Art Lies, Volume 63, Fall 2009 Page: 50
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How To Be Singular Plural
text by Andy CampbellHow to describe Libresy Lokas, the latest body of work by Austin-based col-
laborators Otis Ike (nee Patrick Bresnan) and Ivete Lucas? On the surface,
their photographs, sculptures and video seem to document two disparate
communities in Monterrey, Mexico: lucha libre wrestlers and transgen-
dered or transsexual drag queens. To the casual observer, the wrestlers
and drag queens represented by Ike and Lucas are as immediately and
irrepressibly knowable as they are enigmatic and mysterious. The gift
these collaborators possess, however, is that they establish a closeness
with their subjects, and often the subjects reciprocate by drawing the art-
ists close as well. By doing so, it becomes impossible to disentangle rela-
tionships-to make remarks one way or the other about the place of the
artist or the subject or even to think of either in a traditional way.
The path to such conclusions lies through description-not of the art-
work itself but of the processes and structures behind the artists' visual
excavations. To get there, the ideas of Jean-Luc Nancy, particularly his for-
mulation of "being singular plural," are of use. Let's be clear-this essay
is not about luchadors or transgendered people or drag queens. If these
things are the nouns in an artistic sentence, I am more concerned with the
verbs-in the doing and the being.
How to play the field
Like other contemporary photographers, most notably Nan Goldin, Nikki
S. Lee and Ryan McGinley, the work of Ike and Lucas is suffused with
notions of communities and group identities. Yet, by examining each of
the aforementioned artists' processes, key differences emerge. I want todefine these differences in the negative, not because I think Ike and Lucas'
work exists in such a state but, rather, to move toward an abstraction of
description. This approach is also my way of playing a popular game in
art history, which is to trace how one artist is like another in an effort to
tease out their dissimilarities-in the hope of making a kind of easy group-
ing more impossible. Context is important, and had the artists presented
themselves to me as ethnographers or social scientists I would be writing
about contemporary ethnography-or, rather, an anthropologist would be
writing this essay.
Nan Goldin documents and performs (in the guise of slideshows) the
lives of her closest associates. These people are branded by others as drug
addicts, queers, drag queens and East Village weirdos. Goldin calls them
friends. This is a lacuna in much scholarship on her work-how to deal
with the reality of everyday life as she sees it and honor that vision with-
out attempting to evaluate the artistic product in a strictly empirical sense.
One person's drug addict is another person's mother, and who's to say
such a person can't be both-and shockingly-be both reasonably well?
Such distinctions are subjective-a fact that social historians and post-
structuralist thinkers have known for some time. Thus, when one writes
about Goldin, there is a kind of futility in that writing, a making oneself
(the writer) known, but there can be no objective way to move a critical
discussion forward. Oftentimes, writing on Goldin crosses over into unwit-
ting nostalgia ("Wasn't the East Village in the 1980s great!") or tries to
describe her work objectively.50 ART LIES NO. 63
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Gupta, Anjali. Art Lies, Volume 63, Fall 2009, periodical, 2009; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228028/m1/52/?q=how+to+be+singular: accessed June 4, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .