This past weekend in Chicago, the artist Cally Spooner and Hendrik Folkerts, Curator of International Contemporary Art at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, gathered a motley crew of folks at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. In celebration of the opening of Cally’s Deadtime, an anatomy study at the Graham, they presented a score — “A Thesis on Spillage” — with a similarly disparate gang of artists, writers, dancers, scholars, and philosophers (including Nuar Alsadir, Marquis Bey, Wendy Brown, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tony Cokes, Melody Giron, Irena Haiduk, Sanford Kwinter, Ralph Lemon and Darrell Jones, Maggie Segale, and Frances Stark).
We were fed. The day meandered, occasionally it punched. Many of us cried. (I’ve noticed I usually cry when I watch Darrell Jones dance.) Some of us left and returned. It reminded me, as I’m frequently reminded, of one of my favorite aspects of live performance (in which it can be said everyone presenting, even those reading from a book, was engaged in due to the contextualization of the day as a performance, one in which even attendees were implicated). I always advise my performance students to take pleasure in the fact that eventually any live performance will be over. When you’re less interested, this is fortification to press on (or maybe leave and come back). When you’re gripped, this is a reminder to pay even closer attention, to listen and look at everything, to devour it all — it will, soon enough, be gone.
Toward the end of 9-hour collective performance, during Cally and Hendrik’s thank-you’s, I was touched by the fact that Hendrik saved a final “thank you” for a person who, as Hendrik said it, has been a master of spillage: Pope.L.
In my own tribute to Pope.L I’ve been re-posting some of my essays from ‘Endurance Tests,’ an irregular column for the brilliant and now-defunct contemporary arts journal Art Practical which I wrote from 2013 - 2018. As I cull through the many conversations I conducted over those years with black artists around the country about the live-ness of their practices, the way their practices and lives necessarily spilled into one another and beyond any container, I have also come to understand the column itself as an exercise in spillage. A this-and-some-of-that-too. A but-what-about-this-over-here. All things are possible, as I learned through this column, as I was instructed by Pope.L, and as I was reminded this past weekend. Sometimes, for some things, you walk away and come back. Sometimes you get gut punched.
This week I share a very sweet and intimate conversation with the poet and artist Jibade-Khalil Huffman, which took place during the 2014 Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum and just before his show with Claudia Rankine opened at MaRS Gallery. In it, Huffman continues this expansive practice of making dissimilar connections, making choices and even conflicting proclamations based on both intuition and logic, needling indeterminacy and seeing what surfaces. Enjoy.
“Endurance Tests” was an irregular column on current explorations of representation, the ethereal, and compulsiveness by black artists working in the field of performance. Across profiles and interviews, the column took seriously the proposition of performance as a repeatable and assimilable text. “Endurance Tests” examined contemporary performance-makers actively syncretizing the many implications of blackness: illegality, contagion, maladaptivity, and a privileged relationship to cool.
The Unmooring of Jibade-Khalil Huffman
first published in Art Practical on April 16, 2015
In her pivotal essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde writes of the “places of possibility within ourselves [which] are dark because they are ancient and hidden.”1 She demands we consider the radical and formative potential of “poetry as illumination.” For artist Jibade-Khalil Huffman, too, poetry is no luxury; it is a means to disentangle language from ontology, assembling new compositions suggestive of other ways of being. In Huffman’s video and slideshow-based installations, everything is subject to deconstruction—from subtitles to karaoke to slide presentations—making the viewer aware of their agency in forming meaning out of words, light, and composition.
Huffman’s interest in the expansiveness of language extends across mediums and genres, its trajectory following those traced by poets such as Lorde and Claudia Rankine. In fact, Huffman has been collaborating with the latter poet for an upcoming show at Mars Gallery. In Huffman’s poetry, words are collaged into combinations of sentences and delivered to the reader as fragments. In James Brown Is Dead and Other Poems, for example, the passage, “an awkward/silence by/DW Griffith,” is followed by a series of blank pages, an image of the Warner Bros. Pictures logo, and more blank pages.2 This collage of linguistic snippets and yawning gaps of silence creates a feeling of being perpetually unmoored. The uncertainty opened up by Huffman’s poetry also generates a space for him to address the cognitive dissonances that come with being an artist of color in a predominantly white art world. “In some ways I don’t deal in big subjects… I’m thinking of Race with a capital “R”—certainly that stuff slips in. But it’s embedded in a life. And that’s what I’m interested in,” he says. “The main thing is thinking through modes of text that already exist and employing poetry to deal with absurdity. Instead of writing an essay about misreading and how, for example, whenever I see an ‘applause’ sign I always see ‘applesauce’—there’s no word for this misreading. I just wanted to make a piece that shows this.”
Jibade-Khalil Huffman. Untitled (Cake), 2015. Archival inkjet print, 8 x 10 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
With Sculpture for Jeffrey Tambor (2012), Huffman did just that, placing above a theater door the word “APPLESAUCE” in dark letters across an off-yellow light box. Its form is an obvious reference to the flashing “APPLAUSE” sign one would find hanging over a stage for a live studio audience. When I encountered the piece, I reflexively moved to clap before realizing which word I had read, a realization that quickly turned into confusion over what to do next. This example is telling of Huffman’s use of objects as well as words to explore the interplay and exchange between various ways of knowing. In his art, intellectual processes invariably come up against sensory experience, with the resulting confusions raising more troubling questions about historical memory. As Nikki Darling writes of Huffman’s work, “This is a rejection of letting words do their job.”3
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