Writing as reverberations of underground explosions echo throughout Doha—the soundtrack to the birthing of a city—I recall how a recent Skype conversation with the Brooklyn-based artist Danna Vajda concluded on Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh. The artist’s reference to the French architect’s utopian social project in India resonates with her long-term preoccupation with subversive politics of space and economics that control our access and understanding of public and private space.
Raised in Vancouver, Vajda, the daughter of an architect, advocates for urban planning and construction to consider civic necessity at its conception. Yet she is at odds with activism as artistic practice, preferring to make objects, installations, trompe l’oeil paintings, and scripted performances that tease out signifiers of the social and economic structures among which we live. Because these objects have no use and deal only with the politics related to their own materiality, the work maneuvers toward resistance to a commodity-obsessed art world only to reveal a series of façades.
In Anewwork, 2011, produced for a show at SculptureCenter in New York, the artist propped a glass door, a glass storefront window, and a blank canvas against the gallery wall. Together, they suggested the vapid emptiness of consumption and challenged expectations of monetary exchange and circulation. Vajda’s use of materials like glass, marble, and textiles speaks to the fiscal and social value of building-material aesthetics, as well as an acknowledgment of the real estate industry as one puppet in the capitalist theater.
Her materials gesture at the charged histories of class economies. Silk and marble, for example, speak to the longevity and authority of bourgeois taste. “The perfect simple silk blouse and yeah, you’ve fucking arrived!” she says, tongue in cheek. Questions specific to the architecture of control and private property unspool in a recent project: upagainstacurtainwall, 2013. In this installation a black silk dress, an image of an empty storefront printed on silk, and ATM receipts painted on silk mark the space for the performance of a script. Real estate developer Bob Rennie’s controversial proposal for a satellite Vancouver Contemporary Art Museum is transferred from a PDF to a Word document, in turn redistributing punctuation and formatting to create a shell of the script, I HAVE READ, UNDERSTAND, AND ACCEPT THIS AGREEMENT. Your signature, 2013. It was first performed by Vajda at CSA space in Vancouver in 2013 and read, per her instructions, “in the context of the opening while wearing the dress made from storefront curtain.” Replacing the words occupants with non-occupants and Vancouver with vacant city from Rennie’s original text, Vajda also embedded fictional characters, to create, as she describes it, “a collage of legal, official, and personal testaments to the internalization of a city and its property relations.” Reading the script as written, with its exaggerated pauses and unorthodox punctuation, Vajda delivered a Dadaist performance of dry-witted contradictory references and wordplays on the economies of real estate, time, work, and individuality.
Vajda enacts the linguistic and aesthetic devices of marketing to explore the construction of myths that deviate from collective desire. In a performance of thewateringhole at Franklin Street Works in Stamford, Connecticut earlier this year, Vajda mixed eight whiskey cocktails with items including chewing gum and marbles, reciting the recipes as part of monologues that revealed themselves as resignation letters. The work mocks the revival of craft aesthetics—in this case, artisanal liquor—a nostalgic yearning for alternative, DIY forms of production. She considers this performance as a way to exaggerate and critique excess and aspiration as characteristics of an overly success-driven workforce. The artist explains her interest in the notion of “toxicity as a stoppage of the efficient body”: being intoxicated as a way to escape regulated forms of labor. The artist herself plays the role of a cocktail bartender in this setup, which is one example of what she calls “performing a dual sense of existence.” Vajda occasionally adopts the vocation of cocktail bartender to literally and conceptually feed her life and work. Objects, ideas, and Vajda’s own life form webs of temporal economies, erasing distinctions between physical and imagined modes of regulation.
Capitalism’s cycles of boom and bust are the trope Vajda deploys as she collapses and recomposes its signifiers in the same way the structure consumes itself for rejuvenation. The subtitle of upagainstacurtainwall makes clear the giving and receiving imbued in the work: “A curtain printed with real estate is the artist’s new dress. A hand that gives, once tilted, is the hand that asks. The paper trail of ATM receipts leads to a silk road, or a pit of tears.”
Her work also contemplates the possibility of individuality, even as our habits of thought, action, work, and consumption are highly choreographed. “While there is a collective ‘we’ struggling within or against capitalism, my struggle is of course different to that of everyone else,” she states, underscoring the point that “these differences are what allows me to cope with the world and feel like a protagonist; however, it is the same individuation which obscures that with which I struggle.” The performance miko1,2,3, 2012, is about our personal relationship with capitalism, and trying to locate sanity and difference within ready-made individualities. Three oil-on-canvas paintings of the April 2006 Artforum cover featuring Christopher Williams’s photograph Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide (Miko laughing) are held to cover the faces of three characters who read a script about how they “use their face, form, and language as a method of social and economic mobility.” Vajda employs scriptwriting and prose as “a means of address that positions the listener to the text, just as architecture can shape one’s movements in a place.”
She will once again investigate the performance of “dual existence” and the shifting terrain of the real estate business in “Placeholder,” her show with Cara Silk Benedetto at Toronto’s Art Metropole, which opens September 3. The project delves into individual and collective claims and desires for space. Vajda and Benedetto have collaboratively written a script that instructs them to perform various characters—including, per an exhibition spoiler, Couch Surfer, Narcy, Renter, Guest, Masoch and Gatekeeper—and to make objects for and during the exhibition. Enhancing the experience of seeing double, it is highly likely that whiskey cocktails will be served.
A version of this article appears in the September 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
