The Sincerity of Performance
For 9 months, I worked in a cramped marketing office on the mezzanine level of The San Francisco Art Institute’s sculpture studio with 5 other people. I nestled into this Russian Hill castle as a final performance in my extensive bay area job hopping.
The first exhibition our team worked on was the U.S. debut of The Proposal by Jill Magid in 2016. The works presented in the on-campus gallery space were the final chapter in a larger project on the architect Luis Barragán’s professional archives started in 2013. From her website:
The Proposal is my first feature film and the last chapter of a larger project I began in 2013 called The Barragán Archives. The project explores the contested legacy of Luis Barragán, México’s most famous architect, and how his legacy is affected by the fact that a private corporation, Vitra, owns his archives and controls the rights in his name and work. For more than twenty years, this corporation has made his work largely inaccessible to the public. The film questions whether a single actor should be exclusively in control of how the world can engage with Barragán’s work.
In 2017, I visited some of his sites in México for the first time after admiring his work from afar. Any visitor knows how strictly controlled photography is in his spaces and of his work. I wondered if people sneaking photos knew that his name and professional works, even images of his works taken in the 1970s, were now under strict copyright by the Swiss furniture and design company, Vitra? Did they know the “á” accent in his name was taken out of the registered copyright?
I finally watched the film in its entirety for the first time today, some five and a half years later (insert spoiler alert). We see Jill living on-site in Barragán’s home where he died in 1988. She immerses into his world and life like a method actor. Much like Barragán’s “emotional architecture,” she seems to allow phantasmic feeling guide how she builds her research questions and performance.
It is revealed that Vitra’s chairman emeritus, Rolf Fehlbaum, acquired Barragán’s professional archive (for $2.5 million) in lieu of a ring to propose to his then-girlfriend Federica Zanco (who is obsessedddd with Luis). Or that’s how it’s told.
Throughout the film, Magid engages in written correspondence with Federica Zanco, art historian and head of the Barragán Foundation in Switzerland. She builds an intimate dialogue with Zanco, rooted in their mutual fascination with the architect’s work.
In between these scenes, Magid’s archival research begins to reveal questions of ownership, reproduction, contracts, access and post-humous legacy. The artist begins to build relationships with the three generations of Barragáns still living in México, inviting them to dinner and a presentation. She requests their permission to exhume the ashes of the deceased architect in order to grow a diamond from them. She would replace the 525 grams of ash needed with a 525 gram silver horse…he loved horses.
The diamond would then be turned into a ring, and an IRL proposal would be made to Federica Zanco to return the archive for public access in México. A work of body for a body of work. A gift for a gift.
Jill Magid’s work is absolutely bonkers, and I can’t stop looking. On her site she explains:
During the past eighteen years, I’ve trained as a spy, a police officer, and as a war journalist. Gaining access to power systems takes research, trust, and a series of unorthodox requests, requiring constant negotiation. From the inside, I engage these systems in personal dialogue. From there, I’m able to raise questions and concerns on how we live in relation to them.
There is something precious about how she poses questions in the deep dark zone of corporate IP, surveillance, systems of control, to those very people who run these invisible places. Having just the right amount of fear to cover your tracks, but not enough to keep you away. Through her work, Magid reveals the art of the contract and abiding by legal parameters in a way that poetically undermines their power.
There are many questions that make me go ????, like was she using these people to make a point? Is it her place to convince a family to dig up these remains, especially as a non native? In watching the film, though, I could sense her integrity throughout the process and the convoluted context of the archives. She saw an end goal and had to make sure she was abiding not only by the “literal” law but also by what governs us in human relationships—building trust, being in mutual exchange, gaining consent, attempting to re-balance agency (to the DNA inheritors of a person’s legacy over a corporate entity). And even then! Inviting Zanco to open access to a significant part of México’s cultural heritage is a way of humanizing the dance of corporate acquisitions, of appealing to her heart and perhaps a misplaced desire for exclusive intimacy.
There is a sincerity in Jill Magid’s performance, it’s how she gains trust, and yet there is also an objective. The performance of sincerity permeates through our culture, whether on social media, going autopilot with basic etiquette, or playing nice with a bully. The objective is to keep the peace in many ways. For Jill Magid, the sincerity of her performance reveals where conflict is expertly hidden, invites as many characters as possible to participate in that witnessing, and offers a choice in this situation/project.
Revisiting her work has helped me build my own ability to think about my career as performance. I skip from job to job because I am following a trail of bread crumbs leading somewhere currently unknown to me, while provoking the boundaries of ownership, surveillance and revealing the lack of sincerity in cultural story-grabbing. I wish I wanted to just do my job sometimes! This investigative drive, cozying up to systems of power in as sincere of a way as possible, has an objective. I’m learning, as an artist, this doesn’t always reveal itself to us. Perhaps knowing the objective can detract from the sincerity of the pursuit.
One of the men shown during the discussions sparked by The Proposal says, “Since this is a work that generates a degree of frictions with social institutions, and with social actors, the main thing we gain from her work is the shadow produced by that interaction. And this shadow can present itself in the form of debates, in the form of circulating ideas, and in the form of questions if we are ready for them.”
Any strategist will tell you how important the right questions are to strategy. It can make great work. It can also break great work…even great systems and legacies. Jill is self-aware about her participation in asking these questions:
As the film’s protagonist, I am aware that I am entering a story that has not previously involved me, and that my presence could affect its future, or a retelling of the past. I believe that it is crucial to discuss how artistic legacy is constructed, shaped, and manipulated. Does allowing the public to engage with an artwork in various ways and from multiple perspectives threaten its integrity, or make it more integral to society over time?
In his Pritzker Prize speech, Barragán offers, “‘The irrational logic harboured in the myths and in all true religious experience has been the fountainhead of the artistic process at all times and in all places.’ These are words of my good friend, Edmundo O'Gorman, and, with or without his permission, I have made them mine.” Hah. Would he even care if his dear friend’s widow made a cool few mill off of his archives and someone else paraded his legacy?
He goes on, “Death. The certainty of death is the spring of action and therefore of life, and in the implicit religious element in the work of art, life triumphs over death.” With death’s certainty, life is a permanent spring. It is there before and it will be there after, death is but a momentary performance.
It seems like The Proposal, morbid yet fascinating in nature, is just another work of life. Perhaps, in revivifying her project in this stream, more questions about integrity in artwork can be asked. After all, Vitra still hasn’t opened the archive after 26 years.