SWEAT

Assembling the Eighties

Mendi O. — Wed, 26 Sep 2001 15:42:00 +0000

Welcome to SWEAT. A few months ago, I attended a conference on Black British Artists called Assembling the Eighties: A Trans-Atlantic Dialogue on Afro-Asian Arts in Post-War Britain at Duke University. This conference was mainly concerned with the art of artists who came to promininence in the 1980s, though new work was discussed and artists from earlier movements (such as Paul Dash, the youngest member of the Caribbean Artists Movement ) were also present. I had the opportunity to hear, meet, and see work from quite a few artists and critics whose work I admire. It was great to see all the work and the conversations were intense.

One of the struggles during the conference was over how much emphasis should be placed on craft and how much emphasis should be placed on cultural critique. Nobody had simple answers to this question, yet the discussion was heated. Ultimately, everyone agreed that placing emphasis on either side to the exclusion of the other was pointless. When, however, and how, and even whether the discussion had actually turned to craft or cultural critique, on the other hand, was another matter.

Another important issue was gender. Everyone agreed that gender was important; everyone agreed that women had been overshadowed. It was unclear, however, how this had happened. Lubaina Himid gave a paper about the women who are often excluded from discussions about Black British artists who were working in the 80s. I came away from this paper a bit frustrated because all I could remember afterwards was this point, that Black women's work has been forgotten. I couldn't remember much of the work I had seen or the names I had been told; there were so many. I also didn't get to see as much of Himid's work as I would have liked to have seen.

On the other hand, I have vivid memories of the new work by Isaac Julien and Keith Piper, both of whom gave wonderful presentations of their work in the context of other work they admired. I was left wondering, is the only difference the attitude (the men were affirmed if still struggling for justice; the women were frustrated if sometimes in the mix)? Were they given more time? Was I more attentive because I already knew of their work? Because I had already been in conversation with them?

This problem reminded me of my undergraduate thesis work on Langston Hughes and Nicolas Guillen. I was intrigued and encouraged by their friendship. I wanted to have access to the kind of Diasporic artist exchange they had. They were and are important to me as a Black artist, but as a Black woman artist, I wondered if this sort of possibility really existed for me. I often engaged with the work Black women writers from around the world, but what about the friendships? Where was the community of Black women artists of which I could imagine myself a part?

For the past few months I've been thinking about this problem and about the careers of Black women artists. Going to Assembling the Eighties made me wonder what was to become of me, a Black woman artist. The problem of our visibility and (financial? cultural?) ability to connect with one another is not new to me. But somehow, it is just now slapping me in the face. What is in my future? More importantly, what does what I do (now and ever) have to do with that.

Part of what is striking to me is that although I had been wanting to know (about the work of) Black women artists, critics, and curators, the only ones I really talked to were women who were already working in the United States (Judith Wilson, Yong Soon Min, and Sonia Boyce). I didn't have conversations with Lubaina Himid or Gilane Tawadros or Lola Young or Sutapa Biswas or even Janice Cheddie, with whom I had had some brief exchanges over email. (Ok, I did speak with Pauline de Souza and Naseem Khan. This may be disproving my point, but I'd rather throw in this curve than pretend I didn't have meaningful conversations with them.) My point is, if Black women artists and critics are sometimes in the mix but black women artists aren't checking for them, how are their legacies going to carry on? Who else is going to do it?

All this is to say, I started SWEAT so that I could have a place to think about the work of the artists who give me pause or pleasure in public. I am going to engage with the craft of their work and the issues it provokes. I am going to give black women artists a big part of my attention in this space. Don't be surprised, though, if artists who are not Black women show up in this space. The point is to deal with my all influences and make sure black women get their due.

Mendi Lewis Obadike

Daniel Bernard Roumain as Rock Star

Mendi O. — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 01:22:00 +0000

April 17: Daniel Bernard Roumain @ Montclair State University

Keith and I went to see (and hear) Daniel Bernard Roumain at Montclair State University. The performance was called Soulphonic Soundscape and he played with his band The Mission. The show was billed in this way: A night of hip-hop, funk, soul and classical featuring composer/musician Daniel Bernard Roumain, his 10 piece ensemble, DBR's Mission, choreography by MSU's Donna Scro Gentile, and students from the MSU community in a collaborative concert of original instrumental music and songs written by DBR. Because he is known as a classical composer, I expected less of a rock show. I'm really interested in the different directions Roumain is taking his work these days.

A year or so ago K and I went to a Black History Month performance of chamber work by black composers. Little did we know that the only black people in the room would be in the audience. (I swear I’m not going to rename this blog “The Only Black in The Room”. I could, though, couldn’t I?) The ensemble played work by William Grant Still as well as one of DBR's "Hip Hop Etudes" – which requires the ensemble to improvise. While the result sounded more like funk than jazz, I was curious to hear from Roumain what made it hip-hop. Hearing these etudes and other works with a rock band (the band had a pianist, keyboardist, drummer on kit, a DJ, a vocalist, and five violinists – Roumain was the pianist, vocalist, and lead violinist) made it sound even more like rock.

Roumain’s show ended at 5pm. We then went to Princeton to hear “The Ancient Concert” (I’ll blog on this later.) While we were there we learned that DBR would be back the next Friday and we were scheduled to come back that Friday, so we went to hear him again. This time he played by himself. In the workshop before the concert he played “Hip Hop Etude in D minor” Because it sounded like a ballad, a woman in the audience asked him, hesitantly, and with many references to her kids who listened to hip-hop, what made it hip-hop. His answer was that “hip-hop can be many things”. He went on to think about focusing on the pulse rather than the beat. There was more, but that’s what I’m focusing on right now.

Coco Fusco Reading in a Startling Hot Pink Jacket

Mendi O. — Tue, 02 Apr 2002 10:13:00 +0000

Mental Notes I’ve Been Taking on the Body: Coco Fusco Reading The Incredible Disappearing Woman (in a Startling Hot Pink Jacket)

2. b) On Fusco's resume, the play is described in this way: "THE INCREDIBLE DISAPPEARING WOMAN A multimedia performance for three actresses about women, sex and death in the US- Mexico border region. Commissioned by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Currently in pre-production, slated to open and begin an international tour in 2002."

Note that I don’t have a script in front of me and I saw this reading over a month ago. [5] I don’t know names or other important details. I know what stuck with me: We are in a gallery where there is to be a diorama of the performance piece by an artist who, twenty years earlier, played in front of an audience an audio tape of what he said was the sound of him having sex with the corpse of a Mexican woman. [6] The play is a conversation between three women who work in the gallery space either to clean it or work security. Each woman has a story to tell that relates to the diorama.

Hearing Fusco read I kept thinking of the Toi Derricotte poem, "On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses." [7] Think on this:

. . . Does anybody
know this woman? Will anyone come forth? Silence

like a backwave rushes into that field
where, just a week before, four other black girls
had been found. The gritty image hangs in the air
just a few seconds, but it strikes me,

a black woman, there is a question being asked
about my life. How can I
protect myself? Even if I lock my doors,
walk only in the light, someone wants me dead.

(I keep wanting to write something else after this fragment of a poem, but feel, at the same time, that nothing else should go there. "wants me dead" are the last words of this paragraph, but if I were to point to some idea that should be thought in relation to that paragraph, it might be: "As I read Derricotte's poem, I got the sickening feeling that something wanted me dead and as Fusco read her play, I got that same feeling." )

What I loved about the story is the way it makes characters whose lives are undervalued on both an institutional level and an interpersonal level loom large on our stage because they are ‘live’ (in relation to the video characters representing the artist of the diorama, the museum officials, and the museum going public) and because we spend time listening to their stories. I think what Fusco achieves here is part of what I have been saying I want: a way to make what gets deemed small take up a lot of space and a way to make our interior lives speak to and through the public realm without the decharacterization Laura Riding warned us about. [See "H*h"]

What I haven’t said yet and what it is important that I say is that each woman is a Latina woman. I am tempted to add "of color" because these distinctions are important to me, but realize that I am perhaps projecting. Maybe they aren’t all of color. Maybe they are but maybe Fusco’s point is not that they are "of color" but rather that they are Latinas or that they are of the class they are (two were working class and one was middle class, or came from the middle class) or that they, specifically, know what it is to be expendable. I am including this thought process of mine, though, because my point in writing down these notes is to explore how these things resonate with me.

The idea of being "of color" or "not white" brings with it a layer of meaning signifying that the characters face certain challenges to their dignity and to their person that ‘woman’ and ‘Latina’ alone don’t necessarily indicate for me. I write all of this, however, because I recognize that I don’t know what kinds of challenges white Latinas face as white Latinas or, more specifically, whether the story told in Fusco’s play is more likely to be about women of color than it is to be about other (white) Latina women.

Later, I will have more to say about whether I am reading this story or reading into it. Later, I will have more to say about why I feel compelled discuss the race(s) of the characters beyond ‘Latina’. Later, I will have more to say about how adding this kind of race to the discussion of the characters isn’t just or necessarily about adding color to their bodies. I’ll tell you more of what I’m thinking about invoking the non-whiteness of a character as a way of ascribing a certain set of positions in relationships (within a history of colonialism / slavery) to her people.

Right now, however, I need to say that the fact that the only body on stage at this reading was Fusco’s meant two things. One was that I could and had to fill in for myself what the characters looked like and who their people were and what that had to do with what happened to them. The other was that I could and did end up reading Coco Fusco’s body in that space.

c) Which brings me to Coco Fusco’s act of reading her play in a startling hot pink jacket. I think part of why I want to think about the women in the play as ‘of color’ is because I am interested in Coco Fusco as a woman of color. What I mean is that I am interested in 1) the ways in which her critiques of the art world or a certain kind of capitalist project regarding globalization are informed by her experience of living in her body and as a member of communities and 2) the way that that experience is connected to mine because our bodies signify in similar ways and we are in the same and different communities where the people’s bodies signify in the same and different ways. Thinking about this hot pink jacket, however, which zipped up the front and was nylon and had a stick up collar that was almost as wide as her shoulders, I am led to think of the body in a different way right now.

I must note that I am wary of going in this direction, precisely because Coco Fusco is a woman of color. If SWEAT wasn’t a place where I had made up my mind to think about notions of blackness and womanness and the roles they play in the making and reading of art, then I don’t think I’d go into what she was wearing here at all, because the fear would be that my conversation would be moving from the important ideas about politics and form into the unimportant (read: girly) ideas about fashion and beauty. But because this is a place for me to think about how I read art texts and how other people read them and what our bodies have to do with that and what the reading says about me and what is possible for me as an artist, I'm going to go ahead and do my thing.

Now, I'm focusing on the jacket, not just because it was fashionable. I later noticed that Fusco was also wearing very stylish pants and shoes, but the jacket it is significant to me because it called attention to itself. Right now I am thinking of reading Karla Holloway's writing about her grandmother's injunctions against wearing red and of a conversation I once had with Jessie Carney Smith about the fact that Fisk wouldn't hire Zora Neale Hurston because she wore a red dress to the interview and of the number of times things went wrong for Clare Kendry in a red dress. Hot pink is not red, of course. Maybe hot pink and red signify differently. And anyway, I was not thinking about disaster.

This talk was at Yale. That means nothing, in particular. Only I was thinking about the fact that being in the academy has made me want to wear dark colors more often. Bright colors have almost disappeared from my closet. I remember once, during my first year of grad school, I came to class wearing bright purple. During the break, all these people had things to say to me about the brightness of the color. Now, what they said was all good. People of color who were a little farther along in the program came up and joked that they were glad to see someone not afraid of 'color' walk through the door. People of all backgrounds laughed with me about how people in my program had a reputation for wearing all black. But it was all too much for me. I didn't want to be that visible. I just wanted to come to class and talk about Space and Location. I wondered whether coming in with all this 'color' was a distraction from what my brain was doing. I decided not to wear those colors until I could be sure. (I've not worn them often.) But I digress. This is not about me. [8]

The audience was there to see "Coco Fusco". She knew they (we) were going to be looking at her. And she is, after all, an artist. Isn't that part of the fun of going to see artists seeing how their aesthetics get mapped onto their bodies? Why, as an artist, pretend that people who know you or have come to find out about you aren't interested in looking (at you, your choices)?

I am thinking about this partly because I recently gave a talk at Williams College about my work in net art. I'm rather comfortable giving talks. I don't remember what I wore, but I remember choosing something that looked and felt good, but was relatively conservative -- which is my general teaching aesthetic. I had a very strange moment, though, when I presented a clip from The Sour Thunder. In The Sour Thunder, I was playing a character, wearing wide-legged pants and a sheer, wide-armed midriff shirt. All of a sudden it seemed very strange to have two of me in front of these people, one in a gray suit jacket, the other in a white midriff. Did the appearance of me in a midriff undercut my authority as a presenter? Did the appearance of me in a gray suit jacket undercut my authority as an artist? Was this a double-bind situation? Or is there power in being able to stake claim to more than one style of presentation and still have a unified, broad reach in aesthetics and intellectual discourse?

There was something very right about Coco Fusco's hot pink jacket, which was stylish and in the lectern light, gave her a semi-natural glow. What was striking to me is that the color accented what might be said about the style: that it was meant to make the watcher think about beauty. But this is interesting to me not as a distraction from the play, but as a something to be considered alongside it.

Before reading the play, Fusco gave a brief discussion about her research on the performance artist who made the audio piece about having sex with a corpse. At one moment, she looked at our faces and made a comment about how morbid this was. She smiled and told us that she could stand to do this work because she used to be a goth girl. This self-interruption made me think again about aesthetics, about pleasure, about the desire to follow certain threads. When she said she thought she should make this guy who wanted to make art about having sex with a dead Latina woman talk to her because she made art in which she played dead Latina women, I know it was an attempt to lighten up the mood in the lecture hall. But I also took it as a reminder that the best art, like the best politics, is wrapped up in the pleasure of following our fascinations as caring people in the world. This act has also got me thinking on adornment as a way of claiming one's own body and the right to redirect the gaze directed at it.

With hope for peace,
Mendi Lewis Obadike
http://Obadike.tripod.com

[5] Ok. Interestingly, I realized as I was writing that I do in fact, have the script to this play in Fusco’s newest book: the bodies that were not ours and other writings (which you should run out and get right away and I should read cover to cover instead of dipping in for the things I already know are in there). However, I didn’t change what I wrote because I think the reach (in trying to remember whether we had the information about race and trying to figure out what having it or not having it meant for me) was good for my thinking and might be good for yours, too. Here are Coco Fusco’s notes on the live characters:

Magaly Valdes a middle-class Chilean in her 40s, fair skinned, dark hair, medium height, thin.
Chela Flores a working-class Nortena in her late 30s, buxom, mestiza, lots of layered hair and make-up.
Dolores Zepeda a working-class Salvadoran in her 50s, mestiza, small build, heavy set.

Interestingly, while I now know that Dolores and Chela are mestiza and Magaly is fair-skinned, I'm still not sure what to make of Magaly. I mean, I know that she is light, and coupled with the information that she is middle-class, that information given might be enough to make me read her as white. Somehow, though, I don't. Because fair-skinned is a color not a race, and even that color term can mean different things. And while Magaly does operate with a level of privilege among the women and in relation to the gallery that might be ascribed to the whiteness of her character, there is a certain something else written in her character that I associate with being a woman of color. What is it? I think it is a sort of knowledge about the way the institution sees them. If Dolores and Chela are sometimes something of a mystery to Magaly, what is not a mystery is the way the gallery is going to respond in to them. What I don't know is whether this the kind of knowledge that comes with being 'of color' or whether this is the kind of knowledge that comes with having any identity that gets discredited. By the time I get to this understanding, however, I'm wrapped up in the story. I'm excited about the places the story takes my mind, but I'm too far gone (into the story) to think about categories.

[6] This part of the play is based on an actual event. When I learned about this action in a History of Performance Art class, it made me sick. Whether the artist actually had sex with the corpse of a Mexican woman or just wanted people to think that he had, he was using 'a Mexican woman' as something one could use however he wanted. I was watching younger students (of color or just tan? Sometimes it's hard to tell) try to express their discomfort about the piece and what sickened me is that the felt the need to qualify their own statements, as if they were working towards understanding the project as art and away from their disgust and outrage on behalf of human beings.

As a student who was, by this time, also a teacher, I became even more wary of a 'higher education' that made us feel like the goal was to get away from our feelings about how people ought to be treated. What good is an institution (of art or higher learning) if it only presents work that is 'shocking' or 'important' but doesn't take us somewhere useful as humans on the planet? I suppose part of what is so important to me about this play is that it is not only about women whose lives are devalued for different reasons, but also because it is also about institutions. It is about and to and within the art world as an institution or set of institutions that can see or not see us.

[7] This poem appears in The Vintage Book of African American Poetry edited by Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton.

[8] Yes it is. Don't sleep.

copyright Mendi Lewis Obadike 2002

note: january 30, 2007: This post is preceded by other, related posts, entitled: "Mental Notes I’ve Been Taking on the Body: Writing vs. Speaking" and "Taking on the Body: Coco Fusco's Work"

. . . Taking on the Body: Coco Fusco's work

Mendi O. — Sat, 30 Mar 2002 10:25:00 +0000

Mental Notes I’ve Been Taking on the Body: Coco Fusco's work

2. Coco Fusco recently came to New Haven to do a reading of her play The Incredible Disappearing Woman which has three live characters and a few characters on video. There is so much I could say about the body and this play. Maybe I will say more on it when I see it, read it, or hear it read again. Right now, though, I want to think about what resonates after her reading in light of a) how I feel about Coco Fusco’s other work, b) what I loved about the story, and c) Coco Fusco’s act of reading her play in a startling hot pink jacket.

a) How I feel about Coco Fusco’s other work, quite simply, is that it is important. To get more complex, I’m disturbed by it but keep coming back. When I think of her, I often think first of a talk I heard her give at Duke a few years back. She showed Couple in the Cage, a documentary video about "Year of the White Bear: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit . . .", a collaborative performance with Guillermo Gomez-Pena [3] where they were on display in a cage as "two undiscovered Amerindians" from the island of Guatinau. Here is how Coco Fusco describes the performance in "The Other History of Intercultural Performance", an extremely valuable essay on /reflection on /documentary of the performance which can be found in her book English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas:

Our plan was to live in a golden cage for three days, presenting ourselves as undiscovered Amerindians from an island in the Gulf of Mexico that had somehow been overlooked by Europeans for five centuries. We called our homeland Guatinau, and ourselves Guatinauis. We performed our "traditional tasks," which ranged from sewing voodoo dolls and lifting weights to watching television and working on a laptop computer. A donation box in front of the cage indicated that, for a small fee, I would dance (to rap music), Guillermo would tell authentic Amerindian stories (in a nonsensical language), and we would pose for Polaroids with visitors. Two "zoo guards" would be on hand to speak with visitors (since we could not understand them), take us to the bathroom on leashes, and feed us sandwiches and fruit. At the Whitney Museum in New York we added sex to our spectacle, offering a peek at authentic Guatinaui male genitals for $5 (39.)

I want to write about my feelings about the piece, but I’m having a hard time finding the language to describe the way the piece was documented or why it hit me so hard. Part of what the video documents is the reactions of people looking on. What is unbelievable to me is the belief of the spectators in the spectacle they perceived.

So many of them believed they were looking at two undiscovered Amerindians who were being displayed in a cage. What I am trying to figure out is where this is ridiculous to me. Do I really believe that it is ridiculous to think that someone might be displaying people of color in cages in this day? I mean, do I think we are so far beyond that history that no one would believe this was something other than a comment on that practice of old? Or is it the nature of the performance that I find unbelievable. From the language to the music to the dance to the costumes to the cage to the fact of the performance, the performance doesn't appear to be about fooling the audience into believing what they are seeing. It seems to be about using extremes to make people take a second look at their/our every day lives.

What is it that these people on the video see when they think what they are being told is going on is really what is going on? Do they see the hair weave and faux leopard skin clothes as ‘instant globalization’? What do they hope to hear in Gomez-Pena's story or see in Fusco's dance? For what purpose do onlookers believe someone has brought these two people to them in a cage? There was also something much more disturbing to me, however, than the question of belief. There was one scene which was an art world event at the Whitney, so people knew they were interacting with art, engaging with a comment on our culture(s). On the video (by Fusco and Paula Heredia), I watched people feed Fusco and Gomez-Pena bananas, take pictures with them, and pay for Gomez-Pena to expose his genitalia.

I felt about that like I do about Yoko Ono’s "Cut Piece". I am thrilled by the bravery it took Ono to invite audience members to cut away her clothes in "Cut Piece", but I am disturbed that people actually did it. [4] I feel the same way about the Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s solo piece (that I can’t find described anywhere on the web—hope I get this right) where he was in a bag laying on an elevator floor until someone came to his rescue. That one hits me right in the gut. People stepped over him, people went so far as to look inside the bag and then kick or ignore him, but it took a long time for anyone to come to his rescue, even to do so much as call 911. Why? How?

And I feel a related way about Nao Bustamante’s "Indigurrito", where she strapped on a vegetarian tortilla (as a dildo) and invited white men to take a bite of the burrito after confessing their sins as a Columbus Day performance. I think this was a bold, funny performance and understand the action as not only a funny, fun action, but also a comment on the way Latinas (or maybe specifically Chicanas) are appreciated when they are sexualized or giving you food or being oppressed, but not when having self-determination about what it means to be who they are making whatever art they want to make. Maybe calling out the art world while feeding people an edible dildo makes it, well, easier to swallow. This is the way she began the performance: This year I was told any artist of color must complete a performance based on 500 years of oppression in order to get funding . . . I don’t know about you, but that makes me cry as hard as it makes me laugh. Isn’t that the way these things really go?

It’s hard for me to imagine having my body on display like any of these performers have, though, even to make a point, especially knowing that it won’t just be a point. People will actually come play with you if you invite them to. And some of it may have to do with wanting to be an obedient audience member. Some of it may have to do with needing to identify with the performer. But some of it, I am convinced, is about some white people wanting to make colored people act out this fantasy and be a part of it.

As some of you know, my collaborative partner and husband Keith attempted to sell his Blackness on eBay this summer. Now, this marketed Blackness had more to do with the way Blackness is conceived of than it had to do with howit is perceived (ie: on the body). Still, the body was in question. Most of the messages he received in response were fun, but I am surprised (but why?) by how much fun people some had with the project. Many people seemed to be engaging in the "laughing to keep from crying" way, no doubt, and no one sent anything nasty our way, but sometimes there was a lightness to the response that really gave me pause. How can you, I would think to myself while reading the emails of some white respondents, stand to play so hard with this, enjoy this so much in front of us, when you understand how serious this is, even though we are making fun and inviting you to join?

Part of what struck me about Fusco’s talk (and part of what strikes me about her essay in English is Broken Here) is that she talked about the difference between her response to being exposed to all kinds of scrutiny and interactions and the way Gomez-Pena dealt with it. Fusco writes:

Gomez-Pena found the experience of being continually objectified more difficult to tolerate than I did. By the end of our first three days in Madrid, we began to realize not only that people’s assumptions about us were based upon gender stereotypes, but that my experiences as a woman had prepared me to shield myself psychologically from the violence of public objectification. (57.)

I don’t know what saddens me more, the depression Gomez-Pena had to experience to bring us this priceless information through the performance and its documentation or the fact that going through the experience didn’t register so heavily on Fusco’s scales because she is a woman.

I feel like letting this be the last word but I can’t stop writing before I say something about seeing Nao Bustamante and Coco Fusco perform Stuff. According to the statement on Offbeat: "The work takes a look at how fear and desire for food, nurturing, and erotic pleasure are intertwined with American perceptions of Latin women, and how society contends with its' mixed fascination for their cultural otherness." This is how Fusco describes it on the MoMA site:

[Stuff] deals with how tourism, which I call the "underbelly of globalization," affects Latin women in countries that are very close to the United States, the Caribbean, and Mexico. And we kind of go through, section by section, different kinds of culture tourism, indigenous-oriented tourism, new age, spiritual tourism, and we get to, finally, sex tourism. And there, the sociological material that we drew from for the script [came] from the interviews that I had done in Cuba and all these sex tourist language books that we bought, which are like Berlitz guides, but instead of saying, "How do I get a taxi?" and "Where is the bank?", it's like "Roll over and get the whip" and "Are you married?" and "If you're married, are you into having an open relationship?" [These phrases are used by tourists] who want to have sexual partners in Asia and Latin America and anywhere else they decide to go.

. . . part of the performance is a dialogue in which we bring on a male member of the audience and train him, using phrases from the guide books, on how to pick up a Cuban girl in Spanish. And he gets his Spanish lesson on stage and it's very very funny. And presenters always say, "What if people don't want to do it?" I've never had trouble getting a guy up there. I don't know if it means that I have some special talent, or that they're just really eager, but it's never ever been a problem.

I saw this performance at Duke and people came because they knew at least Fusco’s work, if not also Bustamante’s and many of us had already heard them speak about their work at this point. I don’t know what we were expecting, given these facts. But many of us were surprised by how theatrical Stuff was. I mean, it was like a play. Although it had many audience participation parts, there wasn’t the kind of opportunity to watch people play into like "Year of the White Bear" or "Mexarcane International".

Now, I am one of those people who came wanting to see something like that, not knowing how I could since I and most of us were "in the know." I had an interesting discussion with my local crew of artist-intellectuals (all Black, Latino, and/or Chinese) about going to this performance, what our expectations and desires were around it, and how and where these were and were not fulfilled. Interestingly, the photographs used to promote this performance were not images from the performance, but rather were from another project by Bustamante and Fusco called "Paquita y Chata Se Arrebatan". About these images, Fusco says:

I wanted to deal with the issue of Latin women's sexuality. I had been doing some research on the reemergence of prostitution or sex tourism in Cuba that has escalated since 1993 to become, at this point, probably the most [or one of the most] significant source of income for women under 25. I did a lot of interviews with women involved in the business, with men who were involved as pimps, with men who were involved also as prostitutes (although gay prostitution is not as big a deal in Cuba as it is on some of the other islands in the Caribbean or in Brazil). And it was based on those experiences that Nao and I started to think about the history of this representation of the Latina as oversexed, as a sex pot.

I have a hard time finding images from Stuff on the web.

My favorite parts, after a long reflection, were when Nao Bustamante did a solo sound piece using her body as we had our eyes closed which was a reflection on new age spiritualism and when Coco Fusco did a solo performance of setting the table as audio played of her speaking about her relationship to food and serving friends or boyfriends as a Latina woman.

Bustamante's performance moved me because it made me think in a focused way about what it means to be in the same room with a person, during a performance in particular. Closing my eyes, I was clear that I was in the present moment. I could still tell Nao Bustamante was right there in front of me. I was also aware that if I opened my eyes, I could see her, but I wanted to experience the performance as I was asked to experience it. I was moved by the sounds she made and the comment about 'our' desire to get sprititual in a trendy way. I also liked that this was a point when I was asked to just think and listen and not look. Since we had been set up to look at Paquita and Chata and since Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante are so attractive, I liked that we were to also think and listen and reflect with our eyes closed and experience being in this live environment without looking at them or one another. While this by no means took the body out of the performance, it did get us to engage with reflect on the body in a different way.

Fusco's performance got me because it was so personal and I really appreciated hearing and seeing such a personal act in the middle of this story about all these other characters. I also related to the story in a personal way. It made my brain stretch to think about setting the table alongside prostitution. And the action itself was also beautiful and intense. I really felt like I was looking at her at home. I felt the desire up there and almost felt like I was looking at myself. This is because of the action and because we are around the same height and color and I have worn my hair like she does. (In fact, at the talk earlier that day, a friend of mine passed me by and went up to tap Coco Fusco on the shoulder, thinking she was tapping me.) I think of this part of the performance often when friends are coming over and I'm cooking. Or when I'm cleaning up quickly before a party. I think of what I must look like alone, hoping to make others happy and have to ask myself what all this is connected to. I have to ask myself what the urgency in my actions is about.

I’m not sure how to end this section of writing. I do feel the need to say that I am still trying to digest what we artists who identified with Fusco and Bustamante expected from Stuff and whether we were disappointed to get a play about culture tourism instead of the sex pots the promo flyers promised . What is it that we black artists expect from other black artists, particularly those who are performance artists? What kind of interaction would I hope to have with another black artist doing these kinds of performances? What kinds of interactions do I, as a black artist who sometimes performs, want or expect from other black artists or artists of color? This is a set of questions I began asking myself when I first saw Coco Fusco perform and that is only one of the reasons why her work hits me so hard.

More to come.

Peace,
Mendi

[3] Gomez-Pena has an accent over the o and a tilde over the n. I don’t have keys that allow that to happen and don’t want to perpetuate bad spelling, so please take note. You will also note that the footnotes are numbered according to the entire piece Mental Notes I’ve Been Taking on the Body, rather than just to the section you are now reading. Hence, we started on footnote #3.

[4] These performances also remind me of a friend who once said he would like to be tied up in bed by his lover, to give him complete control over his body and know he would be made love to ever-so-gently by him. I’m reading the desire in this statement and in these performances as a desire to trust people to be good to you even when they have permission / increased ability to harm you. And maybe it is also a desire to prove that your suspicions about them are wrong. I’m disappointed when, in response, people say: "OK. I can harm you? Bet." Why don’t they say, "But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to participate in this scene in a racist, sexist, violent way. I’m most interested and most heavily invested in respecting humanity. Yours and my own." instead?

copyright Mendi Lewis Obadike 2002
http://Obadike.tripod.com

note: january 30, 2007: This post is preceded by another, related post, entitled: "Mental Notes I’ve Been Taking on the Body: Writing vs. Speaking" and followed by another, related post, entitled: "Taking on the Body: Coco Fusco Reading in a Startling Hot Pink Jacket"

old comments:

"But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to participate in this scene in a racist, sexist, violent way. I’m most interested and most heavily invested in respecting humanity. Yours and my own."

...funny. my lover asked me to tie him up in bed once and that's exactly what i told him.

LOL. ok so that's a thorough and complete lie but hey. there's so much juicy and worthy of discussion and contemplation in this one, and my body just recognized it's four in the morning. so i gotta go to sleep but want you to know i'm reading you.

Posted 4/7/2002 at 4:44 AM by honeychild

Hey, where'd you come from? I was just getting ready to perfect my talking-to-nobody-but-myself-in-public aesthetic. she says as if it makes sense to take this tone when you're giddy with excitement about having a reader! after all. I'm in a weird mood. But thanks for the heads up.

Posted 4/8/2002 at 8:04 AM by mendi

Cocoon

Mendi O. — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 03:50:00 +0000

wrapping myself
in my own thread.
hoping to come out
a butterfly.

Thanks for Everything Mr. Paik

Mendi O. — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 04:55:00 +0000

Nam June Paik passed away Sunday. He got so many things right that he is more to me than an artist whose work I know. His work moves me in the places where I laugh and experience awe -- which are not necessarily the same places, but not necessarily different, either. When I first saw "Zen for TV" in person I couldn't take my eyes off it. Why does his work hit me in the gut? I'm still meditating on the answer. I want to say so much but can't do it yet. All I can say is "thanks".

Paik's website
Father of Video Art Paik Nam-june Dies
J's Theater on Paik
Nam June Paik, US Video Artist
The Worlds of Nam June Paik
The Nam June Paik Museum

What Are We Worth?

Mendi O. — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 05:37:00 +0000

Doing research for a new project Keith and I are working on. Reading a lot of interesting books on slavery. I'll say more about that when the time comes, but in the meantime, I'm sitting with what I'm finding out as I'm making my work. In the stacks, I stumbled upon a book I wasn’t looking for; it’s called We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century and it was edited by Dorothy Sterling. I opened to a random page and what I read hit me hard. A mother and daughter who had been separated due to slavery for twenty years had reconnected and started writing to one another. The daughter was free and was hoping to buy freedom for her mother and brother. The mother, Elizabeth Ramsey, writes to her daughter:

I said in my letter to you that Col. Horton would let you have me for 1000 dol. or a woman that could fill my place. I think you could get one cheaper where you are than to pay him the money. . . . I think that 1000 dollars is too much for me. You must writ very kind to Col Horton and try to Get me for less money. I think you can change his Price by writing Kindly to him.

What hit me was learning what comes along with the knowledge that one is property. I had never thought about the fact that my ancestors must have been knowledgeable about things like how much a person goes for in Texas, versus Ohio. Or how much they were each worth, individually, in a dollar amount, such that a dollar amount such as $1000 could be exorbitant. (Did they often assess one another that way, thinking of dollar amounts when they noticed each other's physical qualities?) Or the way suggesting that another person come be a slave in one's place could be discussed as a matter of fact if one were writing one's free daughter and hoping to meet one's own grandchildren. It was the matter of fact way that she thought through what it would take. Of course, of course, but it opened up a whole world of sorrow for me to read that letter. How are we still dealing with this kind of knowledge today? What is the after-image?

For the record, the daughter was able to buy her mother for $900.

Words to the Wise: Czeslaw Milosz

Mendi O. — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 06:14:00 +0000

A year or so ago, I was instructing my students to write an ars poetica and went to my poet-friends for some brainstorming on how to write about the art of poetry. Reggie H. sent me the poem "Ars Poetica?" by Czeslaw Milosz. Here's an excerpt I want to think more about:

"In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail."

Words to the Wise: Sandra Cisneros

Mendi O. — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 10:31:00 +0000

I love Sandra Cisneros' work. When I first read her I thought I was going to study her intensely so I could tap into whatever she was working with, but after a powerful experience researching her for a course I took called Woman as Writer, I didn't really come back to pick up what I'd started. Well, I did track down an address for her and write her a letter (this was pre-Internet), but it came back unopened with the words: no longer at this address. By the time it came back I'd decided it was a silly letter and that it would be better just to study more than to embarrass myself in writing. Anyway, Cisneros recently gave Ramola D did an interview at Macondo, an invitation-only summer writing workshop she (Cisneros) runs in Texas. The interview was published last year in The Writer's Chronicle. Reading her words really opened something up for me and I've been dipping into it for inspiration. I'm gearing up to teach some of the lessons I've learned from it this semester, so I thought I'd post a quote here:

"[W]hat I’m looking for is a kind of generosity with the characters and a heart that understands them, beyond holding grudges or getting revenge. I really believe when we write there are moments, a few seconds, when we become the Buddha, when the writing transcends us, when we’re writing in the light. It’s channeled through us so the writing can be wiser, more loving—and then we go back to being ourselves . . . I think you have to get very humble, and fearless, for the writing to be wiser. You have to be in a zone of absolute humility for that light to be channeled through you."

Feeling It: Alice Coltrane / Turiyasangitananda

Mendi O. — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:32:00 +0000

Yesterday I heard the word that Alice Coltrane passed last Friday from Cherryl's blog and then saw it confirmed in the news. I don't have many words, but do feel the need to say something about this, having been profoundly moved by her work, as have so many people. Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda holds a special place for me because of the ways it can mystically and consistently heal me. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter is going wrong, when I'm soul sick, I can put on this album and something will begin to shift within me. I know I'm not alone in this. So many others have mentioned it in passing. There's a science to it that I don't quite understand, but I think it has to do with the balancing of the gravity of Cecil McBee's bass playing and the lightness of Alice Coltrane's harp and piano playing. But perhaps that is just what I can hear.

This summer, I mentioned to Keith that the person I thought it would be most meaningful for me to hear in person would be Alice Coltrane. About a month later, we started seeing her picture around town and we read in Essence that she not only had a new album out but also would be playing in Newark. We of course picked up the CD and knew we had to go to the concert. Translinear Light comes decades later and has a different sound, but Coltrane's healing science is still at work. There is a certain peace I have while listening to "Sita Ram" -- particularly when she plays the lower frequencies on the organ. In fact, hearing it live when she played in Newark was particularly powerful because we could feel the frequencies physically moving us. I play "Sita Ram" and "Satya Sai Isha" frequently, both because they move me and because I want to understand how they move me. They are both Hindu hymns played as if they are Black American Christian hymns. Or perhaps I should say that is how I hear them.

Or maybe I should say what I really mean. The too simple way to say it is that I knew it would be meaningful for me to see Coltrane live (and not just listen to her album) because I appreciate the ways she is black and universal. It's not just about the ways she brings Black American and Indian musical traditions together, but that is a focusing point for my attention. I have more to say about her but I'll stop here. I'm going to participate in some MLK day events. Later, I'll come back to AC and James Brown. Love to all, Mendi

Bring That Beat Back: Furious Flower

Mendi O. — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 04:16:00 +0000

I'm not ready to write new long posts, but here's a photo from Furious Flower last September. From right to left: Reginald Harris, Evie Shockley, Stephane Robolin, and me. Photo by Major Jackson. Unfortunately, Evie, Reggie, and I were all giving papers at the same time in different rooms.

In other news: Yesterday was SWEAT's four year anniversary.

The Book Meme

Mendi O. — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 01:10:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to blog on the February Mabou Mines reading of A. Rey Pamatmat’s play Beautiful Day, which is about four friends attending a smalltown wedding. It’s a beautiful work that manages to ask big questions about marriage, community, friendship, small town life, and queerness (in broad sense) while keeping the story's characters and their lives central. I hope to see it fully produced someday soon.

I promise say more about it soon, but in the meantime, Rey has tagged me to answer this book meme, which I found extremely difficult to answer. But I’m up for taking challenges and breaking rules, so here we go:

1. One book that changed your life?

The difficult about this question is that many, many books have changed my life. That’s how I got to be a writer. I thought I’d think a little about how a few very different ones them changed my life.

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

This was the first book that came to mind. It’s my obvious favorite book for a number of reasons. I read it while on a summer research retreat in college. I had workshops in the afternoons, but hours upon hours to myself in the mornings. I spent my mornings reading Beloved, thinking about survival, and mourning ancestors. I came out of the experience feeling better prepared to face the world, so I also began to understand -- in a big way -- the kind of personal, spiritual work that novels, literature, and art in general could help people do. It’s when I decided to study literature seriously, and in every way as a writer, as an academic, and as a person.

Cien Poemas de Amor y Una Cancion Desesperada, by Pablo Neruda

In high school my English class had to write research papers on a poet. No two people could write on the same author. The list of about 50 suggested poets included only white, US American men writing in English. The black students, who had begun quietly talking amongst ourselves about the fact that we were only taught dead white men in our literature classes had made a pact that none of us would write on anyone on the suggested writers list. The trouble was that we all knew the same black writers and this was pre-Internet. Each time I tried to sign up with a writer not on the list, someone had already chosen him or her. My mom suggested I write on Pablo Neruda. I was taking Spanish and had started trying to write poems in Spanish but this choice was most attractive to me because no one else had claimed Neruda. When I started reading his poems, I fell in love with the imagery and the way I had to work to understand the ideas in translation. My own early poems were greatly affected by the stimulation. So are the later ones.

The Princess Bride, by William Goldman

My mother and I were in California at the studio of the artist Ted Poniflet. Neither she nor my father had seen him in about fifteen years. They talked about the old days. I was ten years old and he had never met me, but he had just finished this book he thought I might like. He began to hand it over to me and then he decided that maybe I wasn’t old enough to read it. I looked at the cover. It looked like some kind of fairy tale. What in the world could be too adult? He decided to give it to me and I, of course, devoured it, wanting to know why he liked it and why he thought perhaps I was too young. When I read it I felt like the adult world had been holding out on how fun and wild literature might be for adults.

2. One book you have read more than once?
I tend to re-read most books I like and every book I teach. (Beloved was an exception -- I’ve been against rereading it for the last 13 years. I think I might reread it, though, because I don’t want to forget it.) Brutal Imagination, by Cornelius Eady, though I've got nothing on my mother, who read it almost every night for at least a year. Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde. Over and over.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
Am I chilling on this desert island or am I working every minute just to survive? If I’m chilling, maybe I’d want something long and winding, like Gayl Jones' novel Mosquito. If I’m working to survive, I'd probably want haiku (Basho is a favorite) or something by Harryette Mullen. Morsels to memorize and roll around in my mind as I’m gathering wood to build my shelter and pulling up roots and herbs for sustenance.

4. One book that made you laugh?
White Boy Shuffle. The Princess Bride.

5. One book that made you cry?
Beloved. (a lot)

6. One book you wish had been written?
I’m currently trying to write two of them. Absolutely no spoilers.

7. One book you wish had never had been written?
Hmm. It feels a bit futile to regret the present, but my first thought was The Bell Curve.

8. One book you are currently reading?

I’m a multitasker. Right this very moment I’m re-reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Ron Radano’s Lying up A Nation.

Keith is reading John Cage’s A Year from Monday and I’m reading in it when he puts it down.

We're both reading and enjoying Mark Tribe and Reena Jana’s New Media Art (only partially because there’s a section on us in it).

I’m reading Wayne Koestenbaum’s Jackie Under My Skin: Interpretting an Icon, in part for research purposes and in part because he’s been a mentor to my friend Ronaldo.

I also recently read and reviewed Alex Weheliye’s book Phonographies and Jurgen Grandt’s book Kinds of Blue for American Literature. What else?

I’m loving Wendy S. Walters’ poetry book Birds of Los Angeles. I want to write more about it because, like much of Walters' writing, I find I can't hold on to what she's doing formally, but the order in it seems so definite and purposeful. What kind of magic is she working? I keep the book by the bed and have been reading in it most nights it for the last couple of months.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

10. Now tag five people:
Audiologo, J’s Theater, Amardeep Singh, Cherryl Floyd Miller, Frank Leon Roberts, and Unbeached Whale. That’s six.

Eating in America

Mendi O. — Sun, 27 Apr 2003 02:08:00 +0000

Dear friends,

It's been a long time, no?

So, I was having this conversation with a group of artists about whether or not we (as a community) were elitist. A friend encouraged me to post my response here. It went something (but not exactly) like this:

"I think the charge of elistism can be productive for us if we use it as a charge to reflect on what we are, look like, could be, want to be, and/or will be. I mean, if we just say We're not elitist because we're great or We are elitist so we'd better get over it then maybe we aren't using this moment to our greatest collective advantage.(I don't mean to suggest that anyone has argued either of these simple ideas. by the way. I just mean that an extreme form of an attempt to answer the question Are we elitist? with a Yes or a No might leave us stagnant.) The question for me is always: How can I/we get (more) power responsibly and use it for good, and share it with more people?"

Now, I share these ideas here because I've been thinking a lot about what it means to want power. Because of the US war on Iraq (that is: "Operation Iraqi Freedom") I have been having what I call a "fear of expendability". My first response is horror at the way all the leaders on all sides are willing to waste the lives of so many. I'm not surprised, but I am horrified. And it's a logical, though maybe selfish, response to think about wanting to make myself and those I love less expendable. It's like when someone is accused of a crime and they start saying He was always a loner . . . and you decide to go to that party you wanted to avoid, after all.

You know that going to a party doesn't make you any less of a misanthrope. And, conversely, staying home doesn't make you any more of one. Still, you don't want to give your enemies anything to work with. Or am I the only one who is this paranoid?

What I'm really thinking about is the academy. You know, people encourage you to go as far as you can go in school. Your family, your friends, your church are all proud of you, give you money and praise and then one day you're an academic and therefore not to be trusted. This isn't a complaint. It's a moment of reflection.

What does all this school mean in terms of my identity as an artist or cultural critic? It does affect my taste, and I'm not apologetic about that. I did want to study more so that my craft as a writer (in all forms) could become more sophisticated. I'm attached to, have ultimate respect for, and study quite a few artists who haven't spent quite so much time (or any time at all) in the academy. And my ultimate hope is that my being in the academy can mean something, yes, for the students who come through, but also for people who are not currently validated (or authorized) by the academy (ie: with a degree, or with attention.)

But how, exactly, should this be done? Should it be done by breaking down the system of validation or should it be done by extending that validation to those who don't traditionally receive it? I've tried both, but when I meet young people who are trying to become poets or get through school, my first inclination is to tell them everything I know about traditional methods of validation. This goes from how to submit works to how to impress teachers to what awards to seek to how to edit a poem. It only makes sense to do this, I think, but I have to wonder, isn't this sort of like trying to get everyone US citizenship so they'll be safe from America instead of trying to make the world safe?

Is this the wrong metaphor? If so, write me back at mendi@blacknetart.com and let me know if I can post your response.

Peace,

Mendi

Mental Notes I’ve Been Taking on the Body: Writing vs. Speaking

Mendi O. — Wed, 27 Mar 2002 16:35:00 +0000

Dear Reader:

During my (visual) silence these past few months, I’ve been taking mental notes on the body. I’m taking them for an essay I’m going to write when I get the time. In the meantime, I am slowly writing them down and plan to send them to you over the next week. Expect disjuncture. Read between the lines for yourself.

1. [1] I have decided that part of the reason why I am so ‘loud’ in my writing is because people can’t see or hear me. I don’t like to look at people while they look at me. Sometimes I get distracted trying to think about what they see and can’t think so much about what I want to say. I start thinking about how I look or how it looks to say a certain thing. I think about how it looks to say a certain thing when I’m writing, but there’s a time lag. I don’t have to worry about what it looks like to write something as I’m writing it (unless I’m in a chatroom), so the writing just flows. When I’m speaking, I am conscious of the inability to go back and edit what I’ve said. I try to edit midsentence or simply miss the moments when what I have to say would be most relevant to the conversation at hand.

I’m not as comfortable with people hearing me speak as I am with them reading my words unless they’re hearing me say something I’ve already composed. This has something to do with the way I assimilated into Southern US American culture as a child, with a softness in my voice that sometimes undercuts the points I make and sometimes underscores them. I get distracted by how I sound or how I ought to sound or what the tone I take will mean to my listener.

Now, I’m not sure how to say what this has to do with the body. What I’ve just written seems to be about how sound and vision work in ways that aren’t wholly dependent on the presence or absence of my body. But what provoked me to write it has something to do with the presence or absence of my body at a scene. If what you look at as you get what I’m ‘saying’ is not me but my words, then I can at least feel that what you are judging is not my body (which is far too often invoked as a symbol of irrationality), but rather, my logic (which is tight).

This is ultimately a question of control. [2] I try not to think of the fact that my body is invoked in my writing or the fact that my voice can be imagined or the fact that when what I have to say is undermined by the trope of irrational blacks and women and black women it is because ignorant people are going to respond to the idea that my body comes with limited brain power whether my body is physically there or not.

Still thinking about peace,
Mendi

http://www.blacknetart.com

PS. Next is a discussion of Coco Fusco's work.

[1] These notes are numbered only for the visual effect. In no way do the numbers reflect the order in which the ideas were noted in my mind.

[2] I fought the urge to add "isn’t it?" here. If I were speaking, I’d probably have just said it and regretted it. "Isn’t it?" is one of the reasons why I’m afraid to move to England. That and the kind of soft voice so many British women have. I am so affected by other people’s speech that I pick it up. It’s not completely involuntary. I love other people’s speech and other people’s speech melodies. In Leeds, I was beginning to get a softer voice and a light British melody. It had something to do with liking to hear the voice do new kinds of things. I’m afraid to move to England, though, because I tend to be more direct when my voice is not so soft and lilting and when my sentences end with statement-period rather than statement-a bit of doubt-question mark. I like myself more when I am direct.

old comments:

Writing (especially in this modern day format) takes on the guise of many things because there is no actual body to attach it to.

That's why I took down my mugshot in my profile.

People mix up words with physical appearance. There are plenty of people that read my blog and would think that I was a middleclass white male college boy unless they saw my big round Korean face smiling at them.

We tend to associate the physical with stereotypes. When I speak face to face, I am constantly aware of that. Is this more relavant to minorities? Because we're stereotyped more than others? No. Ultimately EVERYONE has a stereotype of EVERYONE.

But when allowed to speak freely in public as we do around close friends, I believe we learn more, or think one step further because we receive direct (wordless) interaction. Thus I love comments (although they aren't as immediate as a smile or a punch on the arm or some other physical language). They may not be direct, but it is something. And something is always more material to build another step out of.

Peace.

Posted 3/27/2002 at 1:36 PM by hairlessmunkee

[1] yr logic is always tight, brill

[2] thoughts on the period (as in american punctuation, also as a colloqialism for end-of-story, connoting surety) in relation to the 'full-stop' (as in british punctuation, also meaning, just, an ending, with no more or less emphasis implied than that.)

[2a] but i rather like it. i think it's kind of cute, init? and i pick it up when i'm there too. and come back saying 'sorry?' instead of 'huh'

[3] it's uncomfortable enough being looked at without the added pressure of being listened to at the same time. i like one or another at a time, thankyouverymuch. ideas OR the face. the words OR the giggle. also because i don't think FAST; i tend to keep my thoughts to myself when face to face with practically anybody, and express feelings instead, which come closer to the surface & more quickly.

[3a] which is why i so admire people who think in public. out loud. faces attached? you're a superhero. b/c it is sticky terrain we are navigating, between words and bodies and the frailty of language to hold even our most robust ideas.

[4] i'm glad i wandered over here before yr latest spate of communicado was pushed off the page, oh, suddenly-loquiacious one!

lovelove,

Posted 4/7/2002 at 4:29 AM by honeychild

Political Drama / Black History Museum

Mendi O. — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 16:54:00 +0000

Some things I want to think about more when I get the time:

Black History Trove, a Life’s Work, Seeks Museum
An article by Jennifer Steinhauer about Mayme Agnew Clayton's amazing collection of artifacts from African-American history. I think this collection will grow in importance over the years. I'm struck by the work her son (Avery Clayton) believes culture can do. Am collecting information about what people think culture does or can do. More later.

Her collecting grew from her work as a librarian, first at the University of Southern California and later at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she began to build an African-American collection. In 1969 she helped establish the university’s African-American Studies Center Library, and began to buy out-of-print works by authors from the Harlem Renaissance. Around that time, Ms. Clayton invested in a bookstore. When the principal owner squandered their profits on the horses, Mr. Clayton said, his mother agreed to take her partner’s collection of black-oriented books rather than take him to court. . . . “One of the things that culture does is that it works like a family,” Mr. Clayton said. “If you know you come from a good family, it enables you to go out into the world, no matter what happens to you, and do O.K. It is the same thing with culture: If you know you come from a great people, it gives you that same feeling.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/arts/14clay.html?th&emc=th

Political Drama Re-enacts Moments in a Death Chamber
Barbara Becnel and Shirley Neal wrote and produced a reenactment of the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams. The article is by Jesse McKinley. I'm thinking a lot about art that intends to be political these days, who shows up for it, and how it does its work. What I want to remember to think about is the way simply re-presenting what happened can be a comment on it. I saw in the news today that executions have been suspended in Florida and "a federal judge ruled that the lethal injection system in California violated the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment." How much does how we understand what is happening play a role in this? How much does art have to do with how we understand what is happening.

“This is political theater in the extreme,” Ms. Becnel told a crowd of about 150 people who gathered to watch the performance. “But it’s political theater in the extreme because we need it.” . . . On Wednesday, the theatrical re-enactment began at 12:01 a.m., the time Mr. Williams entered the death chamber. . . . With a simple set — folding chairs, a gurney and a platform — the play’s action was minimal: three witnesses stood, a guard strapped Mr. Tillis to a gurney, a nurse fumbled with an IV. Only once did anyone speak, when Mr. Tillis asked the actor playing the frustrated nurse whether she knew what she was doing. The entire performance took about 12 minutes — about a third of the actual execution time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/us/14tookie.html?th&emc=th