The dash separates and the dash joins. For the Dash column, Gracie Hadland recaps the destruction wrought by Nikita Gale for Takers at LAXART, on view May 7–June 25, 2022. Some destruction was warranted: it was the nonprofit gallery’s final exhibition in their building on Santa Monica Boulevard, once a storied recording studio.
Installation view, Nikita Gale: Takers, LAXART, May 7–June 25, 2022. Photo: Ruben Diaz.
Two big, middle-aged white men in jeans are fighting in the gallery. Big Mama Thornton’s recording of the song “Hound Dog,” written for her but made famous by Elvis Presley, scores footage of the men swinging exaggerated blows. This is the only scene in the three-minute video looping in Nikita Gale’s exhibition Takers at LAXART. One fighter pins the other to the floor. Recklessly, they move to the wall. One man pushes the other’s head through the drywall, revealing a section of dark wood. The paneling is original to the LAXART building and to an earlier tenant, Radio Recorders, where Thornton minted the “Hound Dog” track in 1952 and Presley laid down other singles in the 1960s.
Gale’s piece puts the visitor in the aftermath of the fight, witnessing its documentation in the arena where it went down. One will recognize the door they just walked through in the video. More tactile evidence exists just behind the screen, scarring the building’s corporeal surface: punches thrown through the drywall left peepholes through which one can see the vintage wood paneling. This is proof that the fight really happened. But one is keenly aware of its artifice. The theatricality, the staging of the situation is obvious, inflecting the dramatic violence with a kind of pathetic, over-the-top machismo.
And what are we doing in this battered room? Are we participants in a battle? Witnesses, in any real sense? Are we the “takers”? Gale leaves these questions unanswered, leaves us in limbo not knowing whether to wince or to laugh. The feeling is slightly voyeuristic, uncomfortable but maybe cut with amusement at the gratuitous physical violence. It also encourages self-awareness. We consider how our viewership is perceived by others, if we are looking at it in the right way or having the right reaction.
Gale isolates and abstracts this moment of violence. But we are left to imagine what white men typically fight over: real estate, money, women? Stolen property? The fight seems allegorical, a stand-in for past traumas and aggression and a long tradition of white men fighting insularly over such things. The work addresses the violence implicit in appropriation, less as an art historical gesture than the exploitation of intellectual, cultural property. The debt rock n’ roll owes to Black American music is no secret: it’s Elvis. Despite Thornton’s formidable talent, presence, and influence, she never achieved fame beyond this hit song. Gale emphasizes the discrepancy in the two careers, but subtly, without directly addressing Elvis, an icon of white American pop culture, perhaps assuming viewers will make the connection. I’d never heard Thorton’s version before, so I wondered: was this a cover of Elvis’s song? Or was Elvis’s version not the original? In what way does a song belong to someone? I began to think about the term cover. To cover is to recreate something of someone else’s, but it is also to conceal. Gale breaks down the layers of appropriation physically, puncturing the partitions of the room, and musically, playing the song’s original 1952 recording instead of its famed cover.
The dualisms overlap, if not feud: the white drywall and the dark wood, Elvis’s version and Big Mama Thornton’s, the viewer’s immediate experience in the room confronting the video’s mediation of the same space. In between segments of the exaggerated violence, as limbs swing and the men breathe heavily with gruff expressions of rage, the camera moves to the holes, where “Hound Dog” gets louder as if emanating from the adjacent room. The camera lingers on the space in between the drywall and the wood, the men becoming blurry moving shapes in the background. The wood is in sharp focus; the song is louder. Big Mama Thornton exists as a kind of haunting third performer and Elvis as a fourth. We hang between the past and present.
Outside, there is an official municipal sign noting the historical significance of the building at the corner of Orange and Santa Monica. Gale manifests the distortions of such historicizing. She subverts the kind of fanfare typical of monumental or historical acknowledgement. The exhibition was LAXART’s last in this space before moving to larger digs. A show with a little property damage is warranted, maybe cathartic for the artist and gallery staff, acting on a pent-up desire to break down the building’s structure and to start fresh somewhere else. Gale orchestrated the scene, choreographed a brawl as a way of releasing Thorton’s voice. x
Gracie Hadland is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.