In this Uncanny Juxtaposition:
Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend. The Contemporary Austin, March 1–July 21, 2024.
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Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come. Waterloo Park, displayed through March 2029.
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In March 2024, two artistic projects opened in Austin, Texas: the exhibition Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend (at The Contemporary Austin, March 1–July 21, 2024) and the public artwork Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come (on view at Waterloo Park through March 2029). Featuring paintings by a central figure in contemporary art and the British Black arts movement of the 1980s, Make Do and Mend was organized on the occasion of Lubaina Himid (b. 1954, Zanzibar) receiving the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize. Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come, by artist duo Teresa Hubbard (b. 1965, Ireland) and Alexander Birchler (b. 1962, Switzerland), is a video installation and the newest contemporary art commission to activate a revitalized green space in Texas’s capital city. These two projects may not seem to have much in common. Paintings on one hand and site-specific video on the other. Black British queer woman artist, white Irish woman and white Swiss man artist duo. A prize sponsored solo exhibition running for four months and a municipally oriented public art installation on view for five years. Both Himid and Hubbard / Birchler, however, proceed in tandem from the found object, only to then exceed the conventions and assumptions we associate with the form. Their conjuncture reveals how the nature of meaning and temporality in this evergreen, seemingly codified, artistic strategy can be reanimated.
Found materials make up the painterly ground and many elements of Himid’s Aunties (2023), one of the two bodies of work presented in her exhibition. Installed in the entirety of the second-floor gallery, Aunties consists of 64 plank paintings continuing Himid’s past work with the plank form. Made from wood that the artist finds near her studio, Himid’s planks start from a basic template: taller than human scale and thin like the vertical bar lines in sheet music. In her previous works, the planks might be monochrome and adorned with small objects, or they might be long, narrow surfaces containing painted images and marks. The plank paintings typically appear in arrangements that are mounted on or leaned against the walls of a gallery, taking advantage of how exhibitionary space unfolds. For each Auntie, the artist carves, joins, or laminates wood pieces; adheres, staples, and pins colorful fabric; stipples, washes, or models abstract motifs in paint. The idiosyncrasies of each plank evince an intuitive process that strives toward the desire for a singular, sovereign self.
At the same time, Himid’s Aunties form a collective. By calling her 64 planks for The Contemporary Austin “Aunties,” Himid reiterates the naming practice common to the vernacular of many cultures outside the eurocentric world, in which the moniker is reserved for the significant women who aren’t our mothers. In Make Do and Mend, you encounter these women one by one and in groups that populate the perimeter of the gallery at uneven intervals. Although no two planks are the same, they each play on variations of shared formal themes and constellate together, making meaning not just in their individuality but also in what they have in common. Perhaps like the aunties in our own lives, as the 64 planks orbit around the room, what they share at the center is Himid, the maker—and, in turn, you, the viewer.
This encircling gets reiterated in a moon motif the artist paints on several planks. Small, delicate renderings of the moon’s phases echo the spatial movement of the installation as a whole. The cyclical time signified by the moon’s phases also speaks to the way found pieces of fabric in Aunties construct a particular experience of repetition. I have in mind, for example, a semi-translucent, striped ribbon with two bands of yellow followed by two bands of white. The ribbon is stapled against blocks of horizontal black and yellow paint and vertical strips of laminated wood. At first, this ribbon looks like one found material among the many. Yet, as my encounter with Aunties proceeds, the same ribbon fabric appears again, now as three longer ribbons touching, overlapping, with their ends dangling off the surface—then another instance as a ribbon stapled only at the top, its rippling creases cascading down. Himid’s yellow and white striped ribbon, specifically its reappearances in my passage through Aunties, creates a repeated encounter with a simultaneously same yet different found object. If, as Margaret Iversen has explained, the found object is an unattainable object of desire—“essentially singular or irreplaceable, and both lost and found”—Himid’s multiple and replaceable found object reanimates endless desire with the ongoing memory of our successive confrontations.1
In Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come, Hubbard / Birchler use filmic space and time to stage a similarly repeated encounter with the found object. Their site-specific video—designed to project on the 16 × 120 ft. concrete wall of the Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park—focuses on a selection of found objects. These include ceramic shards, glass bottles, buttons, coins, rusted metal implements, a key, and other trinkets. All the found objects come from a collection of mid-19th to mid-20th century artifacts dug out two decades ago from the underlying Waller Creek system and now part of the collection of the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory. Appropriating these objects from storage to video, Hubbard / Birchler reinvent archaeology’s empirical promise to retrieve a past from the material remains of a place.
Over the course of the work, the artists’ chosen artifacts journey across the video’s frame. They travel within a limitless-feeling, completely black filmic space. In flight, the objects are pictured in exacting, luminous detail, sometimes so enlarged as to fill the entire span of the monumentally scaled projection wall. The ways the objects move in this space vary: gentle like a listless float in zero gravity, rapidly spinning like a young star does, or sometimes falling down as if pulled by the gravity of the actual site.
Beads and marbles are major protagonists in the work. When the video zooms in on these spheres, pockmarked surfaces look like mountainous terrain. White swirls and striations become large continents amidst oceans of color. Hubbard / Birchler create fantastic views which arguably reiterate the powerful scopic height achieved when NASA captured its famed “Blue Marble” photograph in 1972. However, black-ink written identification numbers that also come into view remind us of the objects’ life in laboratory storage, keeping the power and potential delusions of video’s scopic dominance at bay. Taken together, what these documentary characteristics of Past Deposits amount to is a proposition that we engage the site and history of Waterloo Park the way we behold outer space.
What are the implications of reframing terrestrial site and historical time with outer space and the planetary beyond? This is a critical question Hubbard / Birchler raise alongside other thinkers engaged in older and newer inquiries into the Anthropocene, the global, and the planetary.2 In April, Austin was also one city in the path of totality for the 2024 total solar eclipse. In the leadup to the event, NASA explained, “It will be the last total solar eclipse visible from the contiguous United States until 2044.” Elsewhere, casual and serious skywatchers also often heard, “The previous total eclipse in the United States was on August 21, 2017.” Notice the way time frames, and is compelled by, the total eclipse event. Whether eclipse, comet, or planet, we typically behold outer space with a temporality that links together past, present, and future. Our encounter with the planetary in the here and now is inscribed with the remembered experience of the same phenomena before and an anticipation of the experience imagined later.
In Past Deposits, repetitions of the found objects likewise link multiple temporalities. Rather than document an endless showcase of unearthed artifacts that could convey a multitude of archaeological sedimentation, Hubbard / Birchler’s found objects appear, disappear, and reappear. Their repetition in filmic time mimics the mutual inscription of past, present, and future that structures our relationship to outer space. The musical score, created in collaboration with composer Alex Weston, further emphasizes our encounters with the found object over and over. Select objects sound their own particular melody, and as they come in and out of view, the score’s melodic turns move with their found object, activating a sonic memory that joins our visual one.
Even in the work’s title, Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come, you also hear the kind of anticipation NASA and others betray when they take in outer space. In the terms of this artwork, Hubbard / Birchler’s projection into the future concerns the forgotten, now nameless figures who once owned the found objects their video magnifies. Although held by the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory, the artifacts from Waller Creek are officially considered by the laboratory to have no archaeological value. Before Past Deposits, the objects remained neglected in cardboard boxes, adjunct to other archaeological discoveries deemed of sufficient worth to join the historical record. When Hubbard / Birchler reframe site as outer space and found objects as planets, they not only illuminate the forgotten and nameless from the past, they also call us to continue that illumination in the future.
Indeed, the found object repetitions at the crux of both projects in Austin differently imagine how temporality inflects the act of finding. Himid and Hubbard / Birchler’s searches are not quite the discovery of the “lost object” André Breton famously described in Mad Love (1937). According to Hal Foster, the Surrealist found object is marked by a desire-in-loss, a perpetual drive that triggers our return. “[A] lost object, it is never recovered but forever sought,” Foster explains.3 While today this formula of the found object still drives our desire to recover people, places, and pasts—to return over and over—Aunties and Past Deposits also transform the temporality of that drive. Himid and Hubbard / Birchler, in their respective ways, expand return with anticipation. They make a movement into the past simultaneously a movement for the future.
By way of conclusion, it’s worth circling back to Aunties and Himid’s repeated found fabric. How anticipation might thread through Aunties occurred to me when I contemplated the person often implied when we think about aunties: our mothers. Himid, in fact, frequently credits her mother, a textile designer, for the central place fabric holds in her artworks. I don’t think we can say definitively what the yellow and white ribbon in Aunties might signify. But knowing about Himid’s mother and considering all three artists’ proposition for the found object, I was reminded of my own mother. In particular, I thought of her passing and how my mother’s absence urged a synthesis of loss with renewal—another way to describe a return with anticipation. And like these projects in Austin, a signal encounter of repetition, this time with music, imparted this lesson to me.
“Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth. In the backseat of the car with mom….
Think of that piece of music which has a hold on past time, but a hold you can only sense when you hear it again later.
As George lectured on Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze…
With the music’s repetition, the past rushes forth and butts up alongside the time that has passed and the time of the now: who you were with who you are.
…and I didn’t know whether I could be a good son and an art historian.
And in order to be open to the future, you must add to these many selves that have emerged with each repeated encounter of the music: who you will become.
When I hear “Ode to Joy” with her no longer here.
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Endnotes
- Margaret Iversen, “Readymade, Found Object, Photograph,” Art Journal vol. 63, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 50.
- For one recent example from this discussion, which has informed some of my present thinking, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). I’m grateful to Adom Getachew for referring me to this text and discussing these aspects of the problem with me.
- Hal Foster, “An Art of Missing Parts,” October, no. 92 (Spring 2000): 138.
Jamin An