To Have and to Hoard: Xandra Ibarra's Object Lessons Free

In the geometric graphic Lumpy Lumpen (2018), artist Xandra Ibarra offers a thoroughly opaque interpretation of language as a sign system to render laborers arrayed in proximity yet isolation (fig. 1). Part of an invited response to Michelle Handelman's video and performance Hustlers and Empires (2018), the graphic is paired with It's a Thing (2018), a narrative account of a staged hustle presented as a public dialogue between two characters—“White Thing with Power” (WTwP) and “Brown Thing” (BT)—through which we glimpse an artist's negotiation of institutional expectations for minoritized artists and the accompanying incitement to discourse bolstered by art institutions, their funders, and experts.¹ Legible as a one of the culture industry's adjudicators, WTwP activates the staged dialogue with the mimed swipe of a credit card between BT's “butt cheeks,” introducing her as “another mediocre artist of color.” Having purchased her time, WTwP keeps BT on their lap, their sticky stroking hands busy, as they endeavor to expose BT's interiority.

Instead of the sought-after exposure of vulnerability, BT is quick to render legible the hustle going down. Recognizing her “game” in not where it should be for the artworld's rules of inclusion, she enumerates the understood expectation she be “an upstanding citizen making work about displacement, immigration, HIV/AIDS, police violence, war, prisons; [her] race, gender, sexuality, class and/or disability” and to do so in a “neat and digestible” fashion. More to the point she shares that she “recognize[s] game,” telling her interviewer: “If we are going to hustle, let's hustle . . . If I am surplus, if I am out here because you're gonna check a box on your report. Then I wanna take this money, be dirty, offensive, obscene, wasteful, messy, delinquent, criminal. I wanna hustle YOU con estilo.” BT both names the identitarian rubrics through which, as a “brown thing,” she is in the service of routine nods to diversity as ultimately disposable surplus but also claims the hustle for herself, mobilizing negative affects as aesthetic directives. From lumpen to surplus, BT's articulation of her position as a racialized laborer renders dense the power dynamic on display in the exchange, and, one can speculate, the modes by which the artist, Xandra Ibarra, interfaces with art presenters and art audiences as she enfolds them—us—into the scene with the apostrophic declaration, “I wanna hustle YOU.” This, too, is augmented by Ibarra's decision to render the exchange as one between clearly identified things (Brown Thing and White Thing with Power), identifying the players within the hustle as objects.

Across her body of work Ibarra gathers, hoards, and circulates objects thick with discursive and material resonance. She gathers objects of “spictacular” racial limitation—compulsory Latina femme performance as well as those of haunting unachievable whiteness—architecting them into a practice that explores, in her words, “abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects.”² Largely decorative and in deep relation to her body, across her archive wigs, heels, costume jewelry, and synthetic breasts are some of the few objects that draw our attention to the artist's use and engagement with the vibrancy of matter.³ Oriented by the above work, this essay considers Ibarra's object play and the object lessons illuminated through it, considering both her practice of amassment and insistence on the things she gathers as in a relational matrix with individuals slotted into the liminal and mutable status of object. I am interested, as well, in the way this aesthetic strategy intervenes in scholarly conversations on nonhuman matter to also illuminate something of minoritarian relationality and the animation of negative affects toward oppositional orientation to the successes of incorporation as we consider “things” and the relations and affects activated when we ponder the routes through which art “things” circulate.

In an interview with Andy Campbell (2019) for Artforum, Ibarra elaborates on both “thing” status and the thingification process. “A thing,” she tells us, “[describes] works, art and non, that are purposefully created or come to be used as market-friendly racial content. It's a well-funded, sanitized, feel-good, nonprofit-y product . . . Oftentimes this product functions as a form of social management because it's paired with ‘community engagement.’” For Ibarra, then, “things” bear a specific relationship to the market, as do objects in her practice and that of others without thing-status though always under its threat, which requires we think with the legacies of racial capitalism and its ability to incorporate and instrumentalize difference, specifically within and through institutions that collect and display art. In It's a Thing (2018), Ibarra gives us the minoritarian artist, a brown thing, as resistive, a bad object within these circuits. BT is both an uneasy and willful token, too much in the know for proper performance of the role she is permitted and a too willing participant who has monetized artistic engagement with herself as an eroticized object of consumption for those that would paint her as victim. Considered in the context highlighted by BT and Ibarra herself requires, then, that we take into account the artist and the performing body as an important site to help us think through the complexities of these relationships in curation and circulation both in art spaces and, as we will see below, closely linked academic ones.

Performers whose work centers race as an exhibitionary optic have long played with and explored these dynamics, whether taking up the vulgarities of the auction block, the exhibition of indigenous peoples, or the display of the supposed sexual excess of Black and brown peoples often blurring the distinction, as art historian Jennifer Gonzalez (2008) has told us, between object and subject of display. Ibarra also entreats us to consider the circulation of women of color, materially and epistemologically, as a mode of exhausting affective extraction. In what follows, I dwell with Ibarra's object lessons to consider complex encounters with things and the possibilities posed by bad objects among them, especially in networks of negative affect wrought by duress within a hegemonic order where proper objects buttress white subjecthood. Ultimately, these object lessons further an understanding of hustlers and empires—that prompt with which Ibarra, and therein we, began above—within the specificity of art work, its many players and their relationship to projects of empire with their uneven distribution of goods.⁴ I am, then, also thinking of collection, of amassment, of hoarding across different sites of and relations to power as organized in the realm of art under the influence of aesthetic epistemes. With the word “hoard” I seek, too, to entangle my analysis with the disabling medical gaze with which Ibarra tarries.

In her essay “Powers of the Hoard,” Jane Bennett (2012: 247, 246) urges us to “consider the possibility that the person who hoards and the artist who creates share something of perceptual comportment, one unusually aware of or susceptible to the enchantment-powers of things” with their “exquisite sensitivity to the somatic effectivity of objects.” In short, she argues artists as and like hoarders are particularly attuned to “thing power,” the call from objects beyond “a figure of speech” and “a projection of voice,” which, she underscores, we should take seriously for an amplified understanding of the affect of materiality and an enriched sense of how to coinhabit the world (240). Further, thinking with theorizations of hysteria as “the prototypical psychopathology of Victorian England,” Bennett understands “hoarding [as] the madness appropriate to a political economy devoted to over-consumption, planned obsolescence, relentless extraction of natural resources [ . . . ] and vast mountains of disavowed waste” (248). If we follow this contention, what might hoarding mean for minoritarian subjects for whom certain object relations reify social positions of subjection within majoritarian orders, social positions within an unfriendly medical regime within which pathology is mobilized as excuse for population control?⁵ Ibarra's work provides an answer that also draws our attention to the social/medical categories Bennett identifies as a perhaps particularly apt contemporary relation to our objects, adding minoritarian relation to our object status. In other words, while “hoarding” enjoys wide quotidian use to signal hyperbolic accumulation, thinking with Ibarra I am distinctly conscientious of the discursive force of the medical category, particularly as it adheres to women of color.⁶

Grappling with a broader medical regime and its imbrication with other social structures, Ibarra's work entreats us to follow the lead of disability studies scholars who elaborate a social model of disability (as opposed to a pathologizing medical model) to understand the kinds of diagnoses that attach an act (hoarding) to an identity (hoarder) creating, as La Marr Jurelle Bruce (2021) argues, “a set of social exclusions, obstructions, and derogations imposed on persons who diverge from a dominant, ‘abled’ norm” (13). Activating this model, for example, Scott Herring (2014: 17, 7) maintains that “there is no natural relation to our objects” and approaches “hoarding as a unique moral panic over material goods, or an object panic whereby forms of social deviance attach not only to interpersonal behaviors but also to material ones.” This then frames my own understanding of the ways Ibarra hoards as a minoritarian aesthetic gesture from a social position of deviance, to navigate the management of both minoritized communities and objects of and in relation to these communities. While mindful and methodical, in other words, Ibarra's gathering of objects is filtered through her racialized position in a social web of relations that dictates the chain of signification that itself accumulates to render irrelevant the distinction between hoarding and collection for certain subjects even, as I argue, Ibarra wields the first to comment on the second mode of amassment.⁷ To be clear, I am not claiming she lives under the medical discursive, and therefore material, sign. Nor is it my intent to think metaphorically about disability. Rather I grapple with its presence as a social force in the aesthetic interplay of Ibarra's work through this rubric as part of the material she circulates.

There is, too, the “madness” that envelops the “hoard.” These proximal pathological designations are readily attached to women, queers, and femmes of color—hordes, or even, those who have whored, as Ibarra's take on art world hustlers leads us to imagine. I turn to recent work in mad studies to understand this dynamic, first taking cues from what Anna Mollow (2013) calls “mad feminism,” that entreats us to center “subject positions at the margins of madness: of those people who might not bear any psychiatric diagnosis label but are nonetheless regarded by the dominant culture as crazy [including] people of color seen as emotionally erratic,” among others. Similarly and more specifically, Therí Pickens (2019: 4, 13) entreats us to bear in mind the intertwined nature of race and ability through which we might understand “raced and gendered madness at the seam of the Enlightenment project” and its formulation of the human, which so heavily informs cultures of reception and exhibition, bearing in mind Bruce's (2021) reminder that medicalized madness is a “politicized process, epistemological operation, and sociohistorical construction” that require ethical critical engagement (7).⁸ To this madness, Larry La Fountain-Stokes (2021) adds the adjacent category locura. In his work on translocas, in which he parses out the relationship between the literal meaning of loca—madwoman—and its queer invocation, La Fountain-Stokes (2021: 20) explains that loca “suggest a form of hysterical identity, pathologized at the clinical level, scandalous at the popular one, constitutive of the individual lacking sanity, composure, or ascription to dominant norms: effeminate homosexuals, madwomen, rebels for any cause”—a category forged in and through social structures that readily attach to Ibarra. As we will see, Ibarra places her object play in relation to the medicalized emergency of affective excess read as madness or locura that happens in tandem with a designation of less-than-human against the propriety of white womanhood. Invoking the aesthetic enactment of hoarding, Ibarra's amassing of objects of gendered and racial signification and their exhibition seeds a sense of malady, of locura at the juncture of medical and arts ideologies, that forces a reflection on circulation of “woman of color” as object.

The Thing Is . . . 

Moved by a trash heap comprised of organic and nonorganic debris (a work glove, matted pollen, a dead rat, a bottle cap, and a stick), Bennett (2012: 239) is propelled by the transformation of “sullen objects” into “expressive ‘actants.’” The resulting book, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, has become representative intervention of new materialism, a scholarly grouping born of feminist debates about postmodern neglect of the biological, the real, and material in favor of the linguistic and discursive, signaling a majoritarian scholarly interest in nonhuman matter.⁹ Minoritarian theorists whom I follow in my work, however, have long hewn together theory and matter. From the women of color feminist theorizing of theory in flesh to queer of color critique's engagement with Marxism to understand normativity's capitalist requirements of nonnormativity, these bodies of scholarship have long, as Sarah Ahmed (2008) argues, explored the “sedimentation” of the discursive in the material.¹⁰ Further, Native and Indigenous studies scholars alongside critical race scholars have shown us Indigenous and First Nations peoples have long nourished ontologies and epistemologies of relation with the nonhuman world.¹¹

In her essay on the limits of new materialist philosophy, Kyla W. Thompkins (2016) argues that new materialism, and especially a strand known as Object Oriented Ontology in particular (OOO), sees their work as a corrective to identity-driven projects and their narratives of representation. Instead, OOO, “seeks to theorize object life in its most radically non-relational forms [ . . . ] beyond,” Tompkins tells us “representational systems such as language [ . . . coming] into legibility only as form.” Important, then, that from a deeply relational vantage, Ibarra will direct us, below, to think specifically about the form of her work, the form of the exhibition of her work, and forms of circulation even while leveraging her own critiques of representational politics. New materialism's majoritarian interest in matter, which I engage here in a disidentificatory capacity, joins in my writing minoritarian epistemologies from women of color feminist and queer of color scholarship and that which emerges from Ibarra's oeuvre when thinking the social life of objects and the sociality of lives lived in conscious relation, even as Ibarra's work leads us, too, to reflect on the limitations of liberatory epistemologies and related accompanying calls for social justice that emerge from these same bodies of scholarship. With Ibarra, I turn now to the objects to which she directs our attention, the social work these perform, their transformation in collection—in adjacent vibrancy—channeled in exhibition and distribution as commodities.

Doing Things with Things

In conversation with scholar art critic Dorothy Santos on her prints made with menstrual blood, Xandra Ibarra shares, “I am a hoarder of weird things so I just stored them. After a year or so I began to see them as Rorschach inkblots and as an opportunity for staging a performance where I could ‘read’ or pathologize the general public” (Leon, 284). In a recent visit of her storage spaces, when I asked how she made decisions about what items to keep and which to discard, Ibarra repeatedly shared that she simply couldn't get rid of some things (bags of fishnet stockings, G-strings, and gloves, a mound of stripper shoes, synthetic monster hands and masks among them). She had spent too much time making a costume, or had invested too much labor finding the object, or, simply, that she loved looking at them. “It would be real hard for me to throw these things away,” she explained, “that's just crazy” (pers. comm., September 3, 2021).

In her description of object accumulation it is clear that, for Ibarra, her objects present an opportunity to enter in, create, and share social relations forged in and reflecting societal constructs of race, gender, and ability. She is also aware and purposeful with strategies for circulation as leveraging relations within the form of art commodity. Famously, Karl Marx's concept of commodity fetishism diagnoses the obfuscation of social relations as an object becomes a commodity. Labor power is abstracted and alienated in capitalism's elevation of the commodity to its exchange value, in its transformation to magical fetish (Chin, 2016: 24). But as Elizabeth Chin alerts us in her My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries, Marx's conceptualization of the fetish relied on racist misreading of African fetishes and pivoted on insult via simile “stating directly that those who bought commodities were as primitive and backward as Africans” for his condemnation of capitalism to resonate (27).¹² In other words, the term also captures problematic race ideologies informing Marx's diagnoses of relations to capital and within capitalism, particularly as we think about the life of commodities, even while we can acknowledge the utility of the concept for identifying the trauma inherent to capitalism. I note this, as central to my thinking with Ibarra's object play is the relationship between her material accumulation and the racial specters that haunt the introduction of what she methodically gathers and distributes via circuits of exchange in exhibition spaces and markets.

Carefully attuned to her oeuvre and its objects and prepared with exhibition in mind, Ibarra's Inventory of Exhaustion (2016) indexes exhaustion with racializing tropes, with being read through them, with reverse discourse's effort to complicate their signification in performance—overall with cultural production's unanticipated interpretation within the successes of inclusion (fig. 2). The work consists of “vacuum-sealed costumes” photographed to capture the sheen of the clear plastic rectangular encasing holding them, each a “Spic Skin” of performance labeled by the artist: “Cucaracha,” “Mambo,” “Tortillera,” “Cortez,” and “Virgin” (figs. 3 and 4). Carefully preserved, their collection as much on display as Ibarra's performance history, these are the “sloughed off material and shed skin,” of the performance persona Ibarra assumed and then performatively “killed-off” (Wilkinson, 2019). In this amassing work, I recognize wardrobe selections from various La Chica Boom “spictacle” performances including the masturbating Guadalupe of Vigensota Jota, the recently censored Tapatio ejaculating Tortillera, and the Hernán Cortez of Skull Fucking alongside those featured in another photography series, Spic in Ecdysis, including: Molting Showgirl with her ruffles and feathers on sun-burned grass, Carcass with its complementary red and green against a border scene of sand and sun, and the shimmering cucarachica roach carcass floating next to Ibarra's black-pastied recumbent body in Molting in Pool (Ibarra, 2015: 354–56).

Printed with archival pigment, architected in proxy museum tactics, in Inventory of Exhaustion Ibarra thoroughly mediates our exchange knowing, as Susan Stewart (1992: 161) argues that it is “the museum . . . which must serve as the central metaphor for collection.” She shares only the documentation of the stylized objects, the photographs—objects themselves—that carry not only the aura of the artist but also that of the objects Ibarra still hoards, the stuff she can't part with, with which she would be “crazy” to part, in her own account of material engagement. What Ibarra is looking to circulate in this work, however, is not the vibrancy of direct object encounter, the liveness of the exchange, but instead, lingering on relations of exchange, deploys accumulated affect as medium. Sarah Ahmed (2014: 45) has theorized “emotions work as a form of capital” and that cumulative affect is “produced as an effect of its circulation . . . distributed across a social as well as psychic field.” She offers further, “Affect does not reside in an object or sign, but is an effect of the circulation between objects and signs. . . . Signs increase in affective value as an effect of the movement between signs: the more signs circulate, the more affective they become” (45). While Ahmed's claim that affect does not reside in an object may seem at odds with what I am working through here, I read her as underscoring the relational rubric of exchange to operationalize affect, with that circulation occurring across realms—social and psychic—in a broadening of the economic. Following Ahmed, Ibarra's photographs allow her to present the combined affective force of previously circulated performance skins, their histories, and her exhaustion, all the while creating another object to accumulate affect in relation to the mechanisms of control the work puts on display: archiving and exhibition.

A project about managing exhaustion, the photograph also proactively documents Ibarra's career transition filtered through her feelings of being hustled, of “the affective dimensions of being fatigued, fucked raw, emptied of matter, never reaching completion”(Wilkinson, 2019)—that status of full subjecthood denied to minoritized individuals. Attending to, hoarding, her performance objects (her matter) privately, Ibarra lingers in frustration, mining what Christina León (2017: 372) has described as stuckness to reorient her practice—a stuckness that through opacity embraces an impasse “wherein the future is uncertain but the mere persistence of aesthetics implies the potential for dwelling in that very impasse.” Ibarra moved from performance via her avatar, La Chica Boom, to largely sculptural, film, and video work, after what she describes as failure to anticipate audience responses to her “explicit, abject, and humorous forms of Mexicanidad (spictacles)”—a misrecognition that occurred “not just in performance but in [her] life in dealing with institutions, people, the state” (Wilkinson, 2019). Ibarra reorients to center on reflection of the consumption of her work, of a process she says renders her surplus. If, as Ahmed (2014: 45) summarizes, for Marx the circulation—“the movement of commodities and money in the formula (M-C-M: money to commodity to money)”—is what creates surplus value, the circulation and accumulation of abject racialized excess, its affect, is what Ibarra is managing, what she is carefully negotiating as she recognizes herself as surplus in the capitalist scene of biopolitical control that is the gallery, museum, and exhibition hall. Highlighting affective management through the institutional mechanism of the museum Ibarra evinces negotiation of the ideological space of both art circulation and the circulation of ideas of proper Latinidad in curation of type, in the use of taxonomy, that has led to Ibarra's misrecognition and censorship.¹³

In contrast to the exhibition of objects thick with sticky Mexicanity her spictacles exhausted, what of those objects that repel instead of adhere, whose proximity hurls the artist into violent spasms confoundingly triggered by mad laughter? Thinking very explicitly about scenes of exchange she enters when displaying her work, in describing her performance (fig. 5) Nude Laughing, Ibarra notes her art-historically minded response to John Currin's painting Laughing Nude (1998) to “[examine] the vexed relation racialized subjects have to not only one's own skin, but also one's own entanglements and knots (skeins) with whiteness and white womanhood.”¹⁴ She responds to this vexed relationship, inclusive of the whiteness of the medium, of the form of Currin's work and its sites of exhibition, with performance alongside a series of objects in relation.

In Nude Laughing Ibarra meets her audience dragging a trailing translucent sack behind her. Ibarra is nude, wearing an amplifying breastplate. As she walks, down hallways, around the white cube of the gallery, up stairways, she teeters on yellow heels. She emits sultry, nervous, bubbly, loud, desperate laughs that resonate with discomforting vibration. Moving close to audience members, the performance taunts engagement. Her performance of this work at Brown University on November 14, 2016, climaxed in an empty studio arrived at after ascending several narrow flights of stairs. After circling the perimeter, Ibarra crawled into the flaccid sheath that had trailed behind her, full of what she tells us are “paradigmatic ‘white lady accouterments’” (fig. 6).¹⁵ Her shoes had fallen off her feet as she struggled, arching, kneeling, to negotiate her proximity to objects that don't/won't adhere to her brown body, laughing still after moments of writhing. As she came out of the cocoon, long dark tresses matted to her face from the sweat of exertion, its contents spilled. Silent, she left the room, having pushed herself, struggling for breath, to the limits of her capacity. The objects she had gathered remain on the floor with us, her audience.

If Inventory of Exhaustion reflected an invocation to circulate as object, as a brown thing, in performance resplendent in racial signifiers, Nude Laughing serves as a response to other white things with power. We might think of Ibarra's hoarding in her translucent sack and her laughter as designating, after Larry La Fountain-Stokes (2021), a loca's response specifically to the violence of white womanhood across its organic and nonorganic sites, its different capacities for accumulation of wealth and worth (La Fountain-Stokes 2021). Ibarra's might be, as Bennet surmises of hoarding in the contemporary moment, the “appropriate madness”—accompanied by different modes of haunted and haunting laughter—to the perpetual violence of white womanhood on different registers as well as those racial logics that suffuse relations of exchange: Ibarra's relationship to the gathered objects, her practice of gathering them and their signification, presenting this signification in social exchange simultaneous to its delivery as commodity in the museum, gallery, academy—all art market vectors. After this scene of exchange, of course, Ibarra returns to where her performance ended, to gather her objects to continue to hold them not only, and not necessarily principally, for future performances, but because she would be “crazy” to discard them. Burdened by hegemonic signification of gendered ideals that cannot adhere to Ibarra's brown body, in sharing her hoarding she shares her tarrying with white ghosts—the hysteric position it creates—but also creates the scene for revelation of these relations as well as those of shared ambivalent experience to matter and the racialized hierarchy in which it exists.

Things Fall Apart; or, To Have and to Hold, Till Death Do Us Part . . . 

From exhaustion in extractive performance and the madness of limited object relations, Ibarra turns to actants that have been influential to her as an activist, educator, and artist, in her recent Ashes of Five Feminist of Color Texts Ibarra fulfills a long-desired urge to burn books that have, in the artist's lexicon described above, been made into “a thing,” into “market friendly racial content” (fig. 7). She does this to “reconsider,” she tells us, “the larger conditions around their circulation” noting the way “these frames inform and undergird supposedly inclusive sections of the art-market and museum world, as well as the way liberal nonprofit funding structures function” (Campbell, 2019). In planning this work, Ibarra identifies insidious effects of evaluative institutions (museums, universities, nonprofits) that create exchange value for artwork but also liberatory utopic epistemologies like those represented by feminists of color specifically at the site of increased symbolic deployment, the university, as the project served as capstone to her second advanced degree.

For Ashes of Five Feminist of Color Texts Ibarra uses citation frequency to determine the texts to accumulate in her premeditated act of bibliocide. The ultimate selection included “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color,” by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1994); Black Feminist Thought, by Patricia Hill Collins (1990); This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1983); Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Lorde (1984); and Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987). Ibarra then burns these works and gathers their ashes into book jackets (fig. 8). The jackets she has made are not slick glossy marketing tools but rather matte-black textured casket/urns recalling communal library editions (fig. 9). These are displayed open flat with their corresponding Dewey decimal call numbers stamped on their spine indicating alternate spatial logics as well as their continued lives in public collection. In yet another way to think of ways to have and hold these materials, Ibarra erects these as in a mausoleum, so in keeping with gallery hanging conventions if not for the crassness of the red funerary carpet and rasquache artificial flowers in brass vases aside the entombed ashes (fig. 10).

Ibarra trains her attention on the object form that holds feminist epistemologies, bringing her into material relation with them as “things,” art market commodities, even while she puts on display her own disenchantment, her own exhaustion and depression with art markets and the cooptation of the ideas in texts that she “deeply respects” and “reveres” but with which she has become “frustrated” in the face of their simplification and depoliticization (Campbell 2019). Transposing a work about the institutional life of the concept of intersectionality and Black feminism more broadly, Ibarra tells us, “Jennifer Nash's Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, helped me realize how these writings came to be flattened in my intellectual and political life. Sure, we can expose well-meaning students to these authors, but doing so often means simplifying and depoliticizing their work. In other words, women of color feminisms are made into ‘a thing,’ even though they were never intended to be that and have meant so much to me beyond that condition” (Campbell 2019). Nash's (2019) book, indeed, reflects on the incorporation of Black feminism into the academy and its circulation as a privileged symbol of reform within women's studies departments that nonetheless continue practices that harm black women, going on to say “the field retains little interest in the materiality of black women's bodies, the complexity of black women's experiences, or the heterogeneity of black women's intellectual and creative production” (3–4). This tendency, Nash argues, has produced what she describes as “defensiveness” in response to the crass popularization of intersectionality, a position in which Black women labor to recover the true and proper meaning and origins of the concept as entwined with Black feminism and “intimacy with black women” ultimately curtailing epistemological possibility (136–37). I am struck by Nash's description of the affective consequences of defensiveness. “I understand defensiveness,” she explains, “to be a space marked by feelings of ownership and territoriality, and by loss and grief. The book, then, theorizes defensiveness as the feeling that emerges when intersectionality is thought to be a lost object or, worse, a stolen object” (32).

Thinking with epistemological proximity and, indeed, entanglement (as a work like This Bridge Called My Back evidences), Ibarra tarries with women of color feminisms as epistemological objects, but also with the object form these can take for circulation. It is her engagement with the latter that results in a different though related affective possibility than the one outlined by Nash, even if they share a “holding on.” Ibarra's engagement with these texts as objects provides a site to perform her own affective irresolution and to invite the same from viewers likely to be shocked by book burning, an act that might initially be read as echoing conservative censorship of the kind to which Ibarra has been subjected. She offers, then, object lessons on transformation of these epistemologies for the art market, for purchase and display, and of herself as a continued bad object for Latina representation. As these texts become enshrined as commodities, they also mark the transformation from what we have, to what we hold in mourning. There is no effort to recover here, to restore, or return. There are only the ashes that are the result of her own confrontation. The burning of such cherished texts, of both genuine political visioning and of hollow diversity and inclusion projects delivers an unavoidable caution about self-congratulatory efforts to increase the prevalence of minoritized artists and epistemologies in majoritarian institutions and its consequences.

My turn to Ibarra's object lessons responds to important art advocacy-focused demands for representation and inclusion. Often the call for a shift in numbers is treated as the only kind of work that can make a change, overlooking what the aesthetic gesture of the objects interjected into spaces of exhibition can offer us. In her most recent book, Arlene Dávila (2020: 2), for example, identifies Latinx art as a “productive category . . . revealing of how matters of class, race, and nationality are operationalized in contemporary art worlds.” Her focus on “structural change” toward “an equitable presence in communities, in collections, in museums, and in the world” (21, 175) is productively thought alongside the way minoritized artists are themselves navigating what Dávila calls “the entire ecosystem of museums, critics, collectors . . . involved in the process of evaluation” even while Dávila declares that “on their own representations themselves,” the work that hangs in art spaces, “can do little to challenge racism” and further, that “art alone is not going to save us” (21). While I agree with Dávila about racism as structurally instituted, I want to direct our attention to the work of objects, which we know from the above also includes the work of “brown things” like Ibarra. Minoritized artists are often intimately aware of the potential for their work to be transformed into, as Ibarra might say, “a thing” in the process of commodity fetishism, but her object play within relations of exchange thickens our understanding of the fraught and important work of art presentation. As so elegantly captured by Jennifer Ponce de León (2021: 4), aesthetic gestures and the force of ideology they impart, powerfully structure our worldview, and can be “produced, reproduced, and transformed” at these sites.

As described by Jodi Melamed (2015: 78), following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, racial capitalism functions as “a technology of antirelationality (a technology for reducing collective life to the relations that sustain neoliberal democratic capitalism).” Ibarra shows us how this technology structures exhibition spaces. She also, however, offers us a counter technology, an object lesson that instigates and queries relational exchange building by hoarding, by holding on, as minoritarian disruption that dwells with the reality of exhaustion, depression, and locura as response to being made “a thing,” a craziness that echoes what Jose Esteban Muñoz (2020: 23) saw in the contributors of This Bridge Called My Back who showed “that this craziness was a powerful way of being in the world, a mode of being that those in power needed to call crazy because it challenged the very tenets of their existence,” themselves now made into things, held in mourning.

Written with gratitude for the generosity displayed by her editors and for support from The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Notes

References