Charles Gaines at The Hammer

In Faces (1978), on display in the exhibition’s second gallery alongside the impressive Motion: Trisha Brown Dance (1980-81) series, this restoration of agency becomes politically charged in a move toward human subjects. Similar to Walnut Tree Orchard, the collection of overlapping and colorblind facial contours—friends and relatives of the artist—resists the typological ethnological categorization historically used to justify racist criminological and colonialist enterprise. In this regard, the work also questions the presumed objectivity of photographs, linking Gaines with his “Pictures generation” cohorts, such as Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler. The coordinate plots are themselves insufficient: flattening heterogeneous subjects into a numerical code and layering them until they become unrecognizable. Gaines codes the face, but the face cannot be reassembled from the code. The material logic of the grid falsely promises the viewer an accurate portrait of the subject imprisoned within the austere and silencing aesthetic plane of modern- ism. Race falls prey to the grid’s dissecting logic.