AND ALSO WITH YOU

PATO HEBERT

ST. EDWARDS UNIVERSITY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The artist would like to offer his gratitude to the St. Edwards University community, especially Hollis Hammonds, Elisa DazMartnez, Meridith Schmittou and the Kozmetsky Center of Excellence in Global Finance, Jessica Buie, the gallery team, and students and fellow artists in the Public Art class, as well as Kris Cohen, Aleta Lee, Adonis Volanakis, George Ayala, Sita Bhaumik, Tisa Bryant, Jaime Cortez, Doa Felicitas Cortez, Quang Dang, Luc Demers, Tri Do, Christopher Ferreria, Rene Garcia, Alexandra Juhasz, Dennis Keeley, Daniel J. Martinez, Ruben Ochoa, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Christine Pan, Peter Precourt, Reina Prado, Dont Rhine, Aya Seko, Jennifer Wofford, Elizabeth Gerber, Kiffen Madden-Lunsford, Ciara Ennis, Deirdre Visser, Nizan Shaked and students, Theresa Tensuan, Sarah Willie-LeBreton, Lauri Firstenberg, Rock Hushka, Sue Bell Yank, Ted Kerr, Nelson Santos, Frances Phillips, Claire Peeps, Leslie Ito, Michelle Moreno, Miriam Romais, colleagues and students in the Art and Public Policy Department at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, colleagues and students in the Art Department at Reed College, colleagues and students at Art Center College of Design, colleagues and students on the InSight project, Lynn Gumpert and her team at NYUs Grey Gallery, Stephanie Snyder at Reed Colleges Cooley Gallery, Lasers Over Los Angeles, Bunny Gunner Art Services, colleagues and constituents at the Global Forum on MSM & HIV and APLA Health & Wellness, Stephen and Mary Hebert, Mike, Noriko, Takumi, Naoki and Santiago Hebert-Nishizaka, Susan Hebert, Faith Idemundia, and everyone in the extended Hebert, Garcia, Nishizaka, McIntosh, Murgas, Torrazza, Henscheid and Idemundia families.

FOREWORD
There is a mesmerizing quality found in Patrick Pato Heberts expansive photographic work, Delegates, XIX International AIDS Conference, Washington, D.C., 2012. In this 36-foot long grid of images, figures move in and out of frame, only visible from the waist down, and floating in a patterned sea of blue conference carpet. Diversity, yet inclusivity and individuality in contrast to the collective, seem important themes in this work as hints of cultural and personal fragments are found in brief captured moments of textiles, clothing, handbags, briefcases and a variety of types of footwear. It is the massive nature of this work, the repetition, and almost dizzying effect of these images that links directly to the ongoing social and viral tepidemic that is HIV/AIDS. Hebert states in reference to his Delegates series, that it gains its strength from the endless ebb and flow of conference traffic juxtaposed across multiple images, evoking the burgeoning scale of the pandemic as well as the increased professionalization of our response. As an intermedia artist, educator and cultural worker, Heberts work explores contemporary social justice issues through social practice, participation and collectivity. The content presented in this catalog documents the eclectic body of works created and participatory actions facilitated by Hebert for an exhibition at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas in November 2012. The exhibitions title, And Also with You, draws inspiration from a portion of the Catholic liturgy that has been revised and is no longer in official use. Interested in spirituality and the ethics and poetics of interconnectedness, Hebert was an ideal candidate to be a visiting creative scholar at St. Edwards University, supported by the Kozmetsky Center of Excellence in Global Finance and the Fine Arts Gallery.

And Also with You features a variety of artworks ranging from photography, installation, sculpture, language, temporality and graphic design. On the opposite wall from the Delegates are three large word searches that feature synonyms for concepts of Doubt, Oscillate, and Balance. These playful text pieces utilize the popular form of word search puzzles to engage visitors in a game of discovery. Other works in the gallery include a grid of constructed shields that reference the recent Occupy movement, as well as enlargements of handwritten text from a student engagement project facilitated by Hebert and produced by students in the Public Art Class at St. Edwards. All of these works reflect Heberts interest is repetition, the formalism of the grid, and the playful nature of materials, while at the same time engaging viewers through a rich visual, linguistic, symbolic and spatial experience. It is our pleasure to be able to present evidence of this compelling exhibition and collaborative project created for the St. Edwards University community. We want to thank Pato for his gracious donation of his time, intellect, compassion and creativity to work with our faculty, staff and students on this ambitious project. This exhibition and visiting scholar program was made possible through collaboration between the Kozmetsky Center of Excellence in Global Finance and the St. Edwards University Fine Arts Gallery. Special thanks go to the Kozmetsky Center Director Elisa Diaz Martinez, Executive Assistant Meridith Schmittou, and Kris Cohen, Assistant Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Hollis Hammonds Associate Professor of Art Director of the Fine Arts Exhibit Program St. Edwards University

I LOSE IT WHEN I ....

BY KRIS COHEN

In the interstices of sidewalks that cut through planned space, a field of small flags that one can stand apart from and survey, as one might survey land from above, chaotically recedes into the distance. In visual conjunction with an architecture of many styles, periods, and apparent functions, the path-ways evoke a particular form of landscape: the American college campus. Our presence in this spot, off the citys public grid, probably guarantees that we already know this to be St. Edwards University in Austin, TX. (the reasons that we arrive here are part of our makeup in the distended moment of encounterand this make-up is addressed by, and thereby in the work constituted by the flags). The flags are rectangular and, when seen from a distance, can look unmarked save for their colors, some a solid and vivid blue, others a bright orange. These colors, and the small scale of the flags, immediately sever the nationalistic referent that cant not be invoked by the presence, here on the page, of the word flag. An overall coherence obtains in the flags hectic clustering. At the same time, color divides the field of flags into two populations, as though something is being measured by the difference: electric blue or a safety orange striated with grey. The flags whip miniaturely in a Texas wind, motion also tending to produce a kind of coherence in deviance. To say the flags wave together is to belie the complexity of their individual movements; to say that they are each singularly in motion is to belie the overall visual effect, a kind of penumbra of coherence around or immanent to the field, the feeling that the flags belong to something, and that in looking, in noticing, we too might belong to that something.

The principle of belonging here remains mysterious, but the feeling of belonging, of a galvanizing tug in the direction of the work, is unmistakable. We participate by looking, and that participation, in all of its tonal and formal variety, echoes the flags deviant coherence. But there is more to do than look, so there is more to learn. On each flag, there is writingnot the standardization of typewriting, but the quiddity of handwriting rendered in as many styles as there are flags. This appears to accentuate, to further particularize the flags singularity. But like the flags singular responses to wind, which unify a field precisely in an unprincipled diversity, handwriting both unifies and diversifies. Handwriting evokes the particular bodies indexed by the singular of style, while signaling the choice, made in the past by some guiding authorial hand (probably artist, but conceivably project planner, curator, collaborators) to produce a project in which all people participate through or in the medium of their own handwriting, everyone together leaving their mark in just that way. Handwriting both unites and divides the field. In the nearby Fine Arts Building, there is a simple plastic bin. In the bin, unmarked flags, the same flags that buffet the front lawn of the building. Nearby: felt-tip markers, and instructions to write on the flags. Here we learn, if we havent learned it through close observation of the flags in the field, that there are two prompts: I lose it and I am at peace. Its the kind of stark, delimited choice that limns the form of simple surveys, questions constrained so as to pre-format the data set that results. In choosing to respond, respondents thereby become part of a set before the fact, a protodata point, by virtue of the delimitation and its language.

Each prompt produces an open bracket and invites people to inhabit that space, to complete it. We also learn that this is the work of LA and New York-based artist and activist Pato Hebert. The flags, and the responses that mark them are part of a work called Surge (2012). A related work, Congregation (2012), can be found inside the gallery. These two works join five others to make up an exhibition, shown as part of Heberts week-long residency, entitled And Also with You (2012). Unlike most data understood as such, the field of flags needs no second-order visualizations. It is not raw material for something to come. Rather, it visualizes itself. As an image, it is no less and no more ruly than wind blowing across small fragile flags whose plastic heads sometimes, in stronger winds, detach from their thin metal poles. Although the descriptor participatory, so easy to use in relation to this work, seems to privilege the act of writing on a flag, of responding to a prompt, there are many ways to enter or encounter the work, and no indication given in the work as to which, if any, is privileged. We can join our handwriting to others, our choice of prompts to others, our responses to others, and enter the work that way. Or we can look, wander, peruse, inspect, maybe tuning in to the intimation that something like data or knowledge or, at the very least, a coherent project is on offer; maybe tuning out to the staccato slant rhyme of the flags in motion; maybe enjoying the irredeemable excess of the scene (oh its art!); maybe disdaining precisely that same feature (oh, its art.)

Facing Page: Surge Ink on utility flags 2012 8

Details from Surge Ink on utility flags 2012 10

Moreover, these modes of engagement and others (spacing out, disengaging, walking away and becoming a backdrop or mote in someone elses encounter with the field) are not separated by the toggle of an either/or. They are combinable, and each standard choice of how to interact with the work might easily give way to aberrant offshoots (no one would stop you if you wanted to rearrange the flags). But the range of possible engagements is more complex still. As part of Heberts residency, students as well as faculty and staff at the college played significant roles in the conceptualization and realization of the work. That is why the title Surge names the work and its constituent parts, but does not and can never fully organize those parts. The dis-organization of making and viewing, of participation and contemplation, or organizing and witnessing, are a deep part of the works scene, its production as well as its habitation. In contrast to these careful defractions of meaning stands the tonal absolutism of the prompts: I am at peace, I lose it. With both, one is asked to match self-knowledgea personal event, a memory, something made up on the spot that nonetheless feels true or amusing in a way that feels self-similarwith a feeling or state (peacefulness, losing it) that is meant to be inviting, habitable, or a site of ready projection. The stakes of the first are an affirmation of being: I am. The stakes of the second are discomposure of same: I lose it. Peacefulness most obviously indexes a kind of valorized selfplenitude, but it might also name a cessation, as in the euphemism for death, at peace.

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But both prompts participate in familiar vocabularies of selfhood, the languages many have learned to grant the provisional calm of phrasing to the fragility and flux of being. Moreover, the starkness of the proffered choice itself, its dramatic juxtaposition of peace and losing it, is itself part of such vocabularies, whereby selfhood is delaminated into some sort of public scene, often along such dramatic lines, across choices forced into polarity by a project that often lurks somewhere just off stage. And as in those vocabularies of self-knowledge, one neednt and people often do not adhere like disciplined subjects to the given choices, the pre-formattings of self. But neither do they exist in a wide-open field without obstacle or barrier. Reading the responses to the prompts, browsing the flags, one reads the record of peoples negotiations of that particular betweennessbetween improvisation and a pre-formatted structurethe particular form of which so strongly characterizes historical periods and the shifts between them. To inhabit a particular moment in history is to constantly negotiate the various forces that anneal and obstruct ones personhood, ones livelihood in the tbroadest possible sense. And both sides of that negotiationimpersonal forces and personhoodregister the particularities of any historical moment. Surge speaks to its own historical period, its present tense, in another way. In this writing of Heberts work we need to be reminded of something that needs no reminders in the viewing: the flags, despite the name, a name which is unavoidable in this context, do not look like national flags, American flagsthey are not that kind of icon. On the contrary, they look most like utility flags.

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Taken together, they evoke an especially complicated or confused power or telephone company project. So it is in the domain of writing (and speaking) where we can notice that the project stages a particular deflation from public symbol to public utility, American icon to simple, pragmatic marker of something buried just under the grounda deflation that speaks to the projects historical specificity, its way of inhabiting the present tense of its ongoing production. This is an especially significant demotion in the works present neoliberal context (a context I address more slowly below) where it is precisely the relationship between symbols of nationhood and the implied promise to provide for the populace of that nationby providing utilities, nutrition, regulations, a safety net, and various buffers to the structural inequalities of a capitalism seen, from this liberal standpoint, as distinct from the statethat has been slowly eroded. In the face of Heberts project, we occupy that hollowed out field. Neoliberal politics leaves the individual ever more isolated, exposedcomforted or more likely not at all comforted by the idea that we are all responsible for ourselves, that anything we might get in the way of support from our government should be understood as a handout and undeserved. In this situation, the autobiographical takes on added historical weight. Surge asks people to participate in a version of the contemporary spectacle of autobiography.

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Details from Surge Ink on utility flags 2012 14

Self-broadcasting formats like Twitter and Facebook invite gnostic self-characterization in public, and often in ways that are pre-formatted by trends, by available styles of self-articulation, by popular memes to which people respond or against which they take up a stance (e.g. hashtags, emoticons, forwarding, linking). Such autobiographical statements read like a series of dispatches from inside the new, more cramped form of individuality being forged by American politics in its neoliberal turn. There has been a tendency, especially among public intellectuals and critics of contemporary culture, to decry the glut of selfrevelation, to call its participants and its organizing cultures narcissisticprecisely, in other words, to blame the individual for the banality or boredom or anger one might feel in the face of todays political shifts and concomitant cultural forms. Such diagnoseslacking a theory of the individual or the ways individuals are shaped intimately by historical forcesare far more compelling as theories of what it means to be witness to so much self-characterization, to participate in that way. Witnessing, after all, probably constitutes the bulk of our participation in whatever cultures we take ourselves to be a part of, however active we consider ourselves to be. Whatever other avenues of participation Surge offers, it all but demands we participate in that way, as witnesses, even if only to the field of flags and the tiny autobiographies they throw to the wind. Hebert asks: what, exacttly, are we having a relationship with when we are made witness to tiny, wild scenes of self-elaboration like the ones Surge stages, where answers cluster hectically around the stable form of a pre-formatted question, where the results of those answers get collectivized and visualized, made available for consumption both in their singularity and in their provisional, maybe-imagined generality?

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Hebert presents these answers in two formats: on the flags themselves, and in a second and separate work located inside the gallery, Congregation (note: a noun rather than the verb form of Surge). In Congregation, Hebert himself has selected a few of the prompts that appear on flags outside the gallery, reproduced and enlarged them as vinyl stickers, and pasted them from floor to ceiling, wall to wall on one of smaller walls of the rectangular gallery space. A horizontal bank of gallery light switches and the glass door to the gallery interrupt the works allover expanse. Hebert arrays the responses around those features of the space. As a result, the arrangement feels like a negotiation with constraints. And here again, in contrast to Surge, the artist makes the choice. The responses, reproduced as vinyl stickers, maintain the handwriting and the sentiments, but leave behind the flag form. Presented as if written directly on the wall, each reply is unframed, organized and made discrete only by the stylistic unity of the reproduced handwriting. The phrases that begin with I lose it appear in silver; those that begin with I am at peace in black. Here, style bears the full weight of personhood, however fractionally or obliquely evoked: the style of the sentiment expressed, its use of language, its tone, the form of self-understanding evinced, the graphic style of the handwriting. Compared to Surge, Congregation establishes a viewing situation where the focus is more squarely on the individual, where individual responses are ostentatiously legible, even isolated. As a back formation of the isolation of the individual responses, a group comes into being that is more spatially locatable, even observable and quantifiable. Congregation thereby brings into being a more conventional audience for those responses.

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Surge and Congregation expose each other in this way, via opposition, even negation. In the relative exposure of the gallery context, then, we may read: I am at peace when I am washed clean. I lose it when liberals think conservatives are close minded. Seriously?? I lose it when I feel oppressed by religion. I am at peace when I turn it over. I am at peace when I am being true to myself. I lose it when people use gay as an insult! I am at peace when I play Super Smash Bros. Im at peace when I twerk. There is an ongoing history of artworks which, in prompting people to leave a trace of activity in the field of the artwork itself, produce a self-reflexive awareness of the artworks public. That is, a history of artworks that call a public into material being within and as the artwork itself. Hebert himself cites Yoko Onos Wish Trees (1996) as an influence. Commonly, such artworks borrow forms of knowledge production that appear foreign to the art world, or, at least, foreign to the aesthetic field of art production. The form of the poll, for example, has come in for some scrutiny (e.g., Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, [1971]; or Lucy Kimball and Andrew Barry, Pindices [2005]).

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The various sciences of personhood have also been persistently appropriated (e.g., Martha Rosler, Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained [1977], Natalie Bookchin, My Meds [from the series Testament, 2009]). Polling, psychology, and medicine, for instance, have long been defining forces in our capacity to know ourselves, individually and collectively. They have even set the conceptual parameters for the very idea of knowing oneself, and, thereby, for knowing the publics of which one is and isnt a part.

Detail from Congregation Vinyl 2012

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Heberts project participates in this history. And so it prompts us to ask after the contemporary conditions for the production of knowledge about the self as well as the selfs wider social ambits, the group forms in relation to which the individual form is elaborated. To produce awareness of a group is, in powerful part, to produce that groupgroup form in mediated publics being primarily an effect of awareness (rather than of face-to-face, intimate knowledge of ones associates). We dont face the other people who write on flags, even if, being a part of the campus community, we know them or think we do. We come into contact with them through what they write.And we come into contact with the group that is produced by the work through a kind of synthetic movement across the flags, a pattern recognition or ambient aggregation or overall feeling we get in the presence of the amassed answers, either in the specificity of their actual expression, or in the very idea that the statements on the flags are there to be read, even if we dont read them, or dont care to. The abstracted phrase come into contact here replaces the word that I have been tempted to use: knowledge. If we derive something that we feel to be knowledge from the work, via participation, our own and otherse.g., knowledge of other people, of the contemporary conditions for peacefulness and for losing it, of how orientations to those subjective states divide a population this knowledge is partial and necessarily phantasmatic. It is, in other words, intensely, multiply, and purposefully mediated.

Facing page, detail and installation views of Congregation Vinyl 2012 21

But this is a form of mediation to which a great many of the works addressees are fast growing accustomed. Its the form one encounters in Tweets, Facebook posts, Tumblr captions, and comments fields. It is partial and gnostic, while also indexing a person, resident somewhere, although not in the here and now of our reading. Even if the group assembled by and through Heberts work is entirely opaque to scrutiny, to patterning, to the various familiar activities of knowledge production, the point remains that Heberts work is invested in the production of just that inscrutable group form, and just that problem of belonging in all of its opacities. These opacities are our own. They make up the landscape of life in a densely mediated, networked culture like the one that is the site for Heberts workwhich is, in that sense as well as the more familiar one, a site-specific work.
Im at peace whenIm alone I lose it when i am unable to articulate my emotions. Im at peace when I get lost in my music. I lose it when friends die unexpectedly. I am at peace when I amstill [the i in still was dotted with a heart].

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Here, people produce autobiographical fragments by conditionally inhabiting (the prompts are statements about a condition) the I given to them by the prompts, but not as part of an attempt to present themselves, not in the interest of anything so encompassing or replete as revealing themselves to an unseen audience. Rather, as a simple response to a prompt, they offer up a single phrase, generous in its acquiescence to the works request, but with no pretense to be anything more than partial and, of necessity, unrepresentative. Of what could they be representative? To confidently claim an answer to this question is to beg the question of the work. The phrases do not represent the person, or a person. They improvise a relation between individuality and convention (convention being a community of others, resident in repetition), between self and other, interiority and exteriority, present and past, personal history and historical event (the prompts were given, self-consciously, just on the eve of the 2012 presidential decision, which is to say, at the end of another protracted, internecine political battle, the stakes of which were both very high and hyperbolically overdramatized by Obama and Romney supporters alike).

We will need to learn to live with this apparent contradiction between structure and diffusionthat, in fact, might be the works most urgent suggestion.

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And this relation (not this person, but this relation) is staged provisionally, for an unknown or anyway unseen audience, and for a situation (that of the artwork itself) that is only slightly better known, that at least has been experienced in some of its particulars, i.e. by way of participation itself. Which is to say, people are enjoined (sometimes by the presence of the artwork itself; more commonly, by friends and colleagues) to produce a phrase (or more than one) that bears some relation to their own self-perception, while working within and indeed responding to the constraints of the prompts and their familiar emotional language. They are then asked to place that statement on a small flag that will end up within a field of flags whose size, scope, and responsiveness to the weather makes the collected statements part of a visual field that never sits still or offers itself up for easy reading. This circumstance, considered in all of its particularity, serves to almost infinitely diffuse the sense of a knowable individual or a knowable public for which any participating individual writes. So the diffusiveness of the individual participants is matched by the diffusiveness of the possible publics that the work makes possible both actually (the work is a record of the presence and activity of just those people) and as an ideal (the works collaborative or participatory structure, in principle, allows many forms of interaction that, taken together, constitute the work as an extensible form, an ongoing event and never just an actuality). And this, in turn, is matched by the diffusiveness and fugitive conceptualization of the kind of group that all those responses, taken together, constitute.

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The formal structure of the work is this diffusion, active on these three fronts all at once: the individual, the public, and the group with no name that gets formed as an effect of a field of improvised relations. We will need to learn to live with this apparent contradiction between structure and diffusionthat, in fact, might be the works most urgent suggestion. How else to name its field of relations, these partial exposures given and received on the run, this field that is never the same and yet that is its own un-static record; that mingles past action and present inflection perpetually, folding those temporalities over one another in every flag that is added, every flag that is read or not read but blurred across a surge of color? To throw our hands up and call it an artwork would speak to some of the ways that the remit of that category has widened, but would underdescribe changes to the constitution and forms of public visibility, culture making, and spectatorship that the work not only references, but couldnt exist without.

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WORKS CITED
Barthes, Roland. The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills. In Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Bishop, C. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic : An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. . The Care of the Self. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Kilminster, R. Narcissism or Informalization?: Christopher Lasch, Norbert Elias and Social Diagnosis. Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 3 (2008). Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.

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47 Synonyms for Doubt (Detail) Bloodwood 2012

51 Synonyms for Oscillate (Detail) Mirrored acrylic 2012

67 Synonyms for Balance (Detail) Zebrawood 2012

Facing page top: 51 Synonyms for Oscillate Facing page bottom: 67 Synonyms for Balance 28

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Previous page: Delegates, XIX International AIDS Conference, Washington, D.C., 2012 Archival pigment prints 2012 This page and facing page: Details from Delegates 32

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An Occupied Armory Paint, plastic, hosing 2012

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Back cover: Detail from Delegates 35

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