BROWNIE Project荣幸与Afternoon Projects联合呈现群展“激悦和隐蔽的私密地带”。展览邀请观众审视已知和未知、理解和记忆的局限以及感受已知和未知的认知距离。展出作品陈列于画廊两层空间的明屋与暗房，展览空间变身为悬而未决的谜题，引申出地上生活和地下暗室之间的暗喻。这些半隐藏的线索和痕迹、激悦和隐蔽的隐蔽性，正是我们存在的诗意。
展览呈现艺术家约瑟夫·巴克利的最新作品。以下内容来自他在纽约 Cushifritos Gallery 个人展览的采访，采访者为来自纽约布鲁克林的作家 Brian Paul。
展览持续至2023年12月31日。
BROWNIE Project"激悦与隐蔽的私密地带”展览现场
"The Secret Realm of Thrills and Concealment"Installation view at BROWNIE Project
Brian Paul （以下简称BP）: 你能谈谈在 Cuchifritos 画廊展览中的元素吗？那张皇家蓝色的地板上有月亮和星星，视觉上非常引人注目，而你之前的最新展览《叛徒肌肉》也有类似的全面覆盖。
Joseph Buckley（以下简称JB）: 我和妹妹的童年经历很不稳定。我们经常搬家。我妈妈努力让我们的房间尽可能舒适，并小心地将我的卧室窗帘从一个房子搬到另一个房子。2020年《地板工作》的符文来源于那些窗帘的设计。
尽管今天我是一位雕塑家，专门制作雕塑，但正是通过早期作为策展人的工作，我真正开始以一种可以表达的方式理解通过操纵空间可以实现什么。随着我了解到这一学科的殖民历史及其在警察和占领中的同类，这种知识变得更加复杂。从某种根本层面上，这些作品试图探讨策展、警察和占领之间的联系。
扭曲空间是一种非法的快感。我对这些地板、墙壁、窗户和天花板的“全面覆盖”方式感到兴奋，这些对空间的地图样式的主张既是激进又微妙，观察那些可能对一个空间有完全了解的人如何处理那个被根本性打断的空间总是特别有趣。
Joseph Buckley, Cousin Table, 2020.
Cuchifritos Gallery, New York.
Brian Paul (BP): Can you talk about the elements of your show at Cuchifritos? The royal blue floor with the moon and stars is visually very striking, and your most recent exhibition prior, Traitor Muscle, also had this kind of all-over covering.
Joseph Buckley (JB): My sister and I had a precarious childhood. We had to move house a lot. My mum made an effort to make our rooms as comfortable as possible, and was careful to take the curtains from my bedroom from house to house. The sigils from Floor Work, 2020 are derived from the design on those curtains.
Whilst today I am a sculptor making sculpture, it was through earlier work as a curator that I really began to understand (in an articulable way) what one could achieve through the manipulation of space. This knowledge wrinkled with complexity as I learnt of the discipline’s colonial histories and its cognates in policing and occupation. These works are, on some root-ish level, attempts to speak to those connections between curation, policing & occupation.
Warping space is an illicit joy. I am excited by the way these ‘all-over coverings’ of floors and walls and windows and ceilings, these mapping-like claims on spaces, are both radical and subtle and it is always of particular interest watching people who might otherwise have total knowledge of a space deal with that same space once it has been fundamentally interrupted.
Joseph Buckley, Traitor Muscle, 2018.
Art in General, New York.
BP: 墙上的书是《悔恨之魔》的复制品，这是你最近努力写一部科幻小说的成果。但它们也是雕塑品，涉及一种模仿的深入过程，以复制朴素科幻书籍典型的风化过程。这个书名是从哪里来的？
JB: 《悔恨之魔》是我2016年在纽约国际工作室与策展项目（ISCP）举办的一场展览的标题。这个标题仍然相关，我一直在思考它。它不断发展壮大，成为我目前正试图写的一部小说中的一个角色的名字：一个在罐子里的大脑，放在一台机器中——通过人工延长寿命，并负担着完美的记忆。作品封面上的图像是对这个角色故事中的一个关键事件的插图描述，如果我正在写的小说集中关注这个角色的话。在书中的背景下，这只是众多事件中的一个片段。
自我第一次想到它以来，它已经发生了变化和转变，但目前《悔恨之魔》是一种试图通过恶魔学的逻辑重新背景化和拟人化我们所有人都感到的悔恨这种平凡感情的尝试。
BP:The books on the walls were copies of The Demon of Regret, a work born of your recent efforts to write a sci-fi novel. But they are also sculptures, involving an intense process of mimicry to replicate the weathering typical of pulp sci-fi books. Where does this book title come from?
JB: The Demon of Regret was the title of a show I did at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York, in 2016. The title remained pertinent and I kept thinking about it. It grew and grew, becoming the name of a character in a novel I am currently trying to write: a brain in a jar in a machine—life artificially extended to obscene length and burdened with a perfect memory. The imagery on the front cover of the work is an illustrative depiction of what—if the novel I am working on were focussed on that character—would be a key event in that character’s arc. In the context of the book, it’s just one episode among many.
It has changed and shifted since I first thought of it but at the moment The Demon of Regret is an attempt to recontextualise and anthropomorphize the banal feelings of regret, that we all feel, through a logic of demonology.
BP: 展览中的最后一件作品与展览同名：《表兄弟桌》。这里，葡萄、消化系统、断头台——可识别的形式被层层叠加和结合。我们谈到了“时间扭曲”，中国·梅尔维尔对革命的描述，以及断头台代表的是一种什么样的能量：最后的一搏，一种极端。断头台和桌面上的人物之间存在着什么样的联系？
JB: 是的。这是一件雕塑，由4个1/5比例模型组成，模型是“原始”的1792年法国断头台，倒置用作由内脏制成的桌腿。内脏呈无菌、灭菌的粉红色，而肝脏和胃被一簇肿胀的紫色葡萄所取代。手中握着头的头部位于心脏的位置。
这件作品在开始和现在之间经历了许多修订、变异和重新启动。我们生活在一个被不公正定义的世界。这种不公正在过去几年变得越来越明显。因此，断头台一直是我一直在思考的事物。它已经成为我和朋友们开的许多笑话的笑点（实际上也是互联网上许多其他人的笑点）。在孕育它的革命的背景下，断头台是结束正常政治过程的工具。当贫穷和受压迫的人，那些习惯于无权无势的人，寻求暴力和血腥的重生时，它成为了一个工具。一个颠倒社会的工具：当断头台被倒置时，它的意义不是被“关闭”，而是充满了悬停动画的绝望。
这就是说：倒置的断头台是无效的。它们被倒置并缩小成桌腿，是关于那些仍然习惯于无权无势的人的无能为力。内脏是在思考家庭时制作的。我是一位来自英国的黑人加勒比人。我来自的社区受到更广泛的国家蔑视（甚至在没有遭受种族主义的情况下，你都不能成为皇室家庭的成员）。我来自一个你称呼母亲朋友的孩子为“表兄弟姐妹”的社区，我一直在思考家庭制度的黏糊不清以及我们彼此之间应该或不应该做的事情。我一直在思考酗酒问题，以及它在英国社会中的不可或缺且癌变的作用。我一直在思考睡眠和疲劳。内脏，组装不当，展开成为一个躺着的图表，构成了一个从Orcish Shelving System（2018）开始的进化过程的终点：在那里，曾经的身体必须被堆叠并迫使成为家具，而在《表兄弟桌》中，身体，被剥离和去肌肉化，再没有希望的腿，无法生存。
BP:The final work in the show shares its name with the exhibition: Cousin Table. Grapes, the digestive system, guillotines—here, recognizable forms are layered and combined. We spoke about “time torquing,” China Melville’s description of revolution, and what kind of energy the guillotine represents: a last-ditch, an extreme. What connections exist between guillotines and the figure on the table’s surface?
JB: Yes. It is a sculpture consisting of 4 one-fifth scale models of the 'original' 1792 French guillotine, inverted to serve as table legs for a tabletop made of innards. The innards are rendered in an antiseptic, sterile pink, and a swollen bunch of purple wine grapes replaces the liver and stomach. A head held in a hand lies in the place of the heart.
The work has gone through many revisions, mutations, and restarts between now and its beginning. We live in a world defined by injustice. This injustice has become increasingly obvious over the last few years. As a result, guillotines have been something I've been thinking about a lot. They have become the punchline to many of the jokes my friends and I make (and, indeed, of a great many other people on the internet). In the context of the revolution that spawned it, the guillotine is a tool for the end of normal political processes. A tool for when the poor and oppressed, those habituated to powerlessness, seek violent and bloody rebirth. A tool for inverting societies: when a guillotine is flipped upside down its meaning is not ‘switched off’ but it is instead suffused with the hopelessness of suspended animation.
This is to say: guillotines inverted do not work. Their inversion and shrinkage into table legs is about the impotence of those still habituated to powerlessness. The innards were made whilst thinking about family. I am a black Carribean person from Britain. The community I come from is despised by the wider country (you cannot even be a member of the royal family without suffering from racism). I come from a community where you call the children of your mother’s friends “cousins,” and I have been thinking about the gooey sloppiness of the institution of the family and what we do and do not owe each other.I have been thinking about alcoholism, and its integral and cancerous role in British society. I have been thinking about sleeping, and being tired. The innards, incorrectly assembled, lain out into a lying diagram constitutes the end point of an evolutionary process that began with Orcish Shelving System (2018): where once bodies must be stacked and forced into becoming furniture, here in Cousin Table, bodies, flayed and de-muscled, can no longer survive without legs of hopelessness.
BP: 你在“Disturb the Neighbors”目前的展览中重新探讨了对历史政治物体的关注（断头台现在是议会宝座），以及围绕它们的态度。你能描述一下构成这个展览的两把椅子以及它们创作中涉及的思想吗？
JB: 是的。第一把椅子是议会主席椅的70%比例复制品。我的版本是一个缩小的解释（正如当前的议长椅是对郁闷的维多利亚时代中世纪主义者普金的原作的缩小解释，因为纳粹把它炸毁了）。与原作相比，这把椅子呈银色。它坐落在一个呈现下议院皮革绿色的基座上，带有一个仿木塑料装饰，取材于议长椅上方头部雕刻的木雕。在椅子的背面有一个缺失的面板，观众可以看到内脏，仿佛椅子有内脏，仿佛它的银色皮肤确实是盔甲：仿佛这个肮脏的凳子里面是湿的。
第二把椅子是基于我为作品《玻璃贵族》制作的椅子。这是一个60%比例的复制品。原作是由MDF制成并覆膜（在Coffin Levine的帮助下），而这个版本则是由一次环氧树脂的单次浇铸制成的（与原始贵族所用的相同材料），就好像他和他的椅子融为一体。原始的贵族椅子是基于让·莱昂·热罗姆（Jean-Léon Gérôme）1867年的画作《凯撒之死》中描绘的参议院宝座。这是标准的新古典主义作品，但椅子与历史记录不符（参议员坐在大理石长椅上），在场景中像奇异的被遗弃的未来回声一样蹲在那里，与现代主义设计格格不入。椅子坐落在一个与《表兄弟桌》中的断头台的红色相同，视觉上类似于上议院红色的基座上。一个寄生蜂扭曲地蹲在基座的下方窗帘上。
这两个作品都非常关注上院/下院。我一直把这个展览看作是《表兄弟桌》的负片。那里有温柔，但这个展览关注的是全面和残酷制度的坚韧……
Joseph Buckley, Hateful Stool, 2020.
Disturb the neighbors, New York.
BP:Your current show at Disturb the Neighbors reprises this engagement with historical political objects (the guillotine now the parliamentary throne) and the attitudes that surround them. Can you describe the two chairs that make up this show and the ideas at play in their creation?
JB: Yes. The first chair is a 70% scale replica of the Speaker's Chair from parliament. My own version is a reduced down interpretation (just as the current speaker's chair is a reduced down interpretation from sullen Victorian-medievalist Pugin’s original after the Nazis blew it up). This stool, in contrast to its original, is rendered in silver. It sits upon a plinth rendered in the green of the Commons leathers and with a faux wood plastic trim derived from the wooden carvings from the headboard above the Speaker's Chair. On the stools reverse there is a missing panel, into which audience members can see viscera, as if the chair has innards, as if the silver of its skin is indeed armour: as if this foul stool has wet insides.
The second chair is based off of the chair I made for the work Glass Aristocrat. It is a 60% scale replica. The original was made of MDF and laminated (with the help of Coffin Levine), this version is cast from one single pour of epoxy resin (the same material the original aristocrat was made out of) as if he and his chair merged into one. The original Aristocrats chair was based off of the senatorial thrones depicted in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1867 painting The Death of Caesar. It is standard neoclassicist fare but for the chairs which, at odds with the historical record (senators sat on marble benches), squat in the scene like bizarre orphaned future echoes of modernist design.
The chair sits upon a plinth that’s the same red as the red of the guillotines in Cousin Table but also, visually similar to the red of the house of lords. A parasitic wasp squats warpedly on the plinth’s lower curtain.
Both works are very upper house/lower house. and I’ve been thinking of the show as something like the negative image of Cousin Table. There was tenderness there but this show is about the hardness of totalising and cruel institutions…
BP: 我们过去曾谈过，在耶鲁的时候，你是如何理解为何那个地方成为后殖民主义讨论的中心，并且这带来了怎样的悖论。你能谈一谈你在2013年来到美国后，你的工作和思考发生了哪些变化吗？你提到了在Kobena Mercer和Hazel Carby的指导下学习，并表示那是一次变革性的经历……你能谈谈可能推动黑人英国学者在你之前来到美国的反黑种族主义吗？
JB: 我感到在英格兰作为一个黑人、工人阶级、北方人，我在那里所能取得的成就有一个坚实的上限。而且我不是和Mercer或Carby这些较年长的黑人英国人同一代的。因此，我不知道我是否真的能够谈论他们的经历，但我们之间有的不仅仅是年龄的差异。也就是说：我对于“黑人英国”持怀疑态度。我担心这是一种细致入微的东西，被更广泛的社会原子化，这个社会尽一切可能削弱那些本应有共同目标的社区之间的团结。我在英格兰北部长大的经历与同龄人在托特纳姆（Tottenham）长大的经历截然不同。
此外，我的黑人身份同时也因为我的白人身份而变得复杂。根据英国种族主义的逻辑（将黑人与外国联系在一起），我是黑人。然而，在美国这里，尤其是在纽约，我可以被认为是许多不同类型的人（尽管人们通常会联想到哥伦比亚或埃及）。我的浅褐色皮肤和英语口音使我更容易进入某些空间，而这些东西（我的黑皮肤和北方口音）在其他情况下却完全阻止了我。我知道在许多方面，美国对于有色人种来说是一个危险的地方，但我承认，在异国他乡成为一个外国人，比在你的出生地被当作外国人更容易。
虽然我当然在家里经历了种族主义的身体暴力，但主要的英国种族主义主要通过占据和维护一种令人讨厌的合理否认的领域来运作。只要其他白人能够一致认为没有发生种族主义，那么就没有发生种族主义。黑人和棕色人的安全完全无关紧要。围绕着种族主义的对话只能以一种以白人舒适为中心的方式进行，而违反这种娇惯则会导致大声、喷溅的愤怒。
BP: We’ve spoken in the past about how, in your time at Yale, you came to understand why that place had become a kind of hub for discussions of postcoloniality and what kinds of paradoxes that presents. Can you talk about some of the ways your work and your thinking changed when you came to the US in 2013? You mentioned studying under Kobena Mercer & Hazel Carby and how that was a transformative experience... can you talk about the antiblack racism that may have pushed black British academics to America before you?
JB: I sensed a solid upper ceiling to what I could achieve in England as a black, working-class, Northerner. And I’m not in the same generation as those older black British people like Mercer or Carby. So I don’t know if I can really speak to their experiences, but there is more than just age that separates us. This is to say: I am dubious about what a Black Britain is. I fear it is a granular thing, atomized by a wider society that does all it can to undermine solidarity amongst communities who otherwise have common cause. My own experiences growing up in the north of England contrast wildly with those of someone of the same age and raised in Tottenham.
Furthermore, my own blackness is complicated by my simultaneous whiteness. Under the logic of British racism (that weld blackness to foreignness) I am black. However, those logics don’t necessarily hold in the United States. Here, especially in New York, I can pass for many different types of people (though people usually triangulate on Colombian or Egyptian). My light brown skin and English accent have eased my access into certain spaces that those very things (my black skin and Northern accent) have wholly barred me from. I know that America is, in a great many respects, a dangerous place for POC to be but I confess it is somehow easier to be a foreigner in a foreign country than to be treated as a foreigner in the land of your birth.
Whilst I have, of course, experienced racist physical violence at home, British racism, in the main, operates by occupying and maintaining a zone of nauseating plausible deniability. So long as other white people can agree that no racism has taken place, then there has been no racism. The safety of black and brown people is utterly irrelevant. Conversations around racism may only be broached in ways that center the comfort of white people and any breach of this coddling results in loud, sputtering indignation.
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来到美国，我意识到我在戈德史密斯学院接受的概念性教育并不适用。那些完全依赖于共享参考词汇的作品，在我为之创作的人完全不了解我在指涉什么的情况下显得乏味。尽管我们阶级主义和种族主义的教育体制的现实意味着并非每个人都有机会接受艺术教育，但每个人在生理层面上都能理解一个在空间中呈人形的身体。我们对“认识”人形事物的能力是如此之强，以至于我们能在云朵中看到面孔，在木头纹理中看到图案。
我曾经创作过关于悲伤的作品，但现在我创作关于历史、虚构、当代和猜想中的虐待，将人们变成财产、兽人、嫌疑犯和克隆的作品。所有这些都与对这些虐待的根源进行的持续研究有关——封建主义、白人至上主义、资本主义、帝国主义等——以及权力通过雕像、浮雕等方式描述自身的方式。
Coming to America, I realized that the conceptual education I'd received at Goldsmiths didn’t track. Works that were wholly reliant on a shared referential vocabulary fell flat once the people I was making work for had no idea what I was referring to. Whilst the realities of our classist and racist education systems mean that not everyone is afforded access to arts education, everyone understands, on a physiological level, a human-shaped body in space. Such is our ability to ‘recognize’ human-shaped things that we can see faces in clouds and patterns in grains of wood.
I once made work solely about grief but now I make work about the historical, fictional, contemporary, and speculative abuses that render people into chattel, orcs, suspects, and clones. This is all coupled with ongoing research into the sources of these abuses—feudalism, white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, etc.—and into the ways in which power describes itself through statuary, friezes, reliefs, and the like.
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Joseph Buckley, Cannibal Galaxies, 2023.
Specialist, Seattle.
约瑟夫 · 巴克利 Joseph Buckley
