i. problem machine
My skin darkens every summer. Growing up in Oregon, grey overcast winters were matched by clear temperate summers, during which my parents encouraged me to spend time outdoors. Alongside seasonal tan lines, I became accustomed to the way my mother, a white woman from a small town in the Pacific Northwest, and father, an immigrant from the Philippines, would comment on the deepening color of my skin. “Wow, you’re getting so dark!” It surprised them how quickly I browned once the sun emerged. The attention was neither critical nor celebratory—rather, a remark of surprise.
At times, it even catches me off guard. I’ll look down in June and the brown backs of my hands suddenly contrast the pink palms underneath, lines of difference drawn on the side of every finger. I’m reminded of this when watching Max Guy’s video Problem Machine (What’s it like to be dead? What’s it like to die?), in which the artist, who is Black, undergoes an indoor tanning session. This service exists to help fair-skinned Westerners achieve a “sun-kissed glow”—cancer risk and all—without sun exposure. Meanwhile, in countries like the Philippines, a multi-billion dollar industry around skin-whitening thrives on the parallel desire of Asian people to maintain their proximity to whiteness. Bleaching soaps and creams, chemical peels, and even probiotic “supplements” are popular; one example of the latter, PROBIO-WHITE, promises consumers “whiter skin from within.”
The basic concept behind Problem Machine could be read as a joke: a Black man walks into a tanning salon. The very act of indoor tanning as a dark-skinned person seems rife with absurdity, but Guy’s ten-minute video evokes less humorous reactions; we can only imagine the potentially awkward preamble to the video that shows only the interior of the ‘sunbed.’ One wonders if Guy was greeted with surprise by the salon employees. The video depicts him lying down, nude, bathed in the harsh blue light of a machine designed to transform the human body. We see his chest rising and falling as he breathes. Viewing his body in this confined space—both intimate and overexposed—is so unnatural; in a different context it would feel like a violation. The artist darkening his already melanin-rich body becomes a conceptual act in itself, though the viewer receives no visual evidence of this modification. Once the machine emits an audible drone to signal the end of the session, Guy’s skin appears no different. The glowing tubes quickly turn dark, leaving visible only a silhouette of his legs and feet.
Problem Machine points not only to the problem Guy’s body poses for the tanning bed—the machine’s intended efficacy is minimized when there is already an abundance of melanin present in the skin of its user—but also a fallacy within the modern “beauty industry” that produced such a device. Within a globally hegemonic Euroamerican culture that outwardly denounces racial discrimination, skin color modification reveals the degree to which colorism still persists today. The tanning bed, and its counterpart in skin-bleaching products, relies on a metric of beauty driven by the white supremacist inequities that govern labor and enjoyment. Both are designed for an idealized user: a fair-skinned woman who can slip in and out of her skin color as if it’s a cocktail dress. She enters the sunbed in anticipation of her body on display, perhaps at a Caribbean beach resort.
Though a cosmetic tan is marketed as a “healthy glow,” simulating something as powerful as the sun actually comes at a serious risk of developing cancer. Guy’s reference to death in the title of the piece points to this absurdity. Considering Problem Machine’s complete title also forces the awareness that, compared to the typically white users of tanning beds, the artist’s proximity to death may fall farther out of his agency before he enters the machine at all. Perhaps all it can offer is to take him closer.
ii. carved conversations
The beginning of history starts as a dry act of receipt keeping and turns into a very complex literary form.
SaraNoa Mark shared this thought in a reflection on Carved Conversations, an installation of etched asphalt stones they gathered on the beach at Chicago’s Promontory Point. The thought stays in my mind. Human beings evolved the tool of language mysteriously, but the concept of ‘keeping score’ has certainly been around from the start. Reading about the etymology of “score,” I find it can mean both a “mark, notch, incision; a rift in rock,” as well as the number twenty. The term originates from when early shepherds used sticks to count sheep: instead of cutting a notch for each animal, cuts were made to indicate the larger, but still perceptively manageable, amount of twenty sheep. This practice of scoring sticks denoted numerical values, but Mark’s marks—incisions slowly and methodically carved into stone—form letters, words, statements, and whole conversations. This act of recording, too, becomes a signification of value. To capture a person’s speech in stone is to suggest they are worthy of a remembrance that is profoundly material—rocks are literally weighty, the archival antithesis of an increasingly amorphous digital cloud.
In this time I was compelled to collect the asphalt. I made around 11 trips dragging bubby carts full of rocks from the beach up to my 4th floor walk up apartment. Slightly absurd, but I need to live with objects before I can work with them. I knew I wanted to carve text into them and spent a long time hunting for the right text.
Like the steel boxes encasing the asphalt stones of Carved Conversations, Mark locates Promontory Point as a container of sorts, for relational possibility. In the summer of 2020, Mark became part of an informal community that gathered on the southern shore of the Point, some of whom made a habit of remaining at the lake from morning until after dusk, moving in a rhythm between the water and the shoreline rocks. The artist considers Carved Conversations “a collaboration between myself, the lake, and the community,” and a key figure within this exchange is DD Klionsky, a community organizer and lifelong resident of Hyde Park who Mark befriended at the Point. Klionsky wished to preserve the spirit of communion that had been created there over the pandemic summer, when the already tight-knit group became even more closely bonded. Around the same time that Mark began gathering rocks, Klionsky started tape-recording her conversations with other lake regulars. When Mark was granted permission to use these transcripts in Carved Conversations, two different practices of collecting material merged.
Ömür Harmansah said something like, the amount of asphalt in the world is so massive on the earth's surface we begin to speak about them as strata, as new geological layers.
Carved Conversations finds resonance with Cecilia Vicuña’s “Arte Precario,” the artist and poet’s name for a ritualistic practice she began in the 1960s. Using only found objects and debris, Vicuña created delicate assemblages on the beach in Concón, Chile, then let them wash away with the waves of the Pacific Ocean. Mark’s material arrives with the waves of Lake Michigan: heavy chunks of asphalt, their edges smoothed after an unlikely life underwater. As a collaboration between both human and non-human actors, the work encapsulates an anthropogenic ecology of time and place, emerging from the conditions of what cultural historian T.J. Demos names the “capitalocene.” Like Vicuña, Mark works with debris fragments that have been consumed by time, their original purpose now obsolete, resembling only a fragment of their earlier self. But this kind of trash can’t be washed away—in fact, the asphalt asserts its staying power by determinedly returning to the land. Mark responds to the permanence of this material with their own slow carving, a ritual practice that transforms the stones’ status as industrial refuse.
Since I've lived in this city I have been interested in the way the water is constantly sorting and organizing materials.
Like rocks washed up onto the beach, the people of the Point became organized by their love for Lake Michigan. As sun and water structured their days, it also began to define a way of relating that diverged from the dominant order of the moment, where we spent many pandemic summer days not in the sun, but in front of a screen. “Was that online talk recorded?” we would ask each other. The response was usually “yes,” and so we’re left with endless hours of recordings, accessible in an instant via the cloud. Who will care about our Zoom panels in a century’s time? Will anyone even be around to witness these histories? Both painstakingly crafted and barely legible as texts, the scored rocks of Carved Conversations offer a poignant answer to this troubling reality: the impulse to preserve something of great personal value may ultimately be in vain. But maybe it doesn’t matter—all we can do is try.