HOW TO: Oh, look at me is a film that captures the multi-layered, interdisciplinary performance conceived by GeoVanna Gonzalez as an activation of her sculptural installation of the same name on view at Locust Projects through May 22. Through the performance, which features an original musical score by Batry Powr and involves two dancers, Cheina Ramos and Alondra Balbuena, and poets, Zaina Alsous and Arsimmer McCoy, the installation is transformed from a static form to a space that encourages contemplation, meditation and connection.
The film, as a receptacle of different languages — spoken, gestural, musical — that come together in their singular agency to create a communal whole, functions as an added layer of meaning, a translation of a translation. Through the performance, Gonzalez examines how forms of communication and miscommunication, both in person and mediated, reflect our self-awareness and condition our perception of those around us.
The Hours is the original soundtrack album, on the Elektra/Nonesuch label, of the 2002 film The Hours. The original score was composed by Philip Glass. Not all of the music in the film was composed specifically for it: earlier music by Glass, including a theme from his opera Satyagraha, was also featured and credited separately at the end of the film. Michael Riesman and Nico Muhly arranged the soundtrack for piano solo. This score was published in 2003 as a 64-paged book containing most of the tracks.
KT – “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” And then James Baldwin says, “I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense, but as a state of being, or a state of grace, not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
SJ- So amazing. You hear James Baldwin, the son of a preacher. And for him, that love that he always saw and grasped for and had hope in — that he called that grace. And what grace grasps is the thing that it’s not just a given. It really is a gift, and it has political force. It’s quest. It’s daring. It’s exploration. And James Baldwin reminds us that if we give up that hope, that quest in love, then we’ve lost.
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 148-72. Originally published in Artforum 5 (June 1967): pp. 12-23.
“Michael Fried pushed the question of presence to the fore in his famous (perhaps infamous) essay “Art and Objecthood.”[2] Fried distinguishes between, on the one hand, the presentness of modernist art—art that defeats its own objecthood, that displays a conviction which avoids theatricality, that at every moment renews a claim upon the viewer; and, on the other, the presence of Minimalist, or what he called literalist, art—art that embraces (“hypostasizes”) its own objecthood, that is fundamentally theatrical, that includes the viewer in its situation and requires her for its completion.
[…] At the end of his essay, Fried seems to turn from creation to fall and the hint of redemption. He writes, “I want to call attention to the utter pervasiveness—the virtual universality—of the sensibility or mode of being that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theater. We are all literalists most of our lives. Presentness is grace.”[5] I read Fried here as claiming that we live in a world where objects are usually present to us simply as objects, and that modernist art offers something extraordinary: an object becoming more than an object, carrying with it the presentness that comes to us as “grace.”
To avert one’s gaze from Piper is to refuse to hear the sound in her work of that quite specific objecthood that joins blackness and black performance. And the critique of Fried’s dismissal of objecthood and its complex, ambivalent grounding in Clement Greenberg’s in/famous assertion of the necessary optical purity of authentic modernist art is possible only by way of the exploration of that specifically black objecthood that it has been Piper’s project to inves-tigate. If, as Zora Neale Hurston suggests, the essence of the Negro is drama, theatricality, then perhaps this is how that theatricality works. (p.234)
Perhaps the real importance of the frame /support /boundary is that it divides the work from the milieu that defines and contains what Fried describes as our quotidian literalism. The parergon is, here, the condition of possibility of what Fried valorizes and hopes for: presentness as grace, presentness as opposed to presence. The literalist work /object is without or in denial of the parergon. The two relations to be thought, here, are lack and denial, parergon and milieu. (p.243)
Fred Moten, Resistance of the Object:Adrian Piper’s Theatricality, In the Break.
The Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves, today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA, Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents’ own reactions to bondage.
While African Americans were virtually excluded from Writers’ Projects in several Southern states, the pattern was not universal. In several states–notably Virginia, Louisiana, and Florida–ambitious black units flourished; in several others the number of black workers fluctuated in response to work quotas. And the energies of the black writers were directed almost exclusively to the collection of materials pertaining to African-American culture.
The relative paucity of black personnel on the Writers’ Project makes their accomplishments all the more impressive. In addition to the collection and preparation of materials for the state guides, African-American workers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia engaged in research studies on black history and culture. The Washington office of the FWP also contemplated publishing a history of the antislavery struggle “from the Negro point of view”; development of a comprehensive bibliography of writings on African-American culture; and the compilation of a documentary record of events in the history of the Underground Railroad. Sterling A. Brown, whose unstinting support and encouragement sustained each of those efforts, had personally formulated plans for the publication of a volume that would draw substantially upon Writers’ Project materials obtained by black researchers. These studies were curtailed and publication plans based upon them thwarted, however, by the abrupt termination of the Writers’ Project in 1939. Only The Negro in Virginia, a product of that state’s black unit directed by Roscoe E. Lewis and one of the outstanding achievements of the Writers’ Project, attained publication.
Limitations of these narratives–
…At best with the awareness that a totalizing of history cannot be reconstructed from these interested, selective, and fragmentary accounts and with an acknowledgment of the interventionist role of the interpreter, the equally interested labor of historical revision, and the impossibility of reconstituting the past free from the disfigurements of present concerns. With all these provisos issued, these narratives nonetheless remain an important source for understanding the everyday experience of slavery and its aftermath….
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997), 11.
Martin Jackson, ex-slave, San Antonio. United States San Antonio Texas, 1937. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/99615314/.James Green, ex-slave, San Antonio. United States San Antonio Texas, 1937. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/99615295/.Albert Todd, ex-slave, San Antonio. United States San Antonio Texas, 1937. July 9. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/99615382/.
William Branch, 322 Utah St. San Antonio, TX (Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1, Adams-Duhon. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. p.149)
Whirling in the dark universe, alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—
What do we have really? Sad tricks with ladders and shoes, tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring attempts to build character. What do we have to appease the great forces?
