Artspace Exhibits Dive Below The Surface

The tree in the image from the short film Leaf of Life has spread its branches wide, offering inviting shade, protection — and perhaps nourishment. The fruits that artist Ilana Harris-Babou has placed in its branches are healthy enough, but the way Harris-Babou has rendered them, there is something fake about them, a little suspicious. We want to eat well. We want to be healthy. We want to live better lives, in greater harmony with our neighbors and with nature. But how do we know when we’re doing that? How do we know if we’ve been had?

The film is part of Revelations, an installation by Harris-Babou running with Against the Greater Good, a set of pieces created by artists Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas, at Artspace on Orange and Crown now through Dec. 3. Taken together, the two pieces offer a thoughtful, sometimes humorous, and sometimes hopeful take on the enormous problems of global inequality, racism, and climate change, and what role art can play in helping people navigate the complexities of it in their daily lives, perhaps to even take baby steps toward improving things for themselves, those around them, and the environment.

“In Against the Greater Good/Contra el Bien General, artistic duo Bergman & Salinas present a new series of conceptual works including sculptures, wall-mounted mixed media, photography, painting, sound, and text works,” an accompanying note reads. The installation ​“critiques how systems of capital corral the commons, against the general good for humans and non-humans alike.”

This description plays down the work’s deeply personal origins for the artists, who are based in the Pacific Northwest. In a short essay entitled ​“How to Delay Extinction” — printed up in small booklets as part of the exhibit — they explain that ​“reading an earth history book to our daughter Agnes, we tried to explain the five mass extinction events to a 6‑year-old.” Agnes knew that dinosaurs had already gone extinct, but her parents found themselves ​“lacking the words” to describe what happens next. ​“We told her that everything changes, mostly slowly, sometimes quickly. We did not worry her about the recent research connecting massive wildfires with the most significant mass extinction in Earth’s history, the end-Permian, when less than 5 percent of species survived. Agnes has known wildfires since she was born, and the yearly smoke pouring through the cracks in our house likely caused her asthma attacks.”

For Bergman & Salinas, the event is the spark for them to explore the connection between our economic system and climate change, and their place in it as artists. ​“Artists, like everyone else, live and work in global capitalism,” they write. But is another way possible? Can the means of making art, the materials used, address longstanding economic inequality and the need to adapt to a changing climate? During the wildfires, trapped in their house due to the smoke outside, it occurred to them that the coal that blackened the ink they used in their art was essentially the same stuff that was making the air outside dangerous to breathe. This got them thinking about ownership of carbon — not just ink, but food, and in particular, seeds, and the rush by agriculture companies to patent them, whether the seeds were theirs to own or not. Following an unabashedly Marxist line of logic, they thought about how the elites at the top of the system we live in make decisions mostly to benefit themselves, at the expense of the greater good — everyone else and the natural world.

These were gloomy thoughts, but meanwhile, they had a 6‑year-old to care for. Focusing on her changed the tone of their thinking. ​“Trying to understand and come to terms with mass extinction events ourselves, we noticed an unfamiliar feeling that we could not quite identify at first: hope. We always spin things for Agnes so she feels safe; there is plenty of time later in her hopefully very long life to feel the anxiety and horror of living on earth under capitalism. So, for ourselves as much as for her, we explained that through adaptation, life is so powerful that, despite being burned, frozen, hit by asteroids, earthquakes, eruptions, acrid air, big oil, and the United States Supreme Court, life always finds ways to thrive. What we didn’t say during her bedtime reading is that, while it is guaranteed that humans will go extinct, likely bringing with us another great extinction event, life on this planet will thrive after we are gone. We will be the peculiar creatures only seen in fossil records. In the meantime, if enough of us agree, we can avoid early extinction by ceasing our attacks on all the other wonderful creatures stuck living in this period with us.”

Against the Greater Good takes its name from The Disasters of War, Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s famous prints documenting the atrocities wrought upon Spaniards during Spain’s war with Napoleon in the 19th century. Bergman & Salinas run far with Goya’s take on art as journalism and activism, but they begin by paying their respects. On one long wall of the gallery is an array of pieces in which the artists have drawn over Goya’s prints, not to obscure them, but to draw strength from them, to send a signal that we are perhaps fighting a different kind of war today, and by not averting our eyes from its victims, we can adapt and act in a different way.

The artists also portray reasons to hope, beginning with metal reproductions of a few failed attempts by corporations to patent seeds. The pages are reproduced in their legalistic glory, which the artists snarkily annotate with what appears to be a set of Sharpie markers. Each of them ends with a gleeful circle drawn around the conclusion and labeled: ​“patent cancelled,” ​“patent terminated,” ​“patent revoked.”

Elsewhere the artists have put together a reading room for visitors to learn more. Accompanying the exhibit is a series of lectures and other events to dig deeper into the themes of Against the Greater Good. Perhaps most directly, though, are a series of booklets on the floor; visitors are encouraged to take one. In it is a chapter from Karl Marx’s Das Capital, illustrated by public-domain images from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Tucked in the pages of each book is a packet of seeds — also in the public domain, freely given, for us to plant as we will.

If Bergman & Salinas achieve their artistic perspective by taking the long view — of the history of the development of economic ideas, of the natural history of the planet and the mass extinctions that preceded us millions of years ago — Ilana Harris-Babou can perhaps be understood as positioning herself within the maelstrom of it all. Sure, we all want to live better lives, and we want to do the right thing and help other people and the environment. But how do you even begin to do it? Where do you start? Especially when, as Harris-Babou points out, many of the people on the same road have agendas of their own?

Decision Fatigue, featuring Harris-Babou’s mother Sheila Harris, plunges into the beauty and wellness industry. It begins from the perspective that mainstream ideas of these things are all too geared toward White women of means. But then where are the alternatives? The film parodies today’s influencer talk that purports to offer a better road to wellness by rejecting the mainstream, but just like the mainstream, is mostly interested in figuring out how to part women from their cash. In the course of the film, Harris uses rose-quartz jade rollers, applies a face mask to her skin made from crumbled Cheetos, and gets ready to eat a TV dinner. As an accompanying note describes it, ​“capitalism ensures that viewers, namely women-identifying people, do not actually have the choices they imagine; and, as Sheila reveals, they might encounter more than fatigue when and if they attempt to indulge in choosing.”

A similar bait-and-switch happens in Human Design, in which Harris-Babou, assuming the role of a fictional CEO, offers a lifestyle brand that offers customers a chance to slow down, reconnect with their roots, and live a more meaningful life, in contrast to more ostentatious forms of living. In the process of the film, however, it’s shown that the alternative can be just as gaudy as the mainstream, just as caught up in the problems of racism and appropriation. What is the way out?

These questions become most acute in Leaf of Life, which combines a fake cooking show, an account from Harris-Babou’s sister, and footage from self-proclaimed herbalist and healer Alfredo Bowman, a.k.a. Dr. Sebi to show the extreme difficulties of finding a better way to live. Harris-Babou’s sister, we first learn, had a job at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, in which she witnessed firsthand how hard it was for poor Black people to get good healthcare — and the callousness of some of her fellow employees in dealing with their patients. It instilled in her a certain distrust of the medical establishment, even as she trusted some of the science behind it. But was there another option?

The film then takes us to Dr. Sebi, who combined a deep narrative of Black liberation with an advocation for healthy eating that, in time, led to some very outlandish claims — such as that eating the right foods could cure someone of AIDS. His charisma, however, got him far. He garnered celebrity clients from Michael Jackson to John Travolta and made a lot of money. This did not prevent him from being tried for money laundering in Honduras. He contracted pneumonia in jail and died while awaiting trial in 2016. His followers saw a conspiracy in his death — as they did in the death of the rapper Nipsey Hussle in 2019, who was said to be working on a documentary about Dr. Sebi that would indict the medical establishment.

Harris’s sister explains both the allure of Dr. Sebi and her eventual disillusionment with his ideas, after frequenting a Facebook group of his devoted followers. As the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, the sister reports, the antipathy toward the medical establishment reared its head, to the point that moderators began blocking sensible advice from medical professionals about how to avoid contracting the disease and how to get treated for it. The disinformation, she realized, could end up killing someone, and she left — with a deeper understanding that the way the system was rigged against her and her people appeared not only in White mainstream society, but the alternatives proposed in some Black spaces as well.

Harris-Babou’s work is complex and challenging, and like Bergman & Salinas, Harris-Babou offers a way forward in the worldview she presents. She offers no easy answers, and more important, advises skepticism toward anyone who claims to have them, especially when they’re telling you what you think you want to hear. The works of both artists come together in asking viewers to get beneath the surface to find the deeper currents in human and natural history, and seeing where they lead.