This selection of essays accompanied the exhibition Homage: Queer Lineages on Video - Selections from Akeroyd Collection presented at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University
ESSAYS
This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition Homage: Queer lineages on video held at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University in the City of New York, June 27 to October 19, 2025. The Wallach Art Gallery’s exhibition programs are made possible with support from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Endowment Fund, the university, and our patrons. Copyright © 2025 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, including illustrations in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission from the copyright holders. Texts © the authors Images © the artists unless otherwise noted Cover: Kang Seung Lee, The Heart of a Hand , 2022 (video still details). Courtesy of the artist, Vincent Price Art Museum and Commonwealth and Council.
Editor: Rattanamol Singh Johal Managing Editor: Jeanette Silverthorne Designed by Cara Buzzell and Lucinda Hitchcock. Typeset in Maison Neue and Flexa.
ESSAYS
04
INTRODUCTION
BETTI-SUE HERTZ
.
08
RATTANAMOL SINGH JOHAL . QUEER LINEAGES ON VIDEO HOMAGE
16
UNBINDING SIGHT
PIPER MARSHALL
20
CARRYING PROMISCUITY AND EXCESS GATAN THOMAS Ë
24
BEDROOM SANATORIUM
(
)
WONG BINGHAO
BING
WHAT HOLDS AN ogether exhibition t o is sometimes hard t ticulate. grasp or ar In the best scenario, ain orks ret the w onomous their aut ological and ont state of being while o the contributing t The relational field. orks placement of the w within one contiguous er space offers the view , with xperience a new e ork affecting each w the others within a spatialized format. After scanning 38 media through the 2 eroyd works in the Ak or and curat Collection, Rattanamol art historian ed Singh Johal select y seven eight works b Homage: artists for Queer legacies on s notion . Johal’ video of homage is built on qualities of gratitude for an individual or ve individuals who ha come before and ed queer associat ories that cultural hist vious era. mark a pre oss orks crisscr The w ory of avant- the hist garde film and video e to its queer in a tribut es. attribut
The network of references throughout Johal’s selection mines its own phenomenological hermeneutics as a series of linked displays of homage. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s tribute to Bruce Baillie and Kang Seung Lee’s tributes to filmmaker Derek Jarman and writer Oh Joon-soo ask their audiences to sit with a clump of grass, gurgling water in a brook, or freshly shoveled dirt. With these calming images that register passing time and the flow of details that unfold in a natural setting, they create spaces eliciting burial, altar, and memorial. The time codes for works by Carolyn Lazard and Tony Cokes nod to the “flicker” technique of structuralist film of the 1960s and the queer aesthetics of dance clubs saturated in acid color and the beats of house music. Picking up on the physical effects, Cokes’ “pulse” is coupled with text phrases by Rainald Goetz, Jeremy Gilbert, and Ewan Pearson, re- energizing the contradictions of that lost world. Lazard’s and Cokes’ works connect through the sensual sphere of clubbing, which appears in the films as a dominant thread that locates desire and its obstacles. Kang’s steady camera fixates on dancer Joshua Serafin, who appears as if in a trance, embracing becoming the late Singaporean-born choreographer Goh Choo San. Here also, the music’s driving beat propels the video forward. Serafin’s dance, compelled by sorrow and an insistence on bringing a life back into view, invokes Goh’s embodiment. Dineo Seshee Bopape also employs her own body in real time, in a performance of unfolding intimacy, insisting on the mirror encounter between the camera and the screen. Documentary is a genre of recovery—a remembrance of what happened or could have been. Seeing the performance of someone who is no longer alive reawakens their presence in mediated form. Filmmaker P. Staff brings Tom of
Finland back into a lived space, literally the home he shared with some of the film’s protagonists who continue to care for his archive. Rirkrit Tiravanija and his crew steady the camera on John Giorno who performs his poems, memoirs, and music works. Here, the camera as a vehicle for archive-making creates the homage simply through its ability to record. The devastation of HIV/AIDS is the barely visible link between the works by Cokes and Lee, and certainly, illness such as heart attacks or strokes often precedes death. A profound sense of loss is just under the surface of this touching exhibition. The works, whether exuberant or meditative, elevate the artists’ voices through bodies, images, and sound to conjure up other bodies as they were. Johal has taken us into circles of care for those who were and that which is cherished. The underlying poetics of sadness in this exhibition, with its expression of care, and the aggregate of longing to secure a place for remembrance, to reach back to a person, a scene, is itself an inspiration. It is the seven artists in their making and remaking with deference and love, with new languages of celebration and loss that comprise this exhibition’s ultimate gifts. I would like to thank Shane Akeroyd for generously offering us the opportunity to present video works from his amazing moving-image collection and to Hana Noorali, the collection’s online curator, for her guidance and collaboration throughout the project. We thank all the participating artists for sharing their compelling and provocative works with us and our audiences. We are so grateful to authors Gaëtan Thomas, Wong Binghao (Bing), Piper Marshall,
BETTI-SUE HERTZ is the Director and Chief Curator at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery. Recent curatorial projects include Rubén Ortiz-Torres: Zonas de Colaboración ; Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology along the Hudson River ; Angela Su: Melencolia; and The Protest and the Recuperation .
and Lynton Talbot for their contribution to the interpretive understanding of the works in the exhibition. I want to wholeheartedly and warmingly thank Rattanamol Singh Johal, for his vision, dedication and commitment to realizing Homage: Queer lineages on video .
A deep, chocolatey brown paste covers the screen, an imperfectly coated top right edge revealing it to be an opaque material layering an otherwise transparent surface. A couple of seconds later, an upward stroke dissolves a strip of this gooey matter, rendering it translucent. A shadowy presence emerges from the left, rapidly creating two, three, four, five, six such upward strokes. With each murky clearing in the viscous overlay, the presence of a figure becomes increasingly apparent, and we begin to discern a face entering the frame whose tongue produces each mark on what appears to be the surface of the screen but is in fact a transparent pane of glass placed in front of the lens. It is the accompanying soundtrack—John Coltrane’s 1964 jazz classic “A Love Supreme”—that lends Dineo Seshee Bopape’s 2006 video its title, and attunes the viewer to the play of intimacy and adoration between screen and subject that is slowly brought into focus in this work, and by extension, in the exhibition Homage: Queer lineages on video . The oft-cited and endlessly revisited early theorization of the “video monitor as mirror” and the associated articulation of “an aesthetics of narcissism” is visualized here with a literalness that can only be read as humorously subversive and poignantly self-reflexive. 1 In the decades separating video’s emergence within the artist’s toolbox as a mode of practice that exploded pretensions of medium specificity, self- referentiality and immanence, video has—among its many uses and abuses—been deployed to document and memorialize, to profess admiration and devotion, to bestow historical significance and contemporary resonance, to express love and enact critical intimacy between makers and their elected interlocutors. Video, in this
esthetics of Narcissism,” , “Video: The A 1 See Rosalind Krauss . 76): 50 1 (Spring 19 October
regard, accommodates a pointing outward—to figures, places, narratives, and experiences whose representations are consciously constructed and immersively presented through its easy manipulation of time, space, sound, and environment. Drawn from the Akeroyd Collection, Homage: Queer lineages on video presents works by seven contemporary artists who use moving images to pay tribute to cultural figures and histories that have been formative, if often (though not always) overlooked. The works in the exhibition, all made over the last two decades, explore how lens and time-based media have enabled artists to articulate desiring and melancholic modes of relationality across generations. Seeking a paradigm for such relationships brings to mind the “politics of friendship,” theorized by the postcolonial scholar Leela Gandhi in the context of metropolitan anticolonial thought and unexpected solidarities. Gandhi reads “friendship,” after Derrida, as an unscripted relation offering the possibility of a community apart from “established affective formations (of family, fraternity, genealogy, filiation)” and a politics that is improvisational, hospitable, communicative, and ultimately radical. 2 The works in this exhibition evince such non-filiative—indeed queer— connections, as artist engagements produce novel forms of kinship and commentary. The titular “queer lineages” are manifest in all their diversity across these artworks, each of which enacts forms of adoration, care, closure, and criticality in relationship to an elected antecedent. “Kinship needs form,” write Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman in their essay, “Kincoherence/Kin-Aesthetics/Kinematics,” introducing the edited volume, Queer Kinship:
Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, 2 Leela Gandhi, e (Duk and the Politics of Friendship Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, 19. , 2006), University Press
3 . In unpacking this Form , Sex, Belonging, Race , kin-aesthetics erm they coin the t central idea, t are es, “how kinship and ar which encapsulat ork , bound up with the w both, as social practices ough the y work on and thr of the body; the 4 .” Bodies appear and materiality of the body y xhibition—the very work in this e disappear in e otected, they are they reveal, they are pr perform, ted to attest. In and permit o rest, laid t exposed, Untitled (John Giorno reads) ’s iravanija Rirkrit T at one point Giorno performs his writing, (2008), arhol’s five-and- recounting the making of Andy W with Giorno (1963), Sleep a-half-hour-long film In both s protagonist. ver) as it (Warhol’s then lo s— arhol’ orks—Tiravanija’s and W moving image w originally shot on film and with Giorno as their e o dominat what might first seem t shared subject, . Much has been ’s voyeuristic gaze is the camera ough its construction thr s film, arhol’ written on W 5 . o capitalist desire s relationship t and it repetition, ake, but e a continuous t At first, it may seem lik ork is equally Tiravanija’s ten-hour-long w s and vealing the cut ed, eventually re construct ’s transitions that capture and connect Giorno ver several days. In the case of performances o y ’s (and b Tiravanija’s film, however, the camera er’s) witnessing of Giorno association the mak rating his , and nar ork, playing music reciting his w es to memorialize the life for the camera serv particularly for us viewing it subject and his milieu, . ’s passing in 2019 ake of Giorno today in the w ooden ork in a w en shown the w Tiravanija has oft o the scale of a studio space in structure made t , an institution ery home Giorno’s storied 222 Bow ork life and culture and the own New Y of downt ystems. This is a ters of Giorno Poetry S headquar o y in a city that is still home t resonant legac , iravanija himself tists, including T thousands of ar
Aes- “Kincoherence/Kin- ay and Elizabeth Freeman, 3 Tyler Bradw Form , Sex, Belonging, Queer Kinship: Race ,” thetics/Kinematics 4. , 2022), (Duke University Press 4 Ibid., 5. y of Repetition: “The Pla . Joseph, 5 See, for example, Branden W . (Spring 2005): 22–53 Grey Room 19 s Sleep,” arhol’ Andy W
and where kinship as a form of (mutual) recognition and support offers possibilities for survival, exchange, collaboration, and growth. About making this work, Tiravanija has said, “As I watched John perform, I felt the great wave of energy and compassion, the force of life that John was transferring onto us (his listener, his viewer, his audience).” 6 This intergenerational energy transfer, effectuated through the audio-visual and temporal medium of film and later video, circumvents any normative understanding of kinship and genealogy or any simplistic notion of commemoration. Similarly, across Kang Seung Lee’s works — Garden (2018) and The Heart of A Hand (2022)— a queer, transnational poetics is at play, surfacing relationships between significant cultural figures across disparate contexts whose lives were indelibly impacted by HIV/AIDS. Lee works across media, often producing elaborately rendered flat-bed arrangements of a wide range of images, embroideries, texts, and collected objects associated with queer subjects, their bodies, and histories. Functioning as fragmentary memorials or altars for remembrance, the conceptual connection between Lee’s assemblage works and the videos included in Homage is evident. In Garden , the artist makes a pilgrimage to storied landscapes created continents apart by the artist Derek Jarman (1942–94) and the writer Oh Joon-soo (1964–98), where his camera frames tended earth and nearby expanses of vegetation, sea, and sky. Lee orchestrates a link between both hallowed sites and their founding figures through a ritual of transfer and exchange, bringing drawings he made in the other person’s garden (on biodegradable sheepskin parchment) as well as a small amount of soil, for the purposes of
ers.html yc/chapt ,” https://www.ilovejohngiorno.n 6 “John Giorno Reads
interment and material integration. One could say he tends the ground on which an “affective community” between figures like Jarman and Oh can emerge. These figures may have been separated by distance, culture, and language but are brought into posthumous relation through the mediation of the contemporary artist for whom their creative contributions, their anti- normative lifeworlds, their experiences of illness, and their untimely deaths remain resonant. Another such figure is relationally revisited in The Heart of A Hand . Goh Choo San (1948–87), the internationally accomplished Singaporean choreographer, also died from AIDS related complications. Lee proposes a collaborative reinterpretation of one of his works for the American Ballet Theatre, by means of a staged performance conceived and executed with Joshua Serafin, Nathan Mercury Kim, and the composer KIRARA. This quartet produces for the camera a performance and animation that also engages references from Goh’s transnational queer contemporaries, including the writing of Xavier Villaurrutia and the paintings of Martin Wong. The profusion of materials, media, and genres contained in the resulting work embodies Lee’s method of presenting archival fragments and artistic (re)interpretations using an energetic and immersive montage. An energetic montage of text, color, and sound also describes Tony Cokes’ approach. Displaying a certain economy in terms of production value and display format, Cokes’ SM BNGRZ 1+2 (2021), made in the wake of Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions on gathering and travel, asserts the necessity of togetherness, movement, and contact between (queer black) bodies as acts of resistance,
creative expression, and shared joy. As the words, beats, and neon shades pulsate through our bodies and animate our senses, we too are momentarily initiated into the liberated community of viewers, listeners, movers, and shakers produced by the work. In an entirely different context, the artist P. Staff finds such energizing transgenerational community at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles through repeated visits, observation, conversations, and archival access. While The Foundation (2015) was made well before Covid-19, it emerged in the continuing shadow of HIV/AIDS, as artists across generations were addressing its ongoing impact on culture, lived experience, networks of care and solidarity, and the construction of identity. As diverse figures, histories, and aesthetic practices are brought into dialogue, both within this work and in the exhibition at large, the resulting constellation reveals modes of memorialization— of paying homage —that disturb canonicity and heroization through constant creative reinterpre- tation. They intervene into established genres of commemorative image making—including portraiture and documentary—through performative acts, selective appropriation, and imaginative staging. A different set of interlocutors and antecedents informs the works by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Carolyn Lazard as they engage the formal structures and characteristics of experimental film and early video. Divergent legacies of these avant-garde forms of the 1960s and 1970s surface in their contemporary works, including issues of perception and disability. Lazard’s Red (2021) includes a strobe sequence created using an iPhone camera and the artist’s finger, directly riffing on the methods deployed
RATTANAMOL SINGH JOHAL fzal Ahmad is Shireen and A ory ofessor of Hist ssistant Pr sian Arts and A Professor of South A , he . Most recently Ann Arbor ersity of Michigan, of Art at the Univ at The Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP ed co-curat vener of the t, New York. He is also the con Museum of Modern Ar a. olkat er Curators’ Hub 2025 in K Experiment
by structuralist filmmakers as they manually modified film stock and projection technologies to produce flickers, color saturation, and other kinds of visual disturbances. Very significantly, Lazard introduces a strobe warning into the work, alerting visitors to the visual noise of the installation which might have detrimental effects on some. Warnings about flickers and flashing lights were included in a number of experimental films of the 1960s and ’70s but there was no shared vocabulary or screening protocol that systematically alerted viewers to the potential triggers therein. Lazard’s thinking around access and influence involves an underscoring of the visual tropes of experimental moving- image practice and their impact on the body. Weerasethakul also channels the legacy of experimental film towards a meditation on landscape, ecology, and temporality. In For Bruce (2022), dedicated to the filmmaker Bruce Baillie (1931–2020), Weerasethakul uses slowness, gentle natural sounds (running water, insects), and the flash and flicker of light reflecting off water and shining through trees to offer a queer reorientation of spectatorial sensibilities and transgenerational dialogue. Homage: Queer lineages on video reflects on the ability of film and video to disrupt processes of both memorialization and erasure, foregrounding instead the multivalent meanings and affective charge created by resonant com- binations of image, sound, and text. Departing from the preoccupation with visibility and publicness across politics of identity and representation, these works demonstrate the potential of anachronistic gestures, formal affinities, and archival adjacencies in reframing relationships between artists and their chosen ancestors.
In Dineo Seshee a love s Bopape’
(2005–6), supreme you sense a figure . ou see one before y The video opens with te hovering a silhouet een the camera betw e colored and a chocolat , it surface; gradually vident that becomes e the shadowy figure own is licking the flat br s vement plane. The mo om moving fr purposeful, The action o right. left t om the removes fr om , erasing fr surface the opacity and also o the finish of adding t , accumulating the plane ouches of the the t . For the full tongue es of the seven minut ertical video, the v strokes streak and splodge the screen; the image blurs before it ed frame . The fix clarifies of the figure are methodical and e are reveals that w looking at both the methodical subtraction e and the of chocolat clarification of a . countenance
Soon, reflected in the mirrored surface is an androgynous face—the artist’s—that we see in profile and in reflection as she somewhat sensually and somewhat laboriously laps, as if to attend to and consume the brown goo that makes way for her image. A Love Supreme links the video’s insistence on bodily process and materiality to a queer indeterminacy: it connects the malleability of sight to a repeated, corporeal image. Bopape presents her double and opposite, an image that is consumed and preserved, negated and affirmed. The video speaks to the ways that
Dineo Seshee Bopape, a love supreme , 2005–6 (video still). Courtesy of Blank Projects, South Africa
contemporary media artists take up the worn dictates of avant-garde film—the stringent regulations that enforce transparency, materiality, structure within the frame and inscribe a unified masculine vision—to intentionally uncannily upend such restrictions within video. Bopape gestures to a queer transformation of sight through her insistence on a doubled and contingent body, an alteration that carries over to Carolyn Lazard’s Red (2021), which also expands the frame with a repetition, albeit with double projection. In Lazard’s two-channel installation, one screen (outside the room) offers an access note. Green text pulses to indicate to viewers when the second channel (inside the room) flickers. Disturbing the binary of on and off, for some the work functions as the strobe advances, for others it only functions as the light retreats. The contingency resonates with the blurring of the titular color, which also breaks down the unity of vision. The varied gradient shifts from coral to vermilion, from scarlet to crimson. Like Bopape, Lazard crafted the frames with touch, pushing their finger back and forth over their iPhone camera. We see their caress as collected by the lens. The doubled projection generates indeterminancy, opening up the work to those with photosensitive sight. If Lazard unyokes the unity of sight with home-made strobe, Apichatpong Weerasethakul does so through the doubled play of light on water. The view in Weerasethakul’s two-channel work, For Bruce (2022), oscillates between a mid-shot of a wooden bridge spanning a brook to the birds- eye view of the wooden planks reflected on the quivering surface. His fluid assembling of dappled light and rippling plane suggests illusory images.
The double vision mesmerizes, as the wind pushes across the water and shimmers across the screens. When Weerasethakul trains his lenses, he mixes in layers of motion—the irregular undulations—that derange transparency and move in opposite directions to the school of minnows darting just beneath the surface. Writing now, it seems given that the worn regulations which once shored up and produced a specific viewing subject were limiting, yet still they are embedded within the discourses that adjudicate moving images. These artists make a plea for adjusting our focus, showing new ways to expand our perception by doubling it, blurring it, slowing it, layering it, and flooding it, and teaching us to practice fluency.
PIPER MARSHALL , and or, critic ersity) is an educat (PhD, Columbia Univ , xhibitions at collecting institutions ed on e curator. She has collaborat , ofits. Most recently , and nonpr , private foundations educational spaces ormed ransf ideo T Signals: How V eam for orial t ed on the curat she serv at The Museum of Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning and the World ork. t, New Y Modern Ar
There is something intrinsically elegiac in videos showing gay men affected by the AIDS epidemic. In contrast to today’s abundance of moving images, many of the films that portray people who died at the apex of this crisis are the only recorded traces of their subjects. Think of the interview conducted in 1984 by Lyn Blumenthal of her friend the art critic Craig Owens as part of a series on women (and feminist) artists and art writers. For two hours, while smoking abundantly, Owens tells the story of a vocation—from drawing clothes and designing buildings as a child, to theater production as a young man, to his training with the fellow critic Rosalind Krauss and his brief affiliation with the journal October . More crucially perhaps, Owens insists several times on the ideal
, 1984 w An Intervie ens: Craig Ow e Horsfield, Lyn Blumenthal and Kat tesy Lyn Blementhal Cour (video still).
of self-reflexivity that so intensely shaped his intellectual practice. The rarity of this document, the sole publicly available film showing the writer, carries an emotional force. Indeed, this dimension is unintentional and retrospective: the video was made before Owens received the HIV diagnosis that led to his death in 1990, at the age of 39. In contrast, many other films that feature a person whose life was taken by the disease, including recent works, explicitly memorialize their subject. In 2023, experimental film and video artists Lionel Soukaz and Stéphane Gérard assembled sequences of the former’s video diary Journal Annales . The result, Artistes en zone troublés , is a poignant portrait of Soukaz’s lover Hervé Couergou, who died of AIDS in the 1990s. What is deeply striking about Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (John Giorno reads) (2008) and P. Staff’s The Foundation (2015), two works included in the show Homage: Queer Lineages on
e palpable the fragility y don’t mak , is that the Video , . On the contrary and scarcity of what remains erial. xcess of mat they confront us with an e Tiravanija filmed the poet John Giorno in his reading and performing his writing ork loft, New Y , for over more than y apparent order without an t of their video es par . P. Staff locat ten hours ge ers the lar in the Los Angeles house that shelt . s erotic drawings om of Finland’ archive of T erior, furnished es a calm int er observ The view es, a space which xed archiv es of bo with shelv also functions as a residence for a small queer xuberance of , the e . In both cases community While material might be described as contingent. y an illness that killed his friends ouched b directly t . tunately escaped the virus and lovers, Giorno for ere es w . His archiv He wrote until his death in 2019 en ry, as happened so oft not discarded in a hur as buried at veryone w e 1980s when e in the lat as already in his . Tom of Finland w the same time ork, or of an immense body of w , the creat sixties ere first described as a when cases of AIDS w However, with John Giorno “new disease” in 1981. ter of profusion is not a mat om of Finland, and T . The plenty is inscribed in ance historical circumst ords, texts, . A plethora of w their artistic practice . Promiscuity xual scenes , men, and se images e ays. “Nothing succeeds lik in all possible w o read in excess,” says a poem Giorno chose t y ered b ely count Tiravanija’s film (a claim immediat e “Nothing recedes lik ’s famous silkscreen, Giorno ”). success ote, , art critic Douglas Crimp wr In 1987 .” He “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic xual was concerned with the defense of a se , straight and tacked by public figures culture at
. Ann Arbor ersity of Michigan, orian. He teaches at the Univ is a hist
GA TAN THOMAS Ë
gay, who instrumentalized the AIDS crisis to impose their moralism. Alongside the political fight, Crimp and others were trying to maintain sexual camaraderie, love, and friendship in the darkest times. They continued to live. Some conjured death with laughter—Copi’s play Une visite inopportune (1987), Gregg Bordowitz’s “The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous” (1993)—while acknowledging pain. They taught us that a crisis is never reducible to a well-ordered pathetic script. Decades later, when faced with the legacies of John Giorno and Tom of Finland, Rirkrit Tiravanija and P. Staff were once again confronted with the question of promiscuity. Neither Tiravanija nor Staff attempts to police excess through order. There is no archival impulse, no willingness to create an organized narrative out of the abundance of material. P. Staff doesn’t even open the boxes that contain the drawings. We barely get to see any of Tom of Finland’s celebrated iconography through the film. Is it because the artist is more interested in how a sexual culture exceeds sex? Or is it because carrying someone else’s promiscuity is about maintaining the rhythm, hence the choreography that occupies the second part of the film? Rirkrit Tiravanija provides an answer that is as simple and efficient as Giorno’s poetry. Yes, the artist’s promiscuity is about enthusiasm and enjoyment. The picture is devoid of any ornamentation—Giorno stands in his loft and recites or reads text. But it’s never dry, never boring! He smiles, he looks at the camera, he is agitated, he is animated. He is having fun performing, and we’re having fun watching him. His excess is captivating.
Wincing at the world from behind sturdy, latticed window grilles, I promise myself that I’m not conspiring to constrict my chances, fear life’s opportunities. Whatever is going on in the world right now feels inevitable, messianic. But these omens are alluring and shiny. They look so presentable on a doom scroll. I want to say that this glorious hypertrophic media whirlpool triggers an anxiety latent within me, winds up my neck and chest, but that would be false too. Scotomization is my familiar activity. Its physiological corollaries—flinching, blinking, recoiling, or a complete shutting down of the will to cognize—comfort me. These are completely natural insulating reactions, sedulous to a body like this, and
guided by killer preservationist instincts.
Tony Cokes, SM BNGRZ 1 + 2 , 2021 (installation view). Courtesy of the artist, Greene Naftali, New York, Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York
Conceive of what Calvin L. Warren calls “ontological terror”—the absolute annihilation of Being wrought by antiblack technologies—and there can be no conceits or concessions. 1 By comparison, Carolyn Lazard’s video work Red (2021) is compassionate, only a rehearsal of life’s cruelties. Its strobing red monochrome made me giddy and nauseous. Despite the video being only 10 minutes long, I couldn’t watch it continuously. I had to close my eyes, or the browser tab, or look away for a moment. The papule-red of Red , a strident siren monochrome importuning our sensory fields, is bewildering and expedient, but Lazard extends their viewers a little mercy in the form of periodic trigger warnings: ten-second countdowns that let us know when the hazy disorientation will stop, and when it will begin again. Here, the video form trains viewers to inure their faculties against potential trauma. Art has softened the blow, but has it finally lived up to its alleviative reputation? The reality is that ontological terror is a “permanent condition of black being and the world itself” that is “beyond [humanist] resolution and abandonment,” conciliatory affective politics, and artistic representation because “the world depends on this terror” to continue turning on its dispossessive axis. 2 If Warren’s nihilistic thesis is chilling and depressive, it is only because we recognize its veracity, pervasiveness, and permanence. Unlike Lazard’s considerately factored warnings, “one experiences terror precisely because one never knows when this self will be targeted.” 3 Parsing archives of antebellum New Orleans, Emily A. Owens similarly traces the “terroristic anticipation” of enslaved women in slaveholders’ iniquitous games of “pursuit,” in which the language of consent was forcefully solicited and hence perverted in fabricated “scene[s] of transaction” that “transform a
and Nihilism, error: Blackness, Ontological T 1 Calvin L. Warren, 60. , 2018), (Duke University Press Emancipation 65–75. 2 Ibid., 107. 3 Ibid.,
woman’s injury into a man’s grievance.” 4 When the legislated bureaucracy of safety and salvation proves to be utterly ineffectual, or itself structures and facilitates brutality, can there be any true reprieve? Consider the defiance of Tony Cokes’ bright, pulsing video SM BNGRZ 1+2 (2021) and Kang Seung Lee’s surreptitiously sumptuous The Heart of A Hand (2022). Both videos implement text as an incongruent document or archive. Cokes triply combines insouciantly lurid pairs of monochromes, quotations from polemical texts, and hedonistic dance tracks to shove us to PARTY, throb, gyrate. With an impulsive teenage spirit, the video’s texts coax its viewers to give in to dance’s “ability to seduce one into the loss of one’s own identity or selfhood,” or to join a growing collective throng in an obstinate “refusal of representation and consequently…of identity” altogether. Lee displays the late Xavier Villaurrutia’s poems in a blocky ASL typeface, commonly used by Martin Wong in his paintings, throughout his felicitously solecistic video portrait of a dancer. The video begins with the illegible hieroglyphic fonts corresponding to sensuous lines from Villaurrutia’s poems that propitiously miscegenate feelings and body parts. Text becomes even more of an indecipherable symbol. Experienced together with the video’s thumping and escalating soundtrack, this dual language evocatively intercedes the interpellation of a body of difference. Lee’s gesture professes contamination. They gather, permute, and experiment with deracinated stories, affects, and forms. Extrapolating from Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theoretical dismantling of the origins of modern philosophy, one could conjecture that in Lee’s art, the I—the “self- determined (interior) thing”—has access to “exterior things” and fearlessly lifts the
xual orce: Se Consent in the Presence of F 4 Emily A. Owens, w Orleans omen’s Survival in Antebellum Ne Violence and Black W , 2023), 61-81. th Carolina Press ersity of Nor (The Univ
injunction of their action on its essence, rendering itself “an affectable thing.” 5 Video—historically and as deployed by Lazard, Cokes, and Lee—pulls the hermetic artist into the wider orbit of a collective consciousness, with sympa- thizers real and imagined, scenarios near and far. No feat of engineered psychological fortification from the world’s smorgasbord of atrocities can disguise the truth that we want to be a part of something, despite the promise of recrudescence. The din and clamor of infernal gaping salivating prattling of other people are also immanent to us— we who refuse to refuse our shrillness, vanity, and selfishness. We need ugliness like air and water. We risk, capitulate, and are implicated for belonging. This is uncon- ditional self/love. Contemplating how these three artists use video (laced with text) as a medium, I think of the “antiportraits”— “recalcitrant” installations that prominently utilize text and sound to mediate histories and depictions of slavery—that Huey Copeland favors, artistic expressions that “do not come easily to hand” and that rebalanced the calculus of cultural currency in their erstwhile era of feel-good multiculturalism. 6 These videos—vigorous and macabre events they may attempt to actuate; afflicting their audiences and creators alike—do not condescend to surrogate the ennui and weight of our existence. Pinky promise you’ll hold me as the world ends?
Toward a Global Idea of Race a, erreira da Silv 5 Denise F 31. , 2007), a Press ersity of Minnesot (Univ , and the t, Slavery Bound to Appear: Ar 6 Huey Copeland, ersity of (Univ Site of Blackness in Multicultural America 19, 201. , 2013), Chicago Press
Tony Cokes, SM BNGRZ 1 + 2 , 2021 (video still). Courtesy of the artist, Greene Naftali, New York, Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York
( BING WONG BINGHAO or. They are the er, editor, and curat is a writ ) editorial and creative director of 5G Bing, an internet grimoire.
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