A Time for Monsters @ Fort Gansevoort, Curated by Cesar Garcia-Alvarez
When Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci was jailed in a Fascist prison in Italy in the early 1930’s he wrote constantly as he reflected on the radically changing world taking shape beyond the walls of his cell. A passage from his renowned Prison Notebooks now popularly circulates like this:
The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.
The monsters Gramsci wrote about weren’t the otherworldly creatures that inhabit our imaginaries. They were the ones that even today continue to occupy our lives—political unrest, economic collapse, war, and death amongst many others. Monsters, as ideas, predate the written word, and have roamed for centuries as forms and forces that threaten the order of things. Their presence unsettles and marks a forthcoming transformation; one that is usually painful and prolonged. Today we see and hear these monsters and their actions in the headlines and images that saturate our screens. They also evolve and birth others—immigration policies that lead to the separation of families and the caging of children, transphobia that leads to the killing of transgender women of color, an epidemic of police brutality that violently ends Black lives. Their badgering existence becomes an erratic background noise and somehow we learn to endure them and sometimes, like recent days have shown, to fight them.
In the last three months we’ve also come to intimately know other kinds of monsters—ones that are visible only to us, as individuals, and that have been awakened by a virus that has deranged the world. These monsters reside in us and in our homes. They’ve been there for a long time and we’ve either had no way of expelling them or chose to ignore them as we busied ourselves with the routines and demands that until recently structured how we lived. Now that we’ve been forced to be still, time has thickened, and we’ve had no other choice than to face them. These monsters manifest in the experience of disease by an already ailing body, as depression and addiction, as violent relationships and failing marriages, as shortcomings in our parenting, as inequality that not only leads us to have to share insufficient space with too many others but that also reminds us of our precariousness. They manifest in the anxieties that bloom from unrealized dreams, in the absence of a love we’ve felt unworthy of, in the necessary grief or rage we’ve denied ourselves from feeling, and in our occasional disdain for our own bodies when they’re freed from the cosmetic armatures we shield them with. These monsters are of the most dangerous kind not only because they unmake us, but also because they must be dealt with in deep solitude and in turn often compromise our responsibilities to others.
This project was conceived while sick with COVID-19 and imagined as a journal entry or visual story. As this virus became more public and the rampage of its monsters evident in all aspects of society, I thought often about the silence of the bodies feeling it and fighting the lesser-known monsters it too had awoken. Through images of works by artists with whom I’ve collaborated with for years and others whom I’ve recently come to know, this project grapples with that silence and those monsters. Alongside these images are excerpts from writings I penned while sick and then during recovery. These texts will appear within the exhibition page episodically. Together I hope they may function as informal narratives that are shaped by wounded bodies and not just about them; as testimonies that challenge the accounts of bodies that are told by medical charts, academic studies, and policy papers while simultaneously erasing them.
In narrative medicine, the stories of those who are ill are an integral part in determining care and guiding healing. As many of us today work to heal—from disease, trauma, or a collective ailment—here are some stories by Felipe Baeza, Gisela McDaniel, Mark McKnight, Star Montana, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Fay Ray, Eduardo Sarabia, Ken Taylor, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Liat Yossifor, and I to keep that work going.
- César García-Alvarez