- Manal Abu-Shaheen
- Vahap Avşar
- Jesus Benavente and Felipe Castelblanco
- Brian Caverly
- Kerry Downey
- Magali Duzant
- Golnaz Esmaili
- Mohammed Fayaz
- Kate Gilmore
- Jonah Groeneboer
- Bang Geul Han and Minna Pöllänen
- Dave Hardy
- Sylvia Hardy
- Shadi Harouni
- Janks Archive
- Robin Kang
- Kristin Lucas
- Carl Marin
- Eileen Maxson
- Melanie McLain
- Shane Mecklenburger
- Lawrence Mesich
- Freya Powell
- Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin
- Alan Ruiz
- Samita Sinha and Brian Chase
- Barb Smith
- Monika Sziladi
- Alina Tenser
- Trans-Pecos with 8 Ball Community, E.S.P. TV, and Chillin Island
- Mark Tribe
- Sam Vernon
- Max Warsh
- Jennifer Williams
- An Itinerary with Notes
- Exhibition Views
- Hidden
- Watershed
- A Distant Memory Being Recalled (Queens Teens Respond)
- Overhead: A Response to Kerry Downey’s Fishing with Angela
- Sweat, Leaks, Holes: Crossing the Threshold
- PULSE: On Jonah Groeneboer’s The Potential in Waves Colliding
- Interview: Melanie McLain and Alina Tenser
- Personal Space
- Data, the Social Being, and the Social Network
- Responses from Mechanical Turk
- MAPS, DNA, AND SPAM
- Queens Internacional 2016
- Uneven Development: On Beirut and Plein Air
- A Crisis of Context
- Return to Sender
- Interview: Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- Mining Through History: The Contemporary Practices of Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- A Conversation with Shadi Harouni's The Lightest of Stones
- Directions to a Gravel Quarry
- Walk This Way
- Interview: Brian Caverly and Barb Smith
- "I drew the one that has the teeth marks..."
- BEAT IT! (Queens Teens respond)
- Moments
- Lawn Furniture
- In Between Difference, Repetition, and Original Use
- Interview: Dave Hardy and Max Warsh
- Again—and again: on the recent work of Alan Ruiz
- City of Tomorrow
- Noticing This Space
- NO PLACE FOR A MAP
- The History of the World Was with Me That Night
- What You Don't See (Queens Teens Respond)
- Interview: Allison Davis and Sam Vernon
- When You’re Smiling…The Many Faces Behind the Mask
- Interview: Jesus Benavente and Carl Marin
- The Eternal Insult
- Janking Off
- Queens Theatricality
I.
A semordnilap is a word, phrase, or sentence that, when spelled backwards, conveys a new meaning, formed from the inversion of its more symmetrical linguistic cousin, the palindrome. Palindromes read the same forwards and backwards, forming an endless loop. Semordnilap similarly doubles back on itself, demonstrating its own definition. Read right to left and “lived” becomes “devil”; to record the passage of “time” is to “emit.” There is subversive delight in the duplicity of a semordnilap that, when paired with its mirror image in a palindromic phrase,1 produces unexpected new synapses. Play a record backwards and you might hear satanic verses. Even our DNA contains palindromic sequences: Two strands form a mirror image that can be read in either direction.
II.
The title of Eileen Maxson’s work evian is naive spelled backwards (2015) refers to a quote from the cult classic film Reality Bites (1994), which depicts a group of recent college grads muddling their way through jobs and relationships. Lelaina, the protagonist, is a filmmaker who struggles between making art that is true to her ideals and giving in to crass commercialization and a comfortable living.
Too broke to buy food, the group of friends goes on a junk food shopping spree at a gas station using Lelaina’s gas card (paid for by her dad). As they’re about to pay, Lelaina’s friend Vickie shares her realization about the expensive water’s name. They buy it anyway and dance. The minimum-wage clerk looks on with a mixture of contempt and embarrassment.
III.
For evian is naive spelled backwards, Maxson commissioned a series of group portraits on Amazon’s crowdsourced microtasking marketplace, Mechanical Turk (aka MTurk). Maxson asked participants to paint the semordnilap EVIAN/NAIVE on either side of a large cloth, taking one photo displaying the word “EVIAN” and a second with the word “NAIVE.”
MTurk is an open marketplace where employers can post jobs for independent contractors, often with durations of less than twenty minutes for pay in the range of $2-$3 an hour. All parties remain strictly anonymous throughout the transaction, each identified by a random string of letters and numbers. Touted as the future of work, MTurk provides a model for an unrestricted global labor market that allows employers to find workers at any time, in any place, for any amount of pay, and for any amount of time, no matter how small, which some say effectively eliminates worker protections.2
IV.
evian is naive spelled backwards subverts this sacrosanct rule of anonymity on MTurk, compelling the workers to take a photo specifically for this project as proof of their veracity. However, a sizable percentage of the submissions are random—an arrangement of spoons, a Ferrari in a desert, a tube of toothpaste, a jellyfish, and a blurred photo of Barbara Walters posing with the cast of Jersey Shore (an attempt at something resembling the requested group photo). The images are the epitome of crassly commercial imagery, not chosen for any particular reason but submitted in hopes of gaming the system (on the off-chance that their work will not be reviewed by a human). Rather than exposing their individual identities, subjecting their bodies to vulnerability, they opt instead to send spam in a cynical bid for financial gain in an exploitative marketplace.
The work hinges on Maxson’s struggle to reconcile the film’s evian/naive scene—is it possible to exist and create art according to one’s principles in an indifferent market, or should we just give up and buy the water? Are the spammers right to be cynical? Is it naive for workers to expose their bodies to the violence of the marketplace? This produces an unresolvable tension in the work, that of striving to make a work that transcends the dictates of a particular market, while still participating in that market to produce said work. The work sticks on this contradiction, cycling between the poles of idealism and cynicism, folding back in on itself like a palindrome.
1. Placed side by side, a semordnilap and its inverse will always form a palindromic phrase, “lived devil”
2. For more background on MTurk, also see Moshe Z. Marvit, “How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine,” The Nation, February 5, 2014, accessed June 12, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/how-crowdworkers-became-ghosts-digital-machine; and Glenn Fleischman, “Turks of the World, Unite!” The Economist, May 24, 2011, accessed June 12, 2016, http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/05/repetitive_tasks.
Amanda Ryan is a Brooklyn-based writer and curator. She received her MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University and a BA in Political Science from New York University.