Care After Structure

by Scott Ferguson

This essay accompanies After Structure, an exhibition curated by Mark Fredricks for University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum, June 13 – August 2, 2025.

After Structure brings together works by Richard Tuttle and Mike Cloud to reconsider a notion that is central to modern visual art: structure.

The question of structure has long divided critics and art historians. Art is autonomous, says one tradition; its structure must be bounded, self-sufficient, and free from external contamination.¹ Think Mondrian, Pollack, and Hirschhorn. Art should be integrated into everyday life, retorts the opposition. They point to Duchamp, Warhol, and Bruguera for whom structures are open, participatory, and receptive.²

After Structure transcends the terms of the dispute by foregrounding far-flung riddles of care.³ In doing so, it challenges what both sides unwittingly share: an attachment to the artwork’s physical location in the here-and-now. Commencing from the here-and-now compels art to choose: autonomy or integration, containment or exposure?⁴ Care, however, is omnipresent. Unlike structure, it concerns everything and anything, admitting no necessary trade-offs between inside and outside, near and far.

What, then, comes after structure? The exhibition answers this query by way of seemingly opposed strategies. At first glance, Tuttle’s series of encaustic monotype paintings on muslin appear woefully under-structured. Colorful splotches, smudges, streaks, and drips on white are delicately pinned to the wall, forgoing the solidity and support afforded by customary framing. On closer inspection, the apparent fragility of this arrangement reveals a highly structured configuration sculpted by precise drapings, curls, creases, and folds. Conversely, Cloud’s pieces give an initial impression of over-structuring. Painted mottles, figures, signs, and symbols spread across multiple strata of paper, photographs, cloth, and wood. In several works, Cloud deploys a superabundance of irregularly cut or broken stretcher bars to create criss-crossing patterns, borders, and frames-within-frames. With time, however, structural profusion gives way to systemic precarity, as compounding instances of overlap, mismatch, and imbalance imperil the art’s material and semantic integrity.

Through these inversions, Tuttle’s and Cloud’s works enfold structural insufficiency and excess into a single dynamic that construes aesthetic form as a problem of boundless care. Breaking with dominant models of structure, care circumvents eternal oscillations between openness and closure, unity and dissolution. It denies hard ontological boundaries, on one hand, and radical lawlessness, on the other hand. In After Structure, aesthetic saliencies, fissures, and edges admit no primordial exclusion. Smudges, crumples, and shards show little tendency toward disintegration. When Tuttle forsakes traditional framing, we discover quickly that any attempt to flee care’s responsibilities routes us back to fresh aesthetic quandaries and needs. In this deliberate destabilization, Tuttle compels us to consider: How else might we buttress social forms when customary supports become inadequate? When Cloud’s contributions multiply structure to the point of bewilderment, dozens of fresh vulnerabilities and hazards emerge that even the utmost care cannot master. In this labyrinthine complexity, Cloud poses a vital question: How to heed exigencies and complications that develop from fervid organization?

In this, care after structure demands a commitment to what might be called remote co-presence. Care is irreducible to proximity. Its forms do not merely circulate from one place to another. Its causal horizon requires no immediate displacements. To the contrary, care convenes meaning in disparate locales at once. Its forms engage non-adjacent events and concerns. Its causality encompasses the whole of collectivity. The mysteries of belonging–of joy as well as suffering–remain inescapably ubiquitous. Why should art proceed any differently?

In After Structure, care’s remote co-presence turns the conventional image of structure on its head. Take Tuttle’s series of twenty-five monotype paintings, tellingly titled Renaissance Unframed, which was completed at Graphicstudio in 1995. Visibly indebted to both Minimalism and Conceptualism, Tuttle’s frameless canvases lend painting’s surfaces palpable, even sculptural, qualities. Yet the works’ conceptual gesture is hardly unidirectional; it does not advance from flatness to volume à la Minimalism. From start to finish, surface markings diversely shape the muslin’s perceived texture, pliability, and weight. Reciprocally, each sculpted pleat, bend, and crinkle communicates from afar no less than Tuttle’s painterly inscriptions. It is not simply that the hand of the artist is forever absent. By relying on museum or gallery officials to carry out the artists’ detailed instructions for pinning, hanging, and folding, Tuttle’s canvases indicate that art depends on constant mediation at a remove.

It is tempting to read the heavy bronze floor sculptures that accompany Renaissance Unframed as stabilizing perceptual anchors for viewers faced with the uncanny origami of Tuttle’s painted fabric. It turns out, however, that these ponderous elements participate in mediations that are no less remote and playful. The sculptures are cast from a Styrofoam carving then coated with a jet black patina. Their contours recall the roughness of basalt, the igneous rock that Robert Smithson arranged en masse in his monumental land art sculpture, Spiral Jetty (1970). Yet the impenetrable density and smooth inner faces of Tuttle’s sculptures maintain the trappings of highly manufactured artifacts. The sculptures come in pairs, each half giving the appearance of having been sliced neatly in two. Although circumstances vary, installation guidelines instruct exhibitors to fit the two parts together and place them on the floor precisely one foot in front of each wall hanging. Positioned this way, Tuttle’s bronze sculptures at once activate and whimsically undermine minimalist phenomenology. With Minimalism, what Robert Morris once characterized as “the autonomous and literal nature of sculpture” puts into question the corporeal orientation and movement of artist and viewer in a manner that trades painterly illusionism for direct reckonings with a universal gravity.⁵ Minimalism, at least on this account, achieves art’s elusive dream of autonomy by contracting gravity’s all-consuming pull into a circumscribed arena—one where freedom emerges by leveraging inner balance against outward resistance.

When it comes to Tuttle’s floor sculptures, however, Morris’s “obdurate, literal mass[es]” become optical and signifying riddles, which mediate physical things and forces from the jump.⁶ The sculptures present a tripping hazard to viewers engrossed by the wall hangings—a subtle challenge to museum officials striving to balance aesthetics with safety. One wonders: Is litigation merely another medium in the artist’s toolbox? Tuttle’s instructions recommend the use of a compass to align the two pieces along the north-south axis of the exhibition space and, of course, the planet. In this sense, the pieces function as geometric points that, together, form a line that wraps around the globe. As a consequence, Tuttle’s sculptures simultaneously satirize and profoundly amplify routine museum safeguards—floor demarcations, signage, and vigilant personnel—employed to preserve artistic works. Where exactly does the essence of the artwork reside? When, if ever, does concern end?

With Cloud’s ultra-structured fabrications, After Structure turns care’s ambit toward persons, domains, and events that one will likely never know or experience in any direct sense. In contemporary parlance, the established term for such phenomena is “parasocial,” defined as one-sided and ostensibly imaginary relations with celebrities, influencers, or fictional characters with whom one has no immediate or mutual interactions. Social scientists and cultural commentators regularly evaluate the costs and benefits of parasocial relations. Parasocial investments can be beneficial in moderate doses, they claim. Yet because this discourse fundamentally pathologizes physical separation and unreciprocated feelings, purveyors of such reasoning fret that inordinate parasocial devotion is damaging to psychological well-being.⁷

Cloud’s work weighs questions of remote association from a more salutary vantage. Cloud does not assume an atomized subject, whose flirtations with real and make-believe strangers teeters dangerously between health and illness. Instead, his art affirms sociality’s wide breadth at the outset. From here, Cloud deploys what he describes as “a wide range of marks, symbols, motifs, palettes and forms” to query traumas and ecstasies, fascinations and repulsions. The resulting lexicon is singular, heterogeneously shared, and thoroughly social. Cloud reports that he is frequently inspired by contemporary news stories. Sometimes, he includes URL addresses for news sources within the compositions of works themselves. When Cloud variously problematizes and hyperbolizes structure, it is this captivating realm of parasociality that commands our attention.

Take Rabbit Quilt (2008), which treats mismatched pajamas as canvas and make-shift frame. The pajama bottoms display the queer children’s television character SpongeBob SquarePants in pirate paraphernalia. The tank top comes from U. S. illustrator Jim Benton’s cynical novelty brand, It’s Happy Bunny. It features a pink, smiling bunny flanked below by a less-than-clever slogan: “You are perfect–except for 9 or 10 things.” (More acerbic quips from the same line of merchandise include, “Hi Loser” and “You suck, and that’s sad.”) Here, Cloud joins top and bottom in a roughly hewn fashion to construct something like a quilt of 1990’s pop juvenilia, a cross-section of high-neoliberal commodity culture.

Significantly, Rabbit Quilt’s central seam draws attention to micro-generational rifts between the inclusive zaniness of SpongeBob and the misanthropic irony of Benton’s black-pilled cutesiness. As a result, “tops” and “bottoms” (in multiple senses) bristle uneasily side by side. Across the textiles, Cloud paints an impressionistic calico rabbit in mid-sprint, which enmeshes the aforementioned rift in ‘90’s youth culture in wider historical thickets. Is this a primordial cave painting of a totemic animal that is spellbound by movement? Is it roadkill flattened pajamas-and-all by a careless semi-truck? Is it Br’er Rabbit, the anti-authoritarian trickster from the Afro-American oral tradition, later white-washed by Walt Disney’s offensive mixed-animation feature, Song of the South (1948)? The answer, of course, is an all-encompassing yes. Rabbit Quilt thickens parasociality’s historical dimensions. It ensconces us in intimate and ongoing entanglements from which no person is exempt. The artwork tenders no stock judgments. It intensifies ethical evaluation and political accountability as it stages a wide-ranging aesthetic inquiry into seemingly unrelated pasts.

Cloud’s most disquieting entries are his so-called “hanging paintings.” The hanging paintings comprise a series of triangular constructions from which dangle several off-the-rack belts that serve as nooses. These works include S of B (2016), Ames 2017 (2019), Uehara 2011 (2019), and Khan 2013 (2019). Cloud deems them portraits because they represent persons who died by means of hanging–though the works show only hand-written names rather than visual likenesses. Some of the paintings are group portraits, including multiple names dispersed across several wooden stretcher bars. As a consequence, the hanging paintings foster unlikely and sometimes unnerving associations among strangers, including museum attendees. Exemplary is S of B, which names Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old Black woman whose alleged 2015 suicide in a Texas jail was fiercely contested by protestors opposed to racialized police brutality. Yet it also identifies actor David Carradine, rumored to suffocate from auto-erotic asphyxiation, and model Cheyenne Brando, daughter of Marlon Brando, who took her own life after suffering years of neglect, abuse, and mental illness.

The point, it seems, is not to flatten differences between heterogeneous social conditions. Surely Cloud, a contemporary Black artist, has little interest in forcing equivalences between Bland, Carridine, and Brando. The idea, rather, is to play up resonances across differences, such that what counts as death’s proper context is socially defamiliarized and reconfigured. With this, the social loss of Bland accrues a cryptic communal importance beyond the confines of an isolated Black history. It would require many more pages to do justice to S of B’s polysemic title, painted cubes and swirls, tottering rocket-like architecture, and uncanny correspondences, not to mention the manifold aesthetic and social connotations at stake in Cloud’s references to “hanging.” Even so, my sense is that none of this dilutes the singularity of death; rather, it deepens and transmogrifies hanging’s collective implications.

I would be remiss if, by way of conclusion, I did not draw out After Structure’s relevance for the present moment. Since January 20, 2025, punishing fiscal austerity and lawless state violence have lacerated communities, destroyed vital infrastructures, and undermined public trust both across the United States and around the world. The current administration operates under a fiercely zero-sum conception of structure. Because they presume that there is never enough to go around, the powers that be fortify structure to protect a chosen minority. Everyone else is forsaken as internal parasites or expelled as external threats. Alternatively, After Structure teaches that there is no outside; collectivity is replete with untold riches; and nobody can exhaust the unending enigmas of care.

Notes

1. A contemporary defense of autonomy can be found in Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). ↩︎
2. For a recent affirmation of the integrative approach, see Grant Kester, Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024).
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3. Scott Ferguson, Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics & the Politics of Care (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018). ↩︎
4. To be sure, aesthetic theory has articulated the central binary between autonomy and integration (or “heteronomy”) in complex ways. For Theodor Adorno, autonomy involves a contradictory gambit wherein art’s utopian impulse toward freedom is only realized when its aesthetic structure fails to perfectly cohere. Jacques Derrida taught us to deconstruct the “truth in painting” by unleashing unsettling interdependencies between inside and outside that frames of all kinds are called upon to contain. Philosophers of process and difference such as Gilles Deleuze prioritize flows of becoming that at once undercut and overwhelm structural boundaries. Still, even when avowing the porous, intertwined, and unstable, such discourses constrain structure within a restricted and zero-sum model of art that is grounded in the here-and-now. See, Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Thomas F.H. Meck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). ↩︎
5. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (Feb. 1966): 42 – 44. ↩︎
6. Robert Morris, “Notes of Sculpture.” ↩︎
7. Thanks to Will Beaman for educating me about the anti-social assumptions inherent in the discourse of parasociality. ↩︎