Jeffrey Gibson, Be Witched Bothered and Be Wildered

0:00:06.9 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re in a storage room for some newly acquired works by the Art Bridges Foundation. We’re looking at a work by Jeffrey Gibson called Be Witched Bothered and Be Wildered.

0:00:19.9 Dr. Ashley Holland: This is a market-produced punching bag that he has beaded with the words from this song from a play called Pal Joey, but he’s playing around with the ways that the words are created on the beadwork. And so he’s taken Bewitched, and he’s separated the “Be” and the “Witched”, “Bothered, ” and then the “Be Wildered.” And what I love about it is that the wild part of it is a neon pink, which I think is such a great call-out for this piece because it is wild.

0:00:54.0 Dr. Beth Harris: I wondered if this was, in some ways, an homage to the punching bag that was underneath and what that punching bag did for him emotionally and psychologically because that was an important transformative moment when he was able to release some of that anger and energy through boxing.

0:01:12.8 Dr. Ashley Holland: I think there’s a lot going on here that is talking about masculinity. It’s talking about queer identity. It’s talking about Indigenous identity. There’s power in the punching bag, and I know that Jeffrey has said that they are symbols of power and strength, but they’re also symbols of aggression and masculinity that is maybe not positive.

0:01:36.8 Dr. Beth Harris: And the punching bag is also transformative for the person who’s doing the punching and has a kind of feeling of release of anger and release of tension. And I feel that here, especially with the words, Be Witched, Be Bothered, Be Wildered, Be Wild. That idea of letting go, of being yourself, of being who you are and not being afraid of that.

0:02:05.6 Dr. Ashley Holland: This is a punching bag that is in a little bit of stasis. You cannot hit it in the way that you would a normal bag, but it’s still speaking to you. It’s just doing it in a different way. And I think he does want you to have that time that you would spend with it, whether it was doing physical activity or actually just walking around it, activating it through your gaze and having that response.

0:02:30.6 Dr. Beth Harris: And we do have to walk around it to see the words. They’re all large capital letters. They’re emphatic.

0:02:39.1 Dr. Ashley Holland: Something I love with Jeffrey’s work is that he incorporates language, but it’s not always easy to read. You often have to spend a little time deciphering it from the visual chaos that’s going around it. And so it’s a piece that really does encourage close looking and it encourages you to spend time with it, to decipher not just the words, but what those words are referencing, whether you know it or not. This is a title that maybe isn’t familiar to a lot of people because it is from an older song. And so is he wanting you to go and search out this song and learn more about it? Are the lyrics important or is it telling a different story?

0:03:22.1 Dr. Beth Harris: So the top half, or maybe more than the top half, because it’s hard for us to see the bottom half because it’s covered by these beautiful hanging white fringes. But that top part is covered in plastic beads and this patterning reminiscent of historical regalia. The fringes at the bottom are also reminiscent of that. And then we’ve got these really beautiful amethyst colored stones arranged like they’re hanging in layers. They lead our eye down to the fringe. It’s almost like a cake with layers, one on top of another.

0:03:58.2 Dr. Ashley Holland: This pattern is very pan-Indian. It is not referencing any specific community. These are commercially produced plastic. I call them pony beads. You can get them at a craft store. You would see them used in a lot of powwow regalia. And then these amethyst-like stones, you start to think new age. But with the fringe at the bottom, if you get really close, you can see those pony beads are embedded against the bag. And then there are these cones that protrude off of it. And then it creates this waterfall effect. So it really is built on itself in a cake-like, totem-like structure.

0:04:38.4 Dr. Beth Harris: And each material being so different than the one next to it. The plastic, the stone, the fringe, the metal. It’s almost like we’ve got every kind of aspect of materiality built into this one piece.

0:04:53.2 Dr. Ashley Holland: That’s why I love these punching bags because no two are alike. They’re all using different materials. They’re all telling different stories. But when you think about them in this larger body of work, it’s this beautiful result that happens that you can almost picture like this is a giant powwow. This is a giant rave, this huge dance of all of these different characters coming together and creating a really beautiful and visual space that is not Indigenous. It’s not just queer. It’s not any of these things. It’s all of those things.

This work at Art Bridges

Meet the Artist: Jeffrey Gibson | Whitney Biennial 2019 (video)

Artist Talk: Jeffrey Gibson

John P. Lukavic, editor, Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer, exhibition catalogue (London: Prestel, 2018).

Contemporary art, an introduction

Terms and issues in Native American art