from the archives
Excerpt from OSMOS Issue 19
SANDY WILLIAMS IV
BY CAY SOPHIE RABINOWITZ
I first came to know Sandy Williams’s work in 2018 when I selected it for a juried exhibition entitled New Waves at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. My curatorial assignment required working only with digital files, so I was not prepared for the way his work would occupy and disrupt both the physical space of the gallery and my mental space as a gallery viewer. I had selected two works that turned out to be dramatically different in scale, yet their impact was equally forceful. Three souvenir-size candles from the series Wax Monuments were deceptively discreet, while Planned Obsolescence was a hulking fish tank into which Williams had placed a submersible pump, tubes, dust, and hardened concrete. Adjacent to this ramshackle relic was a video loop documenting the process by which the object came to be: the artist fed the pump raw concrete; the continuous movement of water and liquid concrete through the tubes and into the tank caused the concrete to set, until the entire system became clogged to the point of its own demise. What makes these works so brilliant is the way they do not belong to or exist within a single register. It is not merely by being performance and object and recording, or by being historical monument and disposable home accessory, or by being time-based and frozen-in-time. Instead, most convincing is its being a conceptualization of physical exhaustion and a physical experience of conceptual forgetting. The work exists as both conceptual time and as the object that simultaneously records and decommissions it.
A recent New York Times editorial made me think of these qualities in Williams’s works. In “How Nationalism Can Destroy a Nation,” Lewis Hyde asks, “what must citizens forget before a nation becomes a nation?” Hyde gleans his answer from the nineteenth-century French scholar Ernest Renan’s compelling argument that the “essence of a nation is that all of its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.” Hyde argues that “ancient differences as to sect or creed must be left in the past.” What happens to a nation whose citizens do not forget or are made to re-remember events from the past (a structure Hyde calls “manufactured trauma”)? This happened in the former Yugoslavia, when ancient strife was re-remembered to serve as the reason for current discord, and it is what prompts Trump voters, whose “chosen trauma is the Civil War and its legacy of racial animosity.” Instead, Hyde argues, we need to forget these old conflicts and remember what we have in common—universal suffrage, due process, and the freedom of religion.
Williams’s objects and recordings, I would argue, facilitate forgetting, as they memorialize the necessity for exhaustion, expiration, and demise. The candles slowly turn Jefferson, Lincoln, and Lee into molten wax; the pump comes to a permanent stop. His engagements do not belong to or behave in line with the expectation of the here and now, but neither do they reside in or dwell upon the past. I would assign to these works a new kind of tense—both verb and constitution—that does not properly exist. It would have to contain both the present perfect and the infinitive. The infinite future perfect. Instead of the idea that we should never forget, which too often justifies the memorialization of a manufactured atrocity with a makeshift victim and perpetrator, the infinite future perfect allows for a better present to emerge out of the carefully enacted and decisively argued obligation to forget. Working through the past, for Williams, does not mean to remember it, but to celebrate its exhaustion. In so doing, he allows for the generation of experiences not based on the records of times past, but based on an infinite future that will have been.
“I am a conceptual artist and filmmaker. My practice focuses on record keeping and time and the ways in which these concepts find plurality within our culture. More pointedly, my work questions the importance we attach to “time” and “the record” as they relate to our legacies, cultures, and canons; our histories, the ahistorical, the prehistorical; fantasies, things that never happened but could have, imagined futures, and parallel universes. For years I have been on a quest to locate a world unrelated to the one that I learned previously. I am trying to look more critically at things that are in front of me, interrogating the methods—the weaponization—of “the historical” as a form of erasure. The way the word historical teaches us what is important and, therefore, what should be ignored or forgotten. I am building a case for the invisible.”
Wax Monuments
I began making these monument candles in the wake of a white-nationalist rally that erupted in protest of the proposed removal of a Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, VA. After this event, many cities conducted a series of town-hall meetings in which residents were asked to voice their opinions concerning the future of these statues. In Richmond, after months of debate, we were told that these objects were federal property and that we did not have the power to remove them. I was somewhat surprised at how little agency we had over the public spaces that we occupy. My solution was to 3D-scan these monuments, shrink them to a manageable size, and turn them into candles that could be melted. In a sense, I felt that by miniaturizing, multiplying, and distributing forms that were previously immobile, singular, and static created a sense of agency that was previously unattainable. This series of candles currently includes Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.
Don’t Take Any Wooden Nickels
For as long as I can remember, my grandmother has told me, “Don’t trust nobody, and don’t take any wooden nickels.” I always knew what she meant, but it was not until recently that I asked her where this phrase came from. That conversa- tion led to the creation of this artwork: a wooden nickel fabricated using the 3D scan of a replica 1913 United States nickel. This wooden nickel has been enlarged in line with the rate of inflation of the original coin’s value. The nickel spins atop a base inscribed with a quote from historic US indigenous people’s protest posters (which originally had an image of this same 1913 nickel accompanied by the words “The Only Indian the United States Ever Cared About”). This base has been embellished, on one side, with inset “real” wooden nickels from the 1950s and, on the other, historical “Buffalo/Indian Head” nickels. A forty-two-minute interview, in which my grandmother tells stories from her life, plays from within the base. An LED ticker display hangs from the wall, detailing facts and histories related to the inception of the 1913 nickel and the “Wooden Nickel.”
Wooden nickels are a form of currency that was privately circulated during the Great Depression, into which my grandmother was born, as a substitute for metal currency that was then in short supply. Because they would expire, people eventually stopped accepting them. I am interested in the idea of obsolete currencies. When the designer of the original 1913 nickel was asked why he chose to depict the face of an unnamed indigenous person and a buffalo, he explained that the government wanted a coin that could be recognized around the world as an American currency. The most American things they could think of were the Native American and the American buffalo, two populations the government was actively subjecting to genocide. This romanticized hypocrisy reminds me of the pedestal, which the monument sits upon and which exemplifies certain ideals or standards that, in reality, our government has selectively avoided throughout history.
I Get It From My Mama
This series of photographs was taken in Virginia over many decades and three generations. I found the middle photograph of my mother while combing through old family documents and trying to map my family’s history. I wanted to consider what it meant for her to sit atop a horse in the same manner that so many figures sit atop monuments. I later found the photograph of my grandmother riding confidently (left) and was inspired to create a photograph of myself doing the same (right). These portraits now serve as a visual record of my family’s history (both culturally and visually), our origins, and our use of space as our bodies reveal traces of the past.
Unattended Baggage
This series of sculptures was created in collaboration with my friend Jack Doerner. The timers on these suitcases count from zero to one hundred days and only reset when the objects are moved or unplugged, essentially allowing the works to keep track of the exact time they spend in a specific location.
I first imagined the details for this project while traveling through London and an announcement revealed that our train would be delayed until the police could deter- mine the contents of an unattended bag. We waited until we were reassured that it was only someone’s forgotten luggage. Many were relieved that it was not a bomb. I thought their fears were unwarranted, but later that month the Manchester Arena was bombed by someone holding a similar bag. When I returned home to Virginia a few months later, a woman was killed during a white-nationalist rally against the proposed removal of a Confederate monument.
I began to think deeply about our relationship to these objects that don’t move and the implied violence that surrounds them. I became interested in the way that monuments reveal to us exactly how the space they occupy has been used for a specific period of time; and, like a planted flag, the way their permanence reifies specific ideologies within that location and erases other histories. What does it mean for some bodies to remain transient as they are pushed and pulled through time and space, while others are allowed to remain relatively permanent, or travel to and claim previously occupied spaces, redefining the identity of those areas?
In response, this suitcase is an object that actively claims space.