It’s fitting that Cameron Granger was born and raised in Euclid, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb named after the ancient Greek father of geometry, because the artist is particularly interested in lines: visible and hidden lines, ancestral lines and the angular, abstract sketches of maps and urban planning. Granger is also a gamer, once a PlayStation kid who delved into role-playing titles such as Final fantasy (1987-present) and Breath of fire (1993–present), now an admirer of speedrunners who zip through a game with stunning efficiency. As a child, he spent countless hours at his grandparents’ house, watching his grandmother solve her daily crossword, focusing on her as she focused on the outlined black-and-white grid.
Granger’s series Movements (all 2024), on display in his exhibition 9999 in the Queens Museum, is a tribute to his grandmother’s puzzle ritual. Each screen print features a crossword puzzle, this one’s squares filled with red pen, others with blue, reminiscent of the way a busy person might pick up any tool – because the ritual, not the tool, is precious is. Beneath each grid is not so much a series of discrete clues as an interconnected poem: where a crossword normally opts for brevity and encourages an ill-formed blob of “common knowledge,” Granger’s clues overflow with emotion and personal history, which confirms dignity. of his grandmother’s place in the puzzle’s cultural canon. She is often the referent of the clue and the subject of its reverence: in ‘3rd Movement – Her Archive’ for example, the answer to a particular clue: ‘It was blue and covered with flowers. You massage her sore hands and tell her how beautiful she looks. She doesn’t believe you” — is “DRESS.”
In Granger’s work too, a straight line connects the personal and the political; the lines of the crossword grid, zoomed out a bit, are not so much a map as a city map. The artist came of age in Columbus and observed the effects of urban planning tactics against poor black residents. In the 1960s, in the wake of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, construction of I-71 destroyed a historically black neighborhood and cut it off from the rest of the city. Those who could afford it left, and the wealth slowly disappeared from the community. Grocery stores closed, schools deteriorated, property values plummeted, and public works projects disappeared.
So in ‘1st Part – Cartography Catastrophe’ the answer to the clue is ‘Here they contract like throats. Messy lines that move us” is “INTERSTATE.” And such urban dislocation is reflected in the rogue urban planning of the crossword puzzle grid. A black square can prevent two words from crossing each other; a grid might ignore genre entirely and contain no intersecting words at all, but only separated islands of linguistic isolates.
The negative image of the ruthless gamers Granger admires is indeed the single-minded, iron-clad bureaucrat – the Robert Moses type whose invisible hand can part the sea of a community, whose influence can seem, if not Biblical, then dark. conspiratorial. So games and city planning are both about agency. In Games: Agency as art (2020), philosopher C. Thi Nguyen departs from the traditional analytical framework of comparing games to other media—praising a video game’s plot as “romantic” and calling its graphics film-like—and instead focuses, in one approach that is a model for that of philosopher John Deweyabout the medium-specific gameplay experience. According to Nguyen, the real ancestors of game designers are not writers or filmmakers, but process artists and urban planners. They’re trying to cope [with] and strengthen users’ freedom of choice to achieve certain effects,” writes Nguyen. “Games are an artistic cousin of cities and governments.”
Granger’s refusal to accept the conventions of the crossword grid is therefore also a refusal to accept the urban grid, and the restrictions on agency it imposes. The crossword is ephemeral – solved and then discarded – but each of Granger’s framed puzzles arrives as a preserved, intentional artifact. The openness of standard dictionary clues is rejected in favor of an obscure poetry that makes the viewer-solver work even harder and functions as a kind of editorial office. Ultimately, he rejects the idea that a puzzle has a solution at all. Some clues suggest no clear answer, and where there are answers, some are crossed out in a form of marking analogous to graffiti on a shiny new high-rise: unreadable to the luxury developers who built it, but full of meaning for the community who is displaced by it.
Granger calls this series of refusals “modding,” after the practice of altering the look or mechanics of a video game, akin to the ways in which low-income black and brown communities develop their own ways to thrive within systems that were not built for them. In ‘4th Movement – Common American Bond’, 2-Down’s clue is: ‘There is no map that can take you here. It’s the arm’s length between you and your brother on the dance floor. They’re the little gaps between you and your loved one’s skin when you collapse at night. It’s the distance traveled between the plate and your mouth when your grandma makes your favorite meal.” The answer in the grid is crossed out. If you look closely, the letters behind the lines appear to spell HEAVEN, but it’s impossible to tell.
Cameron A. Granger: 9999 continues through January 19 at the Queens Museum (Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens). The exhibition was curated by Sarah Cho.
