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In her stunning 2002 show, From Mouth To Ear, Andrea Bowers chose,
after exhibiting widely for nearly a decade, to make her vocation completely explicit. She is a memorialist, a 'sentimental bitch,'(as Bowers
boldly titles Mouth's commemorative scrapbook to the Lori Twersky, editor of the greatest girl rock 'zine), hungry for traces that people
leave upon the landscape. Mounted in a granite boulder on the floor of Goldman Tevis Gallery, a small monitor displys some video footage of
Bower's steady handheld camera moving closer towards a gravestone. Bessie Smith The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing 1895-1937.
Reflected in the polished marble of the marker, a streaky gray-and-white pearlescent sky wraps itself around the grave's location: a tranquil,
not-too-manicured African-American cemetary in a neighborhood outside of Philadelphia, PA. The pearly gates of heaven are maybe just beyond the
stand of trees that lines the graveyard. Bessie Smith, RIP. Is Andrea Bowers Black? Is she a manicurist paying off the mortgage on her
manufactured home in Ohio? Is the lady selling t-shirts in the mall actually her Aunt Dee?
I'm tempted to say that race and class are at the heart of Bower's strategy, though in the most devious kind of way. The images of humanist
photographers like Alan Sekula have traditionally bestowed a dignity and grandeur on their subjects. It is a gift that can only be given by a
person reaching through some distance. Bowers, on the other hand, who seems to simply disappear, in fact becomes an agent of her subjects. Isolating
and recontextualizing images of mass culture within the gallery's sacred high-art space, Bowers manages to present the values of her subjects -
bravada, color, sentiment, a pretty picture as something powerful and worth considering. I Love You Fucking People! Look At Me!
In Mouth, Bowers recapitulates a presentational technique devised over several years that serves her purposes very well: isolating single
images from a seemingly reality-TV video-verite kind of flow and then positioning them against the creamy sober vellum space of gallery archival
paper. In the beautiful wall pieces exhibited in Moving Equilibrium (Sarah Melzer Gallery, 1999), the pre-teen girl in the Wonder Woman costume
who skated to a messy finish in Bower's video All The World Is Waiting For You floats against the background of the paper like a butterfly: she's
caught in time and cherished, poised. It's an image any parent would be proud of. Bowers deploys the materials of visual art dissonance,
dispassion, space and time to arrive at the heightened pitch of sentiment anyone who's ever taken family snapshots has aspired to, not knowing this
is something that a snapshot never can achieve.
The street finds its own uses, William Gibson proclaimed in Neuromancer, the first pop novel of the 21st century, published 16 years
early in 1984. He was talking about the way technology filters to the street like fashion, the way technology becomes itself as it gets corrupted
to people's needs. Arriving in Los Angeles from New York in 1990, Bowers spent the decade trailing around the stadiums and karaoke bars and malls
and air shows of Southern California with her cameras. There's never really nothing, she must've realized early on, there's only ever the
problem of describing what there really is.
I'm struck by the similarities and differences between Bower's images and Andreas Gursky's photographs of raves and spectacles and sports
events. While Gursky's images function as a blankly frightening lament for the vapidity of Global Europe, Bowers looks and finds a subjectivity within
the mass. If you are 19 and living with your parents in Corona, Bowers will take a picture that makes you look exactly how you want to be. Her
subjects don't need to be pushed or tricked or prodded to the point where things begin to ^Ê spill. It's all right there, in the Pasadena Rose Bowl
couple's red and orange funny hats (One & The Same Body, 1998-99); in the concert-goers loose raised fists (Intimate Strangers: Hand Gestures, 2000); in the amateur skater's apprehension as she crouches on the ice before her cue (Waiting, 1999). The philosopher and
psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva noted recently that her analysands have fewer and fewer words to describe just what it is they're feeling. But that
doesn't mean they aren't feeling. And in these works, emotion vibrates in Andrea Bowers' subjects like the incredible multi-colored wind-up plush
toys in the Rose Bowl tent.
In Democracy's Body: Dance Dance Revolution (2001) Bowers discovers discipline and anarchy in a video arcade/club in the Inland Empire. It's
any night, and about a hundred people of nearly every race and body type in their teens and 20s are gathered in this metal building around a
dual-platformed Konami interactive game.
Surrounded by the San Gabriel Mountains, the Inland Empire is a smog pit of arterial life: freeways, condo complexes, instant subdivisions, auto malls
spread out across a desert valley 50 minutes east of downtown LA.
It is also the fourth fastest growing region in America, a place where personal income has quadrupled in a decade and it's possible to buy a brand
new 5 bedroom fabricated home with a spa tub in the master suite for $100,000. It is a mecca of empowerment for consumers, i.e., the people
formerly known as poor.
The kids around the platform watch the players with a great deal of intensity. Like Rocky Horror, karaoke, and other art forms self-propelled
by urban myth, there are obviously favorites here among the crowd, it has its stars. The game has four footpads sunk into the platform, linked to
arrows on the screen that tell you where to put your feet. Your partner is an video-animae of your choosing: female, male, or if you would prefer,
ungendered. A Vietnamese girl dressed up like Superman strains across the distance to the screen as if she were deciphering a math problem. A young
white guy dances like he's fucking: his body is a pole conducting energy between his face and feet.
Bowers fascinatingly conflates this scene to minimalism's house performers: the Judson Dance Theater. Both use patterning and repetition as a means of
breaking out of character-imposing rhythm. Both use mundane movement tasks as a means of transportation, shunning the personality flourishes of
virtuosic feats. Like in Moving Equilibrium, Bowers presents a set of wallpieces in the Democracy's Body installation that isolate the dancer's
images, that give them permanence and let us look at them against blank space. Supergirl's floating like a lily on a deep black pond of shiny
polychrome, encased. By doing this, Bowers is acting both as botanist and fairy godmother: yes, we're looking at them, but she is turning them into
the mythic icons that they really want to be.
If Bowers can do this for the Inland Empire youth, why shouldn't she do it for herself? From Mouth to Ear is possibly the closest that she'll
come to making a self-portrait. It is a self-portrait fashioned from a Deleuzean sense of self, or from the identities held by adolescent fans
(same thing): that who you are is never any more or less than who you love, than who has made you larger.
In Mouth, Bowers memoralizes twenty of the dead people in the culture of the 20th century who've enabled her a female artist born in
Wilmington, Ohio in 1965 - to be. After you've gone/And left me crying /Your heart will break like mine Bessie Smith's voice resounds
around the gallery. Smith's grave remained unmarked for 33 years because of who she was - a woman married to a deadbeat alcoholic who pocketed the
proceeds of every benefit held subsequent to her death. It was not until 1970 when a Philadelphia woman wrote to the Inquirer commenting on the
absence of a marker that a memorial got underway. The stone was paid for by Janis Joplin and Juanita Green.
And it's like this in Battlefields, Gardens and Graveyards, Bower's 50-frame wallpiece in that show - Janet Jackson sampling Joni Mitchell,
Nina Simone covering Bessie, Lori Twersky memorializing female rock & roll - people looping back and finding inspiration from each other.
The Latin root of sentiment, sentire, means consciousness or thought: to experience a recognition. It was only later on that thought
became divorced from feeling ^Ê Bowers the Sentimental Bitch is the most intelligent of artists. Acting as a material witness to the fact of life in
southern California, she provides a subtext to the experience of "surface," which has been one of West Coast neo-conceptualism's least examined, most
Pavlovian cliches.
Chris Kraus, editor of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, is the author of two novels: I Love Dick, and Aliens and Anorexia.
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