Not Total: Jonathan González, manuel arturo abreu, and Rindon Johnson | PCC Cascade Paragon Arts Gallery

Not Total: “the air split the world in a richer combination than last time we spoke…” ¹

Installation View, Not Total, Cascade Paragon Gallery, November 8–December 14, 2019

Ancestral pasts, impurities, landscapes, myths, and involuntary agents permeate Not Total, an exhibition that recently closed at Cascade Paragon Arts Gallery of Portland Community College — just as Guyanese poet, novelist and essayist Wilson Harris predicted. The exhibition featured works by Jonathan González, manuel arturo abreu, and Rindon Johnson—many of whom created works specifically for this exhibition—and was curated by home school, a “free pop-up art school” based in Portland and directed by Victoria Anne Reis and abreu.² Installations, videos, and wall sculptures carried viewers among Paragon’s dual white cube galleries, bearing distinctions but challenging viewers to note associations that continually conjoined and distanced the works from one another. The three artists in the exhibition unrestrainedly delved into the potentialities that emerge from a lack of “self-sufficiency,” or conclusion, through process, ideology, and cultural identity. These entrées into common material and ideological relations were refreshing and challenging. What’s more, the works felt vital, revelatory, and resistive in an age when the purported genius of the artist lingers uncomfortably, whiteness pervades, capitalism fuels the cult of the individual, and the spite of the supposed Anthropocene continually spurns activist efforts. 

“I believe that the images of a character and action are always refracted in the minds of people, a certain refraction or distortion occurs, and this signifies for me that the artist or the writer does not really possess this subjective purity that one imagines [she] possesses. [...] we have to go very deep back into the ancestral past and therefore, there is, it seems to me, a certain impurity, in the artist’s vision, and I therefore, have striven all the time to make character, landscape and myth, agents of each other, possibly involuntary agents of each other, because I don’t believe in the self-sufficiency of the artist […] ³

Centering Wilson Harris as an interlocutor among the three artistic visions via the sole explanatory exhibition text facilitated the distance and intimacy that pervaded the relationships between works. Rather than staunching the flow of asymmetries, discontinuities, or transformations, Wilson advocated for a radical release of artists, characters, and actions within the artistic imagination, thereby diluting the illusion that any one component, or even the artist herself, is “self-sufficient.” In turn, this liberatory perspective invites a spirit of “not total”—the premise of the exhibition—and consequently the “open mind.” Visitors who walked through the exhibition’s galleries—ideally with ample time—observed the seeping together of these elements within each work, and among each of them. But even so, the full impact of this “open mind” eluded me until a direct interaction with “the unfinished” occurred in abreu and González’s performances.

But first, looking at the exhibition, the venture into the unknown hinged upon interdependency, both inanimate and animate, mirroring and extending the learning process that initially inspired abreu and Reis’s curatorial venture of home school, as abreu shared in an introduction to Not Total. The call for mutuality in the exhibition context felt not only responsible, but urgent as the artists wrestled with the unfinalizability of race, climate change, death, self, and numerous other facets that permeated the works. The refractions that structured the generative exploration into the lack include site-specific collaborative curing of rawhide on the roof of the Portland-based contemporary art venue Yale Union; the dissecting the project of “Latinidad” as part and parcel of the grand colonial project; the spreading of earth on the outdoor courtyard of MoMA; and the transposing of gems, photographs, and precariously-placed mementos onto muslin, among others. 

Background: Rindon Johnson, I don’t think your prayers get over your head. No I see nothing. Heal me. To set, to put. Adults always be asking for hands. What one has to do: flowers on the table or other ordinary business. Between sport and lace is a finger. You don’t usually find a soft voice on the side of the road, I’m sorry for my little out burst. I think any of these guys are interchangeable, I think you need to eat a rabbit and then you’ll understand. The shine creates a gap. He heaps me. I’m in over my head. I’m in over my head. I’m in over my head., 2019. Hide, Vaseline, dirt, gravel, dust, shellac, rope, aluminum clips, dimensions variable; Foreground: Rindon Johnson, A trouble in them, 2s019. Hide, Vaseline, dirt, gravel, dust, shellac, rope, aluminum clips, dimensions variable

Strung across each gallery Rindon Johnson’s A trouble in them (2019) and I don’t think your prayers get over your head... (2019), acted as a connective tissue among works, featuring yellowed and glistening hides cured with Vaseline, dirt, dust, and shellac absorbed from the atmosphere the Portland surround. Nearby, Johnson’s video, It is Not the Meaning it is the Sound (2017), divulged the process of curing the hides—slapping and rubbing them with the viscous softening material. By-products of the extractive meat and oil industries, respectively, these materials, in close proximity with Rindon’s body in the performative process, refracted the realization that African Americans were viewed historically and currently as by-products in “a country made with but not for them." ⁴ The by-products, while absorbing the violent processes involved in their making, simultaneously embodied resistance through the collaboration that brought them into being. 

manuel arturo abreu, for hierophants, 2019. Digital video, 8:16 minutes.

This notion of a complex resistance embedded at the core of self-insufficiency runs through the other works exploring the concept of “not total,” such as abreu’s qué significa ser latinx? (2019). The video was composed of lecture-performance aesthetics culled from social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, assessing the history and contemporary character of Latinidad. Sifting through snippet-like social media comments, valuing each contribution, but critically—and somehow poetically—highlighting the lacunae in their arguments and assumptions, abreu’s work deconstructed Latinidad as an extension of the colonial project that silences black, brown, and indigenous communities. abreu paired qué significa ser latinx? with two video-performances, for hierophants (2019) and residence (2019), and a sculpture series. Each of the videos featured traversals of lived-in spaces, capturing enigmatic sculptures indicative of internal states. And finally, the sculpture series, Siete Saudades para Josefa Matos mi bisabuela maternal, 2019, laden with tobacco, ash, nectarines, obsidian, fermented plantain juice, and other organic materials composed “saudade,” or altar-like wall arrangements of deep nostalgic feeling. The lacunae, traversals, and devotional sculptures all reached towards the ineffable as if in mid-stride, knowing full well they would not reach totality, and, in fact, resisting the obligation that they should do so.

“the air split the world in a richer combination than last time we spoke…" ⁵

These intricate resistances diffused through the fluid boundaries of the durational performances staged within the Cascade Paragon galleries accompanying the exhibition by abreu and Jonathan González on November 15th. abreu consulted a stack of well-worn books, opening them at random, voicing fragments of artistic interdependency into the room in what they termed a divination technique. Casually picking-up and dropping the books onto the floor, the tomes materially signified networked, albeit disjointed, relations among abreu, Wilson Harris, and a host of other dialogists through textual rubbing. The result was a “primordial soup” that is the artist’s relation to influences, effects, and the unfathomability of the self.⁶ 

González likewise introduced Weather (2019) as a series of drafts and proposals in four acts. Intoning “it’s not total, it never really was,” above the dull humming of a monitor, González continuously looped back on their own discursivity and performativity in act one, making adjustments in a literal “theatrical climate.” ⁷ This live gesture of the incomplete resonated with González’ seemingly endless solitary motion of spreading earth across the courtyard in the rain of MoMA in the video, black MoMA (2018) that played on an adjacent monitor. In each, Gonzàlez verbally and performatively mused about cracks and fragments in memory, the self, and the earth. 

In Weather, the first act featured verbal fissures, blurs, glitches, and snippets of weather and news, as if embodying a TV monitor gone rogue. “Wildness” gradually became a question, alternative, and site of possibility in the three acts that followed wherein González balanced a container on their back, acting as a table support while rock music took center stage; and subsequently projected scenes of drawing blood on a screen and whipping a rope against the gallery wall.⁸ Eventually the hands drawing blood and undergoing the process melded into bound hands, resonating with the racial symbolism of whipping and the body as armature or support. The performance ended with act four in which González invited audience members to speak about what “not total” meant for each of us. I was selected first and found that I could barely meet the gaze of those in the room as the performances ricocheted in my mind; but I managed to say that “not total” carried a spirit of acknowledgement that was rare. Others spoke more personally and candidly about the resonances between the trios’ aims to displace conclusion and finitude and their own artistic visions. Looking back, and considering the inadequacy of my own initial answer, a more accurate (and still lacking) description would have been that the exhibition and performances were revelatory—disclosing the immanence of the unknown and unraveling the Enlightenment hubris of linearity, individuality, purity, and finalizability within knowledge production.  

Not Total was on view at Cascade Paragon Arts Gallery, Portland, OR from November 8 through December 14, 2019. For more information, please visit: https://www.pcc.edu/galleries/2019/11/03/not-total-by-rindon-johnson-jonathan-gonzalez-and-manuel-arturo-abreu/.

*Images courtesy of Paragon Arts Gallery and the artists.

Laurel V. McLaughlin is a writer and curator from Philadelphia, currently based in Portland, OR. Her research interests span visual art, performance, and dance that engage the intersections of embodiment and new media, and her writing has appeared in Performa Magazine, Title Magazine, Art Papers, Art Practical, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA:19 Blog, Monument Lab’s Bulletin, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, and forthcoming in Performance Research. McLaughlin holds MAs from The Courtauld Institute of Art, and Bryn Mawr College, and she’s currently a Ph.D. Candidate at Bryn Mawr College, writing a dissertation concerning migratory aesthetics in performance art situated in the United States, 1970s–2016.

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1. Quotation from manuel arturo abreu’s poetic reading, November 15, 2019.
2. “About,” home school Official Website, Accessed 18 November 2019: https://homeschoolpdx.tumblr.com/about.  
3. Wilson Harris, “Transcripts of ‘Africa, West Indies and United States, Black artists and writers, 1962–1967.’” (Chicago, IL: Center for Research Libraries, 2012).
4. Dana Kopel, “First Look: Rindon Johnson,” Art in America, September 1, 2018: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/first-look-rindon-johnson-63551/.
5. Quotation from manuel arturo abreu’s poetic reading, November 15, 2019. Many thanks to the artist for their permission to include this poetic quote in this review.
6. Quotation stated by abreu in poetic reading, November 15, 2019.
7. Jonathan González, “Weather,” Not Total Exhibition Press Release, Cascade Paragon Gallery Website, Accessed December 1, 2019: https://www.pcc.edu/galleries/2019/11/03/not-total-by-rindon-johnson-jonathan-gonzalez-and-manuel-arturo-abreu/.
8. Ibid.