“Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state.
We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible.
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[Hermann] Hesse observes that artists feel these painful instabilities more deeply than the rest of society and more restlessly, and out of that restlessness they make the lifelines that save us, the lifelines we call art.
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Hesse insists that artists nourish the goodness of the human spirit “with such strength and indescribable beauty” that it is “flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.”
is only something on which to hang your long overcoat; the slender snake asleep in the grass; the umbrella by the door;
the black swan guarding the pond. This ? has trouble in mind: do not ask why the wind broods, why the light is so unclean.
It is summer, the rhetoric of the field, its yellow grasses, something unanswerable. The dead armadillo by the roadside, indecent.
Who cares now to recall that frost once encrusted the field? The question mark—cousin to the 2, half of a heart—already has begun its underhanded inquiry.
How many of my brothers and my sisters will they kill before I teach myself retaliation? Shall we pick a number? South Africa for instance: do we agree that more than ten thousand in less than a year but that less than five thousand slaughtered in more than six months will WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?
FM: Well, phenomenology as a kind of philosophical discipline, I think, implies some very specific ideas about spatiotemporal coordination and three-dimensionality. It implies a kind of separation of the subject and the object. The object comes into view. The object comes into consciousness for a subject as a function of that separation and hopefully what the object does is, in a way, both confirm and also mirror the assumed three-dimensionality of the subject, of the viewer. When we talk about a well-developed character, in a novel or in a play, the complement we like to give such a character is that they are three-dimensional. And I think there’s something to be said, there’s much to be said in praise of two-dimensionality. There’s much to be said that’s in praise of what people ordinarily, I think, misrepresent as flatness. And for me, I would maybe begin, if you have a chance to visit the gallery, by encouraging a stance towards the works, particularly to the wall-based works, to encourage a stance that isn’t, let’s say, full-frontal. Don’t stand up in front of it or stand against it as if it were your object. It’s a really cool thing to walk carefully and respectfully up to the side of it so that if you can imagine not looking at it, but looking with it or almost looking through it. And especially in those big, huge wall paintings, what you see is all this texture. And you see all this richness. And you see all this shape. And you see the intensity with which color doesn’t oppose itself to shape, but folds into shape. And all of a sudden, it turns out that this two-dimensionality, this sort of holographic reality that he’s giving us, is immeasurably and unimaginably rich, which I think allows us to begin to imagine how rich all of the things which we ordinarily would dismiss as two-dimensional must be, right? Including, for instance, let’s say, the generally understood to be two-dimensional lives of, say, Black folks in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1935 or something like that. It makes me want to really, really think hard about the rich, deep, syncretic, two-dimensional richness of Black Tupelo, Mississippi, which must have been the deepest possible flat place that anybody could ever imagine if it turned out to produce both Sam Gilliam and Arthur Jafa within thirty years of one another. That’s a mystery that somebody needs to try to figure out right there.
Sam Gilliam’s Latest A Roundtable Conversation-Hickey, Martin, Moten Pace Gallery, recorded on December 16, 2020
everyday life is that it enabled (and enables) one to think dialectically. Everyday life may well be the site of alienation, but it is also the site of its undoing, the terrain for social change.
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Through flexibility, a clear sense of the stakes of the battle and the enemy they share, and above all through repeated gestures of cooperation, they make a common front. This is a front that avoids the fixity of class or party but that is nevertheless organized. It takes the overly abstract call to “save the climate”and brings it down to earth—in fact, and quite pragmatically, to particular plots of earth. This is the commune form for our own time.
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contemporary mode is trans-regional— that is, occurring in many federated regions (but not necessarily occurring everywhere, as would an abstraction).
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the contemporary commune mode manifests itself in several regions at once or in close sequencing: sites and local skirmishes based on the situations, histories, and specific needs of the people and other life-forms inhabiting each one thus find themselves “federated”— linked together by the coordinating actions and the relations between groups and individuals established within Soulèvements.
