“Agonism . . . a relationship that is at the same time mutual incitement and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation that paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation,”1 writes Michel Foucault in an essay about subject and power. Exploring this simultaneous 'mutual excitement and struggle' are the concurrent exhibitions at CCA's Wattis Institute, curated by Jens Hoffman with the Puerto Rican-based artist collaborative Allora & Calzadilla, and the solo exhibition by Allora & Calzadilla at San Francisco Art Institute's Walter & McBean Gallery.

In “Apocalypse Now: The Theater of War” at CCA's Wattis Institute, the exhibition is most brilliant when it makes full use of Hoffman's former training as a theater director and Allora & Calzadilla's attentiveness to the politics of sound. For example, throughout the exhibition are the letterdrop-sized slits that puncture the gallery walls, resembling the vantage points of medieval castle from where arrows and bullets are strategically fired. Enabling the viewer to surveil others in the gallery, the slits recursively subject each visitor to another's gaze. In doing so, the slits suggest that perhaps the sublime moments of war lie in the capacity to be rendered vulnerable and to comprehend one's capacity for predation. By foregrounding the theatrics of the gallery experience, the visitor becomes a spectator inculpated in the production of war.

The slits make for an interesting comparison to Luigi Fontana's 'Concetto Spatiale' paintings, which date from the late 1950's to mid 1960's. Each of the paintings in this series feature a taut, stretched canvas slit in the middle by a knife. By disrupting the picture plane and turning attention towards the works' material construction—stretcher bars, canvas, paint, etc.--Fontana's paintings embody the metaphysical tension characterizing the history of painting. So too, the slits puncturing the walls of “Theater of War” self-reflexively comment on museological convention. But while the slits/wounds in Fontana's paintings deny a glimpse into another world, the slits in “Theater of War” reveal what lies on the other side of the gallery wall—the Other who looks back.

Certain rooms in the Wattis gallery present imagery, sounds, text, and objects as ethnographic artifacts of war. “Get Out Of My Mind Get out of This Room” (1968) is an installation by Bruce Nauman in which the artist growls and whispers to the audience, entreating him/her to immediately leave the room. Attracting and repelling the audience, Nauman's installation invokes the conflictual nature of war.

In another room, painted wooden boxes with protruding amplification cones produce cacaphonic sounds. These are recreations of the noise machines developed by Luigi Russolo, an early 20th century artist whose manifesto entitled The Art of Noise (1913) figured significantly in the Italian Futurists' celebration of the First World War. As early sound sculptures that convey the Futurists fascination with technology, art, and power, the Russolo boxes point to the aestheticization of war and its stylistic evolution.

Segueing to Allora & Calzadilla's exhibition in the San Francisco Art Institute's Walter and McBean Gallery, the main gallery hosts a floor-to-ceiling sculpture in which large-scale plaster slabs wind and curl. Within the sculpture, the negative spaces between the slabs leave perches that were, at the exhibition's opening night, occupied by supine opera singers (students from the San Francisco Conservatory) singing historic wartime scores. After the opening exhibition, visitors hear recordings from this opening night emitted from the sculpture's interior. As many projects within Allora & Calzadilla's oeuvre engender participation, it would have been wonderful to see this commanding sculpture in a public setting that invited more daring interaction. For instance, placed onto the terrace just outside the McBean Gallery as a kind of continuation (or apotheosis) of its Brutalist architectural style, the sculpture might have wildly repatterned normative activity.

The side and upstairs galleries of the Walter & McBean gallery presents various videos by Allora & Calzadilla that communicate their knack in capturing moments that slip between simple observations and allegory. “There is More Than One Way to Skin a Sheep (2007)” opens with a scene in which a lamb is roped to the roof of a car, likely being hauled off to slaughter. In a subsequent scene, a male protagonist is seen alternately inflating the tires of his bicycle with a tulum, one of the world's oldest piping instrument that resembles the carcass of a lamb, and solitarily biking around Istanbul. In “breathing life” from one vessel to another (human to sheep to tire), the rider is positioned as a code-switcher between east and west, ancient and modern. The repeated motif of the lamb—figured first as animal, then as the body of the tulum—invokes biblical associations about the transfiguration of life from body to body and song to song. Hovering between narrative and minimalist vignette, the video draws the viewer into an open-ended question about the everyday experience of history.

Notes: Foucault, Michel. “Subject and Power” in _Michel Foucault: Power_. New York: The New Press: 1994. p. 342. This interview between Paul Rabinow and Michel Foucault first appeared in /Skyline, /1982.