Ruining the Spectacle: Nikita Gale’s END OF SUBJECT
by Darcy Olmstead
Nikita Gale’s 2022 installation, entitled END OF SUBJECT, at David Zwirner’s 52 Walker gallery is a wreck. It features a set of enormous bleachers, some bent and smashed, strewn haphazardly across the gallery (fig. 1). Visitors are invited to sit wherever they can, but any position on the cold metal is uncomfortable, making it impossible to observe the work with ease. What people then look upon is a confusing ruin: dangling cords, flashing spotlights pointing out at odd directions from the walls and the floor, and scratched metallic surfaces. It is as if one has entered a school gymnasium after it had been bombed.
In the aftermath of the explosion, a strange soundtrack bounces off the walls and flickering lights fill the room. Nikita Gale’s immersive installation includes an engineered soundscape: Toni Morrison reading Sula, an original audio track by composer Tashi Wada, beating rain, claps of thunder, laughing and crying, a dog barking, and the artist whistling.1 The soundtrack reverberates through a series of metallic prints on the walls of the gallery. Gale explains that “the sounds are from widely disparate contexts so there’s a sense of kind of sonically rummaging through ruins—tidbits and vignettes from widely varying environments and contexts.”2 Gale provides a stream of content in the soundtrack for the installation, but each sound is presented in fragments. Audience members are presented with a sonic archive full of holes and a gallery space in ruins. On the walls are Gale’s “Body Prints,” composed of burnished and painted aluminum panels incised with bodily words such as “finger,” “penis,” “mother,” etc. In an interview for the New York Times, Gale explained that she is “interested in using language to examine different systems that render a body legible as human, gendered, racialized, and so on.”3
In her installation practice, Gale is dismantling the spatial systems that anchor the observer to their own body, thus engaging with longstanding art historical inquiries into spectatorship. She presents a phenomenologically rich space, one that brings the ruins of an amphitheater or stadium into the gallery—all areas where power is negotiated and attention is controlled and directed. Amid bleachers and spotlights, the individual body of the viewer is dismantled into unrecognizable, uncategorizable parts.
Gale says that her initial proposal for the installation came from “thinking through how the activities and ‘tasks’ of the human sensory system… can activate or deactivate structures that inform how subjects… are rendered or alienated/made invisible.”4 Gale therefore acknowledges a long history of theoretical models discussing the observer. This history is famously explored in art historian Jonathan Crary’s 1992 Techniques of the Observer, in which the author examines how capitalism developed a visual model of consumption for the modern subject in the nineteenth century.5 Building upon the work of Michel Foucault, Crary produces a history of visuality that is based in modern systems of control:
[In the 1820s and 1830s] emerges a plurality of means to re-code the activity of the eye, to regiment it, to heighten its productivity and to prevent its distraction. Thus the imperatives of capitalist modernization, while demolishing the field of classical vision, generated techniques for imposing visual attentiveness, rationalizing sensation, and managing perception. They were disciplinary techniques.6
Crary discusses nineteenth-century optical devices—from the panorama, to the stereoscope, the camera, and eventually the moving picture—to examine how the human eye was “re-coded” for control.
Gale uses materials and structures within such a tradition critical of the materials and devices used to direct the modern observer. This is most evident in her discussion of the sporadic lighting installation for END OF SUBJECT, in which Gale positions spotlights on various metal prints and upon the columns of the gallery pointing in random directions:
I often use spotlights in my work because… they’re objects that tell you where to look and direct attention in a way that I find really seductive… So the spotlight is a useful metaphor for thinking about power in the context of the public arena: the stage, or wherever we focus our attention, represents where power is concentrated.7
The structures implemented for crowd control and dominant modes of visuality are concepts crucial throughout the installation. Gale takes sites of power like arenas and stages where observers are directed and restrained, and instead allows room for movement and distraction without purpose. The visitor is rarely comfortable, never allowed to be fully immersed in the work. Every auditory and visual disruption made throughout the performance is a means to break the spectacle.
The spectacle, as theorized by Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle (1967), describes how the visual culture of modern society is used to regulate the spectator. Gale’s work rebuts the spectacle described by Debord: “the spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him” on a screen or in an image.8 Gale seeks to counteract the spectacle through appeals to the individual’s corporeality. For one, visitors are forced to step over a series of wires and constantly move over and around sets of bleachers in END OF SUBJECT. Lights flicker on and off at random intervals, forcing viewers to use their sense of touch among other senses outside the visual. Debord, in one famous passage, writes that “when the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings—figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior.”9 Gale’s installation refuses to rely upon such methods. Any time a viewer begins to be immersed in one aspect of her work, the soundtrack or lighting pulls them from near hypnosis. The spectacle loses its hold.
Yet END TO SUBJECT does not merely seek to dismantle systems of power and visual control, but to bring the body back to the viewer through a form of what curator Eric Booker calls “reverse archaeology.”10 Gale’s implication of the spectator in her work comes from an anthropological understanding of architecture and technology informed by her degrees in archaeology and sociology. Describing her practice in the 2018 Studio Museum exhibition catalogue Fictions, Booker continues, “Initially drawn to an object for its aesthetic or physical qualities, the artist works her way back through each facet of its form—carefully researching its history and use, as well as evaluating the physical and personal experiences she has had with it.”11 She studies the way power is embedded in the gallery, the auditorium, or the arena, and then she disrupts it. Viewers thus step through the ruins of the spectacle itself.
Gale, rather than looking directly to a specific archive, investigates the archaeology of the present and proposes a space for the viewer to imagine bodily alternatives. In an interview with art21, Gale said that “It’s almost like I think of each of my works and each installation as a portal or an invitation to a conversation… [my installations] are creating a permanent record of a gestural, almost fugitive movement between structures or armatures associated with control.”12 Not only are her works future ruins, but future archives—she is attempting to force her spectators to act as archaeologists of their own lives. Debord wrote that “the real values of culture can be maintained only by actually negating culture. But this negation can no longer be a cultural negation. It may in a sense take place within culture, but points beyond it.”13 Gale’s spotlights never point directly upon objects in the room, but beyond them. In Gale’s work, the spectacle has been destroyed, but a space for conversation—a space to fabulate a new future where bodies cannot be so easily racialized, gendered, and coded for control—lies in the wreckage.
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Darcy Olmstead is an MA candidate in Modern and Contemporary Art History (MODA) at Columbia University. Her current thesis seeks to explore artists’ publications in digital time by examining four recent projects by artists who utilize the form of the book to reflect on a world of chaos and hyper-culture brought about by digitization. She is originally from Fayetteville, Arkansas, and holds a BA from Washington and Lee University.
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Footnotes
1. Madeline Schulz, “Nikita Gale ‘END OF SUBJECT’ at 52 Walker,” Flaunt Magazine, February 14, 2022, https://archive.flaunt.com/content/nikita-gale.
2. Nikita Gale quoted in Shulz, “Nikita Gale, ‘END OF SUBJECT’ at 52 Walker.”
3. Nikita Gale interviewed by Janelle Zara, “From Nikita Gale, A Panel Etched with ‘Blood,’ ‘Nerves’ and ‘Knee,’” New York Times, February 18, 2022.
4. Madeleine Seidel, “Nikita Gale: ‘END OF SUBJECT,’ 52 Walker, New York,” BURNAWAY, April 7, 2022, https://burnaway.org/magazine/gale-zwirner/.
5. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer : On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
6. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 24.
7. Janelle Zara, “From Nikita Gale, A Panel Etched with ‘Blood,’ ‘Nerves’ and ‘Knee,’” New York Times, February 2022.
8. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967), trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2014), 10.
9. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 5.
10. Eric Booker, “Object Complex,” in Fictions (New York: Studio Museum, 2018), 48.
11. Booker, “Object Complex,” 49.
12. Essence Harden, “In The Studio: Nikita Gale,” Art21, accessed March 21, 2022, https://art21.org/read/in-the-studio-nikita-gale/.
13. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 114.