Whoa de Whoa: The Gray Center’s “Another Idea” Comes To A Close
By Jad Dahshan, third-year student studying Art History and Chemistry
“I'm a potter in the morning, a painter in the noon, I’m a bureaucrat in the night time, and I am a lover when the moon is bright, whoa de whoa de whoa.”
On July 31, interdisciplinary sculptor and DoVA Professor Theaster Gates delivered a performance that marked the conclusion of the Gray Center’s online exhibition, Another Idea, as well as their Gray Sound Sessions series. Titled Whoa de Whoa, the hour-long program was broadcast on YouTube and paired organist Chris Foreman with a vehement vocal performance by Gates, who molded clay, drummed, and smoked as he sang.
Whoa de Whoa came at the end of an exhibition that interrogated questions relating to conceptual art, sociality, tactility, social media, capitalism, racial inequities in the art world, homelessness, and many others. Like some other performances in the show, Gates’ took on several of these concerns. His meditation on the difference between the ways Black and white people are prosecuted for marijuana possession, for one, echoes Chelsea A. Flowers’ performance, Chelsea’s Trivia Night. During the monologue at the very end of his performance, he occupies a similar speculative space which fellow exhibition artists Cauleen Smith (COVID Manifesto) and Kyle Bellucci Johanson (chance encounters for a third try: attempting a house party on the moon) also sought to create in their work: Gates imagines aloud an art historical training program for the frontline security staff at museums, who do not enjoy the same privileges as curators. Led by a Black woman, they would be called “securators!”
Another current that flowed through the performance was the story of Dave the Potter, a poet who produced enormous stoneware pots while he was a slave in South Carolina in the 1800’s. He often left his name and lines of original poetry inscribed in the glaze of his pots, despite it being illegal to be literate as an enslaved person. “All I have is my hands,” sang Gates, who is trained as a ceramicist, as he worked the clay: slicing it, kneading it, and molding it into a pot that eventually collapsed. Filmed in a dim studio flooded with golden light, shots of the performance alternated between wide shots of the artist and closeups of his hands at work or of the clay’s dark silhouette as it turned on the wheel.
Though reaching across numerous disciplines such as urban planning, painting, and performance, Gates’s practice is unified by an ability to see the “life within things” and tap into the potential of often disregarded and disenfranchised objects and places. His projects often take a transformative role, be it revamping an old bank into an active hub of arts and culture, turning a German museum into a Black Chapel, or molding amorphous blocks of clay into artwork. Perhaps through his performance in Another Idea, Gates’s attempts to transform something deeper in viewers, and less tangible than clay.
Hello! I'm Jad and I am a rising fourth-year studying Art History and Chemistry at the College. I write for artmejo.com about global and Arab contemporary art and occasionally do some arts reporting for the Chicago Maroon. At school, you'd usually find me dangling off a rope in Le Vorris & Vox Circus's practice room at the Logan Center or filming an Instagram story at the Smart Museum. Since being quarantined though, I haven't really strayed beyond the edges of my laptop or sketchbook. Each week of “Another Idea,” I will explore and reflect one piece in the exhibition. The Exhibition is now closed, but you can view the archive at The Gray Center.