Installation view of Mercy Clubhouse at Spill 180. The exhibition presented 54 collaborative new works by Agnes Walden & Creighton Baxter. Image courtesy of the artists.

When Agnes Walden showed up to Creighton Baxter’s studio last fall with loose sheets of paper, they sat on the floor and communicated through visual lexicons, a sense of play, and mutual curiosity. The ritual, establishing a collaboration, became an activity of notation to make sense of quotidian happenings as well as the weightier material, political, and religious manifestations of mercy. Inhabiting one another’s vocabulary, or pushing up against it, the two artists traded power with each pass of paper, exchanging methods and knowledge, and refusing to accede to market-driven demands for individual authorship. This March, the resulting 54 works of mixed media on paper, napkin, and matchbooks exhibited at the Red Hook, Brooklyn-based gallery SPILL 180. Borrowing the Surrealist exquisite corpse method to assemble an accompanying written release, and employing a nonverbal, gestural dance to install the works, Mercy Clubhouse was erected. On the anniversary of NYC Pride’s Rise Up Rally to Protect Trans Youth, Lily Kwak spoke with Baxter and Walden about their material process, PJ Harvey, and the “autobiographical imperative.”

Lily Kwak: Tell me about your collaborative process. How did it deepen or evolve over time?

Agnes Walden: The first thing I think of is us sitting on this padded foam studio floor, slumber party style.

Creighton Baxter: The floor allowed us to shuffle things—one thing is worked on for 30 minutes and something else gets passed to you, so a sense of collectivity emerged in fragmentary ways. When we began, we were making a couple drawings to make each other laugh. Then we started understanding that something was happening inside the images. The intention shifted into collaboration, and the work became a means of thinking through what it means to collaborate. Works in a two dimensional plane often get associated with a solitary practice, but I don't think that's ever true. I don't think people make art alone. The floor was a space of conversation and a horizontal structure through which the project was made.

LK: There’s this bit from the press release you wrote together: “I would never ask a billionaire for mercy. We map mercy in formal, material, spatial, or collaborative valences. To both be at the mercy of the other—handing power back and forth in the closed circuit.” Can you tell me about how you arrived at the title of the exhibition, Mercy Clubhouse, and how its conceptual parameters map onto the works’ formal qualities?

CB: When we began collaborating, we would joke slash not joke to each other: “Oh, this is a band. This is a band without any instruments.” There’s a sense of visual musicality there, and the clubhouse language also inscribes the intention of choosing to be in a space of making something together.

The language of mercy is many things. Granting mercy and asking for mercy are positions along a structure of power. It has something to do with Agnes and I both having a relationship to religion. God’s mercy is about still being with you whether or not you did the right thing. It also has a lot to do with the state of the world that trans women are living in and under right now, as well as our relationship to culture. Literally, I do ask for mercy. I ask for these people to let up and let us be.

Inside the clubhouse, mercy becomes something we're passing back and forth between two women. One of the last nights that Agnes and I had worked together on this project, we left our studio and were followed, and a man jumped out of a car in front of my building. Agnes grabbed her keys through her fist, and I had something in my hand. I realized that Agnes and I were maybe the same type of girl. We were ready to fight to remain here once we realised we were in a dangerous situation. Agnes got us in her car, and once we were in a safer area, we stopped and listened to music, and we held each other's hands for a second before we parted ways.

There’s something about the sense of asking for mercy in a time in which we are under a huge existential level of threat for the material conditions of our lives. The name is a way of us trying to make do with what is. I don't think trans people, or me and Agnes are helpless, but there’s an overwhelming sense sometimes that we are at the mercy of transphobic whims. The clubhouse becomes a place of containment where we get to deal with those feelings.

AW: What’s also exciting to me about two people working on the same drawing is that power becomes a formal element—the way we're exchanging pictures, drawing over each other, asking for permission to draw next to something, or not asking for permission. In a collaborative drawing or painting, you have this freedom and fun, and a low stakes way to generatively trade power around. It feels close to what friendship is like, and what surviving is like. I’m reminded that the thing we can control is what we're doing with each other, and how we extend grace, and mercy, and permission to one another in different ways.

CB: Drawing is done in the spaces in-between living a life, in-between the spaces of surviving, enduring, or seeking pleasure. That’s why it’s so powerful to me, because it requires a capacity to make a mark. It can be taken up at any place and at any time. Everything we made went in this box that we would carry with us, whether we were going to my studio or Agnes’ studio, working a job together, or making a drawing on a lunch break on napkins. Even when we're being followed and chased down the street and on the brink of being attacked, Mercy Clubhouse is still with us, tucked under our arms.

LK: Tell me more about the textual elements that appear in your work.

AW: Toward the beginning of us working together, it felt very much one degree removed from two teenagers doodling in a notebook during class. We were talking about female rock stars who we love and listening to music the whole time, and text always emerged in an organic stream of consciousness that tended to rhyme formally with what was happening.

One thing I love and admire about Creighton’s work is her use of language and text. I was like, “This is my turn to try that on, while we're figuring this vocabulary out together, and give myself permission to use Creighton's toolbox in this way and see how she responds to it.” I felt emboldened in giving myself permission to take it upon myself to be like, “I'm going to try to finish this part of this drawing in the way that she did, and it's not going to look the same.” A lot of people who are close to either me, or Creighton, or both of us would look at the work and be like, “Oh, I think I know who did what. You did this and Creighton did this.” Most of the time they were wrong, and it was the other way around.

CB: Trying on, or doing a cover of, one another's motifs or lexicons as artists is a great point. That's a huge part of the textual element inside the works on paper. There's also something like writing “50 Foot Queenie by PJ Harvey” on a drawing to me that is a means of making a citation of something happening around us and outside of the visual field we were making. It's citing the sonic landscape we were existing in inside the studio. Text functions as an opaque citation that kind of upends what the meaning of the drawing might do.

But also, one of the works says, “Your art about AIDS reads like an overwrought greeting card to nowhere.” That was something I had written on that sheet of paper before Agnes and I ever met and kept in my studio because it was something I wanted to say about an artist whose relationship to art and the history of AIDs I took umbrage with. My hope was that if Agnes and I had worked on that image together, it would be less about my own biting bullshit and drama with an artist and open up what that language or statement could mean. Agnes and I have a serodiscordant friendship. I'm living with HIV and Agnes isn’t. Because we were collaborating, we were able to steward one another's language into a space where, for lack of a better word, it felt safer to say with someone else. That has to do with mercy.

AW: What I also love is that putting texts in these works brings it to a realm of didacticism. It starts to index something happening around us or between us. I think so much of the way people talk and write about painting in general, painting by women, painting by trans people especially, is reduced to a really raw, romantic, sensuous earnest gesture. The way that text works helps me look at them as art objects, something that has a critical stance, that isn’t just a record of our feelings, which they also are.

CB: There’s an early trans studies scholar Viviane Namaste who talks about the “autobiographical imperative” for trans people, which demands that we must produce a coherent narrative of self in order to access the material conditions to survive. That trickles into the histories of our cultural productions as trans people, where you see that the dominant cultural object and form that gets associated with trans people is the memoir. There’s a constant suturing of our creative output to a coherent autobiographical narrative. For me, what we're doing by upending text and image and letting things be fragmentary, or bleed into the edge, or over the edge, is to poke at and upset that demand for a sort of narrative coherence of self. That’s exciting about collaborating together as trans women. It's not possible for the work to be fully contained under a singular autobiographical narrative.

LK: The figures in your works are associated with “feudal power” and “romanticized ruin,” per your press release, or cite icons like PJ Harvey and Lucinda Williams, but there’s an abiding sense of them being in boundless and groundless spaces.

CB: We both have an investment in the figure and the very fraught history of trying to render a figure in a two-dimensional space. When I was first introduced to Agnes’ work, what struck me about her relationship to the figures emerging through her paintings was that they were often wheeling and dealing in something about the icon. They were often referencing real people, whether that's figures like Jayne County or a friend. Whereas, to be general, often in my work, the figure is a fragmented avatar of self, or for better or worse, wheeling and dealing in the symbolic figure. Obviously none of those things are clear cut from one another, and in our collaborative works, the symbol, the icon, and the index all are collapsing in on one another.

The face as a mask, or an open eye that's a window frame to a celestial expanse behind, comes out of my visual language and our collaborative work, and then became problematized a lot with Agnes. I have a different relationship to the figure in my solo work after working collaboratively. I'm more interested in personhood than humanity, as well as the idea that the division between a distinguishable subject and the environment is a matter of scale.

AW: With Creighton, I think so much about flatness, hollowness, affect, and the discerning of boundaries in crisp ways through line and accumulation that is tight, small, and controlled. Whereas my figures are all dependent on the physical processes of gesture and where a puddle of paint falls. There’s a very different relationship to time that our figures have compared to each other, or the way that we build any part of an image. When those come together, they bleed into one another, but also provide foils for each other where we get to play with the material and critical ramifications of depth and flatness.

It's really rare to see these types of collaborations in two dimensional form mature over the course of an artists’ lifetimes. Warhol and Basquiat did it for one show, and it’s often kind of gimmick based, which is something we like about it, but any sort of nascent collaboration is subject to the collage aesthetic and collage spatial relation, and I’m excited to see if different manners of speed might occur as we begin to make work in different ways. We want to do a deck of cards and we kind of want to make buttons, but that's as far as we've gotten.

CB: There's still a spaciousness around what we've done and what could be done. That feels like an integral thing to hold onto as collaborators. It invigorates me to keep the practice of making art capacious and generative.