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Ill Suns: Arthur Jafa and Sondra Perry •Mousse Magazine

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Ill Suns: Arthur Jafa and Sondra Perry •Mousse Magazine × Share on:TropicalHomeWell-nighIssues Subscribe Newsletter Ipad Edition Advertise Publishing AgencyTropicalArchive Filter: Order: Most recent Oldest Category: CONVERSATIONS CURATORS ESSAYS EXHIBITIONS INTERVIEWS OTHERS PUBLISHING REVIEWSTropicalSearch:TropicalUsername Password Remember Me Mousse Magazine Search Follow Us Facebook Instagram Pinterest Twitter Archive Previous Bradford Hurst Kessler and Alex Rathbone at Valentin, Paris NextSoulParty: Hannah BlackTropical1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Arthur Jafa, Untitled, 2016 Courtesy: the versifier and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York / Rome Sondra Perry, Young Women Sitting and Standing and Talking and Stuff (No, No, No) , 2015, performed by Joiri Minaya, Victoria Udondian, and Ilana Harris-Babou at The Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, New York, 2015 Courtesy: the artist. Photo: the versifier Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (still), 2016 Courtesy: the versifier and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York / Rome Sondra Perry, Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One (still), 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York Arthur Jafa, Dreams Are Colder Than Death (still image of Hortense Spillers), 2013 Courtesy: the versifier and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York / Rome From right to left - Sondra Perry, Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation, 2016; Resident Evil, 2016; Historic Jamestowne: Share in the Discovery and Take Several Seats, 2016. Resident Evil installation view at The Kitchen, New York, 2016 Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Jason Mandella Arthur Jafa, Untitled, 2016 Courtesy: the versifier and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York / Rome Sondra Perry, Wet and Wavy Looks—Typhon coming on for a Three Monitor Workstation, 2016, Resident Evil installation view at The Kitchen, New York, 2016 Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Jason Mandella Arthur Jafa, Monster, 1988 Courtesy: the versifier and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York / Rome Sondra Perry, Resident Evil installation view at The Kitchen, New York, 2016 Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Jason Mandella Previous Next CONVERSATIONS Mousse 57 Ill Suns: Arthur Jafa and Sondra Perry Share Facebook Linkedin Pinterest TwitterTropical1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Arthur Jafa, Untitled, 2016 Courtesy: the versifier and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York / Rome Sondra Perry, Young Women Sitting and Standing and Talking and Stuff (No, No, No) , 2015, performed by Joiri Minaya, Victoria Udondian, and Ilana Harris-Babou at The Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, New York, 2015 Courtesy: the artist. Photo: the versifier Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (still), 2016 Courtesy: the versifier and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York / Rome Sondra Perry, Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One (still), 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York Arthur Jafa, Dreams Are Colder Than Death (still image of Hortense Spillers), 2013 Courtesy: the versifier and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York / Rome From right to left - Sondra Perry, Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation, 2016; Resident Evil, 2016; Historic Jamestowne: Share in the Discovery and Take Several Seats, 2016. Resident Evil installation view at The Kitchen, New York, 2016 Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Jason Mandella Arthur Jafa, Untitled, 2016 Courtesy: the versifier and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York / Rome Sondra Perry, Wet and Wavy Looks—Typhon coming on for a Three Monitor Workstation, 2016, Resident Evil installation view at The Kitchen, New York, 2016 Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Jason Mandella Arthur Jafa, Monster, 1988 Courtesy: the versifier and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York / Rome Sondra Perry, Resident Evil installation view at The Kitchen, New York, 2016 Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Jason Mandella by Dean Daderko   Arthur Jafa and Sondra Perry recently mounted phenomenal and important solo exhibitions in New York. Jafa’s searing and prescient short video Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, presented at Gavin Brown’s enterprise’s new space in Harlem, and Sondra Perry’s intense and perversely humorous Resident Evil at The Kitchen were both tightly well-expressed for me on the strength of their shared interests in Blackness and the illuminating ways in which they smartly write the conditions in whichWoebegonefolks find themselves socially, politically, and physically today. Given the precarious and dangerous situation of people of color—in the United States and remoter abroad—voices like Jafa’s and Perry’s shed an urgent and necessary light on what are feeling like increasingly visionless times. ARTHUR JAFA: One of the things that I found really interesting well-nigh your show, Sondra, is how you combine formal and political elements. And there’s flipside sense too—the visceral. You introduce a lot of gratifications of the flesh. Yeah, there’s techno savvy, and technology and media, but my impression was, “Wow, this is very Vodun, digging peoples’ persons up and reanimating them.” SONDRA PERRY: It’s really complex. I’ve been thinking through how to represent different, simultaneous points of view in my work. In my recent video Resident Evil (2016), I included Fox News footage where you see lots of people shooting footage on their phones of Gerardo Rivera’s live unconcentrated from Baltimore during the recent uprisings there. And there’s a resider journalist who moreover uses this footage. Then there’s the Fox unconcentrated itself. I’m sticking these things together to establish a ground where I can think throughWoebegonestuff and moreover come to terms with just what stuff is. AJ: Do you see your work as a body? It’s a funny term. Is it a body? Or, what’s not a body? What’s an un-body of work?Your show is literally a re-assemblage. You’re putting together something new, like a Frankenstein monster, which introduces a sense of dismemberment. SP: That’s it! I made nonfunctional exercise machines, and turned-on pictures I took of my skin in a video I projected over an unshortened wall. I think that the idea of humanness is fundamentally an illusion, and in order to stave White normativity, I prefer to disassemble my own body. To take my skin, reanimate it into fluid waves, and make exercise machines that have their own strained intelligence. The machines let you know that if you think you’re going to get a workout on them, it’s probably not going to happen. AJ: I met someone in my show at Gavin’s who saw my video Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, and talked to me well-nigh mobilizing people. He was super charismatic, saying how we’ve got to take our society back.Planethough I’m obsessed with politics, I’m not an activist. There’s nothing wrong with it, of course. And maybe it’s plane the primary mechanism by which things transpiration in society. But it seems to me that artists operate in a variegated space—one that’s unconscious on a unrepealable level, and symbolic.WoebegoneLives Matter didn’t exist as a hashtag prior to Obama rhadamanthine president.Woebegonepeople want aWoebegonepresident, and we get aWoebegonepresident, so we seem that this person, considering he’s statistically Black—whatever that means—is going to squint out for the interests ofWoebegonepeople. ButWoebegonepeople are still stuff shot like dogs during the tenure of aWoebegonepresident. What does that mean? How do you proceed? DD: Can you talk well-nigh appropriation? AJ: I finger two ways well-nigh it. I’ve got a lot of video footage in there, a lot of other peoples’ stuff, pulled from the Internet. I talked with tribunal who said it was pearly use considering I was using small clips. It made me think that “fair use” is not the same as “fair.” I see a very problematic relationship with misdeed comprising ownership in slavery, right? I’ve got a problematic relationship between law and property. Yeah, I don’t want nobody stealing my shit. At the same time, if ain’t nobody stealing your shit, your shit probably don’t got no value. I’m like, “Well, it’s a good sign,” a sign that the thing stuff pirated has some currency. The increasingly your shit has value, the increasingly it’s going to be pirated. We’re living in a variegated time and space where technology and the way people use it has completely outrun any kind of Cartesian model that’d alimony things orderly. This is a really unpeaceful moment. They’re trying to icon out, plane now, how to clutch lanugo on the Internet. It just refuses to be controlled. My friend John Akomfrah said something in an interview that hit me like a ton of bricks considering it was such a crystalline voice of my fundamental methodology. He talked well-nigh putting things in an “affective proximity” to one another. That’s well-nigh as well-spoken as I’ve heard it. People say, “Oh you cut your video to Kanye’s music,” but it was like eighty-five percent cut surpassing I plane heard his song. I saw him performing “Ultralight Beam” on Saturday Night Live and thought it was amazing, so I downloaded it. I download everything. Anything I like, I download it. I don’t plane think well-nigh it anymore. I moreover cut out pictures from magazines. It’s like, I see something, and want to have it considering I may never see it again. It’s impulsive. Some people say it’s neurotic. Well, my thing is, is it productive? SP: Right! AJ: It’s kind of like, how are you trying to effect change? I see myself as an undertaker. I’m trying to grab people and say, look, this is what’s going on under the surface of things. Don’t squint away. It’s a natural human response to recoil from something you’re disturbed by. It’s what people do—they pull back. If it’s something really nonflexible to see, they’ll run away, or turn the page. I’ve trained myself to do scrutinizingly the opposite: if something really disturbs me, I veritably am going to download it. In hip-hop, it’s the same thing: you take a thing and do something with it. You don’t make a thing. Yeah, these folks are making things, but not usually from the raw material of notes and tones. Hip-hop takes all these given things, these preset blocks, and treats them in a way they weren’t necessarily produced or intended to be treated. SP: That way of inventing a story is part of the reason I started working with my family. I realized that they were really good storytellers. I just think when to stuff young and listening to the same stories at family events. I’d recognize how those stories would transpiration over the undertow of ten years or so. It relates to how we move through the world. In one video I recently made with my family I asked them to talk well-nigh family histories, but to flip them a little bit, to introduce a tiny bit of fiction. That’s what they did the unshortened weekend we shot. To make a long story short, their contributions reverted the unshortened work. My grandmother told me a story well-nigh sepulture an American flag in her backyard. She said when my aunt went into the military, she started hanging flags in front of her house. She said she’d been taking them lanugo and sepulture them in the yard for twenty years. I thought this was so amazing. A few years ago, my grandmother covered most of her yard with cement, which would have made the flags inaccessible, though there were still some, she said, in the collard untried beds. DD: You included this footage in Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One (2015), right? SP: Yes, but that footage was staged. I staged an un-burial considering she had the most recent flag under her bed, where she keeps everything: lineage certificates, the referendum of Barack Obama newspaper, all that stuff. My family told me that since it was winter, she was waiting for the ground to get soft to situate it. So we staged an un-burial. When the video was shown, my mom and all of her sisters came to see it. When the un-burial part came up, I said to her, “This is nuts, I can’t believe y’all do this.” My mom looked at me and said, “We don’t.” The piece was once washed-up and I’m thinking, “You did what I asked you to do, but without letting me know!” I thought well-nigh it for a second, and then asked myself, “Why are you surprised?” It’s a survival instinct to elaborate stories this way, and it’s so indicative of how we live. It’s whatWoebegonepeople do. AJ: I finger the same way. AWoebegonefamily is scrutinizingly like a living readymade. They are readymade. A lot of times people don’t quite realize what a resource this can be. Anything you throw at your family, they’ll definitely throw it back, and it’ll be increasingly complicated when they throw it when at you. It won’t be what it’s supposed to be. It may not plane be true. It may be corrupted. But in terms of how it’s corrupted, it can seem plane truer. SP: Definitely! I’m working on a new piece right now well-nigh how my mother’s visitor reverted all of their employees’ desks to a thing tabbed the Uprise system. It’s a mechanized standing-desk system. The company’s logo says “Join the Uprising!” These clinical office wellness things use wild trademarks and logos. They seem to say, “You’re doing largest for yourself, you’re a revolutionary, you’re standing while you work.” She said, “But what you don’t realize is that standing while you work makes you really tired.” And I said, “That’s it exactly!” So we’re working on a piece that addresses the politics of uplift in relation to the Uprise system. As my family and I are working on these things together, I have to alimony reminding folks that this is not just a theoretical understanding of howWoebegonepeople interact—it’s unchangingly been this way. I think I got a clearer, increasingly historical understanding of this from reading Simone Brown’s bookVisionlessMatters (2015). She’s talking well-nigh surveillance generally, and increasingly specifically well-nigh seeing or visualizingWoebegonefolks through unrepealable types of technologies. Lantern laws were one of the first surveillance technologies in the Western world. In her typesetting Brown opens up a space for thinking increasingly fully well-nigh stuff seen, or not stuff seen, and how this visibility or lack of it is utilized. AJ: Earlier, I thought you were starting to say something well-nighWoebegonepeople and technology, and how your work addresses it. SP: That’s exactly what I was getting at. AJ: It’s as if those two things—Black people and technology—are diametrically opposed. It’s so well-spoken that this isn’t the case, considering why wouldn’tWoebegonepeople not just be interested in technology, but moreover very tropical or versed in its various uses? In a unrepealable respect, at some point we were the technology. It seems like people unchangingly react when they see aWoebegoneperson with a computer in their hands, like there’s something misbegotten well-nigh it.Squintat Scott Joplin and the player piano, or Jimi Hendrix’s guitar: there’s never been a moment where we weren’t totally preoccupied with technology. And these technologies are the precursors of robotics. It goes when to your idea of things that get used by other people for their own purposes. SP: There’s a moment happening. I think what I’m trying to do with my work is really try to sandwich these ideas into a well-spoken understanding of how technologies have unchangingly existed within our community. There are a lot of entanglements that are nonflexible to parse. In my work, this becomes unveiled in my interest in representing my mankind through digital manipulations. I vivificate it with a 3-D rendering program tabbed Blender that’s unshut source. You don’t have to install it on your computer in order for it to work, which is important to me considering I’m such a transient being. I put the program on a zip momentum that I can pick up and take somewhere else. It’s important to me to have this kind of mobility, conceptually and actually. I’m interested in taking what I have, no matter how traumatic or joyful, and seeing where it goes. This siring is really at the wiring of the things that I’m making. AJ: On some level, it’s kind of like, you can’t have a position well-nigh a thing if you are a thing. The last twenty years, thirty years of hip-hop has beenWoebegonepeople with samplers, with computer systems. So why does this stuff plane linger? Why is it that we’re not understood as a technologically engaged matriculation of people? Clearly we’re not scared. We’ll get in there and say, “Yo, you may have designed this thing to do X, Y and Z, but what it’s largest at is this.” SP: Right! AJ: One of the things I’ve been continually obsessed with is the movieWayfarer(1979). To me it’s no wrecking that when the wayfarer first pops out of the guy’s chest, all the White folks pull back. But Yaphet Kotto grabs a fork, and he’s gonna go in on the alien! He’s the only one who’s pushing forward, right? He’s the one saying, “I recognize, I know what the fuck this is. Let’s skiver it and let’s skiver it now!” He recognizes the danger immediately. In a sense, he’s seeing himself. He knows what the danger is. Everybody else is like, “gasp,” but he wants to take this thing out. And the wayfarer plane has fronts2, you know? It’s like some total hip-hop shit. And I am obsessed that they got this seven-foot-two Sudanese brother, Bolaji Badejo, to play the alien.Woebegonepeople can’t plane get work in movies when they want to. So they go to London and find a seven-foot-two Sudanese guy? This is not an accident. You can’t tell me it’s arbitrary. Somebody, unconsciously or otherwise, searched him out considering on some fundamental psychoanalytic level, they knew the wayfarer was a nigga, excuse my language. For real, they straight-up knew this on some profound level. DD: Yes, and come to find out that the guy who saves the wayfarer is unquestionably a human-looking robot who works for the corporation! AJ: Exactly!Consideringthe robot is how the corporation implements its power. Every time something comes up, Yaphet Kotto has the most radically pragmatic solution. He’s like, “Fuck all this shit, let’s nuke the planet from outer space, get the fuck out of here, and deal with the legal ramifications later!” SP: Laters! AJ: Everybody else is getting into discussions well-nigh science and exploration, he’s like, “No!” It’s him and the working-class [White] dude, Harry Dean Stanton, who voice their opposition. SP: Yup! AP: It really ends up affirming how—I unchangingly like to say, we’re ill suns, it’s a term I have now. I say, “Ill suns, we’re ill suns,” meaning we’re suns that shine, but we shine in this way that’s off. We are moreover the illegitimate sons and daughters of the West, meaning we’re in it, we’re veritably products of it, but considering of the way W. E. B. DuBois’s dual consciousness thing works out, we squint at this stuff from both inside and out. Like, you go to see a cowboy Western, and you’re in this weird complicated between-space: you’re either fine with the cowboys or with the Indians. It’s constantly fluctuating when and forth. I think there’s something well-nigh this fluctuation is so typifying of what Blackness is.   [1] Eighteenth-century laws in New York that required black, mixed-race, and ethnic enslaved people to siphon lit candle lanterns with them if they were walking in the municipality without sunset, unaccompanied by a White person; lantern laws are seen as the precursors to today’s stop-and-frisk policing policies. [2] Decorative tooth covers made of gold, silver, or other precious metals.     Arthur Jafa is an versifier born in Tupelo, Mississippi (1960). His latest screenings have been held at ICP, New York; International Center of Photography School, Barnard College, New York, Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art, New York. Selected exhibitions include Serpentine Gallery, London (2017); Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York (2016).  Sondra Perry (1986, New Jersey) is an interdisciplinary versifier whose works in video, computer-based media, and performance explore what Perry calls the “slippages of identity” that pinpoint subjective wits in the digital world. Her latest solo show has been held at The Kitchen, New York.  Dean Daderko is curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.     Originally published on Mousse 57 (February–March 2017)   Related Articles CONVERSATIONS The Long-Term Repository of Half-Ideas: Liam Gillick, Esther Schipper, and Nadine Zeidler (Read more) CONVERSATIONS Toxic Environments, Sensitivities, and Planetary Times: Susanne M. Winterling (Read more) CONVERSATIONS “Somewhere in Between. 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