Paradise

***

Edna Manley's Sculpture, UTECH, Jamaica

Maya Deren's 'A Study in Choreography for Camera' with Talley Beatty

Pas de Deux by Maya Deren

Can you know a place by drawing it?

There are shoes between us

I recently started a series entitled ‘drawing the return’ through which I am exploring the question: “Can you know a place by drawing it?” I am specifically looking at my relationship to Nigeria. The series begins with the piece ‘There are shoes between us.’ The drawing is based on a pair of shoes I made for one of my first performance pieces over 10 years ago. They are leather, covered in white clay, modeled after a pair of Hausa shoes.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the ‘when’ of memory. About timing and recurrence. And that necessary moment of recollection. In 1998 I created this performance piece in which I wrapped myself in a raised structure of branches. I wore a mask with long flowing threads during the 2 days of the performance. When I was outside of the structure I wore hand-dyed blue clothing created specifically for the piece. And the Hausa shoes, which perhaps had been hand-made in a very similar manner hundreds of years ago by my own ancestors.

And so the return…

Lagos Island, Nigeria



There's a city between us



Try these



There are birds between us



How deep did you say this is?



How deep did you say this is? (detail)


We hid our birds

making fathoms

Sight is a feeling

***

shelter, ancestors, transportation (2008)
single-channel digital video
color, sound, 3:02

These video stills are from a series of performance works that I began creating in September, 2007, while at the Can Serrat Artist’s Residency in Spain. When I arrived, stories of global immigrations were very much on my mind. These changing cultural maps led me to consider the individual as the new nation. And all that that might imply about our connections to the history of a place and the land itself. I created belongings, marks, and earth puts on a mask during this time away. Upon my arrival back in Austin, I performed the return and shelter, ancestors, transportation. infinite return (bird on the sun) combines the landscapes of Catalunya and Texas; my body serves as the bridge between.

belongings (2007)
single-channel digital video
color, sound, 3:15

I begin with what we carry.

I am crawling along the foothills, making my way across almond fields, belly to ground. The land will not register my passing. The earth here is solid, compacted. I can walk in boots and leave no trace. I wrap stones around my feet so the mountain will remember: that I prayed and breathed it in and asked and listened and broke open and imagined. And what I saw. The people once fled into this same landscape of serrated mountains, running to and from, escaping. It is in the dust, as are all crossings: Gibraltar, the Canaries, the Atlantic. Our what ifs are immense. Our bodies makeshift rafts on open seas, and ladders pushing walls.

marks (2007)
single-channel digital video
color, sound, 1:15

earth puts on a mask (2007)
single-channel digital video
color, silent, 2:21

Is this the universal? Actions and shared actions? What one body invokes in another?

These performances are drawings, like Haitian Vodoun vévé—lines of cornmeal that mark the floor of ceremony. Vévé are how spirits enter the space; they are journey, possibility. What exactly is possible when body is our everything? How do we move through the world? What does our power look like?

the return (2007)
single-channel digital video
color, sound, :50

infinite return (bird on the sun) (2007)
single-channel digital video
color, sound, 7:03

You see these drawings. Sight is a feeling. Infiniphonic. Sonic and forever. And within that a drawing. And within that. And what if within that.

***

I lingered at the crossroads

I lingered at the crossroads (2008)

What if we do not feel brave? (2008)

***

Is there rope or net or direction for falling?

It is lace it is landscape it is the undulations of our bodies. I am continuously moved by the ability of artists to invoke the body so viscerally without actually picturing it. I recently read a conversation with artists Ernesto Neto and Fernanda Gomes in BOMB magazine (winter 2008). Neto says: “Maybe that’s why people dance, as a way to be outside themselves; maybe not to be is more comfortable than to be—.” I am thinking dance is the place where we are completely embodied, so much so that we are able to be in irresistible connection with the spiritual, the sound, the lights, the sweat, the ether, where our bodies are synced with the communal body, so much so that it indeed feels like a leaving of self, a letting go of the individual. Is this what he means by not?

But now, of the being. I am looking at this work-in-progress from artist Lisa C. Soto’s Rodinia series. Rodinia, from the Russian родина for motherland, a supercontinent hovering on the surface of our spherish world, but before, in the beginning as we know it geologically, rodinia, rodinia, it lingers in the mouth like being in love, a supercontinent indeed, this graphite on mylar. Lace, necklace, the forest. Stones in a river. And so many islands. Or an almost dress, this new pangaea. Her fingers must be stained black from the making, from the stitching of country to country. And so many. There are 192 or 193 or 195 depending on how you count and who counts. And measures. Soto includes territories as well and perhaps other land masses unclaimed. (Are there?) Her project feels unending…that the line of her work may extend into outerspace one day…taking map-like notes on the ever-colonized stratosphere and beyond. The tracing on mylar and the cutting will likely be a forever part of her artistic process.

I love the blackening of materials. The rubbing of graphite into plastic. To proclaim territories and understandings and non-nation nations Palestines Kosovos Puerto Ricos the Lakota Sioux. Though rooted in land, Soto’s Rodinia describes a landlessness as well, where these shadow nations are primary, where darkness is everything, the blackening divine.

There is a whole set of questions I want to ask the artist, a whole set of imaginations that I want to have embodied and explained. Can she tell me how this flesh and bones will look when rome falls, when the disintegration of borders takes hold, when the sea no longer eats us? Is there a motherland even after the first? And will we be whole when we see her? Are we shapeshifted enough? Or not? Is there rope or net or direction for falling? Should we slow and linger? Or disco nap? But I already have…

And is this what we do to remember? That Pluto is not a planet? Pluto, that smallest and coldest and once-farthest from the sun...now you feel? Hear the shadow? This looking is dancing, you know.

***

And then there is into

I visited Annette Lawrence’s studio to view her recent installation entitled Free Paper. The artist saved her junk mail for 13 months from November 2005 through November 2006. She tore the stacks of paper into two-inch wide strips which she then stacked on top of each other. Each month of free paper stands on a small table-high shelf. Lawrence speaks of the 11 years it took her to feel comfortable with the horizontal orientation of work, having moved from New York to Texas where, as everyone knows, the sky is bigger. These works spread out along their shelves like faded horizon lines stacked upon each other. Simultaneously, they stand high like architectural models, quiet skyscrapers pushing up against the white sky of the studio walls.

Evidence of marks and their maker. The strips of newspapers, glossy inserts and hard coupons speak of the internal as well—into earth and body. There is up down, the four directions, inside outside. And there is into. This invocation of the geological suggests a contemporary sedimentation: greys, reds, so many reds, an orange edge, but not quite. Strata of capitalism. Made beautiful. The weight of the thin strips of paper makes the stack curve fall at the edges, as the horizon line always bends in our peripheral vision. We should always remember the curvature of the earth.

These were once trees, this free paper. Lawrence has created rings of age, movement and breath. I can imagine the artist’s hands holding the metal straight-edge against small stacks of paper, then ripping, the sound hypnotic. I am looking at evidence of 13 months in a small room—November through November, an almost-lunar counting system. The overlap of months makes me think of a spiral. And infinity. Though they measure a specific beginning and end, there is really none to speak of. Though unintended, there is a lovely reference to the Jamaican saying “free-paper burn”. When free paper (a slave’s pass or documents of freedom) burn, our vacation is over, we must return to work. But here I imagine free paper could again become earth, trees, ash, air, breath.

I walk closer to these forms, remains and want to breathe them in, smell them, want them to smell like wet earth and clay, something alive. They are curiously absent of scent. I peer around the edges and am reminded of what exactly this is, this free paper: a Target logo, the blonde hair of a department store model, a coupon for 10% off. Must sacred always require the profane? And the liminal the ordinary?

I am in love with these bodies these forms and their spines—the squarish spaces that run through the middle of the stacks, devoid of color, that place in the fold of the newspaper the ink cannot touch. They are crooked vertebrae. Her body, my body, the neighbor, the mail carrier, whose free papers, whose bodies. They are all of us and absolutely gorgeous. I am again convinced that we live in a time of artists. Who else can transform junk into such beauty and reverence. I am reminded of Paul Chan’s My birds... trash... the future, a two channel digital projection that occupies two sides of a flat screen, all futures are possible.


2004. Two channel digital projection installation, front view. 17 minutes.


And they can indeed emerge un-apocalyptically.

It is humbling to stand before a work that makes me want to move slower, to savor and embrace my own actions, the rise and fall of my own breathing and voice. I am so moved by the what remains. It is photographic. Pre-photographic. Ancient as fossils. Rectangles of colored light that reflect up against the wall, a field of red or purple or blue. A kind of camera obscura, as if the light will remember the piece after the paper’s disintegration. (I think of Rothko here. Is it possible that works of art speak to each other regardless of our presence before them? Is the sound between works something we cannot hear? Does it surface as light? Is it the space before—in front of—the painting?)

I have been thinking about what constitutes an aesthetics of bravery. Is it the into? The vulnerability of the dirty, the truest truth of junk, trash, books, bibles, ships at sea, returning and returned, free paper burning. Not because of endings and apocalypse. Perhaps bravery is a future, a red light on a wall that is only sometimes there. A spiral. A chapel...I haven’t even spoken of the boxes that Lawrence builds for mailing these works, perfectly fitted for each month’s variations, rarely to be used, but waiting. More layers in the strata, crossroads become mathematical, between boxes and stacks, between shore and ocean, free and burn, between quick and linger there is into.

***

What happens at the crossroads if you allow yourself to linger?

thinking about Ana Mendieta

as I begin a new set of drawings…

Nok terracotta sculptures, 290 BC, 7 inches high


How does the artifact occupy the space of the paper: can its power be invoked by the drawing itself, so that we may understand it more fully through the act of drawing, by embedding the image in paper with thread, by tracing our own forms into the page as well, as a way to dialogue with the mask that is now hundreds of years old? What does that invocation look like? How does it sound? (Is the sound present in the performances I make with my own body? Is this how the sound of a drawing emerges, in the space of breath and movement?)

How does the drawing allow us to visit the historical record itself, to return to Nok civilization (in the Jos Plateau region of Nigeria) and actually try on a terracotta sculpture as if it were a mask, as if it were a familiar face, as if an ancestor during ceremony, as if I were the ancestor, as if it were my own face that I was able to try on hundreds of years into this future, as if I were the sculptor, as if I were the one who pulled clay from earth sometime between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D., as if dates and time didn’t matter, as if the inevitability of beauty and connection could change everything and all that was asked of us was the deep vulnerability that pencil to paper requires…

Nok terracotta sculptures, 810-511 BC, height 19 inches

questions

What does the line of a drawing invoke?

What is the significance of the collective process? Talk about collective deep knowledge.

Is that collective working process important for your work to grow, expand?

What is the significance of scale in your work? What is monumental, epic? What is the poem? How do you combine the poem and the epic?

What role does the camera play and why? Dancer, participant, witness?

Why is the video necessary at all? Is it documentation? Or, as Pato Hebert asks, is it as important as the performance/ritual/gesture? (Pato Hebert)

What is the significance of place? Is it specific, diasporic, liminal?

What is the significance of time in your work? (filmic, Hopi concepts of time as cyclical, ancestral, etc)

What is the significance of the body, what does it represent, stand in for, site, nation, collective?

Why this body? As Samiya Bashir says, whose body is this?

What is the role of sound in the performance/video work? Silence? How does that affect aesthetics, form?

What is the movement between silence and the infiniphonic? How is silence infiniphonic? What is your relationship to extended versions? (Fela)

What happens at the crossroads? 'This river was once a road' (Ben Okri…this road was once a river)

How do you picture parallel dancers?

What would it look like to dance in an earth skirt?

What are your tools and offerings?

Who are your gods? (asks Sharon Bridgforth)

What is the significance of the story?

What does the story change? And how?

What is the line back to the body?

What does the camera witness?

What does it mean to wrap your head with fathoms? When would this be necessary?

The wrapping of feet, the walking in the dry riverbed.

How do the dancers unwind from the camera? Return to the camera.

How is the camera the 8th dancer, multiple dancers?

How do the dancers make sacred space in which to dance?

What do the spirits see if they are watching us dance? Where do they watch from? The trees, the altar, the river bed?

If the dance were sound, how would you mix it?

How would you play the off-key?

What is the weight of lovers (in fathoms)? (Felix Gonzalez-Torres)

Describe the color of your deepest power?

What is your flesh offering? (Sundance)

How is the prayer sent?

What is the place of sacrifice in the work coming to life?

Do you believe in sacrifice?

What are your primary gestures and rituals?

What are the gestures (of the body) that demonstrate the expression of your power? What does it look like to make them over an extended period of time? What does it look like when a group makes them over an extended period of time? What is invoked, remembered, released, forgotten, conjured, healed, explained, started, stopped, created?

What is it to wrap your head in fathoms?

Whose eyes?

What is the slow motion dance?

How do you take the sweet road? (Sharon Bridgforth)

What do you want to say about the crossroads?

Describe the lines from there to here.

What do you want to talk about?

What do you know?

Describe how time functions, what is your concept of time in the work?

What is the presence of sound, how is the visual full of sound?

What does the work want?

What wants to happen?

What are you scared of?

What do you need to surrender?

What are the resources that this work already has, what has it shown you?

What rituals do you need to do for yourself in order for the work to happen?

What do you observe when you observe your artmaking process? (Record the journey)

how does that sound look?

still from performance video marks (2007)

(writings about belongings, marks, and other new video works):

They’re first about land and the body, my relationship to land. What the land gives and what our bodies know (both being full of deep knowledge). There is also how we make marks, how we mark our existence in this world. I was thinking a lot about migration and immigration as well. Crossings. Of borders and seas. What is it to cross an ocean? Does the water remember our existence? And how? And how are our own bodies marked with the crossings of people we don’t know. People who we know could be us. Are us.

What is the rhythm of our presence in this world? When we walk does the sound reverberate infinitely, endlessly? How does that sound look?

And the masquerade. I am forever interested in the mask and where that takes us. The space between the body and the spirit. Covering and opening. And what it feels like for the earth to put a mask on.

***

I saw the "Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary" show at the Met recently. As I walked through the exhibit I kept thinking, I must not be remembering the definition of reliquary. We are walking through wooden statues dripping with oil, ancestor figures sculpted in metal, stitched dolls that are consulted for important community matters. From the museum catalogue:

“Yet another distinctive genre consists of Bwende and Bembe soft sculptures from the Republic of Congo, with their emphasis on a vibrant red palette, strategic use of contrasting textile patterns, and grand cosmic gestures that announce their role as active intermediaries with the divine. Among the most spectacular and rare examples is a life-size Female Figure by the Bwende master Makosa of Kingoyi that was collected by the Swedish missionary Efraim Andersson in 1938 (Museum of World Culture).”

Female Figure by the Bwende master Makosa of Kingoyi

Soft sculpture? Okay. With the bones of an ancestor inside. The figure, measuring well over 7 feet high is put into the earth during a burial ceremony.

And the un-burying? How does one ‘collect’ the body of another’s dead? What does it take to excavate something so large—both physically and spiritually. Is it excruciating? Does it require amnesia? Or the leaving of one’s own body? Complex like reparations and repatriation.

So, excavation. What do we excavate? And when and why? And how? Can anger be removed from the body? Cut out and photographed? Does it emerge lovingly? Makes me think of Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron and war. He also has a big heart. So while he is fierce and independent, he is very loving, sensitive. Thinking of creating a dance for Ogun.

(Must we undergo constant excavation? And taking, even after the body. Perhaps this is one of the roots that explains my mixed emotions when I come upon the works of Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu and even Ghada Amer. What would you do without the oppressor? Or must we always be broken or breaking?)

***

I am deeply interested in how we, as artists, create, discover our own language. And how these languages become creoles. The crossings are the creoles that we speak. And so to Sun Ra and Maya Deren:

Sun Ra, from Space is the Place (1974)

Maya Deren, from Meshes of the Afternoon

***

That should really be the measure of success: if you can be in your body.

Nigerian Egungun Dancers

The Lovely Willie Ninja

New York City Breakers featured on Graffiti Rock

Ugandan Marimba Dancing

Ag'ya, Martinique's Combat Dance, 1936, filmed by Katherine Dunham

Katherine Dunham Dancing with Talley Beatty

***

She thought the sea.

She began.

Ogun jí (Ogun wakes up.)

He visioned songbirds.

He stopped a war. He opened ceremony.

She thought the sea.

She moved the road.

She danced.

***

The floor of ceremony

still from earth puts on a mask (2007)

Maya Deren created a film with the dancer Talley Beatty in 1945. She first called it: ‘A study in choreography for the camera’, but renamed it ‘Pas de deux’ (step of two) because she considered the camera to be a partner in the dance:



This is the form I have always been interested in, camera as partner. As crossroads, as the floor of ceremony, full of traces and tracings. As colored people we have such complicated relationships to the camera. The taking, the shooting, the cataloguing. Tracking and surveillance.

I first began my journey as an artist as a photographer. I was interested in how to make photographs of people who lived before 1839 (the discovery of photography), how to photograph ancestral memory and deep knowledge.

from Woman who thinks she is Bird Woman (1999)

All begins with the body. The place where everything is infinitely embedded, the history of the world, politics, geography, crossings and returns. I was making glass negatives of spirits and stories, a kind of evidence, a way to talk about my visions, a way to mark history as I know it.

from Crossroads/Blood Diary/Medicine Bag (1999)

So I return to the camera, my partner, my dancer, my floor. Here are four works made in Spain and Austin (‘the return’ and 'infinite return'). (Of course, I stitched as well, but more on that soon!)


belongings and marks





earth puts on a mask




infinite return (bird on the sun)





And the sketches/poems that gave birth to the films, entitled:

456 fathoms the color of the horizon line
611 fathoms the color of the sea at night
with 305 fathoms the color of brown bodies
80 fathoms of Ogun’s colors
97 fathoms the reflection of clouds in water
92 my grandmother’s sunset
435 blood and the earth on the island of Santo Domingo
539 red sun


1
hold them
hold them
hold them
hold them
it is the sea it is mountains it is the sea
fathoms of black bodies
and two suns
i am carrying two
our world has two
i have drawn them this way
like that hold them hold them
hold them
them
drawings them sea them
mountains now crawling
am drawing
is moving
black bodies on the page
i cannot even imagine the falling
fathoms
but your drawing
brings spirits into the room
and they
is moving
hold them hold them hold them
while suns are rising
while these bundles explode
you feel that drawing on your face?
it is the sea it is mountains it is the sea
it is your drawing we are dancing
this drawing
am drawing
am sea
am mountains
and we are wrapping
these two suns
hold them
hold them hold them


2
my belly drags
i have been pulling
across foothills
but the mountain is too close
my son so close
and where the horizon
covered by a woman on the street
shouting these people these people
this is how they are that is how they smell
how loud how dark how pushing
never want to wait in line
how they move they move
they move
this message in my hand
i am watching the horizon for my son
for a boat on the line of purple
it’s the wood of a boat
folded on the horizon
no it didn’t look like him in the paper
it’s a bird on the horizon
it didn’t look like him
a folded bird
folded crumpled in my hand
black and smelling
it is the wood of boatmakers
wood rotting
folded like that in the paper


3
flies incessantly cross my body
they tasting my sweat
dirt removed anoche
a big red ant is coming for me
bites edges of chancletas
skin is skin
she is coming for me
this ancestor is angry
she wants to tear my flesh
and spit it out
to rid me of ghosts i am carrying
she keeps asking why how
how whoever who
finds you crossing that desert
who whoever
has told you we haven’t made crossings already and who

back back drummers

who whoever
h’reg
h’reg
h’reg
and you don’t
cruzamos como siempre
cruzamos como porque
ese dictador ya esta muerto
and and
we have made cities of people
of people
and people
who whoever

these flies will not leave my skin
grandma
and i am crossing
he burned but i am crossing
porque es lo mio
mi cuerpo
es lo mio lo que moscas
mark traverse forget
es lo mio
sudando quemando sudando

am sea sea
am hands
am threads am earth against earth
am drawings am women
how i always how this
how black my ghosts my drummers
on and on
one palomita ay
palomita ay palomita
vida
tell
these flies
these why
are
are
witnesses
are born
but the flies
incessant

and her question?
¿com es diu això en català?
¿on li fa mal?
no it doesn’t hurt
she asked how is your work sacred
y te dijé

am sea sea
am hands am mountains
threads drawings
how this how black my drummers
volando volando
there are thorns and flies in catalunya
and las canarias and gibraltar and and
and
and serrated mountains and
and

incessant witnesses are coming for me
there are drummers coming for me




***

This is a cake, this is a nation, this is a body, this is infiniphonic

I’m off to Barcelona, then to the Can Serrat artist residency in El Bruc, land of the Black Madonna. One of my first stops in Barcelona will be Fundación Tàpies. It's the absolute best to be able to see the actual work. And I always find myself smelling paintings--as if they were books. I have decided to bring my ‘Converses amb Antoni Tàpies’ book, just in case I meet the artist. He is one of my favorite artists and deepest inspirations.

Antoni Tàpies

Cardboard and string, 1959

I am in the midst of packing, figuring out how much thread (can you ever have enough), what paper and how much. I am thinking large-scale drawings will be part of my daily ritual. Drawing is still so scary to me, and beautiful, and a change of scale seems a necessary path to explore. And then there’s performance.

I recently started making a series of performance pieces entitled:

Chronicles
of the black female nude
as told by herself

Still from Preparing for the Masquerade
(Chronicles of the black female nude as told by herself)

I use my body and bundles of thread, measured in fathoms, to talk about our movements, history, memory. I have been thinking a lot about how to encode history in materials. So the colors of the thread hold historical and memorical references:

354 fathoms the color of the deep sea
196 fathoms the color of the water off the coast of Santo Domingo
38 fathoms the color of a memory of blood in water

Thread Palettes

...Thinking of Threads and Ladders...
Artist Youmna Chlala and I have been developing a project entitled:

El movimiento del punto más cerca
The movement of the closest point
Le mouvement du point le plus proche

It is to take place in Southern Spain and Morocco, specifically looking at the Strait of Gibraltar and the cities of Ceuta and Melilla which are contested Spanish enclaves located in Morocco. The Strait of Gibraltar is important for many reasons. At its shortest distance it measures only 8 miles and is a place where many refugees—both from Africa and the Middle East attempt to enter Europe. The cities of Ceuta and Melilla are a way to enter Europe without crossing the Strait, though the high walls, fences and armed soldiers are just as dangerous as these waters. This negotiation of borders and bodies is reflected across the globe: Mexico and the United States, Israel and Palestine, Dominican Republic and Haiti, the list goes on.

Youmna began this project in California at Headlands Center for the Arts, located on cliffs above the bay:

Youmna Chlala

Some of us are made of bone (1)

I used to think that our relationship to land determined everything. Being able to touch or return to ancestral lands, the process of creating homelands, walking on earth, our relationship to food and the dirt. Now I am thinking about our movements. I think of the work of artist Lisa C. Soto. Her work is cartographies of moving lines. She records the globe opening and closing, breathing. And countries in constant motion. In her drawings, the boundaries of countries are always speaking of their own creation and demise. Perspective moves from the microscopic to the infiniphonic* and back again.

*A brief note on the INFINIPHONIC: this just came to me recently (mad props to AL, SB, KH, and a dimly lit car outside of Austin’s Victory Grill). Infiniphonic describes the sensation of listening to multiple sounds, music, stories, to what is heard and yet to be played, it is hyperbolic notes and a playlist of voices and all the beauty and possibility that that implies. You know it when you hear it. SNAP!*

The visual may also be infiniphonic:

Lisa C. Soto

Moth, Hummingbird, Pathways

Lisa C. Soto
Untitled

Lisa C. Soto

Untitled II

Youmna tells me that the city is becoming the new nation. Rather than talk about countries, people refer to the metropolis as the center. So you live in Day Effé or London or Sao Paulo or Bangkok or Austin (does that count?!). The country itself dissipates and hovers while the metropolis grows.

Youmna Chlala
This is a cake, not a city

And then there’s the body.

I am thinking that perhaps it is the body that is the new nation. It is a place of borders, histories, politics, landscape, spirit. It is sometimes all that we have and all that we bring. And, if the body is the new nation: where does it move, who are its allies, what is its architecture, landscape and geography? How does that nation express desire? How does it survive and is its survival important?

Is it in our bodies where the fall of the nation-state will happen?
Is that where change happens--through our movements and journies and landings?

I find myself pulled to these stories of where we are not allowed to go or not supposed to go.
And go.

Still from Shoes (Chronicles of the black female nude as told by herself)



***