An Open Essay on the work of Arthur Jafa, Kahlil Joseph, Jackson2bears and Khadija Saye

by the DYSCORPIA Team

June 17th 2020 VERSION 1

This is an experiment in asynchronous collaborative writing and discussing started by the dyscorpia team. As a group of largely (but not entirely) white academics and artists, we write these words with the understanding that amplifying the voices of others, learning not just their ideas, but also their very modes of thought, and creating conversations around their ideas and work is the most ethical and meaningful thing we can do at this moment. Below is a version of the essay on June 18th 2020.

CLICK HERE FOR AN EDITABLE VERSION

On May 15, 2020, Rafael Leonardo Black, died of Covid-19 at the age of 71.  Born in Aruba, Black moved to New York in 1965 and worked for decades in 9 to 5 jobs that allowed him to practice his real joy during his off hours: art.  After decades of creating evocative and extraordinarily detailed sketches in his Brooklyn apartment, he had only recently had his first New York gallery show in 2013.  

While Black is far from the only artist of color who has passed away this year, his death is an index of not just all that we have lost due to Covid-19, but also all that we are currently mourning as a result of the systemic racism and sexism that continues to keep certain people from using their talents, experiences, ideas, and pleasure to achieve not only prominence but, also more simply, a living wage.  This is a deep shame during this moment when, ironically, artists and their creations are continually illustrating how vital and necessary they are; how art, rather than work, is and must be what makes life worth living. 

This shame is, of course, ancient, but it is being experienced in a fresh way and expressed anew. Equally clearly, artists of color not only recognized the potential of this moment; they made it happen. While Miriam Hansen and others have argued that in the early days of cinema, D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein developed a new language of cinema capable of illustrating and shaping their world, today, thankfully, this language is being recast from very different perspectives. 

Without the sharpness of these artists’ critiques and the clarity of their expressions, we would not have been able to collectively develop a language to display the pain of the world in a way that could lead to real global change.  It is their experiences we are sharing; it is their desires that are collectively being expressed.

These efforts have not gone without notice and are central to the appeal of these artists’ works. Take, for instance, the brilliant Arthur Jafa.  A legend of the LA Rebellion, Jafa won the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale for The White Album, a montage of discussions of race and violence designed to “confront the crutches white viewers rely on when in search of absolution.” Borrowing his structure from the extended musical remixes of DJ Larry Levan, the piece is designed to interrogate the audience on their reactions to what they are viewing.  This effort, focused on the breaks, has been described as a “new film language takes on the clichés of empathy.” This new language shows us how to create action not out of empathy, but rather out of self-critique. Often enough, the deeply felt emotions of those onscreen is made ironic through their placement, and address us in ways that punctuate the idiocy of racism.   

Jackson2bears Iron Tomahawks  also powerfully cuts up and remixes samples of ‘documentary and Hollywood films, Internet video and television news clips’ that exemplify racist stereotypes of Indigenous people in Canada. Jackson2bears uses custom built digital software to ‘edit, manipulate and ‘scratch audio/video media in realtime’. The result is a high energy, high tempo and highly saturated critique of colonialism and damaging stereotypical representations in cinema and the mass media that Jackson2bears performs live at art galleries and festivals. In his sensitive reflection on his ongoing Iron Tomahawks project, Jackson2bears acknowledges the complexity of re-presenting and thus potentially perpetuating the damaging colonial mythologies and stereotypes that are contained in the samples he remixes. Through the repeated performance of Iron Tomahawks however, he has come to understand working with these clips as ‘a kind of cathartic release’. To Indigenous new media artist, writer and curator Archer Pechawis after one of his performances Jackson2bears explained:

“I felt haunted by these images of the “Indian” (the noble savage, the bloodthirsty warrior, the squaw, and the Indian princess) and that for me what I was “calling” (convoking, incanting, conjuring) were no ordinary spirits, but those spirit-simulations that ghost our presence(s) as Onkwehonwe, those apparitions and spectres that have haunted our people for so many generations. I said that, to me, these spirits are our spectral Others, those collectivities of phantoms and revenants that compose a hauntology that even today spectralizes everywhere, all across Turtle Island. It was my intent, I said, to conjure these ghostly apparitions such that they might be publicly exorcised.” pg 24

The title Iron Tomahawks comes from Jackson2bear’s grandfather who used to tell Jackson2bears that when his people saw rifles for the first time, ‘they called them iron tomahawks and marvelled at the mysterious magic that this new technology possessed: the ability to call upon the spirit of He-no the Thunderer.’ Iron Tomahawks directs us to an important Indigenous understanding of technology which is to consider its spirit or essence and how we as humans relate with it. For Jackson2bears, the clips that he works with have a hauntological power that must be attended to.

We also find a powerful sense of hauntology in the work of Khadija Saye where the artist incorporates traditional Gambian rituals as a way to find a spiritual grounding after experiencing trauma. Dwelling: in this space we breathe is a series of wet plate collodion tintype photographs where Khadija Saye, working with artist Almundena Romero, photographed herself enacting ‘invented rituals using sacred objects from her parents’ country of origin, Gambia, whilst clothed in outfits belonging to her mother.’ Saye’s mother was Christian and her father is Muslim, so this series was a way for Saye to explore the struggles of forming a diasporic identity in a dual faith household. In the Dwelling: in this space we breathe series, Saye is photographed with objects that had been blessed by an animist faith healer, a ritual tradition practiced by Gambians of all faiths. In Nak Bejjen for example, we see Saye sitting crouched facing to the right whilst a disembodied hand on the left presses the cow horn onto her neck. The fragile and fugitive collodion process lends a spectral and mysterious feel to the image - white wisps emerge from the horn like plumes of smoke, but it is hard, if not impossible to discern whether the smoke is real or an effect from the traditional photographic process. In an interview about her work, Saye likens the process of collodion photography where collodion is poured onto a sheet of aluminium to the process of baptism where water washes away sins. 

Dwelling:in this space we breathe was curated into the 2017 Venice Biennale as part of the Diaspora Pavilion, making Khadija Saye the youngest emerging artist to be exhibited that year, alongside highly recognized and established artists such as Yinka Shonibare and Ellen Gallagher. At 24 years old, inclusion in this exhibition promised the start of an important career which would enable Saye’s work in which she explored her diasporic identity to be spread globally. 

Shortly after installing her work in the biennale, on the 14th June 2017 (three years ago last Monday), Saye died alongside her mother, Mary Mendy in a 20th floor apartment in the Grenfell fire. 72 people, disproportionately of minority ethnic communities, died in the fire that consumed the 24-story social housing block in North London. The fire spread unstoppably as a result of the low-cost and flammable facade that had been applied to it the year before supposedly in order to appease the wealthy neighbours whose mansions overlooked the block. The local government had opted to use a cheaper kind of aluminium cladding in order to make meager savings whilst it had £274m of reserves. It had earlier (just before the election), offered part of these reserves as rebates to residents paying the top rate of council tax. 

Arthur Jafa, Khalil Joseph and Jackson2bears use the tools of social media and the methods of collage and appropriation to gather together little pieces of our world to show the relationships between actions, events, catastrophes, and traumas.  They act less as mirrors and more as methods for reconfiguring racism less as an impenetrable force and instead as a historical situation that we can get ourselves out of.  In the process, they reveal the world as something worth living in and fighting for. Or in the words of Khadija Saye who channelled her work through a more traditional yet also fragile medium, these works and artists “search for what gives meaning to our lives and what we hold onto in times of despair and life changing challenges.” 

We know there are many more of these stories to tell; they go on and on and they must be told.  If you have one, please share:

Spike Lee does something similar in BlacKkKlansmen, the best film of 2018.  This film, like so many of his masterpieces, uses surreal and abrasive techniques from the French New Wave and other efforts to confront seemingly unstoppable traumas in the world from continuing.  Like Jafa, Lee belittles the racist structures and people around us in order to take away their power and make the fight against their stupidity both more possible and more pleasurable.  Its incorporation of found footage documenting recent police violence and other atrocities makes it clear how connected the long history of racism in America is to our current moment.  Quiet and beautiful moments where actors and activists stare at us through the camera are then used to do the doubled work of asking viewers to critique themselves while offering art and activism as the real site of meaning and beauty in our world.  

BLKNWS, also part of the 2019 Venice Biennale, is artist Khalil Joseph’s ‘antidote’ to the dangerous representation of black stereotypes in mainstream US news. Joseph’s 2019 BLKNWS installation consisted of two large flat screens hung on a wall onto which large photographic images were pasted. The installation occurred twice in the exhibition - in one instance the photographic image was of a group of black soldiers, the other a group of black catholic nuns. Streaming on the glossy flat screens was a high energy, addictive two-channel video montage created using newly created imagery and contemporary news clips, alongside found and archival film footage. Clips of leading intellectuals talking about racism and inequality and cinematic films about slavery were interspersed and juxtaposed with black musicians and artists talking about their work and heart warming viral internet memes of loving fathers with their children. Underfoot was a plush red carpet and viewers were able to sit on little white cubes. With strong overhead lighting the space felt a lot like a trade fair booth. Which it was. BLKNWS was originally a pitch to the television industry for a news channel that was ‘less whitewashed and unbiased’, more ‘creative and reflective on the world we live in and the history that shaped it’.  When it was rejected by all the major US networks, Stanford’s University Cantor Arts Centre supported it instead. In his review of BLKNWS for Artnet, Andrew Goldstein advocates for the urgent need for the BLKNWS project to become real.

References

Arthur Jafa - The White Album - Venice Art Biennale 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NBQzglpkIo&t=59s [ accessed 17th June 2020]

Kahlil Joseph - BLKNWS - Venice Art Biennale 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X-ylDbYN1E [ accessed 17th June 2020]

Dinsdale, E (2020) Artist Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS project is an antidote to a toxic news cycle, Dazed and Digital, https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/49132/1/artist-kahlil-josephs-blknws-project-is-an-antidote-to-a-toxic-news-cycle [accessed 17th June 2020]

Goldstein, A (2019), Why TV Executives Should Make Artist Kahlil Joseph’s ‘BLKNWS’ Network, a Star of the Venice Biennale, Into a Reality, Artnet News,  https://news.artnet.com/art-world/diddy-black-news-kahlil-joseph-1839327 [accessed 17th June 2020]

Weaver, A (2014) Ruffneck Constructivists, Frieze, Issue 164, Jun - Aug 2014 https://frieze.com/article/ruffneck-constructivists  [accessed 17th June 2020]

Iron Tomahawks Project Description, Jackson2bears website, https://jackson2bears.net/iron-tomahawks-project  [accessed 17th June 2020]

About, Jackson2bears website,  https://jackson2bears.net/ [accessed 17th June 2020]

Jackson2bears (2014) My Post-Indian Technological Autobiography, "Coded territories : tracing indigenous pathways in new media art", Steven Loft, Archer Pechawis, Jackson 2bears, Jason Edward Lewis, Steven Foster, Candice Hopkins, and Cheryl L’Hirondell; edited by Steven Loft and Kerry Swanson. University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2014, http://hdl.handle.net/1880/50240 [accessed 17th June 2020]

Estate of Khadija Saye website, https://www.estateofkhadijasaye.com/dwelling-in-this-space-of-breath [accessed 17th June 2020]

Khadija Saye, Diaspora Pavillion Catalogue curated by David A. Bailey & Jessica Taylor pp. 42-43, 2017. https://abe6925c50.site.internapcdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DP_A5_EXHIBITION_BOOK_FINAL_Web.pdf [accessed 17th June 2020]

Nak Bejjan by Khadija Saye 2017, Tate Gallery, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/khadija-saye-26652

Khadija Saye website, https://sayephoto.format.com/about

An Introduction to Khadija Saye, Venice Biennale: Britains New Voices, BBC 2, 1st September 2017.