The Proustian Marxism of Lucia Hierro
Review of Lucia Hierro's "¿Usted Qué Come Que Adivina?" at Charlie James Gallery.
Discussed in this essay:
Lucia Hierro
¿Usted Qué Come Que Adivina?
Charlie James Gallery 961 CHUNG KING ROAD
June 3 - July 15, 2023
Seeing Lucia Hierro’s show at CJ gallery is like cooking soup. The disparate ingredients do not immediately gel. For a minute it just seems like stuff floating in hot water, buoyant celery and so forth. But, simmering over time, the magic happens. The ingredients and methods in Hierro’s works are not unfamiliar but the heat, as applied here, to specific ingredients creates something spicy and original.
Most of the works here are made from fabric printed with large photos and wrapped around foam. The blown up photos are a bit grainy. They recall the menu photos in mom and pop takeout joints: deadpan, utilitarian, and sometimes faded to blue. The foam construction gives them a welcoming quality: comforting, as in “comfort food” as well as vaguely reminiscent of a comforter - tying it, also, to traditionally feminine modes of art production.
The images of food have a poetic sumptuousness as if they were painted. The light and dark spots float free from the image to become semi-abstract marks. This gives the rice a surreal but still appealing quality. The layers of mediation distance us from it and activates our Proustian nerve centers which evokes taste and memory. Like rice (as you eat it), it nearly disintegrates in the eye as it would in the mouth. The discrete elements dissolve into something more like an uneven textural effect.
The fabric and foam constructions create an interesting friction with the image. The soft sculptural volume of the fabric substrates rhyme and contrast with the roundness of items printed on them. The illusionism and objecthood don’t quite line up but create an interesting mismatch and sense of tension. Similarly, a pair of rubber gloves in Remojo borrows a sense of malleability from the fabric.
Compositionally, they are structured like Tom Wesselman’s cut out still lives or Claes Oldenberg’s soft sculptures - either as stand alone items or wall relief combines of several elements. However, Wesselman and Oldenberg dealt with pop art primarily as imagery - as iconic objects or advertisement type illustrations. Hierro’s are more mundane. They represent mass produced items as they might appear in our homes. That is, in our lived experience as opposed to in advertising.
Two pieces which monumentalize aprons complement the rest of the work here, like a pair of gargoyles. They tower over the viewer like maternal figures - evoking childhood and reminding us of the centrality of food to our sense of identity and personal history. They also monumentalize the idea of female-coded domestic labor. The titles of the two aprons, Casa Apron and Line Apron, make the important point that labor is labor, regardless of whether it takes place in the house or in a place of business, for wages. They are important as part of this installation but they are less successful, for me, as objects than the other pieces. They feel more like symbols than objects or visual experiences.
My favorite piece though is Dyckman Express (2023), a 52-inch high reproduction of a GrubHub delivery bag complete with a receipt. It includes both a greasy brown paper bag and the crinkly thin plastic bag encasing it. The outer bag is printed with the text “Thank you!” and some kitschy clip art roses. It’s drab and familiar. Hierro exquisitely recreates it right down to its tiny chaotic wrinkles as registered by the photo but not the fabric substrate’s actual wrinkles. As a petroleum product which we might encounter as litter, it oozes abject toxicity and a certain irritating pathos.
It’s hard to imagine this piece being made before the pandemic. Now, it seems quintessential: the abject/iconic pop art object as ur-commodity. Consider its provenance. This meal was ordered through an app and delivered by a low-paid gig worker. Several different rent-seeking corporations took a cut for facilitating the delivery and payment. Sales tax was paid. The bag probably includes agricultural products produced through vicious labor exploitation and/or animal abuse. The order was presumably placed on an iPhone which was built with child labor and assembled in modern day sweatshops. The bag and plastic containers help create microplastics. It recalls how the pandemic laid this country’s class system bare: low-paid gig, retail, and warehouse workers were forced to work in incredibly dangerous conditions while white collar professionals retreated to the relative safety of remote work. Depending on whether you identify with the producer, delivery driver, or consumer of this bag (or a GrubHub stockholder), you might feel differently about this piece of art. For what it’s worth, Hierro puts her own name on the bag, as its recipient.
Delivery services like GrubHub and DoorDash remove a vestige of human interaction from the process of ordering takeout. Presumably, for the sake of convenience but it feels more like rent-seeking. Aside from the increased delivery fees, what do we really get from this? -added value or just isolation and alienation. It’s not like takeout delivery didn’t exist before apps did. A recent spate of unrelated but truly disturbing killings suggests that we’re even seeing the DoorDashification of deranged vigilantism: people shooting random strangers, simply for the crime of arriving on their doorstep. Truly, what manner of people is this society breeding? Even short of killing at random, what habits of mind does it encourage in all of us?
The press release contains an interesting bit which feels, for me, like it has a confusing relationship to the work on display:
“For Lucia, whose work has long mined the particularities of her Dominican identity and her home in Manhattan, this opacity is part of a continuing conceptual turn against a mainstream that flattens, consumes, then discards cultures as it sees fit, leaving histories and contexts crumpled like so many GrubHub receipts.”
Oddly, the work here doesn’t seem to mine anything about her Dominican identity except as a cultural references: as images or allusions. Likewise, most of the food here is takeout which is a peculiar way to mine your own identity. The overall form of the work is actually quite mainstream - that is, within the conventions of contemporary art. The obvious touchstones include the aforementioned pop artists, feminist conceptual art, and photo appropriation art. They also recall Haim Steinbach - whose work mines the equivalence (as commodities) of various mass produced products and found objects.
The subject matter - the specific takeout items, for instance - seems less essential here than the formal system which she’s invented to talk about the tension between authenticity and market relations. Nevertheless, this cultural specificity reveals how authentic experience can exist alongside commercial transactions, especially with food. I remember certain kinds of takeout from my childhood - not necessarily connected to my ethnicity - which framed important friendships and moments in my life. These things become part of the not-just-culinary backdrop of life - or a period of our life. Food inevitably becomes embedded in other habits, rituals, and traditions. Hierro’s representation of her own heritage reminds us of our own culturally specific gustatory traditions. Putting these precise artifacts under this kind of conventionalized art lens emphasizes the fact that everything is being leveled out, deracinated by capitalism. By performing the thing which she says she’s critiquing, the critique becomes sharper: like Warhol’s, its ironies make it more astute.
After all, what is “culture”, “society”, or the “mainstream?” Ordering takeout - much less running a restaurant which delivers food - is not the function of any one specific ethnic identity, but it is a cultural one, in one sense: the culture of capitalist subjects. It requires participants who understand things like what-private-property-is and how to stand in line at a takeout counter. -Not to mention the myriad rules, laws, and customs which commerce requires. Capitalism does not just exist as a “mainstream” in opposition to other cultural trends - as a form of colonization - but also as an omnipresent force (a form of socialization and a psychology, no less) which exerts pressure on and through everything else: within us, even. This might explain why Hierro would use takeout food as a stand-in for identity.
Another reason (which may or may not apply here) is what British Marxist historian Erik Hobsbawm called the invention of tradition. Traditions are often invented and then projected back onto the past. For instance, much of what we think of as traditional Italian food is a quite recent American invention.
The plastic lid of a takeout container (another petroleum product, incidentally) pressing down on the takeout chicken - Stew Chicken (Combo) Takeout (2023) - is an apt metaphor for this omnipresence of The Market as embedded in daily life, even in areas which we normally identify as nodes of authenticity: like making art, for instance. This is what (I think) the line “Face right down in the practice room” in the Pavement song Cut Your Hair means: capitalism is already shaping production, even before it’s marketed and sold as a product - even when it is marketed as an “authentic” product.
All of this takes us a bit far afield from our usual habits of viewing objets d’arte, I suppose. Hierro’s work is interesting, though, because it seems to pose questions about class, identity, and capitalism that aren’t addressed by most contemporary art. These ideas are difficult to represent because they are not particularly visual but exist in the relationships between things. In light of this, it is quite striking that Dyckman Express is almost but not quite monumental - certainly not as monumental as a Claes Oldenberg sculpture is. It exists in proportion to the human body. You could fit someone in there. Perhaps not comfortably, but that’s the point. It would be quite uncomfortable, like a dead body slumped into a car trunk. In this sense, Dyckman Express (like every single actual GrubHub bag) can be seen as a tiny tombstone containing a little bit of what Karl Marx called dead labor and - for us, even just as consumers - a tiny piece of our souls.
Your writing is fabulous, ticking off so many ideas, with complete understanding of the work. Big fan 💎
Another informative article. I hope your okay if your in LA