Hopscotch Reader #1
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Hopscotch Reader #1: Black Performance
Arthur Jafa urges us to question the ethics of viewership in his film Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016). This question was especially pertinent in Berlin as the film ran for almost a year screening in the enormously lush theater of a private film collector for a mostly white European audience. The video, vividly violent and emotional, narrates the black American experience in a montage of both suffering and Ekstasis. As a viewer, the images evoke a bodily reaction, but more viscerally disturbing is the experience of witnessing the black body in pain with others who have no experience with or context for blackness. As American Artist Rindon Johnson asks of the piece: “Are depictions of the Black body really necessary to critique the treatment of Black bodies?…Who exactly is the piece for? If it is for me?” More than using moving image and sound to incite emotions in his audience, Jafa wants us feel implicated in the performance.
Pope L., once unironically called “The friendliest black artist in America” because of his obtuse, unaggressive critique of sociality, removes the body from his installation “Between A Letter and A Figure” at Berlin’s Schinkel Pavillon and leaves only a trace of the materiality of black performance: sound, bodies, movement. Although Jafa and Pope L.’s pieces vary metaphysically, the way they think through performance to render, maintain, and thwart a non-black audience’s preconceptions, and moreover illusions, about blackness is consistent.
This reader is the first in a project inspired by you, our patrons, readers, and friends, who come to our bookshop with desire and curiosity, eager for recommendations that will inspire you to forge connections and make worlds. We have built this reader (and those forthcoming) as a tool to slow down, learn, consider, and reconsider topics related to our intellectual and critical enterprise here at Hopscotch. This first reader invites you to consider the relationship between blackness and performance, and the exchange that takes place with the audience. In a history and culture that was built around the oppression of blackness, performance is a way for black people to access life and fluidity underneath rigid, pre-fixed identities. Adrian Piper critiques the slippage of identity in her own trickster-work, where she refuses a Kantian definition of her self as a corporeal, singular object. What is exchanged with the audience is often an illusion, a simulacrum of “blackness” that almost always meets expectations. But what lies under the surface, or skin, of performance/expectation is something like Black Revelry: intimacy, life, movement, love, that we have the privilege to witness, and perhaps take part in.
HRR