Manifestos 4: The Dred and Harriet Scott Decision, 2024
Charles Gaines, presented by REDCAT, Los Angeles. Photo: Angel Origgi, courtesy of REDCAT.
Manifestos 4: The Dred and Harriet Scott Decision is a performance-based installation by Charles Gaines. The piece transforms the original text of the landmark 1857 US Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, which denied US citizenship to people of African ancestry. Many see the ruling as one of the most controversial decisions of the Supreme Court, authorizing racism and irrevocably altering the course of the country’s social, cultural, and political evolution.
The five-part performance builds upon the artist’s Manifestos series, in which he disarms and draws upon historical texts, uniting the rational, mathematical, and lyrical structures of music with the irrationality of violence, racial tensions, and social injustice.
To create the composition for each Manifesto, Gaines used a rule-based methodology, transcribing letters A through H from the texts into their equivalent musical notes (with the use of the letter “H” representing the code used in early Baroque tradition for B-flat). While the resulting composition sounds intentional and fluid, it is ultimately controlled by the predetermined notation system and the structure of language.
This performance is presented alongside the exhibition Charles Gaines: Night/Crimes.
This program is co-presented with the Leadership Advisory Committee.
About the Artist
Charles Gaines (b. 1944) is a pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art. His body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Using a generative approach to create a series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent generations of artists pushing the limits of conceptualism today.
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Gaines currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and around the world, most notably a major traveling survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Phoenix Art Museum; a mid-career survey at the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pitzer College Art Gallery in Claremont CA; a museum survey of early works at the Studio Museum, Harlem NY and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA; and presentations at the 1975 Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2015. An exhibition of his work is also currently on long-term view at Dia:Beacon in New York. In 2022, Gaines launched his most ambitious public art project yet, ‘The American Manifest,’ presented by Creative Time, Governors Island, and Times Square Arts. The third and final chapter of ‘The American Manifest,’ organized by Creative Time, will travel to the banks of the Ohio River in 2025.
If you have any questions about programming, please reach out to museum-programs@artic.edu.
Closed captioning will be available for this program. For questions related to accessibility accommodations, please email access@artic.edu.
