Sharon Hayes, Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29 (detail), 2003, four-channel video installation, color, sound, 9, 10, 20, and 15 minutes, respectively.
Sharon Hayes
Whitney Museum of American Art
Sharon Hayes’s ambitious show was set amid wooden dividers, platforms, and stair-units. Designed by Hayes and her frequent collaborator Andrea Geyer, the mise-en-scène was a cross between speaker’s corner, radical-history library, and trade fair—mixed, of course, with major-museum exhibition. (The show was curated by Chrissie Iles.) Hayes’s art, here as in the past decade, explores oratory, confession, re-performance, and the erotics of public talk. We need all the intelligence we can muster on such subjects, and hers is considerable. Still, results were mixed.
Arriving visitors were confronted by a huge curtain blocking off the installation. A slogan was printed on it: NOW A CHASM HAS OPENED BETWEEN US THAT HOLDS US TOGETHER AND KEEPS US APART. This seemed coy, or canned, as did the words on a second banner: MY MEMORY TRANSLATES EVERYTHING INTO SOMETHING ELSE. It’s complicated,
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