MADELINE HOLLANDER

By Emma McCormick-Goodhart
Photography Nicholas Calcott

Three fingers with lacquered nails—the artist’s own—mimic the hexapedal motions of a cricket in the opening shots of Flatwing (2019), artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander’s video and enviro-installation currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hollander, who is fluent in ballet, migrates movement from all spheres of action into her repertoire. Her gestural shorthand for insectival motion, here, presages what ensues: choreographic fieldwork, shot in vivid infrared, in search of traces of a species of field crickets on the island of Kauai, Hawaii.

Flatwing is heady with Hollander’s speculations in response to troubling ecological phenomena: male field crickets have become mute through evolutionary mutation, in order to evade acoustically oriented “climate migrant” parasitic fly predators, and can no longer perform highly sonic mating rituals to attract females. Hollander’s interest lies in the emergence of new mating ritual choreographies, wherein “flatwings,” or silent males, use “cross-dressing” male crickets’ calls to ventriloquize themselves, while mutely performing “satellite” dances. Such new choreographies evolved by silent crickets, it seemed to Hollander, could ensure the species’ survival—and the temptation to observe incipient physical behavior in the field, rather than in a lab, led her to Kauai. “They’re not gonna evolve another pair of legs,” evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk demures in a conversation with Hollander, tragicomic in tone, that she excerpts in the video.

Following an invitation to develop work from the Whitney, Flatwing was honed backwards in slow gestation. The video is Hollander’s first work to be exhibited in the medium—never shot to be shown, it originated instead as research for an earlier performance installation, New Max, shown at The Artist’s Institute in 2018. A feedback loop, in New Max, performers’ temperature-raising exertions strategically impel AC units to turn on and off in machinic pas de deux. The piece is characteristic of the scope of referents in Hollander’s performances, where variegated, multiscalar cartographies are mapped as movement patterns onto bodies, whether human or not: tropical storm systems, core warm-ups, and molecules at boiling point. All phenomena, in Hollander’s cosmos, has a gesture-language.

Similarly, in Flatwing, loose logics and vocabularies emerge out of potent clusters of field drawings, choreographic notations for other lifeforms, scientific articles, and photographs, exhibited on a wall that precedes the video, as if a primer. A mix of research for New Max, and of sense-making while editing Flatwing, it gifts us access into Hollander’s own ecologies of conceptualization—own mythographies, still raw—alongside the phenomena that compels and engages the project in the first place.

Before entering Flatwing’s video portion, we acclimate in a condition chamber of sorts: a rhythmic corridor of green glaze that channels Hollander’s lived sensation of afterglow when taking off her infrared camera headset. Hollander is an artist as well as a synesthete, who says that she “only thinks in color”—an agile evolutionary adaptation of perceptual armor that equips her with capacities to apprehend and inhabit stimuli readier than science’s own. Objectivity is a construct, as feminist philosophers of science Lorraine Daston and Isabelle Stengers make clear, and Hollander’s somatic speculations may yet prove right.

EMMA MCCORMICK-GOODHART: As a student at Barnard College, you built a gestural archive in connection with your dissertation, while you studied with anthropologist Michael Taussig.

MADELINE HOLLANDER: My dissertation centered around doing fieldwork studies that would trace the evolution of our gestural or corporeal vocabulary due to the influx of very specific technologies.

The Wii had just come out, and I was looking at how new interface design was designed to be more kinaesthetically aligned with intuitive movements of the human body—to be more seamless.

I realized that I was already mining the streets, my friends, ballet class, and everyone that I saw every day for gestures that I thought were specific to them—like signature moves specific to a certain technology interface or time. So I decided that I needed to start capturing this, creating an archive or a database, not knowing what it was going to turn into. I would ask friends, or anyone really, to come to my studio or apartment and then I would conduct conversations on video, which might last twenty minutes or four hours. Then I removed sound, extracting postures, gestures, and emotions that I thought were particular. These movement portraits started to accumulate, and so I have hundreds of them. I often open up ten or twenty videos and let them play when I’m brainstorming a new piece, because I’m always culling. I’m never creating new movements; I’m always pulling from things that I see, using the choreographic readymade. It did not turn into an anthropological archive. It could, one day, turn into that.

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: What are your thoughts on new genres of movement, so-called social or physical distancing, emerging from the tricky problem of touch during COVID-19?

HOLLANDER: What's so incredible to me is how quickly we adapt to new changes in culture or design—whether it's architecture, interface, or a new phone. Humans are super plastic. The second that there's an obstacle, we're going to immediately find a way around it, to maneuver, or create a new gesture to make it work. It's been fascinating to see how quickly social norms that we are so accustomed to—what is courteous and what is rude—have done a 180º or a 360º. Now, if you see someone on the sidewalk, instead of saying, "Hello," it's more courteous to actually cross the street and move away. The fact that we can, within a year, completely flip our cultural norms for social courtesy is proof that we have flexibility and that we're not quite as stuck in our habits as people might think. 

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: Will these outlast the pandemic?

HOLLANDER: I wonder what's going to happen next: if it's going to switch back, or if it's going to be a whole new vocabulary altogether, which I would prefer. With masks, I’d been hoping for a much more exaggerated body language, wishing that we all learn sign language. It'd be wonderful to communicate more with bodies, since we have them, but I’ve not seen that happen yet. I've seen more expression with eyebrows and eyes.

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: You’ve also pulled gestural vocabularies from arenas faraway from ballet, like air traffic control.

HOLLANDER: Yes—which is supposed to be relevant at whatever airport you go to across the globe. I'm always trying to figure out what systems of language can be applied, despite their location. That has to do with network systems, like power grids, airports, hospitals, and how those evolve over time.

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: And part of your work is understanding how those systems come into being, as well as become taught and transcribed.

HOLLANDER: Exactly. The evolution of those languages, and their notational systems and instructions.

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: How does site figure in your work?

HOLLANDER: For me, the site is what harbors the choreography. The process of coming up with the piece really does begin with the site and what already exists—what type of movement you can find there, whether it’s on a microbial level, or a human or planetary scale. My research process feels more like excavation than creation: the site is the original choreographer.

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: Vocabularies that pass between objects, sites, and species...

HOLLANDER: Exactly. One piece that was particularly not site-specific, but was generated entirely by concept, was New Max (2018) at the Artist’s Institute. I was creating a piece that was about generating heating and cooling systems. My research for that spanned looking into tropical storm patterns and creating diagrams to understand those movement patterns. Nothing was arbitrary.

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: Flatwing, your video installation on view at the Whitney, diverges in a number of ways from your live performance installations.

HOLLANDER: It's a really unusual piece for me. It's not performance. It's not choreography. It's not something I created thinking it was ever going to be anything except for research. While I was making New Max, one of the ideas that I had for the soundscape was to bring in hundreds of live crickets.

I grew up in L.A., and I remember learning as a kid that you can tell the temperature by the rate of the cricket chirps. When it's warmer, they're super fast; when it's cooler, they’re super slow. They’re live temperature thermometers. When I started researching how to buy crickets in bulk over the Internet, I learned that they're all half-frozen when you buy them, because they’re mostly used as food for snakes. It became clear that it was not an ethical route to go down.

Then I became completely side-tracked by headlines about how crickets in Hawaii, particularly Kauai, had gone silent: headlines that sounded like titles of sci-fi horror films. It knocked the wind out of me—the idea of being in a place where its nightscape is silent or muted felt like an ominous signal. I immediately went down an intense research hole, reading every possible article about why this was happening. I came across research by evolutionary biologist and entomologist Marlene Zuk, who was doing fieldwork in Kauai and learned that the field crickets’ muting was due to a parasitic fly that had been attacking them for the past ten years.

Something like 0.2% of these field crickets had a rare mutation—what they call cross-dressing males, which phenotypically look like females—where their wings didn't have the ridges required to make the stridulation, to make the sound. Instead, “flatwings,” as they’re called, would hover around the remaining chirping crickets, performing a satellite technique. The more I read about these satellite techniques, the more I realized that it seemed that this new flatwing species were more agile, more active, with higher locomotive behaviour. Because I'm a choreographer, I thought that if they can't use their chirp to attract a mate, then they're going to develop all kinds of more physical traits—they're going to come up with a mating dance. That's how this next generation is going to populate. 

I very quickly learned that that was absolutely not true. But I felt like I needed to go see what was happening—to attempt to find the movements of these silent crickets to understand what they're doing to attract a female before they go extinct. I stubbornly booked a flight to Kauai, and rented an infrared camera for five nights. I wanted this to be research for New Max, which I was in the middle of choreographing. I thought that incorporating movements from animals that move in correspondence with the temperature would be an appropriate addition to my research.

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: We hear both your spoken voice and physical footsteps in the field on the video’s soundtrack. How did you approach montaging your conversation with Zuk, a conceptual push-and-pull crucial to the piece?

HOLLANDER: I pulled sections that identified the moments that showed what happens when you have two very, very different intentions, speaking about the same subject: me wanting something that has zero value to her, and her trying to provide something that has zero value to me. This butting of heads between anthropology, art, and ethnography, that is not based on the scientific method. The juxtaposition is almost like an impasse. I decided to overlay some of these snippets onto the footage to heighten that feeling of collisions of thought, intention, and motivation. It’s an unusual piece. I wouldn't say it's about failure, but it's definitely about the obstacle courses of a research process.

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: Is the infrared footage indexical to your motions?

HOLLANDER: Yes, it was literally my body moving through the jungle. A very first-person subjective, with my voice. The other part that’s interesting is that I was never shooting with the intent of showing: I was shooting because the camera served as night goggles. 

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: Did you superimpose footage of Kauai skies on the infrared?

HOLLANDER: The star-like background is actually created by the accumulation of water droplets that formed on the lens of my camera. I wasn't aware of them while filming at all, but I liked the way it created an unexpected constellation-like backdrop for this already surreal adventure. I didn't do any post production to manipulate any of the footage.

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: Field-recorded sound is often used as a technology for species recognition in science. What other layers have found their way into Flatwing’s sound-world?

HOLLANDER: All of the sounds in the piece are from live field recordings. I asked my sister to create an original piece that I overlaid in areas that creates a mounting sense of getting lost. I intermix that with taking actual sample field recordings and playing with their tempo. I take a couple of cricket chirps and slow them down 2,000 times until it sounds like a whale. It turned into something very haunting.

MCCORMICK-GOODHART: Were your drawings, sketches and notations, on view in the show, made before, during or after your trip to Kauai? Did you generate additional material more recently?

HOLLANDER: Both. I included works that were already up on my studio wall that pertained to research for New Max, as well as research and diagrams. The majority of the works went up while going through the footage, attempting to find a way to edit massive amounts of it. Hence the lists of themes, red and green footage categories, film stills, and notes around death dances and mating dances. I didn't add any material that didn't exist while producing or researching Flatwing.

The idea of presenting something that is personal or process-driven in a museum, especially for my first museum show, is a strange feeling. This piece is about that experience of creating it—or my process as a whole. In a way, it's more self-portrait than piece.

Published: April 09, 2021

"Madeline Hollander: Flatwing" was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through August 08, 2021. This exhibition is organized by Chrissie Iles, Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, with Clémence White, senior curatorial assistant.