Incense Sweaters & Ice, still, Martine Syms, 2017
There’s a scene in Martine Syms’ feature-length film, Incense Sweaters & Ice (2017) that’s painfully awkward to watch. The protagonist, referred to simply as ‘Girl’ in the film’s credits, sits on the sofa reading a book. The person sitting beside her, who I presume is her love interest, a man called ‘WB’ (‘white boy’) – we can’t see them – tries to take her picture. At first, she coyly laughs it off, playfully putting the book up to her face, giggling and saying how she doesn’t like to pose. Eventually, she gives in – “OK, I’ll pose I guess” – until she realises that they are actually videoing her. She glares at the camera in disbelief, before looking back at her book, but she’s unable to concentrate now. “So, you’re just like doing this just because? Or…?” she asks the person with the camera, struggling to comprehend their actions. “I can’t really concentrate on [my book] when someone’s filming me,” Girl explains. “It’s not really about you being quiet, it’s the fact that you’re filming me, I’m very aware of you being here… that’s the issue for me right now. So, just… stop, that would be great, thanks.”
This uncomfortable scene establishes some of the key themes that define the 30-year-old LA-based artist’s practice, comprising video, installation, publishing (through her imprint Dominica which she founded in 2011) and performance. It hints at issues of surveillance and authority – what about the power dynamic of a white man videoing a black woman without her consent? – and highlights a world where it’s sort of okay to hold up a camera to someone’s face whether they’ve agreed to it or not. It also presents a microcosm of another of Syms’ motifs – how we perform and behave differently once a camera is held in front of us.
“Anything you do on camera is like a performance,” Syms tells me over the phone. This is a central facet of her practice, one that she explores in the 69-minute film, which was originally shown in MoMA last year and is currently on view at the Graham Foundation in Chicago. The film follows Girl, a nurse played by the artist and choreographer Katherine Simóne Reynolds, as she travels for work from Los Angeles to Mississippi and navigates a burgeoning and ostensibly text-based relationship with WB. It’s frequently intimate – a number of scenes document her naked grooming regime in the bathroom as well as private texts popping up on screen. It also provides a compelling insight into contemporary loneliness. Girl is seen frequently sitting on a wall in an empty parking lot texting while listening to meditation podcasts, dancing alone in a hotel room, and asking WB whether she will ever see him again. Interspersing the scenes with Girl (WB is only ever shown a handful of times as a small phone image in the corner of the screen), are sequences involving motivational coach and songstress Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, played by jazz singer Fay Victor. Clad all in purple, in a luxurious, royally-purple room, Queen White sits at her piano, singing instructions on how one should carry themselves, waxing lyrical on the necessity of having “a positive attitude” and announcing that “you deserve to be seen”
Martine Syms. Photo: Taylor Rainbolt.
Seeing and being seen is an important part of Syms’ work. In an era where communication is carried out via the transfer of images over phones and through cameras and computers, we are constantly surveilled, and act and respond differently because of that. “If anything you do on camera is like a performance then you can expand that more broadly to think about the different types of surveillance that you’re subjected to, and how there’s an ongoing film being made,” explains the artist. Syms refers to this as “ambient cinema” – “I’m just saying that we are all being recorded all the time and you can think about that as a kind of filmmaking”. According to Syms, sceptics have referred to this as “a more optimistic way of thinking about (Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault’s) panopticon,” but she considers it to be more about accepting “the conditions we are already living in, it’s more like a total archive,” she explains.
Indeed, Syms has previously referred to her work as “timely”, and it is nothing if not that. A recent spate of exhibitions (Big Surprise at New York’s Bridget Donahue, Grand Calme at London’s Sadie Coles), as well as upcoming shows at ICA at Virginia Commonwealth University in February 2019 and at the Secession in Vienna the following April, prove that Syms is in demand, and that’s probably because she’s “interested in thinking about what’s going on culturally and the conditions that we live in and the conditions that we see other people in”. As much as she engages with the conditions of hyper-surveillance society, she’s quick to point out that she isn’t a fan of it at all. “There are many violations. I cover my cameras! I’m really cautious with my privacy – I’m not on social media for these reasons.”
Incense Sweaters & Ice, still, Martine Syms, 2017
Although there is an important technological aspect to her practice (at MoMA, Incense Sweaters & Ice was accompanied by an augmented reality app, and in Grand Calme, she created an interactive avatar of herself), she’s also interested in the materiality of photography – found photos, obsolete cameras – and how different materials convey different meanings. It should come as little surprise that her interest in art grew out of an early fascination with photography. “We always had a lot of cameras in the house,” remembers Syms. “My dad liked to take photos and had many different cameras and lenses. I was really into Polaroid and Lomography.” In high school, she started making short films, experimenting with Super 8 and learning how to use Photoshop and Illustrator, which eventually led her to make “more production-conscious stuff, before I would just shoot things”. Before moving to Chicago to do a BFA in film, video and new media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, Syms worked for the Echo Park Film Centre in LA, a non-profit organisation specialising in experimental film. She arranged screenings, and worked and exhibited collaboratively, which in turn influenced her own approach to art- making. “I’m interested in having a peer group and having a connection to what’s going on in the world.”
In one scene in Incense Sweaters & Ice, an elderly woman, possibly Girl’s grandmother, sits in her bedroom surrounded by photographs hanging on the walls, propped on shelves, or pinned to noticeboards. Syms is fascinated by images. “I’m inspired by the production of images, their economy, circulation, value, meaning and problems,” she reveals. Syms attributes her obsession with images to being homeschooled as a teenager: “I had a lot of free time to go to movies or watch TV, so I had this relationship to images and thinking”. One of her key influences is Alison Landsberg’s book Prosthetic Memories (2004), which argues that cinema, newsreels and images in the public domain can generate a collective memory, regardless of whether the individual experienced the event or not. By using images of her own family in her work, Syms creates a profound sense of empathy – the images are relatable and familiar even though they are personal.
Threat Model I, 2018
Montage is essential, too. In her ongoing project Lessons (2014–), Syms compiles found footage advertisements, sitcom snippets, music videos and web-based material to create a video montage in the form of an epic poem. Each of the 30-second clips contains a lesson on – what the artist describes on her website as – “the black radical tradition”. The opening segment, for example, features the activist, author, filmmaker and musician Sister Souljah forcefully describing the ways American society fails African American citizens. At her recent Big Surprise show, Syms took the concept of montage even further by placing four video monitors against photographic wallpaper to create an immersive space of moving and static imagery. As part of this show, she also exhibited Mythiccbeing (2018), a video presenting what Syms refers to as her “shadow self”. Portrayed by a male actor, we see him roaming through a domestic space and conducting a “diaristic monologue” in a further example of her ambient cinema.
Mythiccbeing, a play on the title of Adrian Piper’s 1973 performance Mythic Being (Piper is a significant inspiration for Syms), will also be on view at the ICA in Virginia next year, too, albeit in a slightly different format. Like her avatar in Grand Calme (which was also named Mythiccbeing — the two pieces represent the left and right side of the brain) viewers can interact with the character in Mythiccbeing through a programmed chatbot. She notes that the name of the piece was also inspired by wondering “what would it mean to make technology ‘thicc’?”, referring to a slang term for a curvaceous woman’s body. By loading Mythiccbeing with hours of her own personal responses that pop-up on screen through SMS interaction with visitors, she configures technology as a container for desire.
“2018 is certainly defined by an overwhelming amount of images,” Syms points out. As much as her work explores and warps the conditions of today, Syms is, by her own admission, just as concerned with continuities and historical precedents. “What’s happening right now is connected to what’s happened before,” she remarks. In an age of surface and appearance, what makes Syms’ work stand out is just how research-driven it is. When I ask her about this aspect of her practice, she gleefully replies, “I’m a nerd. It’s just how I approach things. I have this sense that I can think my way through it from every angle. Art is a way for me to think and way for me to learn about myself, but also about the world and other people”.
Incense Sweaters & Ice is currently on view at the Graham Foundation Chicago through to 12 January. Dialogues: Irena Haiduk + Martine Syms opens on 16 February at ICA Virgina Commonwealth University.
This article originally appeared in SLEEK 60, out now.
All images courtesy of the artist/Bridget Donahue.