The Brooklyn Rail

Stepping into the White Cube gallery on Madison Avenue, one is struck by the vastness of its space—its white, institutional blankness. It is the kind of space that Brian O’Doherty described in what is presumably the gallery’s namesake, his prescient three-part article “Inside the White Cube,” which appeared in Artforum in 1976. Reified nearly fifty years on is O’Doherty’s “evenly lighted ‘cell’”: stark and barren, one of those harsh, glaring containers for art so pervasive in our time. Yet what better way than absolute contrast to force out of the viewer the kind of physical and emotional hypertrophy that Tiona Nekkia McClodden demands of herself, a kind of relay between her jouissance—of rage and rapture—and her viewer, standing agog.

Nearly synchronized in orientation, dimension, and spacing, and hung over two floors along the side walls at a height parallel to the viewer’s gaze, fifteen ostensibly black, vertical rectangles proceed in lockstep. In the single work hung at the far end of the ground floor, a butcher’s “meat tree” or “meat hook” projects from a glistening backdrop of dyed leather. Tied to its support by black jute rope, it hangs abject, declawed in a sense, its use value diminished if not extinguished. The frisson of recognition—a “figure” restrained, arms flailing?—withers. A sideways glance two feet or so to the right finds—Maurizio Cattelan style—not a banana, but, bizarrely, a razor angled into the wall.

An ongoing expansion of McClodden’s series “NEVER LET ME GO,” first shown at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2023, the exhibition, titled PURE GAZE, is a realization in formal terms of what the artist has called the “profane hold: a pressure that goes beyond the desires and limits of human interaction.” What is this “hold”? The earthly, physical hold we see and feel in these objects evokes a ritualized artistic practice that begins with flesh but moves inexorably into the spiritual. As a devotee of Santería, a religion of saint worship that evolved among Black Cubans from Yoruba beliefs, the artist has formed a personal relationship with the Orisha (deity) Shango, who is associated with “the head of all artists” and forces of nature, such as lightning. McClodden traffics in notions of transfiguration: of bodies abstracted, of spirits revivified through pressing flesh, of desire sated in metaphysical terms rather than physical ones. She writes: “This is why these works are not exhibited as ‘bodies,’ but instead, as abstract figures. I use the word ‘figure’ in the sense of an expectation or desire to move beyond—a desire for abstracted representation attained through a deep reading of material and a search for ways for more freedom to exist.”

McClodden seeks “freedom” not so much from restraint as through it. Working at the intersection of film, installation, and object-making, she is a Black woman, a lesbian, a bodybuilder, and a participant in BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, masochism) encounters. Her extremes are expressions of a lingering, repressive past—“hauntings” in the sense of ghosts of past social and subjective traumas confronting the present with an urgency, a sense of “something-to-be-done” that Avery F. Gordon writes of in Ghostly Matters: so alive to her in her present that her objects demand that she be present to them, and she is. In her 2019 Whitney Biennial installation, I Prayed to the Wrong God for You, McClodden accompanied a multichannel video with a display of the Orisha Shango’s primary attribute, the double-headed axe, incorporating objects of veneration within this spiritual practice. Addressing the issue of restitution for the descendants of the enslaved in the Artforum feature from May 2019, “1000 Words,” McClodden opined, “I must talk to the objects. I want to go tell them what I did. Because that’s the only way to close it out. I mean, everyone talking about restitution is talking about the objects. Nobody’s talking to the objects. And the objects are alive.”

Each work on view is made through a labor-intensive process; McClodden’s collusion with her materials is relentless and unsparing. Cowhide leather is plied with Saphir shoe polish, miming the submissive gestures of the historic bootblack’s scrubbing and rubbing at the shoe-shine stand. Such gestures, and the position from which they are executed—the client above, the (often Black) shoe-shiner below—also carry erotic connotations within the BDSM community. After dyeing, each substrate is tightly bound with black jute ropes that intersect and loop into vertical, horizontal, or diagonal lines or curves—a kind of mark-making—to form knots in gestures of binding and restraint. These strung black ropes and twisted knots mime the practice of kinbaku-bi [tight binding], a Japanese restraint technique dating to feudal times, when it was used to bind and torture criminals. Evolving into erotic forms of sexual bondage, knotting and tying amplify the tactile sensuality of restraint; looping rope into taut clusters is an intricate and exquisite process, which McClodden has mastered through personal experience. Her ideas expand on Michel Foucault’s understanding of institutional systems, such as prisons, historically used to punish, control, and restrain behaviors. For McClodden, though, “tight binding” in sexual situations is not sadistic or punishing but consensual—a pairing of submissiveness and dominance that ignites sexual pleasuring.

Plying her leather substrate with black shoe polish, running it through with plumes of shimmering violet-blue leather dye and splashes of red-orange dyes, and binding it with rope, McClodden subverts flatness through relief effects, ripples, and folds, interrogating visibility by suggesting contours rather than revealing objects. This complicates conventional representation, creating ghost images redolent of personal investment, both physical and conceptual. An explorer and provocateur, McClodden situates the viewer as witness. The disparate elements of these assemblages—leather, rope, bamboo sticks (historically used for discipline and adapted to BDSM play), bondage rings, the compositions set into deep, handmade black frames—pulsate and ache as they expel what seem to be oozing swaths of blood, leaving black and blue marks as effects of forced crisscross swaddling. Absorption in the gestures of making is foundational to McClodden’s art practice. We follow the tight strands of rope; we peer into the glistening surfaces of polished leather; we gauge the design and examine the florescence of dye, which extends to the leather edges wrapped around their stretchers. Moving forward, back, and side to side, sensing, feeling, and absorbing, become the viewer’s way of making meaning of the artist’s doing. These are durational pieces: we must spend time before them, even as doing so menaces simultaneous thought and breath.

Speaking and writing about her practice, McClodden has described how she forces herself to the edge of identity without bursting its bounds. She prods and pushes boundaries—societal, certainly, but also art-historical. Ferocious yet aesthetically formal, these hybrid works on the wall are both paintings and free-standing sculptures. Their pared-down aesthetic is subverted from within their right-angled frames, branching off into curves and diagonals, which embody process in material form. Visually metonymic, they personify the “abstracted representation” of the figure as McClodden understands it, as if ghosts of the human form haunted their surfaces. Balanced, beautifully shaded, and eerily volumetric, they bring the repetitive act of fulfilling desire to the edge of physical endurance. The power of these works, however, resides in the sense that they are bound for all time: they must endure constriction—endlessly. As McClodden writes in her artist statement for this exhibition, “the brutality of this work is that there is no release.” Abstracted, perhaps, but also troubling the space of display, the work of this uncompromising warrior artist nearly incinerates the white cube in a conflagration of ritualistic practice.