Eliana Willis

As America faces down Election Day, many pundits see a real chance of a long and contested presidential election. Some battleground states could be very close, opening the possibility of Gore v. Bush–style court challenges à la the year 2000, meaning we may not know the results for days, or longer. Some see a real chance of a Supreme Court argument, in a court with three justices put in place by President Donald Trump.
But if you’ve been Google Image searching “the next American president” recently, hoping that the search-engine gods could tell you something even Nate Silver couldn’t, you might find that the winner will be… a vision board? Featuring owl stickers and foam roses and bits of wisdom printed on teabags?
Hmm, that can’t be right . . .
Gretchen Andrew, The Next American President (red) (2020).

Welcome to Next American President, an online art piece by Los Angeles–based artist Gretchen Andrew.
The self-styled “search engine artist and internet imperialist,” who studied information systems and is a veteran of Google and the financial software company Intuit, has commandeered the Google Image search results so that some of the first results you see will be just those hokey vision boards.
How did she do it?
She created a network of websites, including pages on sites like Eventbrite, Yelp, Quora, Soundcloud, and Twitter, loaded with web addresses and images and text that trick search engines into returning these images.
And rather than have them all return some image that could fool the viewer, she said, she loaded up the results with her own artworks.
“It’s important to me that when people see these works, they look wrong,” she said in a phone conversation. “I don’t want to confuse people, I want to confuse machines. I want people to be laughing at Google. If we can get both sides of the political spectrum laughing at big tech, that’s a good thing.”
Gretchen Andrew, The Next American President (white) (2020).

The last Gretchen Andrew project that effectively rickrolled Google was one that virtually placed her paintings in booths at the inaugural Frieze Los Angeles fair.
This time, she’s aiming for, well, a bigger tent.
With her new project, she brings together the philosophy of “the law of attraction,” which says that sending out positive energy into the universe returns positive results; and Internet search-engine optimization trickery, which says that if you load your websites with the right language, you’ll get clicks (and dollars).
In case you haven’t seen one at your aunt’s house, people use vision boards to collage their dreams and desires and to put the law of attraction into action, so it’s an obvious tool for Andrew to use for this piece.
“In this project, I’m the person who is praying, and God at the same time,” she said. “I pray for something and I bring it into being. It’s about the power of attraction and all that, but I make it so!”
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In the 17th century, hundreds of witch trials took place across the five Nordic countries of Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, resulting in scores of deaths and casting a pall over the region.
Witch hunts were drastically skewed along gender lines, and often once a woman in a family was accused of witchcraft, her female relatives were targets of persecution for generations. While the trials in Salem have been widely documented and recreated in popular culture for generations, the incidents of indigenous violence in the Nordic countries have been largely left out of the narrative.

Albrecht Dürer, De fire hekse (The Four Witches) 1497, Nürnberg.

A new show at Denmark’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg explores this haunting time in history with archival material dating from the 15th to 18th century presented alongside contemporary works, including seven new commissions. The exhibition features work by artists including Carmen Winant, Louise Bourgeois, Albrecht Durer, and La Vaughn Belle, tracking not just witchcraft, but the way that fear and hatred spreads throughout communities, a phenomenon that remains painfully relevant today.
“At a time of global unrest, as the politics of commemoration are in question,” the museum says in a statement, “‘Witch Hunt’ suggests the need to revisit seemingly distant histories and proposes new imaginaries for remembering and representation.”
“Witch Hunt” runs from November 7, 2020–January 17, 2021 at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark. See images from the show below:

Sandra Mujinga, Ghosting, (2019). Courtesy kuntsneren og Croy Nielsen, Wien.Photo: Jan Khür.

Carmen Winant, The neighbor, the friend, the lover, (2020). Courtesy the artist and Stene Projects, Stockholm.

Virginia Lee Montgomery, Water Witching, (2018). Courtesy the artist.

Aviva Silverman, We Have Decided Not to Die, (2019). Installation view at VEDA, Florence. Courtesy of the artist and VEDA, Florence. Photo: Flavio Pescatori.

Louise Bourgeois, C.O.Y.O.T.E. (1947-1949). Photo: Installation view of C.O.Y.O.T.E. in exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois: Alone and Together’ at Faurschou Copenhagen. Photo by Anders Sune Berg, © The Easton Foundation. © The Easton Foundation/VISDA.

La Vaughn Belle, strange gods before thee (2020), video still. Courtesy the artist.

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Right now in Madison Square Park, a section of golden scaffolding surrounds a massive sculpture of a torch. The torch’s abstracted flames are actually made from mannequin limbs painted blue and entwined around each other so that they point up toward the sky. The work, titled Light of Freedom (2020), is the creation of Abigail DeVille, a contemporary artist born and raised in the Bronx, whose practice centers on the shifting urban landscape of New York and on memorializing lives lost.
With Light of Freedom, DeVille remembers the earliest enslaved Africans who were brought to New Amsterdam, only to be lost again to a history that privileges other stories over theirs.
In an exclusive interview as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, DeVille traveled around Harlem with a pushcart filled with trash as she visited personal landmarks of the changing neighborhood.
The story of Harlem, she says in the video, “is just the natives being displaced up to this very moment. But, they helped shape the place into what it is now.” Those people, like her grandfather who was raised in a boarding house that now carries a six-figure price tag, are the subjects of the “invisible histories” she wants to acknowledge with her artistic interventions. 

Installation view, Abigail DeVille’s Light of Freedom (2020). Photo: Andy Romer Photography. Courtesy of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

“It feels like the earth is shifting,” she says as she places a sculptural cast of her own face at the site of her grandfather’s childhood home.
In the video, DeVille goes on to trek to a sandy strip of land at the base of the Willis Avenue bridge near 126th street, which is believed to be the site of an African burial ground. There, she unloads her cart filled with fabric, metal, toys, and other cast-off objects. “I was trying to invoke a human kind of presence,” she tells Art21, “I think of trash as a record of existence… these things were used by people. History is permeating everything, whether you know it or not.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series New York Close Up below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. Abigail DeVille’s “Light of Freedom” is on view at Madison Square Park through January 31, 2021.
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

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