Bearing Wit(h)ne: the Art of Kandis Williams

Affect: Network: Territory was performed at Human Resources L.A. in August 2016. | Photo: John Tain

Inside the darkened gallery at Chinatown art space Human Resources Los Angeles, a dancer lays underneath a sheet of mirror hanging from the ceiling. Laser lights shoot through the darkness as the mirror dangles over his neck like a guillotine. From the front, the mirror erases his head, creating a double of his body, laid prone on the ground. He slides out from underneath, and performs a complicated panoply of moves, striding and leaping around the room in sometimes ferocious, sometimes delicate motions. It has been hinted on the invitation to the performance that viewers are encouraged to, at their own discretion, capture the performance on their camera phones.

The performance by artist Kandis Williams and dancer Josh Johnson, titled Affect: Network: Territory, was an experiment based on the scene that plays out across America on what seems like a daily basis. A black man - his body - moves through the world, is surveilled, violence is enacted upon him, images are taken and distributed, and then viewed by millions across the internet. A few weeks after the performance at a restaurant near her apartment in Skid Row, Williams tells Artbound that the interactions were based on the concept of aesthetic wit(h)nessing, a neologism coined by Israel-born painter and psychoanalytical theorist Bracha Ettinger.

What exactly is wit(h)nessing? In an academic paper titled Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in the Era of Trauma, University of Leeds' Griselda Pollock defines it as such: [Ettinger] expands a word's conceptual range from the legal and testimonial meaning of bearing witness to the crime against the other, to being with, but not assimilated to, and to being beside the other in a gesture that is much more than mere ethical solidarity. There is risk; but there is also a sharing.

Affect: Network: Territory was performed at Human Resources L.A. in August 2016. | Photo: John Tain

Williams takes Ettinger's idea - giving a psychological closeness to the viewers during the performance - and adds another psychoanalytic model to draw the audience into the scene of a police shooting of a black man, e.g. the shooting of Philando Castile, in which his fianc e Diamond Reynolds, filmed the aftermath. Williams held a workshop at Human Resources prior to the performance in which the wit(h)nessing was amplified by threeing, a psycho-therapeutic role playing model used in group therapies.

For our purposes, one person was a perpetrator,' one person was a victim,' and one person was a witness,' Williams says. So, [it took on] the model of the shooting videos, but we built into the rules a dissonance, because we were talking about, in America, there are so many operatives that are obscured, so many identities that are formed out of dissonance. We had each of the participants use their own camera to record their movements throughout the space, and what we ended up with was a weird psycho-geographic tagging, of the space - where people were hiding, where people felt safe, where it was comfortable to be, where it was not comfortable to be.

Kandis Williams, Separation, Temptation Blake Son I, 2014. Mixed Media on Paper. 45.25 x 42 (115.57 x 106.68 cm.).

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The mix of Ettinger's wit(h)nessing and Williams' own stylistic developments is a fine example of the way she effortlessly blends psychoanalytical theory and personal experience. I first came across Williams' work in a group show at the Underground Museum in 2014, where she presented a series of black-and-white photo collages, a medium she continues to investigate. In one noteworthy image, Williams collages four young girls - Sigmund Freud's daughters Sophie and Anna spliced into a photograph of Williams and her sister - smiling on an Easter Sunday.

It was interesting to see that overlap of these doctor's daughters - and one future doctor, [Anna Freud] - and compare and contrast those life stories instead of using the actual model of analysis, Williams says.

The collages, Williams explains, have roots in psychoanalysis, but in what she describes as an anthropological way.

Kandis Williams, That of linking with the unknown and bonding in unions with others in the process of becoming and transforming oneself puts patriarchy in danger (Ettinger), 2014. Mixed Media on Paper. 47 x 31.5 (120.3 x 80 cm.).

That whole series is about the question of therapy and who therapy is for, she says. Life events end up becoming theoretical. Freud is a crazy example, because his theories are so embedded in how we understand media, literature, and ourselves. But then, he was a psycho. And a lot of his personal hang-ups come out of inter-personal dynamics with his contemporaries and his family. It's really funny. There's [intellectual scholar] Hortense Spillers, who has an essay called Psychoanalysis and Race,' and Ettinger, who has a book called The Matrixial Borderspace,' which is kind of an interruption of the psychoanalytic model where the phallus is the first confrontation that you have, or the realization that you have with phallus or the fear of castration or the envy of not having one.

(In The Matrixial Borderspace,' Ettinger hypothesizes that if we conceive our connections to each other being less about a connection to phallic thinking and more a matrixial, or womb-like, entering into each other, then we would be embracing unknowns.)

Kandis Williams, Linking Borderspaces, 2014. Sketch Mixed Media on Paper. 36 x 34 (91.44 x 86.36 cm.).

Taking her grounding in theory one step further, Williams often binds her work with a series of readers, photocopied books full of essays and excerpts that Williams is currently thinking about, offered as a way of understanding her work.

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/kandis-williams-artist-collages-sa...
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