White Men Falling

Curated by Andrew Salyer
May 3-12, 2018 — Curatorial Lab, Elvehjem Building

Through the lenses of gender studies, whiteness studies, visual studies, and performance studies, this exhibition analyzes latent and manifest ideological meanings within a photographic archive of white male gestures of falling. Identifying a pattern of what I call cultivated failure as a practice and a trope in contemporary art, I suggest that the work of white male contemporary artists Kerry Skarbakka, Patrick Craig Manning, and a live performance by Andrew Salyer, in conversation with Martin Kersels, Yves Klein, Bas Jan Ader, and Bruce Nauman, question the need for a stable masculinity by rendering the artist tentatively falling, failing, or floating. The work develops a visual counter-argument for how a gendered body should function, and performs a cultivated failure that, in varying degrees, interrogates masculinity and throws whiteness into relief.

This exhibition is about falling – kind of. It’s about the possibilities of change within a feeling of disorientation. It’s a project about remembering how to listen. It’s a project about failure. A project about privilege. It’s a project about how one represents the self. It’s about making art, specifically, conceptual performance. It’s about whiteness. It’s about masculinity. It’s about photography and performance. And it’s a gesture toward de-centering and re-orientation. The artists in this exhibition exemplify and complicate the representational gesture of falling. From leaping, to suspension, to falling via corporal exhaustion, the commonalities and departures between these artists’ works interrogate, reify, and expand commonly held ideas of how white men have historically chosen, and contemporaneously choose to, represent this deeply guarded (and protected) subject position.