-shirts with graphics from the exhibition at a silk-screen station built into it, which all are invited to “take away” in exchange for a donation to the groups featured in the work. Looming over several iterations of this exhibition is a brightly-colored light sculpture by Bowers that captures the goals of TRANSFORMer to “Educate. Agitate. Organize.”
This is a mandate that Bowers takes seriously, and is amazingly deft at maintaining, even on-the-fly, as evidenced in her recent, much-reported-upon response to the news of the Frieze New York art fair’s exclusive use of non-union labor to construct and run its 2013 fairgrounds. Her mural-sized marker drawings of iconic images from American labor history, which debuted in the 2012 exhibition Help the Work Along—itself named after a charming salutation by Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founder “Big Bill” Haywood—were being shown there, and Bowers was justifiably appalled by the irony. However, she turned her position here as an art-fair insider into an opportunity for subversion: not only did Bowers pen new “labels” for her gallerists to hang with her work—a letter informing audiences of the fair’s unwillingness to recognize the unions’ dispute with Frieze, details of the fair’s hiring practices and profitability, and names of pertinent New York City unions and legislators—but she also created graphics and flyers for the local union protestors outside the Randalls Island fairgrounds to use as part of their action. In yet another display of “radical patience”—this time, with the contradictions of a growing, international art-fair system that gives visibility to political artists like Bowers, even as its market-focused practices often undermine those politics—with great wit and spontaneity Bowers bound her historical personifications of labor and liberty to their ongoing, contemporary expressions, in recognition of the continuous work necessary for their maintenance.
But a less-obvious, yet absolutely crucial aspect of Bowers’ work comes from a very different kind of patience than that which is so visible in her various collaborative processes—the more solitary kind of patience required in the creation of her astounding drawings, whose craft is a crucial extension of her activist practice. On first—maybe even second or third!—glance, Bowers’s work on paper appears to be photographic or mass-reproduced in nature; indeed, much of her source material is derived from her photos, videos, and research documentation. However, as the works beg further scrutiny—due to, say, their eye-catching size or palettes, or alluringly delicate miniaturization—her audiences are inevitably awestruck by the fact that these photo-realistic representations are hand-drawn with colored pencils, graphite, or markers. Bowers essentially uses craft to disarm, as another tool for creating allegiances between artist and subject, subject and audience.
Bowers’s touching, ongoing series of portraits derived from annual May Day festivities and protests in Los Angeles exemplifies her subtle use of this effect. In these, Bowers selects protesters from the crowds, with hand-made signs or t-shirts that communicate each individual’s cause: “We Are Immigrants, Not Terrorists!,” “For my Transgender Sisters,” and “People Before Profits.” Drawn in stunning, photo-representational detail, just inches high and surrounded by empty space, Bowers’s portraits lovingly render the sitter—in all these cases, perhaps more appropriately “the stander,” both literally and, figuratively, for their cause—with the kind of care the artist seems to read into the making of their homemade, occasionally haphazard signs. And, while the dominating negative space of the paper that surrounds them—usually, appearing to “push” the subject to the bottom or corner of the image—simultaneously suggests the throngs of the march or the isolation of the voice, the evident empathy in Bowers’s focus on and consideration of each individual’s image force her audience to similarly focus on and consider, even care for, her subjects’ lives, struggles, and claims. This strategy works even when the subjects are depicted in less literally humanizing a fashion—in her decision to draw the type- and hand-written letters of the desperate people who wrote the Army of Three asking for birth control or abortion care, or the memorial-sized “wall” of the known names of those who have perished crossing the U.S./Mexican border in No Olvidados—where the unmistakable detail of the artist’s hand-made mark becomes an invitation for the audience to ponder the human story behind a name, a signature, or a keystroke.
And, it is these stories that arguably unify Bowers’s work as much as its activism, including her most recent, #sweetjane at both the 鶹Ӱ Museum of Art and the Pitzer College Art Galleries. Returning to her home state of Ohio—and a struggling, working-class community that resembles the one in which she grew up—Bowers is analyzing the trial and media responses to the recent, notorious rape case in Steubenville. The title is a play on Bowers’s interest in anonymity as it applies to justice, in reference to both the anonymity of the victim (“Jane Doe”) and how that anonymity was breached in the forwarding of photos, videos, and comments pertaining to the rape by perpetrators and bystanders that eventually led to the trial itself. But, the subject of anonymity and justice here additionally relates to the “hacktivism” of the shadowy, international Anonymous collective, whose tech-savvy members successfully hacked social-media accounts to obtain the deleted or hidden rape documentation that ultimately helped in the arrest and conviction of the rapists—actions that, ironically, may result in longer sentences for the Anonymous members investigated and arrested for hacking than the rapists they helped convict. Bowers has continued to follow—both in-person and virtually—Steubenville and Anonymous as these events keep unfolding, and #sweetjane has been unfolding apace, with the artist sorting through myriad narratives of violence and vengeance, justice and mob rule emerging from her documentation of these communities. While its subject matter is often dark, like Bowers’s best work (and returning to Chris Carlssen), #sweetjane is still rooted in the powerful idea that outraged, ordinary individuals can enact positive change through empathy and allegiance—even when that change comes from confronting “difficult, deep, and personal” divisions. And, in hosting this work-in-progress, the Pomona and Pitzer communities have the rare opportunity to step into one of Andrea Bowers’s projects (and her process) mid-stream, as she documents these politically-charged stories of everyday people more or less in “real time”—with the burden of patience now on her audience, palpably aware of both the tension as we wait for a resolution of the still-unresolved elements of this tragedy (as Anonymous member Deric Lostutter awaits Federal trial for computer hacking) and (perhaps ideally, and by design) our ultimate responsibility in the resolution of these ongoing, fundamental conflicts in the world.
In the meantime, Andrea Bowers will be waiting, patiently, for us to join her in helping the work along.
About Maria Elena Buszek
Maria Elena Buszek, Ph.D. is a scholar, critic, curator, and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado Denver, where she teaches courses on Modern and contemporary art. Her recent publications include the books Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Duke University Press) and Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Duke University Press); contributions to the anthology Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower (Minor Compositions) and the exhibition catalogue In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (Los Angeles County Museum of Art); and articles in Art Journal and TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies. She has also been a regular contributor to the popular feminist magazine BUST since 1999.