“In
the quest for equality, black folks have tried everything. We’ve
begged, revolted, entertained, intermarried, and are still treated like shit.
Nothing works, so why suffer the slow deaths of toxic addiction and the
American work ethic when the immediate gratification of suicide awaits? In
glorious defiance of the survival instinct, Negroes stream into Hillside,
California, like lemmings. Every day they wishfully look heavenward, peering
into the California smog for a metallic gray atomic dot that will gradually
expand until it explodes some one thousand feet over our natural and processed
heads. It will be the Emancipation Disintegration. Lunch counters, bus seats,
and executive washrooms be damned; our mass suicide will be the ultimate
sit-in.”[i]
In this darkly comedic, decidedly pessimistic excerpt from Paul
Beatty’s The
White Boy Shuffle the idea of black agency is radicalized (has been
radicalized) sometime after the 90’s L.A. Riots, as a movement of mass suicide – a relational gesture in
which the black body (re)commits itself to its own agency (see: Seppuku)
in the face of anti-black racism and hatred. Beatty’s 1996 debut novel walks out
the idea and possibility of radical liberation in the face of oppression – the seeds of which, one
might say, were planted in the popular imagination with the advent of the
American Civil Rights Movement. The White Boy Shuffle imaginatively,
fantastically, and fatally extends the provenance of 20th century
black liberation into the 21st century – an idea marched into the
present. That is: if black bodies are consistently, reluctantly, inadvertently,
and violently imbricated in the schemata of American capital, liberation’s only recourse is to deprive
the system of its corporal capital.
I woke up this morning wondering: are we living through a suicidal
moment? And are we, the living, tragically subsumed in the machinations of a
system which tallies each slow death?
***
«les lucioles, quant à elles,
tentent d’échapper comme elles peuvent à la
menace, à la condamnation qui désormais frappe leur
existence.»
– Georges Didi Huberman[ii]
In May I visited Rennes, a charming city in the Brittany region of
France. I stayed with my friend and academic colleague Nawelle and her sister
Myriam – two truly courageous French-Algerian
women who, in the course of our time together, explain to me the cultural concept
of métissage. Analogue to the American mulatto, the métis differs only in its choice of catachrestic illustration. The métis is a polyblend,
a poor weave[iii]
in the construction of a whole fabric. A mule cloth. Funny thing about the métis, if in our curiosity we were to look up the word on French Wikipedia, the first
image to greet us is a handsome, confident portrait of the leader of the free
world circa 2012. In any case, Nawelle and Mimi are gracious hosts, escorting
me through various parts of Brittany (including a lovely afternoon in Nantes),
introducing me to friends, functioning occasionally as my personal translators.
While in Rennes, Nawelle and Mimi took me to an art opening[iv]
at a tiny two level gallery, Le Praticable, quaintly situated on the first
floor of a well-kept half-timbered Breton home. We
turned a corner on quiet, crepuscular Rue de la Monnaie and down a sloping, cobblestone alley found ourselves in another world entirely. The alley, in the grand
shadow of Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Rennes, was teeming with people chattering about
anything and everything: gossip, politics, labor, art, sex, w/e. When finally I
found the entrance to Le Praticable behind the buzzing phalanx,
I entered the space half addled and without expectation. It was all a kind of
happening. Something undeniably vital.
On the main level arranged along and between the small gallery’s white walls were the
curious works of a handful of artists. A series of uncanny photos by Laure Ledoux, featuring an almost recognizable portrait of Bernard
Hopkins. Camera obscura fixed into whole eggshells (Sthéno, Dorothée Buffetaut) and rich black tableaus of carbon powder marked only on
their fragile surfaces by accidental contact (Plaque d’impression carbone, Vincent Vallade).
Down a spiral staircase to the lower level I found myself in a small
room lit by one bare hanging bulb. On the ground to my left was a large black
geodic sculpture and mounted along the walls opposite sixteen black panels
(paper?), each covered, at first glance arbitrarily, with gold leaf. The sight
at first conjured thoughts and images of works in a tradition of geometric
abstraction and minimalism. Then the leaf, perhaps an allusion to Klimt? The
striking black and gold, traces of Rashid Johnson’s Message
to Our Folks. ΑΦΑ? I wasn’t sure what I was looking at.
But I was drawn in.
***
I should say that my trip to France was such a breath of fresh air, a
relief from the violence (mediated and physical) of the nation to which I am
legally bound. Having lived this past year in Marfa, west Texas. Having worked
at the Chinati Foundation. In the solitude of its rolling plains, under its uncompromised
sky, I felt myself burn. Ghosts linger in the quiet density of this little
desert town. Marfa, separated in time and space from the rest of the country,
is also a concentrated representation of the nation at large. Today the town is
an America in microcosm dealing with the devil of gentrification, disputations
of border control, dramatic changes to cost of living, the exigencies of Big
Oil, and the specter of segregation (“abolished” in the sixties, well after Brown v. Board of Ed). All of this twenty
minutes away from Jeff Davis county (the monument of Jefferson shortened
to a more familiar Jeff). This is no condemnation of Marfa, as full of
love and beauty as it is. This is only the confession that my solitude in its
small vastness turned into days and weeks, then whole months of loneliness – the kind of loneliness
one experiences still around people, people (mostly) for whom I had to perform
a persona, people around whom I could not be myself. So France and old friends
signaled a freeing prospect.
Of course gone are the days of France as black utopia – just as the north
no longer signifies, per se, a radical notion of (black) freedom. Today I am,
we are, haunted everywhere by the post-exotic notion that I or we could run from it, and still be in
it. Such is the reach of globalization and
modernity.
But in a world where hate can find you anywhere, so too can love. For
my brief moment in May, in the west of France, I could live the fantasy of my
liberation. I could occupy the sense that I had escaped something horribly
virulent and oppressive. I could talk about the traumata of America
objectively. I felt a kind of hopeful newness being there between worlds,
between languages, with my Gauloises Brunes and bière blanche.
Where was I ontologically, being in opposition to what? Could I
replicate or exist perpetually in that feeling of hopeful newness? “What
does it mean to run from something while you’re still in it? That was the issue
I was trying to work through. One of the constraints that we are held within is
the whole history of the meaning and value that is attached to the “I” and to
the proper name,” explains Fred Moten in a
recent interview.[v] It, perhaps for the poet, is the
realization that freedom is only in the making, that the walls of language and
identity hold one to a carceral reality which undergirds fantastical escape and
hinders imaginative transcendence. It, something in the
way of things that remains, if you’ve seen it, without name. The haunting and haunted mutability of a man’s sunsum.
More concretely it is the attempted enslavement of a psyche and the corporeal
death of a woman who could have been your mother, your sister, your friend, hanged
in prison – her life,
her body, bent post-mortem into a question mark.[vi]
The dialectic nightmare and commodification
of Freedom itself.
Like bowerbirds we (re)construct our self-image by recourse to objects
material (cigarettes, beer, cheese) and immaterial (language, thought, culture) – these acquisitions, this
system of imposed values being the scrim with which modernity veils itself,
through which we see and fetishize each other, behind which we might hide.
In France I want to know if I can be French. I want to know if I can
shed a dead skin. I can buy French. I can study French. I can learn what is
French. But I suppose
I know this does not make me French. It
does not negate a past and it does not protect me from the present. Whiteness
invariably secedes, crosses the street, crosses itself, rends as it is rent,
differentiates – withdraws in attempt to claim and (re)cover – wherever my presence
constitutes and asserts ahistorical blackness, fugitive property,
hypervisibility (as would be the case in a legal dispute) or invisibility (as
is the case in healthcare and labor), I am at/a systemic risk and may be
treated or revealed as such.
The quandary of spirit this augments is one of active versus passive
faith, of doing and being. When is it prudent to act on intuition, to risk the
leap of the fool, to beat against a current? When is it best to play the hanged
man, to retreat, wait, and expect the moral arc to bend agathotropically toward
you or us? I mean, what is my and your relation to the future?
die in
dies Buch
geschriebene
Zeile von
einer Hoffnung, heute…
***
The installation in the small subterranean space of Le Praticable was
comprised of two pieces by French artist Johanna Rocard. The titles of both
pieces presented as a single installation: Ce que nous avons trouvé sous la terre, Nous
avons de merveilleux espoirs (What We Found Underground and We
Have Marvelous Hopes). Johanna, a young woman
dressed smartly in black, was present and rapt in conversation with another
visitor, discussing the nature and properties of her geodic sculpture.
Not intent on talking to the artist I figured I would start with a
close viewing of the series of sixteen black panels. These were mounted neatly
along the wall opposite in two rows of seven, with the last two pieces (also
one above the other) installed along the adjacent wall, the work wrapping
slightly around its viewer. At first I found their installation more curious
than the pieces themselves. They were projecting out into the space, mounted
close to, but not against the wall with impressive, square-head black nails.
This brought dramatic dimension to the sixteen flat surfaces (which otherwise
would have been framed or mounted directly onto the wall), not only allowing
for shadows cast behind each panel, but the nails also evoking urgency,
emergency, fixity, the clavo of esclavo of esclavitud.
Each of the panels, made of what looked to be heavy-stock paper
(Arches maybe), were warped slightly. The way wet paper warps, the
memory of its fibers altered by the introduction of a malleable, living fluid.
Trying to read the work at different angles I noticed, beneath the neatly
applied gold foil, each panel marked by an inky after-image, a photographic
negative. Cause perhaps for the warping. These were laser-etched prints,
flash-burned ghosts in queue, black bodies gathered under the lean limbs of
trees, along gates, in open roads and open spaces. Who were these people, their
contexts, etched like nuclear shadows into these nail-fixed pages? The gold
leaf seemed to cover these figures in odd ways. Sometimes obscuring the face.
Sometimes draping the chest. Nawelle asked if I recognized any of the images. I
couldn’t and wasn’t sure I was interested
either. Their ambiguity caused in me some ennui. Where was the artist taking me
and whose bodies were being used to take me there?
Then there was the sculpture, a large lustrous black stone of alien
provenance. Walking finally around it I realized that the sculpture had been
placed/installed so that upon entering one might see only its black surface. On
the other side it reveals a surface open and coated in gold glitter, geodic
revelation. I knelt to inspect it
closer, witness to a tiny spider crawling across its surface, from black to
gold and back.
I thought at first of Rashid Johnson and his show “Message to our Folks”. I remembered seeing one of art21’s New York Up Close features on the inception and creation of
his black and gold shelves, their signifying symbols, textual references in
post-modern blackness. The video was titled:
A reference to a children’s artbook by Lawrence Weiner (which also happens to be one of my
favorite books, a gift from an old friend). Black and gold. Black and yellow.
These colors are featured prominently in Johnson’s work, are integrated into the language of his installations. The
decadence of his shelves speaks to the moment, for the presence of a black
present born from a historical past. In Rashid’s work you also find surfaces etched and branded – The Gordon Gartrell
Episode (reference to an episode of the Cosby show in which Theo acquires a fancy black and canary
yellow Gordon Gartrell
shirt to impress a crush) features branded red
oak flooring. Mounted on the wall, its dark grain implicated in the proprietary
act of branding, the graff culture mark of etching, gold spray paint. In The Gordon Gartrell
Episode Rashid fashions a kind of surface burdened more by the weight of its
branding than by the objects it carries. As with many of the shelves, there’s this marvelous push and
pull between the surface of the shelf and the objects it shoulders. Others of
his shelves feature objects like space rocks spray
painted in gold – his use of spray paint spare – dots, dashes, lines resisting the morphology of a tag/name which might
eclipse the work itself – the work itself being the sincerest signature of the artist.
Several of Johnson’s conceits, I thought, were present in Johanna’s work. Was there some
transnational, cross-cultural affinity? The artist was clearly experimenting
with perceptual revelations, but how?
Eventually I sequestered a moment of the artist’s time, asking her the
questions that lingered in me after seeing the work. The images on the panels,
it turns out, were photographs of protests – and the gold leaf, placeholders for their banners. Iconographies of
protest in her oeuvre are associatively linked to the notion of hope – locating her creations
in the idea that resistance and hope are synonymous expressions. This, in part,
inspired by philosopher Georges Didi Huberman’s «Survivance des Lucioles» (Survival of Fireflies),
the philosophy of Édouard Glissant, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, among others.
Dialogue with the artist opened my eyes to her vision. The poetic act
of searching these parapoetic objects for a trace of the familiar
frustrates the viewer, forces the viewer to step back and regard the objects as
a whole, regard their gold. That one finds gold, an object historically of commodification,
here represents both resistance and hope – value. Part and parcel of the installation were questions of activated
resistance, actively searching for a provenance, and the suggestion that in the
resistance, in the search itself was (a confrontation with) the object of
value.
***
in this book
the line about
a hope, today…
from Todtnauberg
by Paul Celan
(trans.
Pierre Joris)
“It’s not fully about the
predicament of history. It’s about what you’re able to author yourself, and how you’re able to form the future, rather than living purely, kind of, in the
past.” says
Rashid at the end of “Rashid Johnson Makes Things To Put Things On”.
In France I remember I am someone’s nightmare and someone’s dream.
Back in the states I listen to Frank Wilderson III admitting in a talk that “What civil society wants and needs from black people is far more
essential, far more fundamental, than land and profits. What civil society
needs from black people is confirmation of human existence.”
Rashid builds upon what he refers to as an “evolution of escapist
practice”.
I ask and she is not familiar with
the work of Rashid Johnson, but later she notes, after looking him up, the
aesthetic similarity. Black and gold. Or black gold. The black(ness) of Johanna’s work was
for me both affirming and amusing. Amusing in that blackness is, has become, a
foundation for representations of hope and resilience. Affirming in that
blackness remains a symbol, a position – remains beyond what can be claimed as
human or of the world. In an artist statement Johanna admits reflexively an
imposition of whiteness corollary to the structural position of blackness
inherent in the work. «Dans
un même
mouvement, le geste d’uniformiser
et d’occulter
les messages n’est
pas sans rappeler les pratiques de censure où les
articles et photos gênants
étaient
remplacés par des
blancs.» Paraphrasing:
In the act of obscuring and making uniform (via gold leaf) the protest banners,
the artist also commits an act of censorship, remembers how historically
agitated and agitating bodies and articles were/are appropriated, replaced,
blotted out, altered, censored by whites. I find in this final statement a
poetic consciousness, a responsibility for and toward the presence of both
positions in the parapoetic object. The value (gold) of these (black)
figurations remains vital to a system which replicates, ad infinitum,
subjection. Though complicit in its use of black bodies, her work exists in
both vectors of whiteness and blackness, claiming neither in search and
critique of provenance, in search of what turns a subterranean desire for
emergence and actualization.
The risk that one might travel in search of, and never return to or
find, a home – home in a way marked by the invention of the new world – animates a frailty
which, in some venues, operates also as a kind of fugitive resilience. Neither
suicide nor nomadism per se, because the exigencies of such lifestyle choices
require an agency denied blackness. More like a repeated rejection, ejection – always precipitated by a
desire to know if one has arrived, or if one has simply sojourned. In search of
arrival, constantly arriving. In search of. I want to caution you from letting
any thing or any person take your tongue. I want to caution you being suicided.
«there
is a blessing which my humiliation no more/ is the distance at which it is
yielding to love»
(from The Queen
Johannes by Lew Daly)
***
Also published at 3:AM Magazine.
[i] Beatty, Paul
(1996). The White Boy Shuffle. New York, NY, Picador. Print p.2.
[ii] Didi-Huberman,
Georges (2009). Survivance des Lucioles. France, Editions Minuit. Print p14.
[iii]
as in toile
métisse
[iv]
Part of the larger
Festival Oodaaq
2015
[v]
Moten,
Fred. Donham,
Housten.
July
20,
2015.
“POETRY BEGINS WITH THE WILLINGNESS TO SUBORDINATE WHATEVER THE HELL IT IS THAT YOU HAVE TO SAY” : AN INTERVIEW W/ FRED MOTEN”. http://openhousepoetry.com/2015/07/20/poetry-begins-with-the-willingness-to-subordinate-whatever-the-hell-it-is-that-you-have-to-say-an-interview-w-fred-moten/
[vi]
“She
has
a
face
that
looks
like
family
and
so
I
feel
it
more
than
most…God
have
mercy…”
said my Mother, Nancy Sanchez-Taylor, on
the death of Sandra Bland. via Viber conversation,
July 25, 2015; 9:40 a.m. EST. Followed
by “sad” 9:43 a.m. EST.
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