Wellness and Self-Preservation: Wendy Vogel on Ilana Harris-Babou
This November, EAI celebrates the addition of Ilana Harris-Babou to distribution with an artist talk and screening featuring her videos Cooking with the Erotic (2016), Reparation Hardware (2018), and Decision Fatigue (2020).
In tandem with the program, EAI is pleased to feature this essay by Wendy Vogel originally commissioned on the occasion of Harris-Babou’s solo show Revelations at Artspace New Haven, curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin in 2022. Vogel addresses the relationship between Harris-Babou’s practice and aspirational culture at large, engaging such artists as Jacolby Satterwhite, Sondra Perry, Cauleen Smith, and Simone Leigh to assemble a web of contemporary artists addressing related topics around Black American cultural lineages and care networks, technological self-determination, and consumer culture.
Ilana Harris-Babou, Leaf of Life (2022)
17:41 min, color, sound
Wellness and Self Preservation
by Wendy Vogel
The works in Ilana Harris-Babou’s exhibition Revelations toe the line between homage and critique of health and lifestyle content. Whether her focus is high design or various facets of the wellness industry, she examines “the ways structural inequalities are often framed as personal decisions in American society.”¹ Through her appropriations of social media content, design advertorials, and speeches by hortatory self-proclaimed health gurus, Harris-Babou exposes how seductive, exclusionary, and chimeric the pursuit of wellness can be. Yet Harris-Babou’s videos and objects also crackle with humor and reflect the pleasure of their own making, enacting a reclamation of the erotic that Black feminist writer Audre Lorde outlined in her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”²
In this essay, I will consider Harris-Babou’s recent works alongside peer artists addressing complex histories of extractive labor, structural neglect, and Black self-determination.
Images: Ilana Harris-Babou, Human Design (video stills), 2019. HD Video, color, and sound, 5:40 min. Images courtesy of the artist.
Harris-Babou’s video Human Design, 2019, parodies the self-congratulatory, whitewashed language of a high-end homewares catalog. The video begins with a tour of a nameless design store—in actuality Restoration Hardware’s RH Gallery, located just blocks from the Whitney Museum. As the camera pans over displays of sleekly modernist décor items paired with non-Western objets, Harris-Babou—identified onscreen as the company’s CEO and designer—offers universalist platitudes about good design. She then travels to Senegal to locate the origin of these “exotic” artifacts. Once in Africa, her character toggles between the guise of a chic explorer discovering handcrafted articles and an artisan shaping her own clay forms. The video concludes with Harris-Babou standing at the infamous Door of No Return at the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves) on Gorée Island. The house operates as a museum that shares the history of the transatlantic slave trade. As Harris-Babou’s character overlooks the ocean, a voiceover intones a final phrase loaded with irony: “Classical style, timeless form. It really comes down to how you frame things, and what you let people see.” The implication, here, is that modernist Western modes of display—particularly the neutral “white cube” gallery approach—sanitizes the history of subjugation underlying the circulation of bodies and objects from the global South.³
Julia Philips, Exoticizer, Worn Out (Josephine Baker’s Belt), 2017. Ceramic, brass hardware, steel, 2 5/8 × 13 × 15 in. Image © Julia Phillips, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery © Julia Phillips, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Harris-Babou’s work in sculpture interrogates histories of representation, as well as lampooning wellness culture. In these ways, her objects resonate with the practices of Julia Phillips and Sondra Perry. All three artists received their MFA degrees at Columbia, Perry and Phillips one year ahead of Harris-Babou. Phillips, born in Hamburg to a German father and African American mother, creates sculptural installations titled like tools for functional use. Her works combine ceramic casts of her own body parts with industrial materials such as pipes, straps, and tiles. Some sculptures suggest a quasi-anthropological reading; for example, the ceramic Exoticizer, Worn Out (Josephine Baker’s Belt) (2017), reimagines the banana belt that the American-born performer donned during her “danse sauvage” that captivated Parisian audiences in the 1920s. Other works, however, point toward more aggressive scenarios of racial and gender violence, such as Extruder and Operator I (with Blinder, Muter, Penetrator and Aborter) (both 2017). Phillips’s small, sharp objects displayed on sterile cart-like stands evoke histories of medical racism, while larger installations evoke brutal public and private exploitation by juxtaposing cast body parts with menacing materials. As Zack Hatfield writes in Artforum, Phillips’s works can also traffic in dark irony: “Rather than provide emblems of security, works titled Protector, 2016/2018, and Fixator (#2) (2017), offer those of dystopic bondage, suggesting the harm meted out by institutions of ‘care’ such as asylums, profit-driven health centers, and, indeed, museums.”⁴ Since 2021, Phillips’s work has delved into the parent-child relationship, addressing such subjects as attachment and nourishment.
Sondra Perry, Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation, 2016. Video, bicycle workstation, 68 × 16 × 42 in., 9:05 minutes. Installation view, Resident Evil, The Kitchen, NYC, November 2–December 10, 2016. Image courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC. Photo: Jason Mandella
Sondra Perry’s work, meanwhile, spans photography, digital video, and sculpture, situating Black identity within a history of technological representation. Perry’s work has also addressed wellness culture—and the fatphobia and racism that accompanies it. For the sculpture Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016), Perry attached small monitors above exercise bikes, which played videos of Perry’s computer-generated avatar and an animated view of her flesh. Perry’s digital alter-ego voices critiques about structural inequalities, including the fact that the program used to generate her likeness did not include the option for a larger body. As a reviewer from The Guardian explains, “Visitors are encouraged to ride the machines, experiencing fitness as a luxury the same as the fine arts.”⁵ Perry’s works also delve into her family’s history, where participation in sports intersects with structural oppression. The notable video It’s in the Game ’17 (2017), takes its point of departure from her twin brother Sandy’s appearance in an EA Sports video game. A former Division 1 basketball player for Georgia State University, Sandy’s performance in a real-life game was appropriated without his consent and without compensation for use in the game. This work brings into question how digital images circulate as property, and the stark difference between the value of Black images and the respect for Black life.
Harris-Babou’s video Decision Fatigue (2020), and accompanying ceramic and resin objects, spoof the culture of beauty influencers that market ostentatious self-care regimens as a necessity. She was especially fascinated by brands like goop, founded by Gwyneth Paltrow, “who embodies a certain kind of idealized whiteness and access to leisure time,” the artist explains. “At the time, I was thinking about who does and who does not have time to devote to elaborate rituals of beautification and care.”⁵ Harris-Babou began creating her own ersatz cosmetic items, such as jade rollers, crystals, soaps, and yoni eggs. While reminiscent of the expensive tools for sale on sites like goop, these lumpy, bumpy approximations are utterly unusable. Her video stars a charismatic but atypical influencer persona—her own mother, Sheila Harris (who has collaborated with her on past videos). Sheila improvises a tutorial for a “clean beauty routine” using these objects. Speaking in an off-the-cuff monologue, she discusses such frank subjects as the pain of breastfeeding—“your life force is drained from you ... It’s metaphysical, in fact”—as she washes her face and offers anti-aging tips. Sheila’s script gradually devolves into the absurd; her routine for eating a TV dinner includes applying a Cheeto face mask (plucked from her daughter’s collection) and washing down an ashwagandha vitamin with Pepsi. This enthusiasm for decidedly processed, “unclean” foods breaks the façade of the influencer persona, while also pointing to the contradictions inherent in wellness culture: that the natural is also produced, that holistic trends are often seized from other cultures without attribution, and that leisure is often arrived at through exploitation.
This joint effort between mother and daughter recalls Jacolby Satterwhite’s collaborations with his mother Patricia. Jacolby Satterwhite, a multihyphenate artist in performance, video, and fine art, grew up observing his mother’s ambitions to become a pop star and an inventor. From the late 1980s onward, she constantly drew sketches on computer paper for products that she hoped to sell through platforms like QVC. As curator T. Jean Lax writes of Patricia’s work, “Her schematic designs for fantastical, often-libidinal consumer goods include flying lawn ornaments, picket fences with kickstands and penises with drumsticks.”⁶ Patricia was mostly confined to her home after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and died in 2016. Jacolby, however, has incorporated her sketches and home recordings into his performances, videos, and objects since the early 2010s. His works envisage a hardcore queer utopia, riffing on the aesthetics of the machine factory line, video games, pornography, and voguing. He often translates her sketches into three-dimensional animated glyphs that appear in his kaleidoscopic films and installations; his shows have also included standalone presentations of his mother’s drawings. For his sprawling solo exhibition You’re at Home at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works in 2019, Satterwhite featured both his mother’s drawings and created a soundscape with samples of her voice. The collaborative musical project, created with Nick Weiss, was called PAT. As the musician and critic Johanna Fateman observes, “Patricia’s melodies work perfectly with PAT’s instrumentation, and, with lyrics like ‘there’s freedom in my house,’ the music fits easily into a post-disco lineage of queer techno and sample-based experimentation.”⁷ Rather than classifying the output of his mother’s work as “outsider art,” created by a Black woman grappling with mental illness, Jacolby Satterwhite finds moments of collective play between the art that they each produce. Within his installations, he creates a space of possibility for his mother in art that transcends the limitations of care she faced in everyday life.
Installation view of You’re at home at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, 2019. © Jacolby Satterwhite. Photo: Dan Bradica. Courtesy of the artist; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York and Pioneer Works, Brooklyn
Harris-Babou’s most recent work, Leaf of Life (2021/2022), addresses the enduring legacy of the controversial healthcare guru Dr. Sebi (1933–2016). The Honduran healer, who had no formal medical training, promoted the vegan alkaline diet for Black individuals as a cure for such chronic conditions as HIV and cancer. Harris-Babou was introduced to the diet through her sister, Imani, a healthcare administrator, who joined a Facebook group promoting the eating style during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her video intersperses an interview with her sister, who relates tales of medical racism and mistreatment, with Sebi’s Black Nationalist rhetoric and appearances. During an appearance on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network public access talk show “Ramona’s Roundtable” in 2001, he declares, “Black people should not eat Caucasian food.”⁸ Much like the proponents of food trends such as the paleo diet, Sebi’s logic rests on an idealized past; in his case, he claims that African people ate a healthy diet prior to European colonization and enslavement. While Harris-Babou’s work certainly offers a critique of this régime as a cure-all, the artist is also sympathetic to his message of self-determination and collective solutions. Alongside Sebi’s speeches, this video intermingles footage of delectable-looking meals cooked by Black vegan author and YouTuber Rachel Ama, consisting of ingredients like quinoa, kale, avocado, and lime. As an accompaniment to the work, Harris-Babou has created a wallpaper collage of fresh fruits and herbs endorsed by the diet.
This work can be seen in dialogue with artists such as Cauleen Smith and Simone Leigh, who seek to articulate Black self-sovereignty in their works. Leigh, based in New York, skyrocketed to international renown after representing the United States in the 2022 Venice Biennale and winning the Golden Lion award. She is known for her sculptures that oscillate between abstraction and the shapes of women, often utilizing objects like fruits, jugs, pitchers, and architectural forms from the African diaspora as three-dimensional formal references. “The interior space of these utilitarian objects is often unremarked upon when we encounter them not in use,” writes historian and author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts of these items. “But they are forever invoking the shape of the bodies that once would have formed the vessels, drawn the water to fill them, planted and harvested the grains stored in them... We find them as Simone did: alone, emptied, as artifact.”⁹ Leigh’s work celebrates the traditions and makers of African art and craft. Her figurative sculptures, however, are often made without eyes, suggesting that these sculpted subjects retain a protective interiority against a white-majority gaze in the spaces of international contemporary art. Leigh has also experimented with creating structures for BIPOC community care, in projects such as Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014), with Creative Time, and The Waiting Room (2016), at The New Museum. Inspired by the Order of the Tents—the secret Black nursing sorority founded in the nineteenth century—as well as the Black Panther Party’s community outreach projects, these spaces offered free preventive care to the local community such as free blood-pressure screenings, HIV tests, herbal healing instruction, and yoga and dance classes. During her 2016 New Museum show, Leigh also invited fellow artists to organize and present artwork in the institutional space. She organized programs for a collective of over 100 makers that called themselves Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter.
Cauleen Smith, SOJOURNER, 2018. Digital video, color, sound, 22:41 min. Image © Cauleen Smith, courtesy of the Artist, Corbett vs. Dempsey, and Morán Morán
Cauleen Smith has equally examined the history of Black Feminist representation in her work. She created the drawing series “Human_3.0 Reading List” (2015), and “BLK FMNNST LOANER LIBRARY 1989–2019” (2019), composed respectively of illustrations of books by Black political thinkers, and works that relate to feminist thought. The latter series includes drawings of titles by writers such as Saidiya Hartman and Toni Morrison, as well as books by non-Black writers, such as a Georges Perec novel and a guide to California desert plants.¹⁰ In Smith’s 2018 film Sojourner, she explores the connection between various “nonconformist, deeply humane figures, from different places and periods,” including Black Shaker founder Rebecca Cox Jackson and the California desert assemblage artist Noah Purifoy. This film, a kind of travelogue, weaves the stories of various people together as performers carry banners bearing a mantra from musician and yogi Alice Coltrane, also known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda.¹¹ The performers carry the banners at protests, near the Watts Towers of Simon Rodia, and in a small gathering where they listen to a recording of the Combahee River Collective Statement—a Black feminist manifesto from 1977.¹² Smith’s film sketches a vision for future liberation that centers the philosophy of these thinkers as intersectional leaders.
Harris-Babou’s work leans on pop-cultural depictions of health, wellness, and aspirational lifestyle trends to expose what is missing therein. Her works weave a rich tapestry of associations, connecting them to a larger network of practitioners centering the experiences of women of color. Fellow Millennial artists like Jacolby Satterwhite and Sondra Perry use digital-age aesthetics in their works, in the creation of fantasy (in Satterwhite’s case) and as a means of dissecting the history of representation (in Perry’s). Her use of ceramics can be compared to such formally divergent artists as Julia Phillips and Simone Leigh. And Harris-Babou’s sincere interest in figures that advocated alternative healing methodologies links her work not only to utopian movements—including Black feminism—but also to artists who seek to envision new spaces of community building within art, such as Leigh and Cauleen Smith.
Images: Ilana Harris-Babou, Decision Fatigue, 2020. HD Video, color, and sound, 8:33 min. Images courtesy of the artist.
Wendy Vogel is a writer and critic based in New York. She writes frequently about art, culture and feminist issues for publications such as Artforum, Art in America, ArtReview, Bookforum, e-flux criticism, and MOUSSE, as well as exhibition catalogs and artist books. She is a Part-Time Assistant Professor in the BFA Photography program at Parsons School of Design. In 2018, she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing.
Wellness and Self Preservation was originally written as a contribution to the exhibition catalog of Revelations, commissioned by curator Laurel V. McLaughlin and designed by William Hodgson. In addition to this featured essay, the full publication includes texts by Laurel V. McLaughlin and Yasmina Price, and a conversation between Harris-Babou and Re’al Christian.
Notes
Ilana Harris-Babou and Camille Henrot in conversation in “Screaming from the Inside,” e-flux, Accessed 22 August 2022
See Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Canada: Crossing Press, 1984).
See Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1976).
Zack Hatfield, “Julia Phillips, MoMA PS1,” Artforum, September 2018, Accessed 22 August 2022, https://www.artforum.com/print/ reviews/201807/julia-phillips-76366.
Frani O’Toole, “New Order at MoMA review: artists chart a world in motion,” The Guardian, March 21, 2019, Accessed 22 August 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/mar/21/new-order- at-moma-review-artists-chart-a-world-in-motion.
T. Jean Lax, “In Search of Black Space,” in When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2014), 8.
Johanna Fateman, “Jacolby Satterwhite: You’re at Home,” 4 Columns, October 18, 2019, Accessed 22 August 2022, https://4columns.org/ fateman-johanna/jacolby-satterwhite.
“Dr. Sebi speaks about natural healing,” Accessed 1 September 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HHUe8IZyks.
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, “Simone Leigh: For Her Own Pleasure and Edification,” essay commissioned for The Hugo Boss Prize 2018, Guggenheim Museum, Accessed 22 August 2022, https://www. guggenheim.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/guggenheim-sharifa- rhodes-pitt-essay-simone-leigh-hugo-boss-prize-2018.pdf.
See Siddhartha Mitter, “Waking Life,” Artforum, May 2019, Accessed 22 August 2022, https://www.artforum.com/print/201905/siddhartha- mitter-on-the-art-of-cauleen-smith-79523. The latter series includes drawings of titles by writers such as Saidiya Hartman and Toni Morrison, as well as books by non-Black writers, such as a Georges Perec novel and a guide to California desert plants.
Mitter, “Waking Life.”
See Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective Statement,” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books).