Holding Together
BY ADA DRAGOMIR
Recently, I’ve been able to close my eyes and feel into the future. In quiet moments, it’s easier to see something squinting from around the bend—the sun reflecting off a shard of mirror—a momentary blinding.
The future is warm, a light that plays over your lids as you’re lying in the grass, belly up in the softness of high summer next to a friend. The future feels like abolition now, which both is and is not a physical sensation. The future is full bellies, access-as-agency, secure and affordable housing. It is structures and systems made by and for disabled QTBIPOC which operate in disabled time. It is stewardship and sovereignty of this place in the hands of xʷməθkʷə ̓yəm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səli̓lil ̓wətaʔɬ people, Pacheedaht and Ditidaht people, Wet’suwet’en, Secwepemc, and Kanienʼkehá꞉ka people. The future feels like racialized folks having permanence and decision making power. It is deep and reverent care—for ourselves, for this world, for each other. The future is feeling held enough by our structures and communities to start stripping away, one piece at a time, the systems that cannot and will not hold us in our complicated paradoxical humanity, and walking naked into the Salish sea.
In the future, our only job will be to point towards life—to feel, to think, to show care, to love the things we touch. If we begin turning away from our death drive and turning towards life, the future is squinting at us from just around the bend.
I’m watching a gloved hand caress a lithe wooden figurine about the size of a forearm in the basement of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The hand belongs to Amy Nugent, 221A fellow, the sculpture, a 1952 untitled work in sumac by Florence Wyle. It has never been shown publicly. Along with five other works by Wyle and one by her partner Frances Loring—neoclassical sculptors who met in art school in 1905 and lived queer artist lives before it was cool in New York and then, Toronto—it lives permanently, in darkstorage. Watching that video of Amy’s hand running over this strange work makes me viscerally uncomfortable. It is sensual—sexual even—given the OG deep-lez status of the sculpture’s maker. Look, it’s pandemic-summer and we’re all really thirsty. Don’t judge me.
Instead imagine a gloved hand skimming over a strange figure emerging from a sumac staff—brushing over small carved thighs, then a belly, chest, circling down the side of an arm in a gesture of intimate affection and care, a way of being with an object that is all connection, love, and presence, the kind of tenderness only possible from someone who’s devoted a decade of study and research to the stories of Frances and Florence, their work, and their legacy.
It is astonishing to me that, on average, only 8 percent of collections ever get exhibited for the public to see. Collections are icebergs, and gallery vaults are packed with works—‘dubiously acquired’ cultural objects—that never see the light of day. The irrelevance of collections is a growing concern. Compounded by a lack of space and public money available to purchase contemporary works by women identified sculptors, it's a predicament. On average, work by women and non-binary artists represent 18% of what’s held in public collections in so-called Canada. Sculpture makes up only 4%. Storage is hard to find and space costs money. Sculpture is the trickiest, given the demands on space and infrastructure it produces. Museums and galleries have neither in adequate supply. Take the Vancouver Art Gallery, an old courthouse sitting atop a vast collection of immovable assets that grows by several hundred works every year. The VAG has been front-end loading the case-for-support for a new building for 10 years, citing a need for more storage and exhibition space for works within the permanent collection. However, they have only been able to raise 35% of what’s needed to build. The city's politicians and art administrators are racking their brains on what to do about the issue of storage and exhibition. But even if we zoom out of this particular keyhole, it’s clear that we’ve reached the edge of the art world as we know it. The edge of what the typical museum and gallery can do. The edge of what this world can hold, can make, can feel, can change.
The art world is notorious for working hard to be perceived as liberal, edgy, even radical. In reality, it is one arm of the neoliberal machine. Under the solidarity statements and book clubs, the EDI committees and diversity hires—under the not-for-profit-gallery-cum-tax-shelter—is a reification of already existing hierarchies: a rotted out system of racial capitalism, classism, sexism and ableism.
In the future, art is about access and reverent care. Creative practice is working curiosity, living out our existence in relationship to each other, seeing and being seen, witnessed and held in the ebb and flow of our lives. I think sculptures want the same thing.
Work is made to be looked at, to be cared for. That is its purpose, its job, it’s consuming desire. If we stop thinking about art (whether it takes object or non-object form) as a commodity, and start thinking about it as an experience, a type of relationship, an opening for care, we can start feeling the future.
The VAG is the custodian of our city’s art collection. What if museums—who act as caretakers on our behalf—got out of the way and let us, regular people, take care of some of the collected works?
What if museums gave sculptures what they want?
What if the seven Loring and Wyle works were cared for collectively, in shared relationship and responsibility? Not tucked away in the vaults, but instead held in temporary, collective visual storage. What if they were liberated from the tombs, daylighted, re-commoned, brought out to live with us in our homes?
Use-case:
As digital technologies create new patterns with which to organize our culture and communities amongst physical objects and spaces, our municipal art institutions should be at the forefront of exploring those opportunities.
Many years ago, in a Samhain ritual filled with older queer femmes, sharp in their grief, I heard these words over and over again: what is remembered lives. Our world is full of forgetting, full of forgotten people, forgotten things.
Blockchain is a memory technology—an external place to hold our re-collectings. In other modes of external memory, access to the database is hierarchical. Not everyone can see the entirety or make changes, so only a select few hold power. With a decentralized ledger like blockchain, everyone has access. Everyone takes care of memory but no one has the power to alter it, only to create new memories to link onto the chains. In this way, what is remembered lives.
The Loring and Wyle collection across the country is full of small bronzes and offbeat plaques, plaster medallions, and carved torsos imbued with longing. I’d like for those sculptures to be remembered; I’d like for them to live. Pieces of Loring and Wyle’s oeuvre exist in vaults from Lekwungen lands to places governed by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum, most of them moldering away in storage racks—a mermaid and seahorse in bas relief at the AGGV, bronzes of women factory workers at the War Museum, a dubiously lucky peacock clock stored at the AGO—all held in trust but not trusted to be held.
I believe it’s possible to give sculptures what they want by connecting them to people’s care through an off-site domestic storage cooperative. Like any other co-op model, interested parties get together and invest in something that none of them individually have access to which is held in common under shared agreements. We think that this is the future of collections.
Seven Loring and Wyle pieces lay on the central work table in the vaults underneath the courthouse. The sound of the registrars' quiet voice—an oval, 2.0cm in depth by 65.0cm in circumference, painted plaster, smooth, no chips, good condition, fragile, gift of Linda Lando in 2006—is punctuated by the soft and shallow rap of keyboard strokes. A coder translating—each object’s likeness, provenance, condition, history and needs are described in code, embedded on the Ethereum blockchain, administered through smart contracts, the Loring and Wyle fonds alive in IPFS. Systems for updating location, condition, changing value and changing need are created. Systems for the acquisition of new work, beyond the first seven pieces, incorporated through revenue generating program streams, much of it automated, absorbing caretaker-imputed and publicly-verified information and performing the tasks that a registrar would, in the daylight of collective memory.
It’s a tiered system, levels of access corresponding to levels of sculpture need. As a steward, a caretaker of sculptures, the currency that you trade in, your buy-in power, is care. Membership fees are used to make more expensive infrastructure attainable, but ultimately to fund equity-based acquisition of new pieces. You work your way into relationships of increasing responsibility to the work, ranging from a three month stewardship of a small marble piece, a tough survivor with modest needs, compact and simple to ship, secured over your mantle, all the way to a 5 year stint with a shy and fragile painted plaster bas-relief, which you think of with worry and longing every time you go camping. Leveling up our care incrementally builds trust within the system, building trust is building access to deeper and longer-term ways to be in service to the work—from selection of new works to co-op governance to long term visioning. In the future, our only job is to take care of the things we love. Let us begin with the domestication of art storage.
Open up your phone, and tap on The Sculpture Fund app. A navigation screen opens. You see the collection mapped onto the alleyways and intersections of this place. Click a place on the map. Up pops a small photo gallery. First the object, Bluejay in Sumac, a smallish plaster medallion by Frances Loring (1958), looking severe in the documentation photo. The farther you swipe, the weirder it gets—the more domestic. First, the curly-haired caretaker awkwardly smiling beside the work, then a blurry candlelit dinner party. Then the sculpture’s face bathed in golden-hour sun, an eerie 57 second video of an ancient tabby looking into its round white face still and unblinking, the air pregnant with hidden messages. There’s open hours listed, too. Sunday afternoons from 2-4pm, with kebab and homemade pickles. You even have an invitation to confirm the condition of the work with the network via photographs and questionnaires when you arrive, a form of collective accountability which is another name for collective care. There’s access to a historical documents section, a link to the Loring and Wyle archive at the AGO, scans of Loring and Wyle’s mirrored wills. There’s a sculpture steward’s interface too: weekly condition reports, an in-app conservator hotline that foregrounds accessible ways to show care over sterile conditions and expensive resources—systems that make it possible to collectively give work what it wants and to enliven, extend, and animate the archive.
It is important to realize that some sculptures want to live forever and some do not. The extraordinary power of care is in listening—in hearing and believing work when it needs to be left alone forever, when it needs to live in specialized climates tended by conservators, or when it needs to be at home with the people who love it. Part of what's pointing us to death as a culture is the irony in our terror of dying. We want things to exist forever, unchanged, linear graphs of infinite growth and accumulation. We want endless extraction, endless consumption, infinite beauty, never-ending life; ‘our’ ideas chiseled into stone, ‘our’ monuments poured into bronze installed in verdant central squares. Something to invoke ‘forever’, as if time means nothing, as if ‘us’ signifies anything but a yearning broken collectivity.
Inevitably, if these sculptures come home with us, they will die. If we are to accept care for sculptural work in life-facing ways—in collective visual storage in-home—we must also be prepared to be with them until the end. Call it sculptural palliative care. When they break beyond repair, especially if we’re serious about art-as-relationship over art-as-commodity, their ending might involve a wake, a ceremony, a burial or cremation. When sculptures leave this world, their stories live in caretakers, in the commons; their cultural value, a living relationship embedded on the Ethereum blockchain. Afterall, what is remembered, lives.
The VAG has a rentals and sales program that’s been around since 1952. Members of the public can rent or buy works not included in the galleries collection, with most revenue going back to artists. Over its lifespan, VAG Art Rentals and Sales staff estimate virtually no damage to sculpture. Most damage is to framing of wall works, which is easy to fix. Our carefulness with art objects is culturally ingrained. At one point, the gallery had a loan program for the general public running from their actual collection. If the future has happened before it can happen again.
Amy Jenkins, Head of Art Bank, Canada Council for the Arts, reported much the same, in that, over their 50 years of operations there hasn’t been much damage to sculpture stored indoors, nothing that couldn’t be fixed. The Art Bank does not rent to the residential market but through the pandemic has been in conversation with the Australian Artbank who does. Australia said that while you might think that damage would be worse in a home than in an office environment, their research and experience proves the contrary. There are fewer people in a home, less traffic and more direct responsibility connected to the piece. The Canada Art Bank recently completed a report commissioned by the Canadian Conservation Institute on risks to artworks in non museum spaces. An overall finding was that over a 2 year period the chance for minor damage of an artwork in a non museum space is 1 in 600 and the chance for major damage is 1 in 1800.
We are not proposing to deaccession the Loring and Wyle pieces in order to absorb them into collective care. The works will stay part of the VAG’s permanent collection and residents will give them good lives and a good death when the time comes. It’s a pragmatic move for museums and galleries to turn to collective care administered through a decentralized ledger. Not only are they desperate for space and to reconstruct an image of credibility, authenticity, and public good in the wake of the pandemic, the uprising for Black Lives, and ongoing demands for Indigenous sovereignty and territory, but removing work from collections through destruction or sale is tricky. The desire to preserve work for future generations is often at fundamental odds with available space, mandates, institutional accreditation, and the optics of destroying or selling work. Whatever few years are lost in the increased handling that a storage co-op would entail are gained a thousand times over in the intimacy of care, in living memory of sculptures and their stories.
Recommoning this collection on the blockchain makes sense because it makes space. It makes space for collective care, for reciprocal relationship, and for participation—the mechanisms which propagate culture. It makes space for having a stake, for Loring and Wyle’s legacy, and for sculptures to get what they want. Most importantly though, it makes space for the acquisition of new works. Space for queer disabled Black, Indigenous, and artists of colour, space for works that point to life, space for the future that’s glinting at us from around the bend.
WHERE SHALL I GO?
“Immortal” says the body
Brain says “No”.
Reason pointing this way;
Love pulling that —
Where shall I go?
Florence Wyle