Sharon Hayes on “accelerated becoming”

My friend and colleague Jacob Korczynski, who has just returned from De Appel’s Curatorial Programme and is now the Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), recently drew my attention to this talk by New York–based artist Sharon Hayes, which she delivered as part of the 2009 Creative Time Summit themed around “Revolutions in Public Practice.” I have been following Hayes’ work for some time now, ever since I saw her work in the 2008 exhibition “Not Quite How I Remember It,” curated by Helena Reckitt, at The Power Plant (disclosure: I was also a curatorial intern at the gallery in this period and helped with some of the prep work for the show). In particular, her performances which reactivate past political moments are some of the most compelling investigations I’ve seen so far into the collective nostalgia towards the unfulfilled promises of activist movements from the 1960s through to the 1980s that has been circulating in the contemporary art world over the past few years.

In Hayes’ talk for Creative Time, the artist recounts her early, formative years living in New York in a way that tries to eschew “speaking autobiographically,” as Hayes terms it, and attempts instead to “speak singularly” about her experiences and how they informed her practice. Rather than trying to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between the artistic, social and political experiences she had and her current practice, Hayes underscores the experiential, affective dimensions of living in New York in the early 1990s and becoming a part of movements like ACT UP seemingly by accident. She describes her entrance into these movements as being immersed into the middle of something that was already underway and also as a process of “accelerated becoming.”

Though Hayes is addressing a very particular time and place, her talk does not follow the traditional confessional model of many of ACT UP’s oral histories, which often attempt to instrumentalize suffering and death into politics in a way I sometimes find unsettling. In this model, the death of a friend, acquaintance or public figure is framed as the catalyst for political and social activism. While I know that those experiences informed the incredibly important work that many of ACT UP’s members did and continue to do, I like Hayes’ notion of “accelerated becoming” as another way that political activism takes shape: as a way of accounting for the osmosis effect that takes place within a social movement, where affect travels among individual subjects in a way that is not always easy to trace. It makes sense to me as a model for understanding how people become immersed in a movement and inspired to take action, and also seems to offer some optimism for the political effects of contemporary artworks.