Chad Scott, How to Explain Electoral Politics without Splitting Hares

How to Explain Electoral Politics without Splitting Hares

Chad Scott

Available Space Art Projects, 900 Karen Ave C-214, Las Vegas, NV 89109-1207

October 29th, 2020, 6 – 9 p.m. (one night only)

by D.K. Sole

Like an editorial cartoonist, Chad Scott reaches into the swirl of current events and pulls out some core aspect of whatever-it-is. He builds an installation that puts this selected epitome where we can see it, and also interact with it, and, sometimes, take pieces of it home. I still have a five-year-old pot of dead lawn from his room of tube-fed turf at Emergency Arts (Price per SQFT, 2015). In 2016 he extrapolated the clamor of the Clinton vs. Trump federal election into a group of speechifying screens and microphones in the gallery at the Winchester Dondero Cultural Center (he said … she said…). This year he looked at voter suppression with How to Explain Electoral Politics without Splitting Hares at the good new part-time gallery, Available Space Art Projects. (They run one exhibition per month, with one evening for viewing. Before Scott the artist was Heidi Rider, and, before that, Krystal Ramirez.)

We walked up to the door of the gallery on the night of the show, expecting to be let in. A normal expectation, but it was locked. Scott called us into the car park where he was waiting with clipboards and pens under a red, white, and blue marquee. He was wearing a black mask decorated with loose flakes of something yellow and papery. We wouldn’t be allowed inside until we had passed a test, he told us. It was a shortened version of the literacy test that Louisiana, in the 1960s, used to disenfranchise its Black voters. 

Our chances of getting inside the gallery had ended there, although we didn’t know it yet. We failed the test, as the people who designed it had intended us to. Outrage! The rightful course of affairs had been truncated, cut short, sabotaged! Scott stamped the word “FAIL” across our papers in blue ink. That was that. But maybe someone else would make it in? We stayed for another hour and a half to find out. The experience of waiting by the bunting marquee in the half-lit car park became the exhibition, for us. One woman nearly beat the test, but question eight told her to put a black dot inside a circle inside a triangle inside a square, and she put a blue dot. Why? Because the pens Scott gave all of us to do the test were blue. If we had been wondering if he was going to allow anybody to pass the test then we abandoned our illusion at that moment. He could have used his authority to say, “Blue pens count too. We know what you meant.” But no.

“Is there anything in the gallery?” I asked, feeling skeptical. Scott said there was.

He seemed disappointed by everyone’s failure, even though he had engineered it. Maybe (he added) if we checked, there might be a gap we could see through.

Peering into the room through the gap in the window covering, I could see footage of a campfire moving on the far wall, another campfire video playing on a screen leaning against the wall to the right, and an object that looked like a plastic rabbit on the floor. Squinting, I decided that the rabbit was staring into a beam of light that shot out of a dark hump. The left side of the space was in shadow.

Telling us that his mask was covered with honey and gold leaf, Scott talked about Joseph Beuys’ 1965 performance piece, Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt or How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. With his head wrapped in those same materials, honey and gold leaf, the German artist had walked around a closed-off art gallery in Düsseldorf, letting people outside watch him as he carried a hare corpse around the room and held conversations with it in front of drawings hanging on the walls. 

“For me the Hare is a symbol of incarnation, which the hare really enacts -- something a human can only do in imagination,” Beuys said. “It burrows, building itself a home in the earth. Thus it incarnates itself in the earth: that alone is important. So it seems to me. Honey on my head of course has to do with thought. While humans do not have the ability to produce honey, they do have the ability to think, to produce ideas. Therefore the stale and morbid nature of thought is once again made living.”

At Available Space Art Projects the hare that was supposed to connect us to the earth and incarnation was replaced with this sterile bunny toy, and the the shaman-artist had offered us a lesson in disenfranchisement in place of a symbolic resurrection. If Beuys’ honey represented thought then the thoughts, here, were perverse thoughts and the knowledge in the test wasn’t wisdom. This exhibition, which had floated us free of our expectations by making us take a test before we could do the normal thing and walk in, was now detaching us further. The people in Louisiana who had administered the test in the ‘60s had been playing the role of election officials like clowns. If someone that silly could be in power then the force that gave them power was also silly, and power itself should be abolished. Everyone present was degraded with this silliness, nothing deserved to stay where it was, and we should have the right to do anything we liked, since other people had taken that right for themselves already.

Where could we aim this realization? Not at the artist. We weren’t like the original disenfranchised citizens who had taken the test. We weren’t inhabiting a country, only an artwork. We could go home afterwards. If this is the past of voting in the United States then the Trump grotesquerie is not a degradation.