Like many young culture hounds who subscribe to an array of streaming services, Martine Syms has her shows: as of early summer 2015, Scandal, Nashville, and sometimes Silicon Valley. However, at the risk of undermining the leisure value of the Los Angeles–based artist’s television-watching habits, she possesses a particular grasp of the medium’s depth.
“It’s like a prosthetic memory,” she says, speaking of TV’s relationship with American culture. “One of my early memories is of a white girl twirling in a circle. I realized later on that it was from that show Small Wonder—the oldest I could have been when I was watching it was four or five, but it’s one I think about a lot. It’s stuck in my head, this terrible Fox television show.” There’s a lot embedded in this single gauzy recollection, Syms points out: “I think about my family, my background, socioeconomically where I was. At that time, Fox was really heavily targeting an African-American demographic, part of a shift in the television landscape in general. Even though Small Wonder is an all-white show, there’s a reason that my parents would have been watching that show or channel.”
This train of thought informed the production of her video A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere, part of her installation “S1:e1” in the New Museum’s 2015 triennial. The work posits a brief history of recent television (focused on three golden age shifts, in 1970, 1988, and finally 2006, with the advent of YouTube) alongside images of Syms herself interacting with screens in banal or domestic ways—constituting herself as a sort of hybrid viewer-user-creator.
This structure of thinking—unpacking a moment, “looking at the context of production, the conditions of viewing an image, and including that contingency in the work”—informs much of Syms’s varied, but consistently media-engaged, practice. Her Twitter bio offers the tongue-in-cheek identification of “conceptual entrepreneur”; recent projects have taken the form of videos, lectures, narrative screenplays, and objects, and she also heads the publishing imprint Dominica, putting out two commissioned books a year, as well as artist editions. Prior to Dominica, Syms, with Marco Braunschweiler, founded and ran the Chicago project space golden age between 2007 and 2011, an artist-run endeavor that hosted projects by Jon Rafman, Alex Da Corte, Lauren Anderson, and many others. Though she found herself at the time “really crazy about being professional, and wanting to make it look like a commercial gallery,” Golden Age drew significantly as well on her background in the DIY-oriented Los Angeles punk community, her zine-making, and a stint working at print material mainstay Ooga Booga.
Her day job is in design, something that came out of a long-standing interest in the Web, which Syms attributes to her “general nerdiness.” She notes that design, at least, “isn’t so directly related to my work, because it’s just how I get paid, and in a perfect world I wouldn’t have to work, I’ll put it that way.” But these different pursuits or methodologies do find common ground in her process. “I feel like there are actually a lot of relationships between a website and a film,” she says, “in terms of designing an experience for a screen. And I started to see a lot of parallels between books and publishing and websites, as far as pacing, sequencing, editing. I definitely think an on-screen experience is universal, in a way.” There’s certainly overlap, then, between Syms’s artistic output and net art, but the way she approaches the issue of digital technology is informed by a broader cultural context, not the least of which includes an eye toward the black radical tradition. In a 2013 talk for SXSW interactive called “Black Vernacular: Reading New Media,” anthologized in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, which will be published by MIT Press in November, she recalls an online project archiving her Google searches that was exhibited alongside those of two white male artist peers. Responses to her project led to a series of questions: “What does it mean for a black woman to make minimal, masculine net art?” she asks in the lecture. “What about this piece is ‘not black’? Can my identity be expressed as an aesthetic quality?” Considering “the tension between conventional, segregated channels of distribution and black imagination,” Syms invokes code switching, the sociological notion of moving between languages or dialects in varied cultural contexts, which entered mainstream vocabulary around the election of President Obama in 2008. “Writing the SXSW talk was the first time I thought about code switching as a metaphorical term,” she says. “I was thinking about it as more of a way of making stuff—the idea of smashing two things together that seem like opposites.” She compares it to amphiboly, a grammatical structure deployed formally by the collective Slavs and Tatars: “it could mean two things, or something and its opposite, contained in one idea. So it’s not just switching cultures but bringing ideas together. That’s something that’s continued throughout my work since writing that essay.”
In late 2013, Syms wrote a piece for rhizome called the “Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” seeking “a new framework for black diasporic artistic production.” The manifesto drew from the language and structure of 2004’s “Mundane Manifesto,” written by Geoff Ryman and others from the Clarion West sci-fi writing workshop, which focused on “this premise that if you focus on outer space, you forget about what’s actually happening to the planet,” she explains. “I took the environmental concerns and adjusted them to be social concerns.” Here, adherents (the “alternately pissed off and bored”) agree to imagine a future without magic, space travel, Martians, or alternative universes, instead seeking a “cosmology of blackness and... possible futures” rooted in black humanity, and “the awesome power of the black imagination” that already exists on earth. Syms’s own entry to this genre is Most Days, an audio piece set in 2050 in which she narrates the day of Chanel Washington, a young black woman living in Los Angeles. Accompanied in its vinyl release on mixed media recordings by Neal Reinalda’s ambient score, the voice-over lingers on both Chanel’s wholly relatable domestic routines (waking up alongside her boyfriend, painting her toenails) and her equally intimate interactions with technology (a sleep-monitoring blanket, a vaporizer pen). With the background synth sounds creating a dreamlike mood, that small distance Syms’s futurity creates between the listener and this imagined reality becomes one of quietly unsettling possibility.
While any continued adherence to the rules of Mundane Afrofuturism after Most Days is unintentional, the mood of the piece certainly resonates in her work since then, particularly the presence of a solitary female protagonist, a role that, she says, will be a part of the body of work she’s producing for her upcoming exhibition at Bridget Donahue gallery in New York, which opens this month. It’s not an autobiographical representation of herself but rather, she explains, “a reference to a vernacular, existing mythologies that we already have around us.” She references Georges Polti’s 36 Dramatic Situations: “I like using that because it’s the essence of all popular narratives from the renaissance to now. It allows me to focus on the interpretation of these things that we’ve already established.” By a mechanism similar to that utilized in Most Days, possibility through this proximity to autobiography, the solitary female character takes on a performative edge as well. This has been of interest to Syms since her early LiveJournal days, under the handle “ambiguousperson.” “I like to think about self-performance, for screen and for life,” she says. “Where an on-screen performance is made to be more realistic or true to life, how that changes a gesture or a movement. How real-life performance is influenced by television or movies, that theatricality. I feel like LiveJournal was a really tangible way to create a self with many different personalities.”
Which brings us back to TV, one of many containers of cultural knowledge that Syms has examined and unpacked, equal parts amused viewer and media archaeologist. Responding to the notion of a voice actor or LiveJournal user who’s layered different selves, she says, “I’m really obsessed with this show right now called Power, produced by 50 Cent. One of the characters owns this club and is a drug dealer, and his nemesis is a young, attractive black guy. The club owner invites him to come work with him, and asks, ‘You know, we can’t get blacks and Latinos at our club. What’s the secret?’ The guy’s like, ‘Different people come to my club because I’m different things.’”
A version of this article appears in the September 2015 issue of Modern Painters.
