On Governors Island, a Machine That Jolts History
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Version 0 of 1. New York Harbor was in rhythm on a recent morning, as the artist Charles Gaines considered the panorama from the western edge of Governors Island. The classic attractions — the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island — felt eclipsed by the movement on the water. A giant cruise ship passed, then the Staten Island Ferry. Barges and passenger boats made their way in various directions. The water lapped the embankment, churning current and tide. The scene was giving Gaines energy. His enormous public-art installation on Governors Island, “The American Manifest: Moving Chains,” goes on view Oct. 15. Set on the waterfront esplanade, the 100-foot-long, walk-through steel structure clad in wood is topped by massive motor-operated steel chains. It has been years in the planning — but now, as workers in hard hats finished the installation, its design intricacies were giving way to what Gaines called the location’s “gift” — the aspects you can’t plan in advance. “What is produced by the traffic that’s going along the water — that’s just perfect in terms of creating this motion, this dance,” he said. Site-specific art, he added, involves an unknowable element. “You leave gaps so that things can happen.” Gaines, a youthful 78, is one of America’s most distinguished Conceptual artists, known for drawings, sculptures and installations that are unfailingly elegant yet intellectually complex. But while deeply respected in art circles, he remains little known to the public. That is changing at last. “Moving Chains” is part of a suite of installations unfolding now in New York City and next year in Cincinnati. They evoke river transport, industry, territorial expansion — the building of the American economy from conquest and enslavement. He has thought for years about such topics, and about the ways we narrate or avoid them. But working at public scale, it turns out, has stimulated him with new challenges and revelations. “I’m at a loss for words,” Gaines said, as construction and electrical workers worked on “Moving Chains.” “It seems to be bigger than I’m actually comprehending.” Born in Charleston, S.C., raised in Newark, and long based in Los Angeles — where he has taught for decades at the California Institute of the Arts — Gaines mixes social concerns born of Black American experience with a Conceptual orientation inspired by figures like Sol LeWitt. His art joins these elements in a philosophical inquiry: about the way we form meanings from history and how art can activate these meanings. His early work deconstructed images and photographs into series of grid-based drawings governed by mathematical formulas. A recent ongoing project is equally methodical but more accessible: It involves transposing texts — for instance by Martin Luther King Jr., or Frederick Douglass — into musical scores through a system matching letters to notes. The scores become artworks but also a basis for ensembles to perform. Source text runs on a video monitor, as it did in the “Grief and Grievance” exhibition at the New Museum in 2021. But Gaines remains a theorist. Conversation with him quickly soars into rare air: subjectivity and objectivity, metonymy and metaphor. Rejecting the idea that aesthetic experience is inherently subjective or transcendent, he insists it’s politically shaped. “Art can legitimately inform culture as much as any other discipline,” he said, “rather than being this sort of pleasure, or way of escaping society.” Coursing through his projects is a social concern: How can art destabilize the power structures that channel our thinking? “I’m really invested in the idea of the power of art in relation to the public,” he said. All well and good — but while he has developed his concepts for decades, he rarely put them to work outside the self-contained world of art schools, museums and galleries. His sole public art before this year, he said, was a relatively minor wall project, in Sacramento in the 1980s. “The American Manifest” is major: a three-part, two-city project. Its first chapter came in the summer in Times Square, with a display of American sweetgum trees, upside-down with roots spreading into the air, and a performance based on his notation of the decision and dissent in the 1857 Dred Scott case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Black Americans, even free ones, were not entitled to rights of citizenship — indeed, according to the majority, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” “Moving Chains” will remain on Governors Island until June 2023. Then it will move to the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati — part of a third chapter, to include other site-specific works, in a location redolent with the history of river commerce in enslaved people, the Civil War, and the arc of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. Initiated by Creative Time, the project dates to a planned but unrealized collaboration eight years ago in St. Louis. It regained momentum after Jean Cooney and Meredith Johnson, both on the initial Creative Time team, became the heads of Times Square Arts and Governors Island Arts, respectively, with both organizations joining as co-presenters. For Justine Ludwig, Creative Time’s executive director, the suite represents an apotheosis for one of the most searching artists of our time. “There are decades of a career culminating in this series of works in these different sites,” Ludwig said. With “Moving Chains,” she added, “everything that he’s been working on up to this moment coalesces in the piece.” Johnson, of Governors Island Arts, said the project would show the force that conceptual art can carry, “that conceptual work that is so dense, layered and complex is also translatable and accessible to a broad public.” On the island, watching the idea take form, Gaines was still processing. “It turns out to be this monstrous, in the best sense, piece,” he said. “Moving Chains” is definitely some kind of beast. The structure, which was built by a New Jersey manufacturer and brought over in sections by barge aboard flatbed trucks, weighs about 60 tons. Each of the 9 chains includes 214 large steel links. When the motors run as planned, — for at least five hours, five days a week — eight chains will rumble at one speed while the ninth, central one, distinguished by its rust-colored paint, will go faster — evoking, perhaps something navigating down a river, though Gaines does not force any one interpretation. Visitors can enter the construction, the chains rumbling overhead. The floor and wall cladding are made from sapele, a sustainably harvested African wood. Outlook Hill, the island’s highest point, will afford a grand aerial view of the chains in motion. But the experience inside the piece will be multisensory: “The cladding creates a resonating space,” Gaines said. “You won’t lose your hearing, but hopefully your bones will rattle.” If walking into the structure evokes entering the hull of a ship — a slave ship, perhaps — the connection is no accident. “The general subject of this whole project is the critique of American slave capitalism; how the American economy is built on that, and how that fact is not recognized in the way that we understand that history,” Gaines said. But his approach to the subject is neither narrative nor symbolic. Instead the installation proposes a “structure of metaphor,” he said — for instance, boats don’t have chains, he points out. He hopes viewers will comprehend in their own way, and that the project will jar loose something that is usually tightly suppressed in tellings of history. Gaines’s take on race is rooted in childhood memories: his early days in Charleston and return visits each summer as a teenager. The Jim Crow apparatus of discrimination upset him, but even more, it bred inquiry. “I was questioning, who started these rules?” he said. “I can’t drink out of that fountain — how does that get into place? And that’s an intellectual question! You’re in the South, living under rules of apartheid; it produces an emotional experience, but my entry into it was intellectual.” After his undergraduate studies at Jersey City State College (now New Jersey City University) and M.F.A. at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he taught at Mississippi Valley State University, a historically Black school in the Delta, in the tense climate of the late 1960s. But his next gig was at California State University-Fresno, where the art program had a Conceptualist outlook — setting him on that path and beginning his long California association. At CalArts since, Gaines has shaped generations of students who would go on to notable careers, including Mark Bradford, Rodney McMillian, Edgar Arceneaux, Andrea Bowers, Lauren Halsey and more. Many remain his friends and fierce loyalists — grateful, McMillian said, for the steadfast example he set. “He was doggedly engaged in the possibilities for art regardless of the fact that for years he couldn’t give his work away,” McMillian said. “That’s because he was really engaged in revealing the systems we exist within that propagate inequity. He wanted, for himself and for us, tools that we could use to remake, undo or reimagine ways of being in this land that we share.” Gaines finally appeared in the Venice Biennale in 2007. (He would return there in 2015.) One work he showed was a balsa-wood model city with a toy airplane set up to dive at intervals into the piece, where a rotating panel would reveal a crash scene. The work was jolting. As a “kinetic sculpture,” he said, it was a precursor to “Moving Chains.” On Governors Island, Gaines was feeling the work slip loose of his own conceptions. He was suddenly comfortable with calling the structure a “vessel” — rather than leave that assessment to the viewer. “I wanted it to occupy this weird space between being a boat and being a geometric structure,” he said. But its placement looking out to Lower Manhattan and the Bayonne container hoists, “makes me realize that the boat reference is undeniable.” At long last, the strict Conceptualist was relaxing his rules. “It doesn’t bother me that the reference is so strong,” he said. “It doesn’t narrow the interpretation. It actually poetically widens it.” |