At first glance, the three disciplines referenced in the title of Yxta Maya Murray’s new book, We Make Each Other Beautiful: Art, Activism, and the Law (Cornell University Press, June 15), seem like vastly different concepts. But the reader with an interest in any one of them will get the connection within a few pages: Art, activism, and law have full potential to inform each other deeply, and do—particularly in the work of woman of color and queer of color artist/activists, or artivists, as Murray terms them.
Murray, a Latinx art critic and law professor, tells the story of these artivists and their work with insight, affection, and an eye for interconnections and influence. There is something here for anyone with an interest in art, power, change, and hope, and much to be learned. As Murray writes, “artivism ‘works’ as an agent of legal change in the same way that social movements have always done: by pushing at the law, disagreeing with it, challenging it, breaking it, and thus transforming it.”
Bloom caught up with Murray to talk more about her convergence of interests, the many ways to enact change, and the necessity of shaking things up—both in the greater world and in your own life.
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Lisa Peet: This book pulls together several threads that on the surface would seem disparate, but are actually not. Can you talk a bit about how your areas of interest came together?
Yxta Maya Murray: I started writing fiction and became a law professor at the same time, in the mid-1990s. There’s something that’s known as the right of allocution in federal court, which means you get to tell your story before you’re sentenced. So I was listening to story after story, and I started writing fiction based on that. Those two things were born simultaneously.
It was really the only path that I wanted to pursue until about 2010, when I stopped writing fiction for about six or seven years. That happened because I faced some unhappy circumstances—I was 42 years old, and I had health problems, and I was assaulted by somebody in the publishing industry, and I said, Yeah, this is not working for me. I stopped doing art, I stopped writing fiction. And I said, I’m just going to invest in law, because the people I know in the legal academy are a lot more kind to me.
I wound up doing all of these oral history projects on gentrification and disaster in Puerto Rico and Detroit, and I started learning how to interview people. That was really exciting. At the same time, I felt so starved of art, so I would go to museums and I would look at paintings, and I would look at documentaries about artists. At that point I began to write law review articles about art, in about 2011. I first wrote a legal essay about Tracey Emin, a Turkish British artist who had been raped, and she just seemed disorganized in her art—abject, kind of throwing herself all over the place, really emotional. Then I started to piece together her art and I realized that it can be organized into a series of trials—a trial against herself, a trial against her rapist, and a trial against the community who didn’t support her. So I wrote that all out, and I realized that there were real resonances between art and law.
Around 2012, I saw this documentary about Carrie Mae Weems where she talked about these daguerreotypes that she had photographed in the Harvard Museum, and I realized that there was a copyright issue embedded in that, and also an issue about property law. I wrote a massive law review article about that, and I started doing this legal scholarship about art. But it wasn’t until about 2015 that I started writing for arts magazines—Artillery, Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail. I started interviewing artists and I did that for about 10 years. And then I wrote this book.
LP: What inspired you to begin writing critically about art? That takes a different kind of confidence in your own opinions than practicing law.
YMM: I became very ill, and then I got better. But while I was healing, I thought, you know, you have hit bottom. There is no reason for you to just not do everything that you want to do. There’s no downside. If you want to write art criticism, write art criticism and send it out.
I went to LACMA and there was this Agnes Martin retrospective. Luminous, just overwhelming. But it didn’t mention anything about her mental health, or her lesbianism. And, you know—I am bisexual, and I had just been through cancer, and I just thought that this was information that they were closeting in presentation of the show. So I sat down and I wrote an essay about that, and I didn’t know who to send it to at all. I looked up local arts magazines, and I sent it to Artillery. And then I emailed them until they replied to me. Tulsa Kinney is the editor in chief, and she said, “We’ll take it.” So—this frustration about an Agnes Martin show, my own dark night of the soul, and then this arts editor who brought me under her wing and started sending me anywhere I wanted to go—she was like, “Do whatever you want.” I started running around Los Angeles covering stuff all the time. It became my new passion. I also started writing fiction again. I wrote six novels.
LP: The book opens with you explaining how you discovered the U.S.-Mexico border interventions of Tanya Aguiñiga—what about the other artists you covered? How did you come to their work?
YMM: Some of them came out of research that I did about law. Imani Jacqueline Brown came directly out of trying to figure out what was going on post-Katrina in terms of gentrification, because I do a lot of anti-gentrification work, and I just stumbled across this website where these artists were doing anti-gentrification projects. And then Young Joon Kwak I found because I had been on assignment for Artillery for a show at the Broad in Los Angeles and Kwak’s Mutant Salon was in the show. So— I learned about them through the other work that I had been doing.
LP: The artists you include are very carefully scaffolded—the work of one follows another both chronologically and conceptually, and you refer back to earlier individuals to make points later in the book. Did you know exactly who you were going to write about before you started?
YMM: I sat down and outlined artivists that I thought were doing work that would talk back to law in a way that I could diagnose or analyze coherently for an audience. Since arts activism’s connection with law was my focus, I’ve gotten to know a lot of artists, and I chose artivists that I thought would relate to property law, accommodations law, immigration law, queer rights laws, and societal issues that I think are particularly pressing right now.
The woman of color and queer emphasis, and how I’m tracing the lineage of these particular artists, was a particular choice, and one that I was thrilled to make. The history of articulating lineages in art and in literature and anything is very delicate. I really felt myself to be wandering into a contentious space. But I was excited to look at the “many-gendered mothers” who gave birth to these art forms—Maggie Nelson, in The Argonauts, uses that phrase. The history of it shows that part of these projects will always be dedicated to the liberty, or the nourishment, of intersectional people or communities of color. It was a thrilling aspect of the book for me.
LP: It comes across as very intentional throughout—were there surprise discoveries as you wrote?
YMM: The historical section, the first section, was a lot of discovery. I really was happy to learn everything that I could about Marsha P. Johnson. I had written an article about Yoko Ono, so I already knew about her, but Howardena Pindell doing these kinds of surveys and reports on art institutional racism, Charlene Teters—these were folks that I did have to search out and that hadn’t been in my personal archive. So there was a lot of learning.
LP: Who weren’t you able to include in the book that you’d like to mention?
YMM: Lorraine O’Grady is this incredible performance artist and multidisciplinarian artist. She just won a Guggenheim, but she’s been working since the 1980s. She would show up at art openings in the persona of Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire and whip herself while wearing a gown made out of gloves, really wild and interesting stuff that that was criticizing segregation in the arts.
LaToya Ruby Frazier is a photographer who does work on environmental racism. I’m most familiar with her work in Braddock, Pennsylvania, where she does photographs of industry towns, factory towns that are emptying out but are left with the residues of these toxins. She and her mother both have health problems that are connected to the environmental problems in their hometown, and her work is very powerful.
rafa esparza is wonderful artist. He does a lot of work with earth, tierra, like clay. In 2016 I saw him in L.A.’s Elysian Park doing a piece called Red Summer, where he was next to an LAPD shooting range and every time a shot went off, he would fall to the ground—it was an endurance art piece, and we just sat there just watching him get up and fall down and get up and fall down for a long time.
Carolina Caycedo, who does work in Latin America dealing with hydroelectric dams. She shows how dams, which are so useful for corporations, can destroy local communities. And she taught me about the importance of not just going into a community, making art, and leaving, but in going into a community. making art, and then returning and continuing to give back, which is a really hard lesson.
LP: The book also unpacks a lot of elements of performance art, and how it is relevant, in a way that makes that kind of conceptual work more comprehensible. Did you envision people with legal or other non-art backgrounds deepening their understanding through reading this?
YMM: As a lawyer, I’ve done work on rape law, the law of sexual assault and sexual harassment, workplace discrimination, things like this. But when you see something like Cut Piece, which is Yoko Ono’s famous 1960s piece at Carnegie Hall, and you see people cutting off her clothes, it’s something else. A guy rips off her whole top while she’s just sitting there. You really feel things kind of clicking into place, the issues of sexual assault and consent, and what it means to lack consent, what it means to not provide consent, and what the law looks for. It’s all in that piece. That seems like a critical work of performance art that people interested in the law of sexual assault should take a look at.
Same thing with a piece that happened a few years later, Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0—she lies down on a table, and there are a bunch of objects including a gun around her. And she says, “I have full agency here and I will basically allow people to do whatever they want.” It’s a heightened version of Cut Piece involving weapons. It became very violent, kind of like a Stanford Prison Experiment, but conducted by a woman. It relates particularly to sexual violence and consent in a way that is very disturbing: What does it actually mean to consent? Are you consenting to your own destruction? She’s not, she’s crying, she’s terrified. But she’s there. And I’ll tell you, you can read rape case after rape case where it’s the same fact pattern where somebody’s not leaving, but they’re suffering, and they’re being exploited or being raped, and the courts just can’t put their minds around that reality. These artists are illustrating that in the flesh. So it seems like a like inexhaustible wealth of data for people who are interested in thinking deeply about laws that curtail sexual violence, or at least try to deal with it in some way.
LP: There’s such a growing need for advocacy in this world, and along with that a growing passion for it. What would you say to artists or activists, young people or older people, who are starting out on that journey and exploring the ways they might make a difference?
YMM: I’ve learned a lot by being a newcomer, by joining up later, with this entire other discipline behind me. I did work with a collective called Drawn Together, which I write about in the book. I was the lawyer in the group and I was also the elder by a fair number of years. My collaborators, Anaïs Duplan, Mira Dayal, Simon Wu, and Maia Chao, they were just the most exuberant and thoughtful group of artists and activists that I had been in, and they included me in their work. I didn’t feel uncomfortable, but I definitely felt like I was in a new space. That risk-taking—a small risk, but that feeling of lack of expertise—was very freeing. When you see how old patterns are no longer serving you, that’s when you can begin to advocate with a clarity that might have been denied to you before. So uncomfortable or untried situations, I think, are very helpful for advocacy. Not knowing all the answers is also extremely important. Having a lot of questions is really good. Which is basically the antithesis of what you’re trying to do as a lawyer, because as a lawyer you’re supposed to have all the answers. And there is a whole persona of confidence and control. But learning to release that and unlearn things, and learn a new way, has been very vitalizing.
Lisa Peet is the Executive Editor at Library Journal and a card-carrying bloomer herself.