14 December 7-13, 2023 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | music | cafe | culture | Night+Day | News | letters | coNteNts | thing that is slightly threatening.” Creatively, however, Errazuriz’s ideas are all his and all original. He sees AI as more of another tool in any artist’s arsenal. When it came to creating Maze, Errazuriz typed a prompt into a graphic AI tool and asked the machine to visualize a maze made out of sand. “Ultimately, the maze is just a metaphor,” Erra- zuriz explains. “It’s a metaphor for these times in which we’re up against these challenges, both from an environmental and a technological standpoint.” While the nature of a maze is for people to get lost in it, Errazuriz’s maze was designed with the intent of having people find themselves. The inspi- ration, he says, came from the times we’re living in, where society feels more lost than ever. “We need to find ourselves not only to remem- ber who we are and why we’re here and what’s worth living for and how similar we all are,” Erra- zuriz preaches, “but we also need to find our- selves because we need to think together, because some of the challenges that are coming, both envi- ronmental and technological, they can’t be solved by a single person or a single country or a single company.” In addition to using AI to help construct the maze, Errazuriz wants to take it further and leave the viewer with information on the futuristic tech. QR codes will be used throughout the maze as part of the public art piece, leading to a free digital book titled AI Maze. “It’s more of a guide,” Errazuriz says about the companion piece. He tackles a particular subject on every page — typically revolving around a topic paired with AI — and proposes a series of questions. Teasing some of the book’s thought-provoking lines, Errazuriz says AI Maze will tackle questions surrounding artificial intelligence, such as, “Will it be conscious? Will it be wise, or should I be scared? How scared should I be? Can I prepare? How can I prepare? Can it be legislated?” “I’m trying to use my role as an artist to commu- nicate ideas that maybe a scientific paper can’t do,” he states. “What I try to do is function almost as a moderator in a panel. I propose a question, and I give a brief introduction to what [the answer] could be. I use my role as an artist to imagine freely what other people might not be imagining and paint the picture and then invite discussion on the subject.” Errazuriz hopes the conversation continues — you download the book and talk to your friend about it. Then, they talk to someone else about it and share the download link. The conversation and talk around his e-book and work multiply, living well beyond the installation on the sands of Miami Beach and art week. In a way, Maze acts as an invisible maze, creep- ing through the city and eventually the ether — a metaphysical extension of the physical maze. “I think more than ever, artists have a responsi- bility to contribute to society,” Errazuriz says. “And that responsibility today is helping people stop, re- member who they are, reconnect and have conver- sations and start thinking together so we can pull in our smarts together and we can confront future challenges.” “Maze: Journey Through the Algorithmic Self.” Tuesday, December 5, through Sunday, December 10, behind the Faena Hotel Miami Beach, 3201 Collins Ave, Miami Beach; faenaart.org. Admission is free.
[email protected] Lost from p 10 fill in the blank AT PAMM, GARY SIMMONS ADDRESSES WHAT AMERICA CAN’T ERASE. | BY DOUGLAS MARKOWITZ E mpty shoes, chalk-smeared blackboards, a boxing ring with steps but no fighters — when looking at artwork by Gary Simmons, it’s best to think about what isn’t there. “Public Enemy,” the New York native’s new show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, is full of displays where something seems missing, forcing the viewer to ask what should be there and why it isn’t. According to Franklin Sirmans, director of the PAMM, a throughline of Sim- mons’ work is America’s tendency to erase things — people, places, ideas — that aren’t desirable. “I think back to just a simple idea, that conceptual idea of era- sure, and him looking at our history and thinking about when [Robert] Rauschenberg erases de Kooning,” Sirmans explains. In 1953, Rauschenberg lit- erally rubbed out a drawing by Willem de Kooning in order to make a new work of art. It was a symbolic gesture, a rejection of de Kooning’s generation, which prioritized action painting. “Rauschenberg is trying to get rid of something; he’s trying to get past a threshold,” he continues. “It’s not about your gesture; it’s not about your expres- sion. This mark-making that we like to heroicize — it’s really a much different kind of thing. And we’re here for the thoughts that are embedded in the material, not just the beauty of the material. And that’s what, I think, Gary discovered and has pushed in ways that no other artists possibly could, this idea that you can erase something, but the trace remains.” It’s by the action of erasure that Simmons created his most famous series, the chalkboard drawings he used to excavate American culture. Cartoon characters, silhouettes of buildings, words, and names — all are smeared and distorted, and the ways in which Simmons has altered the outlines also matter. Two paintings trace the work of Philip Johnson, the famous modernist architect whose work was once synonymous with progress. In the Blink of an Eye shows Johnson’s Glass House. The chalk smears are horizontal; the house appears to fly past us at the speed of progress. In Reflection of a Future Past, the erasure marks trace the circular form of Johnson and Richard Foster’s pavilion for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, again spinning us into the future. Johnson was a Nazi sympathizer. Robert Moses, the urban planner who orga- nized the fair and built Flushing-Corona Park, displaced vast amounts of Black and brown people and redlined and destroyed entire neighborhoods to build New York’s highways in the name of “urban renewal.” Double Cinder places the dark side of progress in starker relief, depicting a pair of housing project tower blocs, the chalk smears reaching up like flames. An obvious reference to the burning of the Bronx aside, what is being erased in this picture? Many of the most infamous failed public housing projects of the 20th Century — Cabrini-Green in Chicago, Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis — were, in a sense, doomed from the start, thanks to neglect and poor policy decisions made by racists like Moses. They were demolished, and so was the World’s Fair pavilion. The buildings may have vanished, Simmons says, but the ideas and attitudes behind them remain, influ- encing our lives in untold ways. Like Double Cinder, in Hollywood, the same firey streaks consume the famous sign — “Burn Hollywood Burn,” as declared Public Enemy, the group that gives this show its name. America’s entertainment industry is another domain where racist ideas have existed since its inception. The smears resemble motion lines in Simmons’ drawings of Bosko and the crows from Disney’s Dumbo, examples of early cartoons thinly disguising virulent racist stereotypes which were later sani- tized, memory holed, or presented with disclaimers. The body — or lack thereof — is the focus of Simmons’ installations. Step Into the Arena (The Essentialist Trap) features a boxing ring, empty but for the gloves hanging on the ropes and the chalkmarked dance steps diagramed on the mat. The athletes who put their bodies on the line for our amusement are gone, the only remnant being how they moved. Other installations feature boxing memora- bilia — the pair of robes in Us & Them, the monogrammed pair of gloves in Ever- forward — but no one to wear them. “It’s about the figure, but the figure is always invisible or not there,” Sirmans adds, “which is something that, in terms of Black consciousness, we often talk about, the greatest example being Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. You have the boxing ring with no figures in it, but the dance steps are. You have the robes in Us & Them where there are no figures, but clearly, these are robes for bodies. You might have signifiers of Blackness in Lineup, especially considering when >> p 16 “GARY DISCOVERED AND HAS PUSHED IN WAYS THAT NO OTHER ARTISTS POSSIBLY COULD.” Gary Simmons, Step Into the Arena (The Essentialist Trap), 1994 © Gary Simmons/Photo by Sheldan C. Collins
Miami 12-07-2023
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