To bind: to tie or fasten tightly, to hamper or constrain, to bandage together or enclose. Binding is what we do to book pages, wounds, contractual partners, kinky lovers, unwanted breasts, newborn babies, and things we carry. The act can be violent or healing, limiting or soothing, coercive or consensual, and sometimes all of these at once.
Binding was also one of the central motifs in Carmen Argote’s “I won’t abandon you, I see you, we are safe,” an exhibition that functioned as a space for exploration and play. The overarching constraint here was of the artist by her art: Over the course of the exhibition, Argote was frequently on-site, whether performing actions with a group of collaborators, interacting with objects in the space, or making new work at the communal tables in the museum’s lobby. The effect of her committed presence was palpable: The show felt alive, evolving, inhabited.
It was also intensely personal. Three large mixed-media works on paper, evocatively titled how thin are the walls between, let the child speak, and you are not late, all 2022, announced the material and psychological rawness that pervaded the exhibition. Each one centers a grotesque, loosely human form, surrounded by bits of paper bearing philosophical statements, questions, and self-affirmations: THE OPENING UP OF THE UNCONSIOUS [sic] ALWAYS MEANS THE OUTBREAK OF SUFFERING; TO BE HUMAN IS TO SURRENDER; I’M NOT IN DANGER RIGHT NOW / NOBODY IS PERFECT / MISTAKES HAPPEN.
This sense of intimacy—of the artist laid bare—only heightened as one moved deeper into the exhibition, finding, for example, a vitrine filled with five handwritten letters, each addressed to an invited collaborator: Argote’s gallerist, Young Chung; art historian Mary McGuire; curator Daniela Lieja Quintanar; fellow artist Cedric Tai; and Argote’s mother, artist and educator Carmen Vargas. The letters were only partially visible (and the letter to Vargas was pointedly arranged to conceal the first page behind the last), but even in fragments they illuminated Argote’s desire for relationships—with important people in her life and, above all, with herself—that thrive on openness and vulnerability.
In these diaristic texts, the “inner child” appeared several times, described as a girl aged four or five who walks beside Argote in daily life—an especially evocative image given that walking is a facet of the artist’s rigorous praxis. The inner child also emerged, or was conjured, in the rope play that Argote and Vargas performed on numerous occasions in the galleries, standing or sitting on a circular canvas mat that demarcated a temporary space of engagement. Dressed in jumpsuits, they took turns binding each other with rope, wordlessly trying on a series of relational identities that felt simultaneously inherent to the action and subject to the viewer’s own projections. During one performance, Vargas slapped the mat with ropes in front of a bound Argote, seeking a reaction; minutes later, that disquieting power dynamic melted into unmistakable parent-child tenderness as Vargas gently ran the ends of the cord over Argote’s face, eliciting a look of serene pleasure that continued as Argote, once freed, hugged one of her many “comforting objects,” prone bodily forms (all made between 2021 and 2023) crafted from organic materials such as corn husks, banana peels, and palm fronds, wrapped tightly with crepe rubber bands.
Vargas’s extensive participation in the show further signaled mothering—itself a form of binding—as the major throughline of Argote’s recent work. Toward the end of the exhibition, one arrived at its conceptual beginning, a rubbing the artist made of a headstone that simply reads MOTHER, the ghostly image of which appears three times at the center of the drawing I do not need to give to receive, 2020–21. Argote turns the headstone’s reductive language into an expansive directive: to mother as a primary mode of relation; to radically broaden the scope of mothering beyond the human to encompass, for example, care for her chickens (whose eggs and other effects appear in the show); and, beyond the literal, to include and indeed prioritize one’s relationship with the self. These insistently personal claims are also manifestly political. If we sought to understand ourselves as bound to all living things, Argote asks, what kind of world could we bring into being?
