We saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood last night, me D an my brother, who is in town for the week.
First of all it was at least thirty minutes too long. There were all of these extended movie-within-the-movie scenes that were wholly unnecessary, but by the end of the film one can’t be mad at them anymore because it’s possible that not only is the film about being gratuitous but all the good bits are themselves the gratuitous ones.
D left the theater saying he felt that the whole thing was Tarantino giving the middle finger to his critics and exercising his unchecked will to do whatever he wants. That the Manson kids represented social justice warriors and Brad and Leo a composite of Tarantino’s position as a stronghold of a now older Hollywood generation. At the beginning Al Pacino tells Leo that he’s being brought on as a guest star on new tv shows as a punching bag to establish the show’s dominance over Leo’s now cancelled western series.
I like seeing movies with D because usually his reading will enter at a more social and political level whereas I walk out of the theater blinded by my own fixation on trying to situate movies and directors approach to the real and so I get all caught up in probably reading too much into formal elements. By the end of dinner or drinks afterward we have synthesized our perspectives or agreed to disagree. If D reads this I hope he thinks this is true.
I thought that the movie seemed like, yes, Tarantino pissing all over everyone who hates him, but also like him, after years of hearing it endlessly from critics, making a case for his own work. Though he's pissing on everyone, ultimately the movie tries to answer to the eternal criticism–that his films are excessively violent, misogynistic, etc. Tarantino's answer is kind of garbled, but so is the reality of the situation. The thesis of the film–if there has to be one–seems to be something like we live in an infinite regress of violent images and realities inflecting upon one another. At this stage, who is to say what's real or not?
I told D and Max that I thought it felt like a companion piece to Natural Born Killers, which he wrote and Oliver Stone directed. It is one of my favorite films, honestly. It's so fucked stylistically and for the obvious reasons. I thought Once Upon seemed like Tarantino at least returning to a bookmarked page somewhere toward the end of NBK in that 1. You see a strange collaged almost essayistic stylistic tic in OUTH that NBK models too. In NBK, it's more heavily mediatized; newsreel and faux archival footage. But NBK also does this thing where certain shots are in color and others on black and white and there's not a whole lot of apparent logic as to why or when this happens. Likewise in OUTH, we get these strangely lengthy faux archival film clips from Leo's character's career while another character narrates his past. Maybe instead of toggling between kinds of film like in NBK, we could say horizontally, Tarantino toggles up and down within reality-layers. The best instance of this is when Leo is shooting a scene as a guest star on a show and we watch probably 5 minutes of the scene, as though its completed and edited. But then Leo forgets a line and we're on set; someone feeds him his lines from offscreen, but we never see the crew; the lighting is still perfect. We're still in the camera's reality. Then the camera cycles back to one and Leo starts again. I can't remember if the entire 5-6 minute scene is actually one shot or not; I don't think it was. But it was an interesting mechanism, placing us so wholly in the viewer's position and then keeping us there visually even as the artifice falls away narratively? I dunno.
Anyway, the other reason I felt like this was a revisitation of NBK was because, to me, Once Upon seemed like Tarantino's most direct attempt at making a film about violence and about film/media, since writing NBK. His other films are violent and they are films made by someone who clearly loves movies and the entire apparatus and industry etc. But they aren't about these things. Are they?
An actor and his stuntman best buddy; guy who made a career out of acting out violence and a guy who made a career of shouldering the weight of the real violence required to simulate violence for the screen who has also possibly killed his own wife in real life. And then the Manson family running around in the background–living on a disused western film set in Chatsworth–as we count down to the date we (are presumed to) know marks the murder of Sharon Tate. In Tarantino's version of that night, the three kids who go to Cielo Dr. sit in their car and decide that they'll kill Jake Cahill (Leo) instead of whoever lives in Terry Melcher's old house. They decide this because, as one of the girls says, shouldn't they kill the very people who made them violent? She says a thing about how everything on tv is murder; if it's not (i can't remember what the other thing was), it's murder. The whole thing becomes a different kind of revenge fantasy, wrought by youth on an older generation for making them who they are. It's sort of kill your idols thing, I guess?
This scene was fantastic and I think the crux of the whole film–climax obviously but also the theoretical crux–the kids attack Brad Pitt's character, who is tripping on acid and at first can't figure out if they're real. Tex Watson says what he's been historically recorded as having said in the real Tate murders: "I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business," as he points his gun at Pitt, visibly so freaked out. What ensues is a Scary Movie (the comedy franchise) level slapstick fight beyond anything Tarantino has put together in the past, I think. It's so gratuitous that you can't even be disgusted by it; it's hilarious. The fight ends with Leo taking a flamethrower from a WWII action film he'd starred in and burning the final, already mangled Manson kid to a crisp in his pool. The whole thing is perfect, I think; it digs into this idea that these kids are like pantomiming some image they've ambiently absorbed. It feels like western pastiche even spatially. and then: "I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business," the actually uttered line, said so wannabe-desparado-style.
Anyway, then everyone is okay. Brad goes to the hospital. Leo stands outside of his house and then gets invited to hang out with Sharon Tate and her friends and he is SO thrilled.
I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this movie. I am messaging with Z about it now on Slack. I'm sure my thoughts will evolve. I don't think it was holistically Great, but it was a good film for Tarantino to make. It's funny because people are like oh it's personal and intimate but I think it's not really. It's reflective, primarily.
The great thing is that it was the kind of movie that makes me think about how much I love movies and the film industry and how much I miss Los Angeles. It also made me think about this idea I had for a Western about this woman Biddy Mason who was a freed slave, but her old master made her stay with him. She fled and made her way to Los Angeles, where she became, I think, the most propertied black woman in the city at the time. I would want this to be an ultraviolent, hyperclassical western road movie. Maybe I will start to outline it.
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Friday, July 26, 2019
punishment
Last night D and I went to see this play I had read about. It was an adaptation of Kafka's In the Penal Colony by this young black woman. Adaptation is a stretch; she borrowed the basic premise, and migrated it to an "investigation" of blackness, representation, and performance. I'd read this interview with her where she talked about loving German philosophy and stuff, so I thought I'd go and find my intellectual soulmate I guess.
The play turned out to be incredibly bad; like, on every level terrible. It's not worth going into in detail, especially because D and I already did our bit about it when we met up with Zoe, J, and Natasha after. But it was really depressing. It was so basic and neither provided a compelling structural analysis of prisons nor a psychological, emotionally salient portrait of prisoners. It was like mostly just watching some guys jump around. And then there was this whole monologue at the end where one of the guys said a bunch of stuff about punishment and consumption etc. It was your usual "black bodies black bodies" schtick.
In the NYTimes review of it, they said that it was one of a number of plays in the last year that were offering a racially-charged "theater of discomfort"–the others being Fairview and Slave Play. I got really interested in this tidbit; because the play did feel like some bad Brecht-take. It all got me thinking about projection and alienation; so much of this work relies on the playwright's imagination of their audience. Like identifying white people and working from some imagined concept of what will make them uncomfortable. The big trick is that white people don't feel uncomfortable consuming blackness; it's kind of business as usual. Making a whole play that tries to pin them under that is silly. It's not an intervention, it's just entering into the existing flow of events.
But this bad Brecht thing, it's very compelling. I like the energy, but it's not being done intelligently. I wonder if these writers have read Jean Genet's The Blacks: A Clown Show. I have it at home and haven't read it still, but in reading about it, it kind of feels like impossible to beat. I think something key to it's success is that it flips race relations around, not in this Fairview way, like "now YOU'RE on display, white man!" It does that but it adds others layers of confusion and race-play such that one is more successfully alienated–not just uncomfortable momentarily, but alienated from one's general and actual position. Genet's prefatory note from the show:
"This play, written, I repeat, by a white man, is intended for a white audience, but if, which is unlikely, it is ever performed before a black audience, then a white person, male or female, should be invited every evening. The organizer of the show should welcome him formally, dress him in ceremonial costume and lead him to his seat, preferably in the first row of the orchestra. The actors will play for him. A spotlight should be focused upon this symbolic white throughout the performance. But what if no white person accepted? Then let white masks be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theater. And if the blacks refuse the masks, then let a dummy be used."
Seems so fun to me!
Anyway, D and I got a drink at KGB after the show; everyone there was loud, old and drunk. We left and met up with Zoe and J at Clandy. I ran into B and was really worried that I wasn't pleasant enough to him, but he was on a date I think so like what sort of stop and chat would be had? I want to be friends though. Maybe I'll text him. We sat outside and had a drink and it was nice. Then we went to the radio station across the street for this party; the party was curiously boring. I don't know why, but it was just so whatever. Ran into T there, who I think we've all decided sort of sucks. Sometimes he is nice, but he really wants to be such a Cool Guy and who has time for that. I think I still like him because of that time he came to LA and was pleasant; I think because he wasn't on his own turf, he was more humble and willing to play ball. It seems so unfun to be one of these Cool Guys, god.
We left and went to Bacaro, which was far more pleasant. The four of us sat and had a drink. Zoe and J were really cute. Zoe, I am abstaining from telling you this more directly because I sort of doubt it makes that much of a difference to you, but I thought he was really lovely and I'm glad you brought him along. Natasha met us there and Zoe and J left and then we went back to the party which was even MORE boring this time. We saw Dean, though, which is really always a pleasure.
We went back to Clandestino, where Natasha and D struck up a conversation with a table of handsome Europeans who were talking about love at first sight. We all chatted about this; most of the conversation was about this one guy in the group, H, who was English and I guess was saying he wouldn't dance floor make out with a guy? Or he would? It seemed confusing, whatever they were saying. Natasha and H really hit it off and everyone got booted out of the conversation; it turned out, of course, that he knew our friend C and her sister G. Our world is never going to get any bigger, I swear.
D and I left strategically and, as we did, H asked for Natasha's number. We were overly thrilled–generally thrilled for her, but also I think we both miss the psychological drama of trying to sleep with someone so it's fun to play a role in someone else's quest. And I think we are both proud of our collaborative wingmanning skills.
Somehow, in the process of all of this, we'd both become incredibly drunk. So I vomited and whined a lot about feeling awful, and finally went to sleep.
The play turned out to be incredibly bad; like, on every level terrible. It's not worth going into in detail, especially because D and I already did our bit about it when we met up with Zoe, J, and Natasha after. But it was really depressing. It was so basic and neither provided a compelling structural analysis of prisons nor a psychological, emotionally salient portrait of prisoners. It was like mostly just watching some guys jump around. And then there was this whole monologue at the end where one of the guys said a bunch of stuff about punishment and consumption etc. It was your usual "black bodies black bodies" schtick.
In the NYTimes review of it, they said that it was one of a number of plays in the last year that were offering a racially-charged "theater of discomfort"–the others being Fairview and Slave Play. I got really interested in this tidbit; because the play did feel like some bad Brecht-take. It all got me thinking about projection and alienation; so much of this work relies on the playwright's imagination of their audience. Like identifying white people and working from some imagined concept of what will make them uncomfortable. The big trick is that white people don't feel uncomfortable consuming blackness; it's kind of business as usual. Making a whole play that tries to pin them under that is silly. It's not an intervention, it's just entering into the existing flow of events.
But this bad Brecht thing, it's very compelling. I like the energy, but it's not being done intelligently. I wonder if these writers have read Jean Genet's The Blacks: A Clown Show. I have it at home and haven't read it still, but in reading about it, it kind of feels like impossible to beat. I think something key to it's success is that it flips race relations around, not in this Fairview way, like "now YOU'RE on display, white man!" It does that but it adds others layers of confusion and race-play such that one is more successfully alienated–not just uncomfortable momentarily, but alienated from one's general and actual position. Genet's prefatory note from the show:
"This play, written, I repeat, by a white man, is intended for a white audience, but if, which is unlikely, it is ever performed before a black audience, then a white person, male or female, should be invited every evening. The organizer of the show should welcome him formally, dress him in ceremonial costume and lead him to his seat, preferably in the first row of the orchestra. The actors will play for him. A spotlight should be focused upon this symbolic white throughout the performance. But what if no white person accepted? Then let white masks be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theater. And if the blacks refuse the masks, then let a dummy be used."
Seems so fun to me!
Anyway, D and I got a drink at KGB after the show; everyone there was loud, old and drunk. We left and met up with Zoe and J at Clandy. I ran into B and was really worried that I wasn't pleasant enough to him, but he was on a date I think so like what sort of stop and chat would be had? I want to be friends though. Maybe I'll text him. We sat outside and had a drink and it was nice. Then we went to the radio station across the street for this party; the party was curiously boring. I don't know why, but it was just so whatever. Ran into T there, who I think we've all decided sort of sucks. Sometimes he is nice, but he really wants to be such a Cool Guy and who has time for that. I think I still like him because of that time he came to LA and was pleasant; I think because he wasn't on his own turf, he was more humble and willing to play ball. It seems so unfun to be one of these Cool Guys, god.
We left and went to Bacaro, which was far more pleasant. The four of us sat and had a drink. Zoe and J were really cute. Zoe, I am abstaining from telling you this more directly because I sort of doubt it makes that much of a difference to you, but I thought he was really lovely and I'm glad you brought him along. Natasha met us there and Zoe and J left and then we went back to the party which was even MORE boring this time. We saw Dean, though, which is really always a pleasure.
We went back to Clandestino, where Natasha and D struck up a conversation with a table of handsome Europeans who were talking about love at first sight. We all chatted about this; most of the conversation was about this one guy in the group, H, who was English and I guess was saying he wouldn't dance floor make out with a guy? Or he would? It seemed confusing, whatever they were saying. Natasha and H really hit it off and everyone got booted out of the conversation; it turned out, of course, that he knew our friend C and her sister G. Our world is never going to get any bigger, I swear.
D and I left strategically and, as we did, H asked for Natasha's number. We were overly thrilled–generally thrilled for her, but also I think we both miss the psychological drama of trying to sleep with someone so it's fun to play a role in someone else's quest. And I think we are both proud of our collaborative wingmanning skills.
Somehow, in the process of all of this, we'd both become incredibly drunk. So I vomited and whined a lot about feeling awful, and finally went to sleep.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
zilla
Yesterday was my 26th birthday. I always get really anxious on my birthday and tend to take it out on my loved ones. Last year, I purposefully quarantined myself, spending the day alone. I don't remember what I did. My ex-boyfriend, on each of the birthdays we were together for, would jokingly call me a "zilla" as in a mutation of "bride-zilla." So last year, in an effort to resist my supposed tendency toward this, I spent the day alone until going to dinner with him and my parents.
This year, I didn't even really think about this. I felt sort of whatever about the whole thing; 26 shmany shmix. It feels like a nothing year, adulthood purgatory. But I didn't feel like I needed to do the whole quarantine thing. D and I happened to sleep separately, so I woke up alone. I was a little bit late to work but let myself off the hook. I realized I had an immense amount of anxiety over whether anyone at work was going to know it was my birthday. I walked myself through a variety of scenarios as I walked in. When I sat down, Mark said "Happy Birthday" very positively, so I relaxed. Later, everyone surprised me with cupcakes and I was pretty awkward about it, thanking them way too much, I think. I tried to make a joke about mid-summer birthday trauma, but it didn't land. Later, Z facilitated a surprise flowers and champagne delivery from Liv, my gallerist.
I went to MNZ after work in an attempt to "treat myself" but everything was kind of awful. Nothing fit right, but I knew that this was not my fault, so I didn't feel too bad about myself. I bought a decent top, mostly for the sake of it.
I went down to Chinatown and met D. He had gotten me some extra birthday gifts in addition to a larger and extremely sweet one. They were: keys to his apartment and a humidifier because I'd been complaining endlessly about my dry nostrils. He also gave me a beautiful note that made me cry on the way to the restaurant.
We had a lovely dinner and I stopped feeling birthday anxiety. Then we went back to his house and had some champagne and did some drugs and Natasha and Edie came over. Then we went to Karaoke.
Karaoke was nice and I was glad to see everyone who showed up. I got pretty drunk and sang a lot, I guess. There was only one bummer person, which is my fault anyway; I invited her.
I realized that this bummer woman reminded me of this other bummer woman that Ellen and I had met over the weekend. Both of them fall into my least favorite category of person: "the open wound." Both of these women are incredibly annoying, though I'm sure well-meaning, and naggy. I told Zoe that I think it boils down to them having this attitude of like "I deserve better" or "Don't you see how HARD it is to be me." Now, I'm thinking about the bummer woman from my birthday, and I do feel bad for her. I know for a fact that her life has been spectacularly shitty in ways that I can't even imagine. But still, I think her attitude could improve. Anyway, I don't want to be mean to these women who probably are having reasonable difficulties in one way or another. I've already spent so much time shitting on them.
It's mostly just that I would hate to be them or be seen as being like them. To be needy and lacking in self-awareness or esteem. Makayla sent me this piece from the Paris Review, "The Crane Wife," about this woman who calls off her wedding and it's all about how she made herself be ok with her fiance's total shittiness. It was maybe not the greatest piece of writing but it was interesting and relatable, which in turn felt a bit embarrassing, realizing how unfortunate most of 2017 and 2018 was.
I was texting with Zoe and she said that it seems that I mostly have dated men who are yielding and that I don't diminish myself in these relationships. This is why my relationship with my ex-boyfriend is ultimately sort of embarrassing for me–that from the outside I could appear self-possessed, but then actually be (barely) functioning with such a tiny space allotted for me. Not sure who does the allotting, maybe it's a collaborative process. I'm willing to take the blame in a sense, because I took part in that squishing feedback loop. The reality of how that relationship functioned runs so opposite to how I think people might perceive me–even just people who know me more professionally–that afterward it feels a bit like, "can I trust my own view of myself!" "Am I a pushover?" "Am I a totally deferent shit-eating personality type?" The good news is that as soon as we broke up, I felt like myself and it turned out I wasn't taking shit or making rotten deals in other other parts of my life, just in the relationship! I do think that I do this thing where I bargain away my desires in the interest of what seems to be ease, or self-sacrifice. I think the desire to sacrifice myself in these moments comes from an anxiety that I'm a totally high-strung, bulldozing narcissist. So it's like penance or something.
Anyway, I'm no longer particularly interested in punishing myself for some unnameable original sin of my personality. My birthday anxiety came and went; I mostly handled it ok. I didn't snap at anyone except for Ellen for some reason, but I apologized and she knew I was mostly kidding anyway. At my most anxious, D hugged me and we sat on the couch, and he said he understood how I felt and that it was fine and sometimes just how it goes. Natasha got me a nice cake that said "We love you, Guitaria!" Everyone mingled and seemed to have a nice time. Zoe and I did our usual teenage dirtbag duet. Everyone went to Clandestino afterward and sat and talked about nothing.
This year, I didn't even really think about this. I felt sort of whatever about the whole thing; 26 shmany shmix. It feels like a nothing year, adulthood purgatory. But I didn't feel like I needed to do the whole quarantine thing. D and I happened to sleep separately, so I woke up alone. I was a little bit late to work but let myself off the hook. I realized I had an immense amount of anxiety over whether anyone at work was going to know it was my birthday. I walked myself through a variety of scenarios as I walked in. When I sat down, Mark said "Happy Birthday" very positively, so I relaxed. Later, everyone surprised me with cupcakes and I was pretty awkward about it, thanking them way too much, I think. I tried to make a joke about mid-summer birthday trauma, but it didn't land. Later, Z facilitated a surprise flowers and champagne delivery from Liv, my gallerist.
I went to MNZ after work in an attempt to "treat myself" but everything was kind of awful. Nothing fit right, but I knew that this was not my fault, so I didn't feel too bad about myself. I bought a decent top, mostly for the sake of it.
I went down to Chinatown and met D. He had gotten me some extra birthday gifts in addition to a larger and extremely sweet one. They were: keys to his apartment and a humidifier because I'd been complaining endlessly about my dry nostrils. He also gave me a beautiful note that made me cry on the way to the restaurant.
We had a lovely dinner and I stopped feeling birthday anxiety. Then we went back to his house and had some champagne and did some drugs and Natasha and Edie came over. Then we went to Karaoke.
Karaoke was nice and I was glad to see everyone who showed up. I got pretty drunk and sang a lot, I guess. There was only one bummer person, which is my fault anyway; I invited her.
I realized that this bummer woman reminded me of this other bummer woman that Ellen and I had met over the weekend. Both of them fall into my least favorite category of person: "the open wound." Both of these women are incredibly annoying, though I'm sure well-meaning, and naggy. I told Zoe that I think it boils down to them having this attitude of like "I deserve better" or "Don't you see how HARD it is to be me." Now, I'm thinking about the bummer woman from my birthday, and I do feel bad for her. I know for a fact that her life has been spectacularly shitty in ways that I can't even imagine. But still, I think her attitude could improve. Anyway, I don't want to be mean to these women who probably are having reasonable difficulties in one way or another. I've already spent so much time shitting on them.
It's mostly just that I would hate to be them or be seen as being like them. To be needy and lacking in self-awareness or esteem. Makayla sent me this piece from the Paris Review, "The Crane Wife," about this woman who calls off her wedding and it's all about how she made herself be ok with her fiance's total shittiness. It was maybe not the greatest piece of writing but it was interesting and relatable, which in turn felt a bit embarrassing, realizing how unfortunate most of 2017 and 2018 was.
I was texting with Zoe and she said that it seems that I mostly have dated men who are yielding and that I don't diminish myself in these relationships. This is why my relationship with my ex-boyfriend is ultimately sort of embarrassing for me–that from the outside I could appear self-possessed, but then actually be (barely) functioning with such a tiny space allotted for me. Not sure who does the allotting, maybe it's a collaborative process. I'm willing to take the blame in a sense, because I took part in that squishing feedback loop. The reality of how that relationship functioned runs so opposite to how I think people might perceive me–even just people who know me more professionally–that afterward it feels a bit like, "can I trust my own view of myself!" "Am I a pushover?" "Am I a totally deferent shit-eating personality type?" The good news is that as soon as we broke up, I felt like myself and it turned out I wasn't taking shit or making rotten deals in other other parts of my life, just in the relationship! I do think that I do this thing where I bargain away my desires in the interest of what seems to be ease, or self-sacrifice. I think the desire to sacrifice myself in these moments comes from an anxiety that I'm a totally high-strung, bulldozing narcissist. So it's like penance or something.
Anyway, I'm no longer particularly interested in punishing myself for some unnameable original sin of my personality. My birthday anxiety came and went; I mostly handled it ok. I didn't snap at anyone except for Ellen for some reason, but I apologized and she knew I was mostly kidding anyway. At my most anxious, D hugged me and we sat on the couch, and he said he understood how I felt and that it was fine and sometimes just how it goes. Natasha got me a nice cake that said "We love you, Guitaria!" Everyone mingled and seemed to have a nice time. Zoe and I did our usual teenage dirtbag duet. Everyone went to Clandestino afterward and sat and talked about nothing.
Sunday, July 21, 2019
continental drift
Yesterday, Ellen and I went to a baby birthday; it was nice, but this woman got visibly annoyed that we were talking to her husband. This was really funny; we were talking to him about their baby, and he had started the conversation. No one's body language was suggestive or anything. Ultimately, I felt bad for this unpleasant woman. She was so predictable.
We went downtown and met A for dinner at Dimes. I saw this girl I'd been blowing off for drinks for the last two weeks outside. I'm not sure why I am avoiding meeting up with her so intensely; it's like every other possible option feels more compelling. Not that every interaction must result in the creation of some value, actual-financial or otherwise, but somehow talking to her feels like a massive dead-end.
Ellen and A are both starting medical school this year and it was exciting to hear them talk about it. Ellen apologized for the boring topic and I was like please, no this is so incredible. To work so hard and have to continue to work so hard to achieve this thing, and to have that work and the knowledge that comes from it be so material and indisputable seemed so gratifying. A talked about wanting the knowledge in her body, and I thought that was a great way of distinguishing it. The information she and E will leave with will never exit their bodies in the way that reading some canonical art criticism might pass through me. I generally try to hold onto as much as I can, but it's somehow very different. This information is also subjective, and its use value completely arbitrarily evaluated.
Dinner was nice and then we went to Clandestino and hung out a bit longer. Someone made the mistake of bringing up Oberlin, and Ellen and I were tipsy enough to sink into a nostalgic conversation about school. We talked about this one day in the dead of winter, when we watched music videos all day and researched every rapper we could think of's net worth.
Earlier in the day, Makayla–who was leaving to return to LA in the evening–had asked me when we had time to do our schoolwork in college, if we were spending so much time ruining each others lives and throwing parties. I told her that the schoolwork usually happened while we were doing those things.
Ellen and I discussed this and two things were settled on. 1) That we did a lot of the exciting programming and art things that we did in order to have an excuse for a party. 2) That part of my eternal feeling of professional alienation comes in part from the fact that I was constantly making work alongside friends and now I don't really have that. I'll probably never have it to the degree that I did at Oberlin.
N came and met up with us. I hadn't seen him since I moved to New York. I realized, as we were hanging out, that we have been friends for four or five years now; I also then realized that, to him, this might mean much less since he is significantly older than me. This was all interesting to me because I didn't think I'd have so much to say to him, but it was exciting to catch up and I also realized how much I did actually see him back in LA. He, Ellen, and I talked about romance and the basic logistics of our lives at the moment. He expressed a growing sense of fatigue, which I thought seemed healthy considering his situation in the last few years–a version of art world nomadism. He also had recently fallen in love and been rejected, or so he thought. Ellen and i both felt that he should go after her. At this point in the conversation, I became aware of the fact that I really, really hope things work out for him.
N is very smart and sensitive, I think; but he has a bad reputation. I see why this is, but ultimately he is one of the more rigorous people making art that I know personally. It is hard to reconcile those things, ethically or whatever. His bad reputation is not usually for the rigor–or lack thereof–of his thinking but for how he treats women, or how much he wants to sleep with most women he comes across or something. I am honestly not even sure of how bad he actually is in this arena. Even my logic in this sense is uncool, though, because it's basically based on the fact that he's never tried to sleep with me. Anyway, from last night, it seems to me that he really just wants to be in love and–in the near future–to cease his own personal continental drift.
I found this conversation funny because in all these years of friendship I don't think I'd ever really talked to N about love and it felt suddenly like we were peers instead of him being this older artist who let me hang around with him on occasion. This isn't even the right way of saying this; I didn't feel like he wasn't taking me seriously before. But now, Ellen and I were giving him advice? And he listened? He probably would have previously. I just had the sense that something had shifted. We spoke as three friends who had seen a few iterations of one another's lives, which makes a difference. In all senses, I felt glad for it.
After Ellen left, N and I talked about art and I was pretty drunk so I told him about my show at the big gallery date tbd. I felt weird saying anything about it, and I don't know why I did, though I'd like to think it is because I respect his opinion. Somehow saying something to him and explaining what I was hoping to make made it more real and made me see how nascent the ideas are. He humored me, or maybe he thought it was actually interesting; I don't know, but it was nice and put some gas in the engine.
We also talked about this black artist who I have been dogmatically defensive of over the years, and I can't totally remember what N said, but he made a pretty convincing argument for the artist's overall failure. I argued-slash-conceded that maybe my dogmatism was out of psychological necessity, because if he is bad, then maybe I am too. And he needs to exist in order to give me something to reach toward and away from a particular kind of zombie identity art–art object as a trace of subjectivity, and self expression-that I worry I'd otherwise be kidnapped by and fall prey to in the eyes of critics. We agreed that anyone, any black artist specifically, trying to work on this spectrum has to deal with the fact that David Hammons will always already have bested them. N generously said that my work sat differently; I think he meant outside of these poles–structurally ineffective institutional critique and sexy identity work that dresses itself up in conceptualist drag–and I really hope that is true and remains so.
I had a moment, though, where I worried that I'd digested and accepted N's criticism of this artist with such ease simply because N is a white man. I've pushed back more on others when they've criticized this same artist. I dismissed the thought; N's criticism was thorough and well-informed.
This post now feels like a fan letter to N, and maybe it is. I think he is good, and doesn't get enough credit. Maybe it's mean to say that someone doesn't get enough credit, because it implies that they're doing poorly; but here I mean that he should be written about as important in the future. This is a Lot, but I do really think this. Moreover, I am glad we are friends.
We went downtown and met A for dinner at Dimes. I saw this girl I'd been blowing off for drinks for the last two weeks outside. I'm not sure why I am avoiding meeting up with her so intensely; it's like every other possible option feels more compelling. Not that every interaction must result in the creation of some value, actual-financial or otherwise, but somehow talking to her feels like a massive dead-end.
Ellen and A are both starting medical school this year and it was exciting to hear them talk about it. Ellen apologized for the boring topic and I was like please, no this is so incredible. To work so hard and have to continue to work so hard to achieve this thing, and to have that work and the knowledge that comes from it be so material and indisputable seemed so gratifying. A talked about wanting the knowledge in her body, and I thought that was a great way of distinguishing it. The information she and E will leave with will never exit their bodies in the way that reading some canonical art criticism might pass through me. I generally try to hold onto as much as I can, but it's somehow very different. This information is also subjective, and its use value completely arbitrarily evaluated.
Dinner was nice and then we went to Clandestino and hung out a bit longer. Someone made the mistake of bringing up Oberlin, and Ellen and I were tipsy enough to sink into a nostalgic conversation about school. We talked about this one day in the dead of winter, when we watched music videos all day and researched every rapper we could think of's net worth.
Earlier in the day, Makayla–who was leaving to return to LA in the evening–had asked me when we had time to do our schoolwork in college, if we were spending so much time ruining each others lives and throwing parties. I told her that the schoolwork usually happened while we were doing those things.
Ellen and I discussed this and two things were settled on. 1) That we did a lot of the exciting programming and art things that we did in order to have an excuse for a party. 2) That part of my eternal feeling of professional alienation comes in part from the fact that I was constantly making work alongside friends and now I don't really have that. I'll probably never have it to the degree that I did at Oberlin.
N came and met up with us. I hadn't seen him since I moved to New York. I realized, as we were hanging out, that we have been friends for four or five years now; I also then realized that, to him, this might mean much less since he is significantly older than me. This was all interesting to me because I didn't think I'd have so much to say to him, but it was exciting to catch up and I also realized how much I did actually see him back in LA. He, Ellen, and I talked about romance and the basic logistics of our lives at the moment. He expressed a growing sense of fatigue, which I thought seemed healthy considering his situation in the last few years–a version of art world nomadism. He also had recently fallen in love and been rejected, or so he thought. Ellen and i both felt that he should go after her. At this point in the conversation, I became aware of the fact that I really, really hope things work out for him.
N is very smart and sensitive, I think; but he has a bad reputation. I see why this is, but ultimately he is one of the more rigorous people making art that I know personally. It is hard to reconcile those things, ethically or whatever. His bad reputation is not usually for the rigor–or lack thereof–of his thinking but for how he treats women, or how much he wants to sleep with most women he comes across or something. I am honestly not even sure of how bad he actually is in this arena. Even my logic in this sense is uncool, though, because it's basically based on the fact that he's never tried to sleep with me. Anyway, from last night, it seems to me that he really just wants to be in love and–in the near future–to cease his own personal continental drift.
I found this conversation funny because in all these years of friendship I don't think I'd ever really talked to N about love and it felt suddenly like we were peers instead of him being this older artist who let me hang around with him on occasion. This isn't even the right way of saying this; I didn't feel like he wasn't taking me seriously before. But now, Ellen and I were giving him advice? And he listened? He probably would have previously. I just had the sense that something had shifted. We spoke as three friends who had seen a few iterations of one another's lives, which makes a difference. In all senses, I felt glad for it.
After Ellen left, N and I talked about art and I was pretty drunk so I told him about my show at the big gallery date tbd. I felt weird saying anything about it, and I don't know why I did, though I'd like to think it is because I respect his opinion. Somehow saying something to him and explaining what I was hoping to make made it more real and made me see how nascent the ideas are. He humored me, or maybe he thought it was actually interesting; I don't know, but it was nice and put some gas in the engine.
We also talked about this black artist who I have been dogmatically defensive of over the years, and I can't totally remember what N said, but he made a pretty convincing argument for the artist's overall failure. I argued-slash-conceded that maybe my dogmatism was out of psychological necessity, because if he is bad, then maybe I am too. And he needs to exist in order to give me something to reach toward and away from a particular kind of zombie identity art–art object as a trace of subjectivity, and self expression-that I worry I'd otherwise be kidnapped by and fall prey to in the eyes of critics. We agreed that anyone, any black artist specifically, trying to work on this spectrum has to deal with the fact that David Hammons will always already have bested them. N generously said that my work sat differently; I think he meant outside of these poles–structurally ineffective institutional critique and sexy identity work that dresses itself up in conceptualist drag–and I really hope that is true and remains so.
I had a moment, though, where I worried that I'd digested and accepted N's criticism of this artist with such ease simply because N is a white man. I've pushed back more on others when they've criticized this same artist. I dismissed the thought; N's criticism was thorough and well-informed.
This post now feels like a fan letter to N, and maybe it is. I think he is good, and doesn't get enough credit. Maybe it's mean to say that someone doesn't get enough credit, because it implies that they're doing poorly; but here I mean that he should be written about as important in the future. This is a Lot, but I do really think this. Moreover, I am glad we are friends.
Sunday, July 14, 2019
my dad is cool
I spoke to my dad earlier and he told me about this thing that happened the other day when he was hanging out with some guys from my parents crew of friends. What happened, basically, was that everyone but my dad somehow had heard that the college-aged son of one of the families in the crew had recently transitioned. My dad was aghast at the fact that somehow this had entirely gone over his head. He hadn't seen the kid in a bit, but had seen their father a few times, and everyone else in the friend group.
The whole thing was being treated especially delicately because their mother died of breast cancer in 2018 after putting up a long and admirable fight. So in the span of a year, the family lost the wife/mother and then began to deal with the eldest's transition. The dad was being really good about it, was the sort of party line. The eldest's younger sister on the other hand had taken the position that this was all a phase.
Anyway, this was all really crazy; I haven't seen anyone in this family since the mother's funeral. I was glad to hear that the father was being cool about it, but I also felt sort of bad for him because what could possibly make him miss his wife more than navigating this whole thing solo.
But I guess why I thought to blog about this was because I really appreciated the way my dad talked about the whole thing. He said that he'd told another friend who hadn't yet heard about this, and this friend was like "do you think that all this gender stuff being in the news is encouraging kids to question themselves" and my dad was apparently like omg no if anything it just makes people feel safer and like there is a place for that conversation. It's just funny because I don't think of my dad as at all backwards or conservative but he is still technically a boomer. His frankness about the whole affair was like, charming in one way, like the way he was talking about it was just like "wow!" and he seemed happy that our family friend had support from their family. And it was cool that these boomer-age guys were just sitting around being like "tite" about their friend's kid transitioning.
I have a great deal of faith in my dad, but he constantly surprises me in the ways that he makes good on that without prompting. When I was younger, his frank and consistent like...ethics-mindedness would often pan out as feeling pretty moralizing. For instance, one time in middle school I caught wind of a some popular boys' plot to send a weird girl a valentine with boogers in it. I told my dad about it, thinking it was so Crazy and Wow Wild Right, and he was appalled. He made me call the school office anonymously like I was intervening in a terrorist plot. I was mortified and resentful, but of course he was right to make me do it. Another example, less moralizing but more just illustrative of the kinds of thing he'd be into: for a few Christmases when I was in high school, he would make these gift bags for homeless people–like 100 of them with gloves and gift cards and stuff–and keep them in his car to hand out. Another example: Right after 9/11, my brother–4 or 5 yrs old at the time–said that 3,000 people dead didn't seem like that big a deal, so my dad made him count 3,000 pennies out of this massive jug the housekeeper would dump any found change into.
As we've both aged, his ethics feel less judgey and more matter of fact to me. In my adult years, I've done some things that are way worse than not telling anyone about the booger plot, and he's basically refrained from any wrist-slapping and just been like "so what are you going to do?" He usually knows what I'm going to do, and we often agree about what is right and about what is easy. But even when I take the easy way, he's pretty chill about it. However, I realized recently that I have a massive fear of him thinking that I'm morally bankrupt or baseline manipulative. So maybe I'm not unscathed. But the net effect is good because it's made me an awful liar; I basically never lie to him and I find it excruciating in most other situations.
My dad's massive commitment to "doing the right thing" probably comes from the fact that he almost got nabbed for a really bad thing that he had nothing to do with when he was younger than I am now. Like high level conspiracy charges. I think about that a lot; it's like now he's some perfect example of a kantian ethic - a genuine dedication to a categorical imperative born out of indebtedness to some unseen power, quite consciously not a God. Maybe I will re-read Kant to this end.
Anyway, talking to my dad on the phone is one of my favorite past-times. He is a really cool guy.
back
I haven't been updating so much because I had to write this essay about the Whitney Biennial and then we had the table read of the movie Jos and I are writing and my brain sort of folded in on itself due to obsessing over fixing our blunders and so I had to not write anything for about 5 days, on any project. On Friday night, though, I went to Metrograph for a solo dinner and Meetka (hi Meetka!) said I should update my blog.
I feel like I don't have much to say because of all the writing recently, something that is surprising. I can manage to pull off completing a lot of work week to week, but apparently my ability to process my own experiences and write can be exhausted. I'm also in the process of preparing for the play in October, and that has been harrowing in its own way. I need to stop doing this thing where I put off scary new tasks till the very last minute.
In any case, my anxiety has crested, and I now feel primarily excited about the play.
Yesterday evening, I interviewed this young musician for a magazine. He lives quite close to me so I went to his apartment. I was a little nervous about this because in his other interviews he seemed either awkward or calculating. Like the kind of guy who just wants to make you squirm. But I got to his house, and he was very nice and much slighter than I'd thought from the photos. His house smelled intensely of incense and was sort of dim and there was a lot of diaspora-core decor around in a way that felt comforting, like my Aunt's old apartment in Queens. I should have asked him if he lived alone, because it would have been interesting if he, a twenty-something yr old producer, had chosen the wall-hangings.
We sat on the couch and chatted for about thirty minutes; I Am Cuba was on TV in the background, and I thought this was a perfect conveniently potent element of the encounter that I'd certainly include in the piece. We talked about interviews and architecture and, weirdly, church. I felt guilty that I'd been a little bit grumpy about going to meet him–not that he even knew–because he was really sweet and gracious.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm looking for some sign of Greatness in people when I meet them in passing; I'm so ready to put that on someone. Like wow, a genius! Even typing this, though, I know that isn't true. Most people are terribly dumb and/or dull and you can tell within a few minutes. This kid was interesting maybe because His Thing wasn't My Thing, nor was the way that he talked about his process entirely relatable. But the way he talked about what he wants from it all, that I felt deep sympathy for. Anyway, the whole thing felt somehow enriching; though it's still pretty unclear why. I hope that he gets everything he wants–which wasn't all that much. He primarily seemed to want to be left alone to make his music; I can relate to this. Though, recently, I've been questioning exactly how humble and for-the-love-of-the-game my outlook actually is. I want to be left alone, but I don't want to toil in obscurity.
I'll have to write the piece on him tonight, but right now I just want to draw shitty storyboard frames of this film idea I have had bouncing around my head for the last 3 or 4 months. I was having trouble writing it and I realized I should go back to paper and do some combination of drawing and writing. This happens so often to me that it's become frustrating when I have the realization that I should be writing not typing. Why do I still have to go through this process every time? With this film in particular it makes perfect sense; there is a lot of narration in it and I think I need to know what I'm looking at as I try to think about what anyone is saying. All very practical.
I borrowed Natasha's copy of Douglas Crimp's Before Pictures because he'd died the other day and I really had never read his writing. I'm enjoying it. I think I want to write more art criticism. It would all just be blog posts though, basically.
I feel like I don't have much to say because of all the writing recently, something that is surprising. I can manage to pull off completing a lot of work week to week, but apparently my ability to process my own experiences and write can be exhausted. I'm also in the process of preparing for the play in October, and that has been harrowing in its own way. I need to stop doing this thing where I put off scary new tasks till the very last minute.
In any case, my anxiety has crested, and I now feel primarily excited about the play.
Yesterday evening, I interviewed this young musician for a magazine. He lives quite close to me so I went to his apartment. I was a little nervous about this because in his other interviews he seemed either awkward or calculating. Like the kind of guy who just wants to make you squirm. But I got to his house, and he was very nice and much slighter than I'd thought from the photos. His house smelled intensely of incense and was sort of dim and there was a lot of diaspora-core decor around in a way that felt comforting, like my Aunt's old apartment in Queens. I should have asked him if he lived alone, because it would have been interesting if he, a twenty-something yr old producer, had chosen the wall-hangings.
We sat on the couch and chatted for about thirty minutes; I Am Cuba was on TV in the background, and I thought this was a perfect conveniently potent element of the encounter that I'd certainly include in the piece. We talked about interviews and architecture and, weirdly, church. I felt guilty that I'd been a little bit grumpy about going to meet him–not that he even knew–because he was really sweet and gracious.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm looking for some sign of Greatness in people when I meet them in passing; I'm so ready to put that on someone. Like wow, a genius! Even typing this, though, I know that isn't true. Most people are terribly dumb and/or dull and you can tell within a few minutes. This kid was interesting maybe because His Thing wasn't My Thing, nor was the way that he talked about his process entirely relatable. But the way he talked about what he wants from it all, that I felt deep sympathy for. Anyway, the whole thing felt somehow enriching; though it's still pretty unclear why. I hope that he gets everything he wants–which wasn't all that much. He primarily seemed to want to be left alone to make his music; I can relate to this. Though, recently, I've been questioning exactly how humble and for-the-love-of-the-game my outlook actually is. I want to be left alone, but I don't want to toil in obscurity.
I'll have to write the piece on him tonight, but right now I just want to draw shitty storyboard frames of this film idea I have had bouncing around my head for the last 3 or 4 months. I was having trouble writing it and I realized I should go back to paper and do some combination of drawing and writing. This happens so often to me that it's become frustrating when I have the realization that I should be writing not typing. Why do I still have to go through this process every time? With this film in particular it makes perfect sense; there is a lot of narration in it and I think I need to know what I'm looking at as I try to think about what anyone is saying. All very practical.
I borrowed Natasha's copy of Douglas Crimp's Before Pictures because he'd died the other day and I really had never read his writing. I'm enjoying it. I think I want to write more art criticism. It would all just be blog posts though, basically.
Wednesday, July 3, 2019
;)
I gave this talk in December and just found it on my flash drive, and I think it is the makings of a book intro. Cutting and pasting it here to further mull it over. It cuts off because I wrote the rest by hand just before the lecture. This is now worrisome because I don't remember which notebook I was using at the time. Also I dgaf about "post-humanism" as a framework for this so I'll need to rewrite and figure out some alternative language.
Broadly, the topic at hand today is post-humanism. One of the questions offered as a starting point: How might post-human art re-frame the classical figurations of political subjectivity?
My practice–between writing, making art, and curating–focuses on exploring this notion of “classical figurations of subjectivity” and how they are ruptured, with particular attention to blackness and the internet both. How does blackness rupture classic Western subjectivity–but more importantly, how has it always-already been the very rupture itself?–and likewise, how has the internet and digital technology done the same, often trailing after blackness, reproducing its structures and conditions among non-black subjects?
Additionally, I’m interested in the role of technologies in producing and reifying these “classical figurations” as well as in producing blackness as their outside–which I suppose, in part is why I am here. Photography, mass media, moving image….
In the past I have written about race and feminist image making on the internet, about memes and black cultural production, and more recently about the really big question around blackness and humanity, trying to articulate to myself whether or not, as British Ghanian theorist Kodwo Eshun notes, whether we as black people in America owe anything to the status of the human.”
I’ve largely tried to work through that by looking at the work of other black artists in the US and Europe, and trying to take up new approaches to their inquiry into blackness. So often critics, institutions, and historians begin and end their investigation into black artist’s work with the overly simplistic framework of “positive/negative images,” “combatting stereotypes,” or treating black art (art concerned with blackness) as the creative arm of Black liberation and civil rights efforts.
So today I want to walk myself through that question (How might post-human art re-frame the classical figurations of political subjectivity?) in light of my existing research concerns–lately: this question of the human–and take a route that winds through a few things in contemporary art that have been bothering me lately, which thanks to Danielle and the other organizers I now have a framework through which I can approach them: blackness and post-humanism. maybe this will become an essay from here, for now its schematic, underpainting, a skeleton….
When it comes to contemporary art discourses around identity, politics, identity politics, humanism or at best a liberal anti-humanism or multiculturalism continues to reign as a primary method for discussing artworks. This is the case in a number of ways.
- the artist is treated as an expressive, singular self (following in a western enlightenment ideal)
- HOMO ECONOMICUS We see ongoing use of ‘Man’ as a metric by which to measure everyone else. Even as he is rejected, he is still centered. Even thinking about the language of marginalization, where those marked ‘other’ are cast to the outer rim of some mythic center still held down by white, hetereo, cis masculinity. Further, this homo economicus, which as Dr Shaviro noted, is a utility maximizing entity. After neoliberalism those utilities to be maximized are not only external, but this ‘Man’ must also maximize himself. In art this means: experience, packaged and commodified!
- Ownership - cultural, intellectual property and appropriation are maintained as primary frameworks for discussing 'who gets to make what'
For example, in putting together this lecture I was reminded of a New York Times article about the most recent photography survey at MoMA, “Being: New Photography 2018,” which actually compares the show to Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibition, calling the latest MoMA show, “a long way from” is predecessor. In its title and throughout, the article lauds the exhibition for its humanism (article titled: “What’s new in photography? Humanism, MoMA says”). Of course that could be just one writers opinion, but MoMA’s press release states that the show “asks how photography can capture what it means to be human.” The works “call attention to how individuals are depicted and perceived” and “explore how personhood is expressed today.”
There are other examples of this sort of humanist approach from the last few years–some of my I don’t know if favorite is the word… are: the New Museum’s Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon exhibition, which was not expressly a photo show, but included many still and moving images that similarly claimed to call attention to the perils of representation. “Challenging representations of…” “dismantling reductive representations…”
I want to take a moment to say that I’m not saying that challenging representations is an unworthy task, but rather I’m interested in how treating this as a primary charge for artists and primary framework for artwork analysis limits discourse.
But a few annoying exhibition wall texts and press releases does not an argument make. There’s no evidence to show that the framework of “how personhood is expressed today” obstructs anything else when it comes to a show like being.
So, I’d like to inject blackness into this discourse around post-humanism in art as both a limit and a possibility and look at some instances in which blackness rears its head in contemporary art and slips with the humanistic aims of post-multiculturalism art discourse. But blackness doesn’t offer us a post-humanism that looks like vitalist, new materialist, osthuman future visions Blackness’ intimacy with death–social and biological through the constant threat of gratuitous violence– gives us something else. A posthumanism with death running through it.
—-
Humanism is a broad term with a number of historical instantiations with their own specific flavors. Today, it is my understanding that we’re working with a definition of humanism as a long-upheld western ideal, the human as a universal condition, with ‘Man’ at its center. This humanism descends from Enlightenment ideals–‘The Cartesian subject of the cogito, the Kantian “community of reasonable beings”, or, in more sociological terms, the subject as citizen, rights-holder, property-owner, and so on’. (Wolfe, 2010a, quoted by Braidotti in Post-human.’) Humanism is the ideology of the anthropocene, setting the human apart from nature and non-human actors (animals, plants, technology, and so on). Internally, within the homo sapien species, it is also a tool used to keep the hegemonic order of Western society (and its colonial outposts) by positing that there is such thing as a universal humanity and its criteria–though it sort of claims to be criteria-less–is a given subject’s proximity to ‘Man.’ This idea of ‘man’ emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, a secular and universal man to take the place of Judeo-Christian religious man.)
The constitution and maintenance of this man requires an ‘other’ through which to define itself; he needs a well-articulated negative space. Using the humanist toolkit, his subjectivity is marked out via “consciousness, universal rationality, and self-regulating ethical behavior,” and otherness is defined as his negative image. As those critical of humanism have argued, someone has to be the fall guy, branded as ‘other’ and reduced to less than human for any of this to sustain itself. Rosi Braidotti writes: “The dialectic of self and other, and the binary logic of identity and otherness [are]. . . “respectively the motor for and the cultural logic of universal Humanism.” These others are non-men, non-white, non-western, and/or less-able entities.
This universalizing framework succeeded in reproducing itself without much conflict for a few centuries, until around the 1960s when these ‘others’ succeeded in loudly and enduringly enough questioning its validity. Feminist thought, post-colonial studies, and poststructuralist thought contended, from a variety of angles, that this ‘Man’ upon which humanism hinged was not natural law, but historically produced and was fundamentally flawed–ethically, politically, and philosophically. ‘Man’ and the ‘human’ were prescriptive categories not descriptive ones–a prescription whose byproduct was violence. Further, these (new-ish) anti-humanist lines of thinking recalibrated posture toward ‘difference,’ such that it no longer meant ‘inferior.’
In her book “Post-Human,” Rosi Braidotti traces this historical movement in order to lay the groundwork for her argument toward a post-human approach to subjectivity. Through her discussion of the impetus for a critical posthumanism, it is apparent that part of her hope is to repair the reduction of certain subjects to less than human by exiting the human framework altogether.
I’d like to amend this approach to humanism and posthumanism (and Dr Shaviro’s talk and the conversation between Kevin and him began to get at this) and work through (a sort of pit stop) is this theoretical blank spot, gap, etc. in her account–as a stand-in for many prevailing accounts of humanist/posthumanist discourse-around otherness and the inhuman. Braidotti’s account of humanism exemplifies the larger trend in western European thought, however radical - collecting under one umbrella all forms of otherness when it comes to this task of forming the negative space amidst which Man as been constituted. In my view, this approach requires a minor but crucial amendment, which can be nicely summed up through Alexander Weheliye when he writes that: “In the context of the secular human, black subjects, along with indigenous populations, the colonized, the insane, the poor, the disabled, and so on serve as limit cases by which Man can demarcate himself as the universal human.”
Via Weheliye, my amendment is to note that while certainly all of these conditions serve as limit cases, blackness is absolutely necessary to count among them–at times Braidotti glosses over it, sweeping it into postcolonialism. While blackness is not the only limit case, it is one with notably global reach and permanent status. The sociopolitical situation of blackness globally has changed forms, opened up in some ways, tightened in others, but its logic remains the unthinkable violence of chattel slavery and everything that follows (afterlife of slavery, as Hartman calls it); further, in the context of American politics and visual culture, it is the limit case obsessively on our minds and tongues. In the west, blackness “designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot.” (Weheliye).
So this returns us to a question I noted earlier: Is blackness posthuman?
I think yes, basically. I know that there are some discomforts with the language of ‘post,’ which often seems to signal a completed project, or a moving beyond; but I think that if we can get past that hiccup, then theoretically, functionally, blackness and the posthuman have a relationship to one another worth exploring as we look for alternatives to a humanist approach to artworks.
how is blackness posthuman? Let me count the ways!
There’s an ongoing popular discourse in art, visual culture, and music around blackness and post humanism that primarily gets delivered through afrofuturist aesthetics–images of black cyborgs and aliens, the affinity between black people and technologies such as the turntable and a becoming-cyborg through melding with it in machine musical production. Afrofuturism imagines possible futures built on the outside-ness of blackness in the west, taking up the very real abductions, experiments, invasions that color black histories and building them into speculative fictions. These fictions are found throughout black cultural production–science fiction writing of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney. Funk, techno, and Hip-hop aesthetics.
But alongside this, there is a critical black post humanism that does not necessarily correlate to an afrofuturist aesthetic, though it does often intersect and cross-pollinate with it. “A specific tradition of black radical thought has long claimed the inhumanity—or we could say anti-humanism—of blackness as a fundamental and decisive feature, and philosophically part of blackness’ gift to the world.” This critical black posthumanism approaches blackness’ relationship to the human not as a situation of reduction –black people reduced, alongside other groups, to ‘sub-human’ status– but rather as always-already not-human, inhuman– as the bedrock that is part of the structure’s stability, but also outside of it. Or as Frank Wilderson says: “we give the nation coherence because we’re its underbelly.” This critical black posthumanism doesn’t necessarily call itself by such a name, but is found in black radical thought, post-colonial theory by theorists of the African diaspora, and most recently in a lot of writing that has become popularly known as afropessimism, by writers like Wilderson. His line of thinking, “posits a political ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way.” Unlike the human or even the sub-human, the inhuman slave has no recourse to ownership of self or the potential for self-determination that comes with being a subject as such. The slave is “the object to whom anything can be done.”
Of course, some will argue that since slavery is over, how could this relation–the constitutive divide between slave and human–persist? Emancipation should have rendered black people fully human in the eyes of the state, and only more progress has been made since. It’s here that Hartman’s phrase the “afterlife of slavery” is of use; Hartman argues that while, yes, slavery as a legal and economic system is technically over, its machinations persist–though differently realized, the structures remain in place. For instance, an obvious and material example: the prison industrial complex’s fulfillment of the political and economic goals of chattel slavery.
Another name for this phenomenon, coined by Orlando Patterson, is “social death.” Once easily identifiable in the position of the slave, in contemporary times social death persists as a state of “materially living as a sentient object but without a stable or guaranteed social subjectivity.” In addition to the inability to claim ownership over the self–and as we’ll see one’s image as well–the socially dead exist in but are not of civil society. For Patterson, the socially dead are “ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside.” It should be acknowledged that this concept has its correlates beyond the situation of blackness–can connect it to Agamben’s “bare life,” for instance. In, an American context, however, the black is quite clearly this permanent enemy.
So, in a sort of infinity loop: blackness is posthuman because it is socially dead and (post) humanism is possible and necessary because of social death?
Instead, we can look at moments were a humanist framework–a humanist ethic?–sputters and fails us, to try to sort through its limits. And this returns us to the earlier hooplah about social death and blackness and post humanism. There have been a handful of controversies in the contemporary art world in the last year or two over artworks that try to take up anti-blackness and violence as their subject; only to be met with rage and confusion from many (including myself!) I’ve spent a lot of time trying to pick through these events and the artworks at their center–namely: Dana Schutz’s Emmet Till painting, Henry Taylor’s Philando Castile painting, and Luke Willis Thompson’s Diamond Reynolds video portrait. I want to understand why everyone freaked out, on either side of things, and why things still feel unresolved. Anyway, this long winded description of the interplay between humanism, posthumanism, and blackness gets me to this: In these moments, socially dead blackness grinds to a halt the machinations of an art world trained only in humanist discourse. Humanism will always fail the Thing that is and the things that center the scandal of the black body.
Anyway, the first of these moments is the infamous Dana Schutz controversy For those unfamiliar, Schutz painting depicted Emmett Till’s corpse–a black child lynched in Mississipi in 1955–based on the famous and widely circulated photograph of his body at his funeral. Painted in Schutz’s signature style, the work, titled Open Casket, further mutilated his already mutilated-beyond-recognition corpse. Chaos ensued in the art world. On one side of it: In an open letter, artist Hannah Black called for the destruction of the painting, or at the very least its removal from circulation. Her request was met with accusations of iconoclasm and censorship. Coco Fusco fired back with a long essay on hyperallergic about the dangers of censorship; black cultural nationalism, the long history of white artists making anti-racist art, and validity of abstraction. Importantly, she returns again and again to the framework of “cultural property,” and the misguidedness of Black’s argument that Till’s image is not Schutz’s to use. Many other quick draw hot takes targeted this point; wasn’t Till’s corpse an “archetypal representation of American racism?” useful for “raising awareness”?
This notion of property and image rights fundamentally misses the point. While Hannah did issue a plea for recognition, it is my view that her letter’s real impact is that it models–along with its responses–exactly the dynamics of black life lived in social death that Wilderson and others have discussed. The Schutz controversy made clear that black people still cannot lay serious claim to our selves or our own images. The recirculation of the trauma of anti-black violence is deemed acceptable for the greater good. As Jared Sexton reflected following the controversy, “What is taken to be black is taken for granted, openly available to all.”20 Perhaps not always immediately available as raw, manual labor, black people and blackness continue to embody a speculative and semiotic value thirsted after by a white marketplace. Fusco’s article even draws comparison to the historical trope of depicting the suffering of “Christian martyrs [which] informs much representation of radicalized oppression.” Her argument makes a strange equivalency between belief and the mere accident of being born a certain color.
In the same exhibition, black American painter Henry Taylor presented a painting of a more recent instance of anti-black violence: the July 2016 murder of Minnesota man Philando Castile at a routine traffic stop. In Taylor’s painting–also based on source material captured by a camera–Castile lies unnaturally splayed across the drivers’ seat of his sedan. Taylor’s blocked out style perhaps less depicts than it gestures toward to live-streamed Facebook video posted by Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, who sat in the passenger seat.
Taylor’s painting was invoked throughout Schutz-gate as a sort of bad-faith counterpoint, meant to problematize Black’s focus on Schutz and bolster accusations of an unreasonable interest in cultural property. Detractors asked: Is TAYLOR allowed to represent the horrific violence of police brutality? Are ONLY black people meant to visualize these events? Many plead the fifth, saying that no comment should be made on Taylor’s choice, since he himself is black. Others argued that if Schutz must be taken to task then should Taylor–that the violence lay in the re-representation of the event, not in the image itself. Taylor’s most direct statement on the matter, in an interview in Cultured Magazine, convey that he is preoccupied with anti-black violence on an ongoing basis to the degree of mundaneity. Taylor: “every once in awhile I can’t help but react or respond sometimes. It’s not always emotional. But then you just play the video and it’s like, ‘Wow. Wow. Wow.’”
These paintings together, and the controversy surrounding them, displays an instance where the humanistic framework begins to short circuit. Let’s review:
2) The Humanistic anti-humanist diversity and difference framework loses purchase are as well, unable to totally incorporate these images of the black body under (more than) duress into its empathy and understanding matrix.
Schutz can only justify it by drawing a false equivalency between herself and Till’s mother, (Heidegger) and Taylor only through harking back to European history painting–already the inheritor of Europe’s humanist ideals.
3) Both try to use painting, the re-mediation of photography, to say “please care about this.” Failure of photography when it comes to blackness to repair violences.
Which brings me to another artwork , Luke Willis Thompson’s AutoPortrait (2017), a video portrait of Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of Philando Castile and videographer of the famous clip of his murder. The artist calls it a “a ‘sister image’ to the image of death” found in the original clip and Reynolds’ media presence around that time. Controversy arose as it became public knowledge–due to the work’s inclusion in the Turner Prize nominee exhibition–that the artist, Luke Willis Thompson, was a white new Zealander. Seemingly, the work was an attempt toward a reparative act, to work against the image of violence that circulated so far and wide, to give her ‘dignity.’ But there is of course the elephant in the room : a nonblack artist employing the image of a black woman in order to broadcast affect and comment on an experience not his on. It reeked of a sort of 1970s visual politic, offering “positive images” to combat the negative and stereotypical ones. But again, at the base of all this: what right did he have?
I read this article about the Turner Prize show, and it had the most concise criticism of the work. I honestly can’t sum it up any better so I’ll just quote it. Erika Balsom wrote, for Frieze Magazine:
“The heated controversy around these works has focused on the artist’s identity: what right does a New Zealander of white European and Fijian ancestry have to engage with this material, to profit from black suffering? There are, however, other ways of putting pressure on the artist’s decisions, found within the works themselves, in their misguided apprehension of the previously existing images they depend upon. autoportrait – a depiction of Diamond Reynolds, who in July 2016 livestreamed the police killing of her partner Philando Castile on Facebook – possesses two such points of reference. First, there is the format of the screen test. Immobilizing and objectifying, it is no template for filmic empathy. Reynolds is literally dispossessed of her voice, as Thompson mimics Warhol, an artist preoccupied with surfaces and commodities. Second, autoportrait implies that precious 35mm film is required to rescue Reynolds from the degradation and exploitation of digital image circulation, forgetting that online platforms have equally served to galvanize activism – and that Reynolds herself is one of their canniest users. She may have participated in the making of the film, but she does not need Thompson to restore her dignity.”
Balsom’s take on the work reminds me of a 1978 video by Los Angeles-based artist Ulysses Jenkins. In the work, Jenkins appears on a set accompanied by a stack of televisions, his face obscured by a plastic mask and sunglasses, neck wrapped in American-flag-print scarf, and sporting an Adidas t-shirt underneath a bathrobe, arranged such that only the “ID” of Adidas is visible. The video cuts between this scene and examples of blackface and racist stereotyping from American films and TV. Jenkins repeats a mantra as he settles into a wheelchair and wheels himself toward center stage: “You’re just a mass of images you’ve gotten to know / from years and years of TV shows. / The hurting thing; the hidden pain / was written and bitten into your veins / I don’t and I won’t relate / and I think for some it’s too late!”
While I agree with Balsom’s discussion of Autoportrait (2017), we must be careful not to too aggressively valorize Reynolds’ social media use, and instead allow for the complexity of Reynolds’ existence as a “mass of images”–here largely, images laced with trauma and fear–that have been ventriloquized for the greater social good, much like the images she captured of Philando, and like the photograph of Till’s corpse. It is not so much that Thompson’s portrait does not restore dignity to her–or that he should not have tried–but that it cannot.
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