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
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