Credit Lines
CHILDCARE. MORTGAGE. TAXES. UTILITIES. STUDENT LOANS. CREDIT CARD. RENT. HEALTH INSURANCE.
THESE ARE THE DEBTS enumerated in Christine Sun Kim’s charcoal drawing How Do You Hold Your Debt, 2022, which appears on this issue’s cover, highlighting the feature essay on the artist by the disability studies scholar Mara Mills. It also is currently on view in Kim’s midcareer survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which closes July 6 and will travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis next spring.
Given their broad circulation in both the art world and public spaces over the past decade, Kim’s charcoal drawings have become instantly recognizable, combining language (both English and American Sign Language) and motion (both iconic and indexical) with energetic line work and all-caps social critique. In How Do You Hold Your Debt, the question posed in the title is answered by an array of eight disembodied hands and their respective debts, which are depicted as transparent planes ending in sharp points that slice through the air (as indicated by the parallel lines, borrowed from comic books, that bracket them). The sardonic joke here is that none of the hands actually “hold” their debts; rather, the debts dig into the meatiest part of the palms, which are either open (demonstrating vulnerability) or cupped around the debt (a position as awkward and painful as it is futile). Debt, it turns out, is hard to grasp, to wrap one’s hands around, to get a handle on—and cuts like a knife.
In her essay, Mills describes Kim’s works about debt as evidencing the continuity of her practice as she has shifted from the graphic inscription of the physical movements made by deaf/Deaf people to infographics that parody the purportedly neutral “languages” (both textual and visual) of data. In How Do You Hold Your Debt, the lived experiences of the culturally disabled and the financially indebted are similarly embodied in hands that communicate both less and more than any chart. Their experiences also pointedly (pun intended) collapse onto one another, drawing attention to the financial challenges faced by the disabled and to the intersectionality of the fights for social justice and against income inequality.
As Mills suggests, Kim’s work is part of a larger disability arts movement that is focused less on valorizing the dignity of the disabled for non-disabled audiences and more on identifying the systemic biases that are embedded in our social and physical infrastructures. Perhaps needless to say, this focus on infrastructure should be relevant to all those who are invested in both art and politics, and especially in this moment, when right-wing leaders around the world are actively dismantling the infrastructures of both culture and democracy, while supporting or creating infrastructures (such as tax codes and funding guidelines) that will only further concentrate wealth and stymie demands for a more diverse, equitable, accessible, and inclusive society.
Without flattening the important differences between the art world and the broader social world (including the difference in scale), we can acknowledge the value in continuing to examine our own infrastructures. This can take many forms, but here at Artforum, we have been thinking more strategically about how we fit into a larger arts (and arts media) ecosystem, with the goal of shifting our resources so that we can be most helpful to our networks. For example, given the shrinking number of venues for essays that fall outside of the typical publicity cycles of exhibitions, biennials, and fairs, one of our more load-bearing roles can be supporting long-form writing—and especially those texts that deal with “big picture” ideas that might otherwise get lost in the cracks.
Some of the most urgent conversations happening now that we can support are themselves about the infrastructures that are shaping the arts. In this issue, in addition to close readings of the works of Kim, Pippa Garner, Suzanne Santoro, Gillian Carnegie, Joiri Minaya, and Gertrude Abercrombie, we hear from Sonja Drimmer on the problematic rhetoric promoting the adoption of AI tools by art historians; Davida Fernández-Barkan on a museum expansion in Santa Fe that risks compromising the legacy of public art that put the city on the art world map; and Sarah K. Rich on Jo Baer’s paintings, which can serve as a lens through which to view the mass-produced ersatz “paintings” that are taking over cafés and other commercial spaces. These texts helpfully countenance broader questions about the labor of artists or art historians, the audiences for that labor, and the infrastructures—academic, museological, or commercial—that support (or, in these cases, undermine) them. It is not despite but because times are tough that we must continue to focus on the underlying material and discursive conditions—our lines of credits and our debts—that alternatively expand or limit the good work that all of us can do.
