Sharon Hayes

“There’s So Much I Want to Say to You” at the Whitney Museum

Exhibition review for The Brooklyn Rail, November 2012

Excerpt

In the last year, the civil rights, feminist, and gay liberation movements of the ’60s and ’70s have returned as critical models for a present torn asunder by international uprisings and occupations. The debates and tactics of those tumultuous years have re-entered public space, where activists across generations attempt to determine their pertinence to a nascent decade of revolt. With rebellion past and present in the air, it was an opportune moment for the Whitney Museum to mount major shows from two feminist artist-activists, Yayoi Kusama and Sharon Hayes, who represent these two epochs. In the late ’60s, Kusama staged nude happenings against war and Wall Street; over the last 10 years, Hayes has investigated the language of protest by re-circulating signs and “re-speaking” slogans from past social movements to test their potential in the present.

Framing her rehabilitations of incendiary political events—from the Stonewall riots to ACT UP’s direct actions—as more than nostalgic replays, Hayes has stated that “a moment of time is never exclusively its own.” Her show at the Whitney attempted to materialize this insight by projecting sounds, words, and images from historic protests into an atelier-as-installation where visitors were challenged to discover the ways in which these bygone messages might belong to our future. But while Hayes brought together diverse source material that remains ripe for thought, she also tended to elide the most troubling and paradoxical aspects of the social movements she showcased, by presenting them as disassociated images or neat grids. Gazing at record covers that index political struggle is an unavoidably nostalgic act; on the walls of the Whitney, the albums appear as both images of a fading past and objects whose material obsolescence is bound to their decline in social relevance. Of course, vinyl is not yet obsolete (far from it, one hopes), but pasting records on the walls sure makes the medium seem dead, and likewise keeps the subversive (and divergent) politics of those who confronted oppression superficially visible, yet ultimately buried.