My performance practice has been affectionately described by a mentor as sisyphean–cyclical, futile, pointless and yet entirely necessary. Necessary for what-and-whom? I ask.
As punishment for his crimes, Sisyphus was banished to the never ending task of rolling a boulder up a hill which inevitably crashes down. His labor is his punishment. What is it that I have done to warrant my sisyphean fate? Be Black.
My affront to the world is me having the audacity to be born with skin, the pigment of soil. To be Black is to live in a body that is deemed a problem. To be Black is to be other. Black performers have come up against the never-ending-cyclical task of articulating Black abjection– even if they communicate this is not the explicit aim of their work: relegating the Black artist to a type of Sissyphean fate. Your Black art cannot rest at the top of a boulder, but must be pushed up every time it is concocted, workshopped, performed. At one point I searched for the subversive power or pleasure or beauty in presenting, workshopping and re-presenting my work in an antiblack world. A slap given to me on November 16th 2024 at Baba Yaga Gallery by an audience participant has knocked about my views on Black power and performance. I have since been grasping for the proverbial gallery wall to reorient myself and my live art practice.
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The slap that induced a prolonged bout of vertigo occurred while I performed part two of my performance series “God, Are You There?” subtitled “maybe it’s me” at Baba Yaga Gallery in Hudson, NY. During this performance I ask the audience to take part in a cleansing ritual where the audience and I act out scripts of power juggling vulnerability between each other. This is simultaneously degrading and uplifting for me, the performer. In my live art practice, I use corn oil and granulated sugar to create ephemeral paintings on my body. The combination of corn oil and sugar– to me– works as a stand-in for perceptions of my sexual deviance and gender performativity. I embrace perceptions of my queered sexuality and gender akin to how society discusses the demonized-and-yet-pervasive high fructose corn syrup– molasses too sweet and dangerous for society. Pouring these edible objects onto my body is preparing my body for consumption, while also evoking the history of cash crops and the transatlantic slave trade. My body, oiled and sugared– malnourished enslaved Black folks would be lathered in oil to give the illusion of health and increase the likelihood of their sale– acts as a pastiche to slave auctions. My body, oiled and sugared, acts as an aesthetic brine for my lyrical universe to float in.
I begin my performance in a white-walled–artist-run gallery. A greasy clear tarp lies above these muddy rings left from the soles of shoes in the middle of this room. I stand on this greasy tarp, half undressed, red ripstop nylon track pants tossed beside my feet. I hold a wired microphone caked with sugar from past performances in one hand, and a stack of papers containing the words I intend to call out tonight; pressed against my lips, it amplifies my breathing. I can taste the milky sweetness of molded corn oil and sugar. I’ve performed this before with this very mic. Things are the same, but different. My words have been edited to fit the walls of this gallery. Beside me lies a metal bowl full of corn oil, a box of disposable food prep gloves, a roll of paper towels, and a red ribbon beer can. I stand inside alone, and then in an instance surrounded. The audience followed the words that dripped under my breathing, instructing them to circle me. One by one, I call on the audience to grant me forgiveness. I exhale:
…you each will be asked to grant me forgiveness. In order to do so, you must dunk your palm into this bowl of oil and rub my face. Only grant me forgiveness if you see fit. I will tell you a sin, and ask you if you forgive me. If you think I am deserving, then wash me. If I am not worthy, if my thoughts and actions are just too far for you and you do not wish to forgive me. Rub the anointing oil onto yourself, to shield your vessel from my filth.
I, the Black performer, am contagious. In this performance, I seek remedy. I seek cleanliness. Most of all, I seek solidarity. Frank B. Wilderson’s Afro Pessimism makes the claim that humanity is only able to be defined in opposition to Blackness. There is a fervent anxiety in society to exclude and subjugate Blackness in an effort to lift up whiteness. I posit that to be Black is to live in an ailed body. To be Black is to be in chronic condition with no possibility of pharmacological intervention. What is the ailed body to do other than seek remedy? My artistic drive– my urge to create– was rooted in the belief that Black performance is a method of pain mitigation: the role of the Black performer in contributing to the virality of the Black body.
Virality and contagion account for the reified violence that occurs within the Black body when screaming in agony from the stab wounds of an anti-Black society. What does it mean to be Black and perform pain knowing it reifies violence against your Black body? Where does the power live for my experience of pain in my performance? Is the power in starting the conversation? In the spectacle? In the pain itself? I believed– pre-slap– the power for the Black performer lies in the viewership of the pain. At one point– pre-slap–, I theorized there’s an ancestral catharsis that lies in the horrified-sympathetic-aroused eyes of another. Finding pleasure in the violence of the spectator may be the power, the pain mitigator, for the Black performer. Using the violence of anti-Blackness as a means to an end subverts its hold on the Black performer. What this framework proposes is that to be Black is to be in a chronic condition with no potential for pharmacological or holistic intervention without giving way to the violence. Black beings must find ways to mitigate their pain. It must be done in a way that feels illogical. In this performance I use my vulnerability– my desire to be forgiven– almost as an assertion of power. I offer the audience two choices, to cleanse me, or cleanse themselves. Either way, they are implicated in the performance that I set up. My dirtiness is contagious. I set up a scenario where, even if an audience member opts out, they are still implicated. But in any case, I, the Black performer, maintain control, power, and autonomy in my submission. But then I was slapped.
…
Just as I instructed, the audience circles me in the white-walled-artist-run-gallery. Each ready to be called on. There’s a man with deep laugh lines and wispy gray brows amongst them. White. His cheeks flush round and his laugh lines deepen– he is smiling to himself and he lets no one in on the joke. His eyelids are heavy, his stare is glazed and hollow. I point to him and ask: Do you forgive me? He rolls up the sleeves on his winter coat (this white-walled-artist-run-gallery has no heat), dips his hand in the metal bowl of corn oil and nods his head. I am forgiven. Our eyes meet. My gaze lands on his amused-and-crepey eyelids and I feel a rapid knocking in my chest. I close my eyes. Quick and sharp and wet his palm meets my right cheek. A pause. Then my left cheek.
This man and his slaps didn’t register to me, the Black performer. He, the narcissistic spectator, forgave me. In his eyes, since he found an alternative route from forgiveness and rejection, he was the dutiful participant, engaging in my performance better than the others— he wrote himself into my performance. Up to this point, my artistic guiding principles made room for moments like this to occur and I would maintain a sense of power and autonomy. In fact, building upon Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection, there is a subversive power found in the mutilation of my body assigned Black male at birth. To be a Black performer is to articulate a long history of abjection. There is a necrophobia-negrophilia circular dichotomy between Blackness and other racial-ethnic categories that is inherently sexual. I should have found pleasure perhaps through some sort of righteous satisfaction in over submitting to the violence. But I didn’t feel satisfied, or dignified. I felt as crepey and hollow as the man’s eyelids. I felt numb and de-centered. I continued my performance, anesthetized, understanding that this man took delight in my debasement. Afterwards, I was approached by concerned loved ones and onlookers asking if, how, and when I recovered from his strike. When asked these questions, I would stumble in my response. I didn’t know how I felt or whether what I experienced was negative. I felt the need to perform the memory of the event. And I did. But, it was as though the audience members felt the sting of the oil and the working man’s hand on both of their cheeks and I was the onlooker. Physically, I was okay, but I felt wrong for not passing judgement on him or being slightly annoyed by the compulsion to recount the experience salaciously.
The slap and my performative retellings caused me to untie such a neat understanding of Black performance as pain mitigation and power reclamation. I now see these post slap check-ins as a different form of audience participants writing themselves into my Black performance–though coming from a place of sincerity. Author Rizvana Bradley in the book Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form building within the cannon of Afro Pessimism, posits that since the world where Black art is created and circulates is antiBlack the audience reception of Black art will always be antiBlack because spectatorship is necessarily antiBlack. Bradley introduces the term Black aesthesis which prioritizes the sensory instead of thinking of Black art within regimes of aesthetics political overdetermination in an antiBlack world. Black aesthesis describes the act of Black art as “insistent theorization of its own conditions of (im)possibility.” Perhaps I didn’t pass judgement on the slap because I, a Black live arts practitioner, am not okay. Not because of a slap. But because no matter how hard I scream about the pain I am in as a Black being, there is always someone gleefully ready to twist the knife. There is nothing I can say or do to these audience participants and their check ins to change that reality for Black beings. And yet, we Black performers are blessed (cursed) with the urgent need to scream nonetheless, knowing we are rolling a rock up a hill. A distinctive quality of Black art as a whole– and my Black performance especially– is the sisyphean declaration to define itself on terms that operate betwixt-and-between the language we’ve been forced to adopt.
And so, my bout of vertigo persists. A slap has awakened my body to move toward Black aesthesis– the sensorial– when creating. What if, like the nonsensical nature of antiBlackness, you must engage your body in an illogical manner. Black beings must move to the nonsensical. The maddening. We, Black beings must discard the burden of representation and strategically picture our likeness in a way that reads irresponsible, confusing, dizzying, operating under its own rules. As Black beings there is no escape from the nonsensical nature of anti black violence. We, Black beings must embrace perversion. We, Black beings must perform non logic; making work that seems profound yet makes no sense at all. We, Black beings, must be rigorous in our practice of the illogical. We, Black beings, must understand that there is no escaping the violence inflicted on our bodies. We, Black beings, must embrace that we are not human. We, Black beings, are so– so– much more. We, Black beings, must let this give us permission to break all the precious fragile things in this world and begin anew.
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