Paul Chan’s exhibition Breathers, now at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis after traveling from Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, plays with ideas of rest, respite, tapping out, and calling off. Chan is a conceptual artist recognized for his work’s political engagement and its spirit of playful but studied righteousness. For instance, the first animation in the series The 7 Lights (2005–07) evokes the brutalities of the American response to 9/11, and The People’s Guide to the Republican National Convention (2004) is a map of locations of key RNC fundraisers and galas, which Chan created and distributed in response to then New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s crackdown on peaceful protests against the convention and, more broadly, the US invasion of Iraq earlier that year. Chan’s past political engagement is so effective because his work clearly bridges the gap between the unreality of America’s political machine and the daily lives of Americans, using the material of our day-to-day routines to make tangible the realities of civic injustice. The works in Chan’s Breathers also attempt to use materials of the everyday—air, worn shoes, swimming suits from the Y—to marshal a sense of play toward a call for political renewal.
While Chan’s past work responded to the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 statement that the “personal is political,” in Breathers, Chan obfuscates the political and its attendant relationship to the personal. His new work does not provide the same legibility nor the same sense of belonging as his older works do. The exhibition’s lack of clarity surprised me. I’m drawn to Chan’s early video works, like the 2003 digital flash animation Happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of civilization—a near-eighteen-minute exploration of America’s failed utopian projects, our country’s endless wars, and cruel political system using images of Henry Darger’s heroic Vivian Girls—for their forthright view of the U.S. military-industrial complex. Their critique of imperialist violence is effective because Chan knows and shows the brutality, rather than hiding behind riddles, or masking with beauty, or giving sway to the corporatized technologies that have been changing what it means to live and to make art. These works, shown on a screen, have moved me: they make me think about who I am, as an American, how my life was built, and at what cost. There is something powerful in an artist’s critique of Americanness that asks us: “Who do you think you are, really?”
Chan’s earlier works touched me so greatly because I understood them. Viewing them in the early 2000s, I saw myself, the news, the ambient fear, and distrust that cloaked the country reflected back to me. Something was wrong. This is what I had come to expect from politically engaged artists: they call us to action. And while I don’t believe that most art needs to nor should be instrumentalized to serve another purpose, politically engaged art is also activism, and activism must be legible in order to speak to the people it proposes to speak to and for. Such legibility—as seen in Donald Moffett’s He Kills Me (1987), which became a protest tool for the ACT UP movement, or Vanita Green’s public mural Black Women (1970), defaced by racism on Chicago’s North Side but still standing steadfast—is an act of care.
Paul Chan, Y.oung P.ublisher 99¢ & Up (2), 2017. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Installation view of Paul Chan: Breathers at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, March 8–August 11, 2024. Photo: Dusty Kessler.
In Chan’s earlier works, the screen was his favored instrument through which to communicate this relationship between our daily lives and political realities. But after six years of mostly making video art, Chan said he couldn’t “bear the thought” of making work that requires looking at a screen. “I felt accosted by screens,” he said in an interview with RVA Magazine. “So I just left. I quit.” That withdrawal catalyzed Chan’s multisensory approach to Breathers; as he put it, it “renewed my sense of what was possible.” The title refers both to a series central to the exhibition—tubular nylon bodies activated by the breath of a high-powered fan—and his own breather from screens. It’s one of three series of fabric bodies on view, alongside Deaders and Drowners. The figures all possess a vaguely humanoid anatomy: They have torsos, arms, and heads. They have no distinguishing features other than the all-black coloring of the “Deaders” (an homage to the Scream franchise’s Ghostface) and the repurposed bathing suits of the “Drowners.” All three series are activated by industrial fans. Chan named each family of bodies after their choreographies of movement: Deaders collapse, Drowners flail, and Breathers expand and contract. Yet these names also acknowledge famous figures from the art-historical canon, like the bather, the nude, and even the corpse.
In adjoining galleries, two abstract series, Arguments and Nonprojections (both 2012–13), include materials like shoes, cardboard, electrical outlets, and wires. Chan filled the shoes with concrete, taped the outlets shut, and left the wires flaccid. The winding gallery space enables viewers to parse through each installation as a different period in Chan’s recent oeuvre and move back and forth in time. Arguments and Nonprojections are the only indoor installations in which “screens” appear. These are formed by the outlines of wires that frame sections of white gallery walls or that connect empty projectors aimed haphazardly at nothing in particular. These are screens that break down, misfire, and show us nothing, just absence.
Paul Chan: Breathers (installation view), Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, March 8–August 11, 2024. Photo: Dusty Kessler.
In Breathers, the installations most illustrative of Chan’s history of concrete political engagement are in the exhibition’s retrospective section on his experimental publishing project Badlands Unlimited, and outside, where the large-scale projection Paul’ V.4.3 (2021–ongoing), which premiered at CAM St. Louis, loops. Founded in 2010, Badlands was born out of Chan’s effort to step away from visual—specifically video—art, and offers in the show the earliest examples of the artist’s political position. For instance, in 2012, more than a decade after US forces invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, Badlands published a book of Saddam Hussein’s speeches on democracy; the book is included in a facsimile of Badlands’ New York storefront, which was open from 2016 to 2019. Chan’s decision to compile these speeches (in English, for the first time) was motivated by his 2003 visit to Baghdad as a member of the Iraq Peace Team. On Democracy by Saddam Hussein became an interrogation of what democracy could and should be, because it asks American readers to question what their country was truly doing in Iraq. Badlands, in both its physical location and online home, became a way for Chan to challenge how and where we receive information.
Elsewhere, the exhibition’s lack of legibility manifests most distinctly in Paul‘ V.4.3, projected on the museum’s facade. At night, questions in white text appear typed on a facsimile of a computer screen, such as “What do you consider the most overrated virtue?” and “Why is Bathers an important work?” Paul’ V.4.3 then types a response to each one. Watching the projection from the sidewalk across the street is like witnessing an internet chat in real time, each letter of each word clicking into place as code whirls behind the screen.
Paul Chan, Paul’ V.4.3, 2021–ongoing. © Paul Chan. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Installation view of Paul Chan: Breathers at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, March 8–August 11, 2024. Photo: Dusty Kessler.
Though Chan admits that Paul‘ functions similarly to chatbots, he composed the work’s datasets with over 23,000 text samples from his own writings, interviews, and online activity. For the current iteration of the work, V.4.3, Paul’ also contains information gleaned from over 1,600 questions Chan distributed to his friends, other artists, strangers, and St. Louis residents. Chan consciously modeled these conversations after psychoanalytic sessions, as he explains in issue 3 of SHIFTSPACE (2022), and their constructed intimacy is purposeful. Chan wanted the work’s answers, responses, and engagement with questions to reflect himself: it is, he says, a “synthetic self-portrait.” Yet, Chan pushes the constraints of the screen and conversely limits the possibilities of the individual by referring to all versions of Paul’ by the invented pronouns se, sm, semself, and ser to denote the work’s status as an actor—an agent or a “semself” that can change, grow, and surprise “ser” interlocutors. I believe Chan’s work, which questions boundaries of personality and connection, could have challenged preconceptions of the world and our place within it, but it instead succumbs to a murky ambivalence.
Chan’s early video pieces transformed shared feelings of disillusionment and outrage into a shared recognition and a shared language. They succeed because they are legible. Especially in those years, audiences could see the relevance of this work in their daily lives, whether through the ambient fear of the news or the rise of xenophobia and jingoism (remember “freedom fries” and “America’s Mayor,” aka Rudy Giuliani?). In the personal ways that they articulate these realities, Chan’s early works tell us that something is wrong and, through their commitment to excavating truth, suggest that we, too, have a moral imperative to witness this wrongness.
At dusk, I stood and watched Paul‘ V.4.3 as “Paul’” typed an answer to the question, “What do you consider the most overrated virtue?” Paul’ paused and typed that “virtue itself was overrated,” going on to declare that virtue signaling strips “good” actions of any meaning. I don’t feel much when I hear such a statement from Paul‘. It is a fair point, sure—virtue signaling is not the same as taking direct action, confronting head-on the sights, smells, and sounds of your country’s deeds. But, in the context of an exhibition that does not take a stance on what virtue could or should be, what does it mean to hear about overrated virtue from a chatbot? This question lies at the crux of my contention with Breathers. The show purports to champion the radical potential of opting out and turning away from capitalism, but beyond the exhibition title, how does the work renew our understanding of what it means to connect, to live, to fight for something better in a world increasingly corroded by apathy and ambivalence? Breathers leaves something wanting; it leaves me feeling unsure. And when it comes to the stuff of politics, your life, the lives of those around you, no one can afford to be unsure.
