In the early 1990s a generation of artists in the United States were using exhibitions to draw attention to real-world crises: by the time Bill Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993, AIDS was officially the #1 cause of death for men aged 25 – 44 in the country; the Los Angeles uprising had been declared the most destructive period of local unrest in US history; and the Culture Wars were in full force, after the Robert Mapplethorpe ‘obscenity’ hearing marked the nation’s first criminal trial over content in an exhibition. Terms such as multiculturalism, identity politics and marginalization signified spaces of contestation, while in art, the market had collapsed following a global recession, causing an unprecedented number of galleries to shutter.

Now is the time…

Art-works have long memories and art-shows have long histories, but the lasting impressions they leave come not from the accumulation of time, but from the imminent moment in which they break through the time-barrier. We return to important works of art, or significant art-events, because the history and memory of their presence inspire an iterative ‘present’—a recurring sense, caused by the breaking of the time-barrier, that now is the time of their reckoning and reconstruction. Now-ness creates an uncanny sense for the viewer, curator and critic, that the significance of these works lies not in what ‘more’ could be said about them from our perspective, but by delving into what was once fugitively figured in these works and that breaks-through now with an impending, imminent visibility.

‘It's not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.’—Walter Benjamin

At this point, when the new constellation emerges now, we don’t turn back in time but fast-forward the past. Art and artists walk back and forth, entering and exiting the site of tension, all the while engaging with constellations that have come together in a flash.

Exhibition Playlist

Curated by julia elizabeth neal, listen to the voices of locals in Los Angeles and California, whose perspectives as writers, scholars, artists, and creatives, accompany part two of RETROaction at Hauser & Wirth. Their views form a constellation attuned to art’s past and present resonances to the visual, political, and social.

Featuring Ray Anthony Barrett, Alex Jones, Rebecca Giordano, Uri McMilan, Zamansele Nsele, Daid Roy, Delphine Sims, and Alena Williams, listed here in alphabetical order, and arranged by tenor and approach across the playlist.

‘We speak less now of marginalization and refusal than of the world systems—historic and ongoing—that undergird those processes: capitalism, colonialism, racism. We consider Bhabha’s description of the way we can think of past work and its relation to the present moment through an investigation of strategies of marginalization from the ‘90s and how it has transitioned into a critical space—30 years later—now dominated by the issues of decoloniality, which in turn gives representation to those suppressed ideas of the ‘90s,’ says Gaines. ‘We chose to undertake an investigation of abstract art produced by Black artists to show that the controversies around representation—a significant context for the marginalization of their practices—continues today. Like the original project, ‘The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Reconstitution’rethinks structures of artistic knowledge and the critical discourse that surrounds it.’