Sylvia, Indistinct
Benny Nemer
Text from The Sylvia Fractions catalogue, Kalmar Art Museum, 2013.
The Sylvia Fractions includes the works
Suddenly Sylvia Rivera’s voice breaks through the pandemonium: Y’all better quiet down! The activist has wrestled her way to the microphone to give the audience a ferocious tongue-lashing, accusing the movement of ignoring the plight of transgender women in prison, subject to violence and rape, fighting for sex changes and to join the women’s liberation movement. She rails against white middle-class gays for treating her with indifference and contempt: I have been beaten, I have had my nose broken, I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job, I have lost my apartment for gay liberation. And you all treat me like this? What the fuck’s wrong with you all?
Her voice is strident; it is urgent; it is on the brink of collapse. As she presses on with her condemnation, her voice begins to fall apart with fury and exhaustion; her scream scratches across her vocal chords from chest voice into head voice and back again. She leads the audience in a letter-by-letter chant of the phrase Gay Power, and with each word—Give me a G! Give me an A!—her voice becomes more and more bilious. Every blood vessel in her throat is about to burst. She is a dragon breathing fire. And then, mid-scream, the recording cuts off. We don’t get to hear what comes next. We don’t get to find out if her scream ever ends.
This cut-short scream allows a fantasy of a never-ending shriek to blossom in one’s mind, a shriek so powerful and unstoppable that it shatters every barrier in its way. One imagines Rivera’s incandescent voice defying the laws of thermodynamics: traveling from air particle to air particle without ever reducing intensity, never dissipating; echoing infinitely into space, birthing stars with its volcanic heat.
Alas, the world Sylvia Rivera screamed for is far from being realized, and the ideals at the core of her reproach remain as relevant and urgent for many of us today as they were to her forty years ago. It is hard to imagine such a passionate speech being delivered at modern-day pride gathering, where political agendas have been significantly deradicalized since the Stonewall and ACT UP generations. Would a twenty-first century audience—desensitized by the endless flow of media imagery, disillusioned by the suppression of any form of resistance or protest—even know how to understand such a passionate plea for change? Does screaming have any effect anymore?
These questions reverberate through Conny Karlsson Lundgren’s new video, Y’all Better Quiet Down!/Hallå, kan ni lugna ner er! (2013). Rivera’s 1973 outburst provides the source material for the video, although the spectator does not get to hear the incredible vocal eruption that was immortalized on audiotape. Instead, a group of young, stylish individuals recite a transcript of her speech word for word, and even speak aloud sound cues that appear in the script: crowd noise, applause, whistling, and descriptions of muffled passages of speech as indistinct.
The performers’ understated black clothes are as chic and trendy as their voices are chill and detached. Rivera’s ferocious words are translated into the crisp crackle of Swedish, delivered in a sing-song cadence, carefully paced, with pauses that allow the performers to move to various spots in the bright, airy space in which they pose. They are calm, an impassive Greek chorus, seemingly unmoved by the words they are saying, as though reading a text they do not quite understand. There is no heat here: everything is incredibly cool. Quieted down, indeed.
Their performance feels like the final traces of a Human Microphone from the Occupy movement, in which crowd members deliver a speaker’s message by repeating it in unison, radiating outwards like an echo, thus circumventing laws against amplified sound. While this act seeks to magnify the words of the speaker, the passion of the original speech act is inevitably changed, diluted of its fire. In Karlsson Lundgren’s video, the fire of Rivera’s voice has traveled through space and time, refracting and attenuating. Her fire is now unrecognizable, drained of its urgency, cooled and indistinct.
There is more to this chill than meets the ear. Coolness recurs as a core strategy in Karlsson Lundgren’s artistic work. He frequently uses exquisitely clean, streamlined and oftentimes cold aesthetics to address themes that inspire deep and violent emotion: fury, disgust, inconsolable melancholy and a kind of militant ambivalence. One is immediately seduced into the minimalist perfection of his museological environments—made up of almost too-perfect projections, vitrined display tables and salon hangings of texts and images—only to be pierced through the heart by the stories of injustice his work seeks to reveal and understand.
One must look below the cool, stylized veneer of Karlsson Lundgren’s work to find its deep soul wounds. Is the video a sad reflection of the futility of protest, a portrait of a generation inured to anger by ennui and disappointment, or is it in fact a quiet beacon of hope? Are Rivera’s words lost in our tumbling world of whateverness, or can the embers of her fire be reawakened into tools of contemporary transformation?
In a pause between speaking, a performer in the video strokes the nape of her neck, just below her short, dark brown ponytail. Another performer presses the tips of her chipping nail-polished fingers along the contours of her shoulder. These gentle half-touches also appear in Karlsson Lundgren’s video Aleksa & the Others (2013), in which a performer massages her skin while reciting passages from correspondence between nineteenth-century female artists. Her touch leaves the faintest mark where the flow of blood has shifted under the surface, disappearing as quickly as it appeared. She runs her fingers along the spine of a chair; she kisses the tip of her thumb.
Through these seemingly absentminded touches Karlsson Lundgren’s performers search for signs of sensation; for connection to their bodies and the history woven into their flesh. They search for the anger they need to unleash in order to initiate the change Rivera longed for. Deep beneath their numbed, cool outer appearances, they long for it, too. Through these gentlest of actions their fingers touch through time in an attempt to caress Rivera’s fire back to life, to rouse her from indistinctness to distinction.