KLEIN One of the things we were talk-ing about a couple of weeks ago is whether or not the art world reads you as Filipino-American and is this also informed by your genders or names? How has that affected your careers? Or has it not played a role at all?
LOPEZ Yes, this is something I initially brought up. You and I talked a long time about me not wanting my female name on the side of the building for the ICA show because I feel there is this unconscious discrimination simply in the name. I wanted something more gender neutral— M. Lopez, for example—as I think the cultural branding of a name gets into people’s psyche and it’s more powerful than we think. Another example: the name “Josh Kline” in and of itself has its advantages perception-wise. So does “Paul Pfeiffer.” They are both male, European names. In relation to that, it would be good to have a conversation about “passing,” the different kinds of passing that happen in the art world in terms of production. I try and “pass” in a way that I manipulate a range of cultural material. There are so many ways of passing in order to find a certain kind of acceptance in the modern world. And then there are ways I could never pass. Last week, we talked a lot about Sara Ahmed’s article, “Some Striking Feature: Whiteness and Institutional Passing.” The text discusses how passing is an act of violence because you’re participating in this certain cultural patriarchy and a certain dominance of what’s accepted and what’s not.
PFEIFFER In her account of systemic oppression and violence, Sara Ahmed explores racial passing phenomenologically. How is passing as white experienced from the perspective of someone who is not actually white? Or, how is passing as male experienced by someone who is secretly not male? It’s experienced in the form of internalized self-hatred, something like a divided or fragmented consciousness constantly trying to mask or change itself to fit the expectations of those in power. If there’s any self-awareness of passing, that means you already understand your-self to be different, even fake. And worse, you know you’re reaching for privileges or benefits for which you are not, in fact, eligible. So, to speak of passing at all implies a process of internalized violence and oppression that becomes an indelible part of your internal makeup, your very way of thinking and being.
But then you could flip it and have a conversation about imagining the empowering aspects of passing as a skillset for survival under an oppressive regime. If, for example, you’re forced to learn two languages in order to navigate a culture that hierarchically values English over other languages, you have to work twice as hard. But then you develop an enhanced linguistic ability because you have a brain that can move between two languages, whereas others with more privilege know only one. That enhanced ability to move or translate between multiple languages—a kind of double consciousness—arguably produces a kind of enhanced creative affinity for navigating between codes, or code switching.
KLINE I have a different take on passing. I mean, I agree that everyone passes in some way, whatever your background, in a complicated cultural context like New York, or maybe even the US in general, where code switching is a part of navigating all the different cultures that are encountered in daily life. But I also think sometimes this notion of passing is being imposed from the outside. It’s coming from elsewhere. As I mentioned, I work with a gallery, 47 Canal, whose roster is majority Asian-American. We’re not tryng to pass as anything other than who and what we are. We’re doing our thing, hanging out, throwing parties, making exhibitions, making art. We’re very open about who we are. We’re not trying to whiten ourselves.
But it’s not like we’re not discussing identity. We talk about it incessantly among ourselves. We talk about identity and its impact on our ideas and worldview. That said, none of the artists who showed with 47 Canal at the beginning made work directly about their identity. Maybe this work is rooted in a perspective that emerges or is influenced by our backgrounds, but we’re not centering ourselves or our back-grounds in the work. We’re making work about other issues that feel pressing. I think this prioritization of interests other than identity is something that I share with artists like Paul and Michelle and the others who are part of our dialogue. This was one reason why I was interested in the idea of a show of Filipino-American artists taking place in Manila. It would present another image of what American artists and their art might look like in the present. Kari Rittenbach was part of this conversation about trying to make a show hap-pen. She had this idea to call the show Some Americans, because what does an American look like? Outside the US I think that many art professionals and their audiences have an image of the American art context that’s like white men or white women, maybe some black artists, and then foreign-born artists who are based here, like Korakrit Arunanondchai or Ei Arakawa and that’s basically it. But what about everybody else who’s living here? Or from here? From afar, the group shows in Asia that include Americans tend to in-clude white Americans. There are so many other Americas—and artists who come out of those other versions of the country. A show like Some Americans was always a really appealing thought experiment because of this.
KLEIN Well, I think that relates to the current political discourse in the US where we’re talking about the census right now and who is allowed to be counted and how. What categories do you fit into and what boxes are you checking? These kinds of institutional questions and codifications permeate the extreme societal landscape that we’re in right now. But I wanted to pick up on the question of hybridity be-cause that is something that comes up with many of you for different reasons. There’s a hybridity built into Filipino culture as a result of the legacy of colonization—from the occupations of the Spanish and the US—as well as its indigenous cultures. Joselina, you have a very interesting perspective on the idea of hybridization in terms of curatorial practice with regard to a bigger, globalized picture. And on hy-bridity in relationship to this idea of pass-ing in a larger sense, whether it’s passing as American |or passing as a Filipino even. There’s a kind of transitional or transitory space that it proposes.
LOPEZ I’m still thinking about what Josh said: identity doesn’t matter now. Yes, all of us are passing in the sense that we’re participating in a Western culture, and maybe that’s impossible to escape. We have to participate because that’s where we live, within a particular Western cultural hegemony of determined trans-actions and dialogues.
I remember having this conversation with [the late] Santiago Bose, a Filipino installation artist. He said that there’s no way to surpass all the materiality of Western culture. He was using very specific Filipino materials, bamboo and other indigenous material, and in a way, maybe that’s not valid in the materiality of Western aesthetics. I’m passing because I decide to pick up Minimalism, which is a very es-tablished art historical reference. So I’m thinking of the impossibility of forging an honest identity. Identity is such a big thing now and I think that’s something important to talk about because it has so much currency. But I think in a lot of ways, a lot of people are thinking about that. I’m thinking about it, but more about the pos-sibilities of identity in a non-passing way.
For Full conversation go to BALLAST & BARRICADES, Michelle Lopez catalogue, ICA Philadelphia, Curator: Alex Klein, Catalogue design: Mark Owens
