Sarah Stefana Smith
Disparate parts form a constellation of three.
Third, is a means to an end and surrounds my life as a runner. Running as experience notes a collection of cathartic rituals, if you will, that leave me contemplating the sensibilities of my own abilities, pains and triumphs. Second, is a three channel video installation, entitled Composite Fields (2015), a collaborative between taisha paggett and Yann Novak on view at the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Based on a performance at the Mackey Garage, MAK Center for Art and Architecture in 2012, Composite Fields considers the way in which the body in modern and experimental dance might mold itself and responds to/against social and political realities.[1] The work sits amidst a broader exhibition titled Temperamental curated by Erin Silver that engages first, ‘direct parallels between old and new to consider the ways in which contemporary art might be organized in relation to resistance to formal, social and political strategies of the post-war avant-garde’ and second, temperamental functions as a euphemism for homosexual.[2] First, then marking a beginning, are some provocations by cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten.
1. On ‘mu’, the in-between and nothing.
The impetus of Fred Moten’s ‘Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in Flesh)’ points to a series of conversations between the author, Frank Wilderson III and Jared Sexton on approaches of Afro-pessimism and black optimism to the study of blackness. In impasse, Moten notes ‘by way of the slightest, most immeasurable reversal of emphasis’ Afro-pessimism and black optimism are nothing other then one another.[3] While I do not focus, on the nuances of each debate, it is important to gesture towards Moten’s preoccupation on this debate and more broadly its influence on his thinking, as well as my own. It is here that Moten brings forth a question of particularity and peculiarity. He states:
I have long thought hard, in the wake of their work […] about whether blackness can be loved. […] And this perhaps is where the tension comes, where it is and will remain, not in spite of love, but in it, embedded in its difficulty and violence, not in the impossibility of its performance or declaration but out of the exhaustion that is their condition of possibility.[4]
To propose a question on eros and blackness, is intriguing because of an implicit oxymoronic contour. To love blackness, is to wrestle with the discursive references of abjection and Otherness. At this most immeasurable reversal, Moten meditates on ‘nothingness’, its contours, inflections and infections in which to conceive of blackness and love. Contemplating a relationship between blackness marked as a relation only in its absence to relation, Moten discusses Nathaniel Mackey’s theorization of ‘mu’. ‘Mu’, functions in the lexicon of sound as that which brings one ‘back at some beginning’. Linguistically, muthos, in Greek, connotes a re-utterance, or pre-utterance and a focus of emotion. It further carries with it a utopian reverie of lost ground, existing long ago.[5] In turn, for Moten, ‘mu’ enables a theorization on nothingness as that which holds temporal in-between-ness and mobile location of span.[6] Nothingness moves in the in-between spaces. In ‘mu’ Moten hears an optimist’s nothingness, one that positions a ‘celebratory’ movement of optimism—the immeasurable differentiation—between Wilderson and Sexton’s Afro-pessimism as social death through continuous racial antagonism. ‘Mu’ thinks between fantasy, reality and nothingness in the hold of the slave ship. Moten states:
What requires some attempt to think the relation between fantasy and nothingness: emptiness, dispossession in the hold; consent (not to be a single being) in the; an intimacy given most empathetically, and erotically, in a moment of something that, for lack of a better word we call “silence” a sub-oceanic feeling of preterition—borne by a common particle in the double expanse—that makes vessels run over or overturn.[7]
‘Mu’ then is about circular and cyclical interaction and motion. Mu is a circling to the beginning from an end point, a movement that has no end or beginning, only something that circles around. Returning to Mackey at length, Moten unpacks mu as ‘wheeling, spiraling runs as if around or in pursuit of some lost or last note, lost or last amenity: a tangential, verging movement out (out-landish)’.[8] Simultaneously, ‘mu’ in translation from the Japanese word wu, signifies no, not, nonbeing, emptiness, nothingness, but which also bears the sematic trace of dance, therefore of the measure if given in walking/falling, that sustenance of asymmetry, difference’s appositional mobility.[9] This translation between East and West points to mysticism that troubles metaphysics. So it is through this use of ‘mu’ that Moten tries to pose a question, not through a beginning to an end, but in mu’s wheeling interaction, on blackness and the unrequited love that might inform it.
For my purposes, it is useful then to think through the performative of mu, as movement concerned with exhaustion. Mu, might be said to signify a differently dispersed set of movements, micro-inflections and inflictions that both inhabit and explode the boundaries of a contained/functioning/ and high performance body; in this case, the body represents a mythical corporeality, or bodily audio-scape. It is in this exhaustion, between mu’s flights of fantasy and material reality, a state of extreme physical and mental fatigue, that one might denote a successful conclusion, or more productively placed, a fatigue with no guarantee, expectation or final outcome.
2. On ‘mu’, Composite Fields (2015) and exhaustion.
A Composite Field (2014) offers an opportunity to contemplate modern movement, corporeality and exhaustion.[10] An audio-visual installation, it is comprised of three video projections. Each screen marks one of three intimate and site specific performances that take place during the course of one evening. The performances take place at Mackey Garage Top at the MAC Center of Art and Architecture in 2012. A collaboration between taisha paggett and Yann Novak, the work puts to use ambient sounds from the Mackey Garage top as a point of departure in which to engage sensory materials as objects to be manipulated, reconfigured and reframed.[11] When the three-screen installation is viewed together, the nuances between performances are heightened. Subtle disparate parts are inflected and noted. An encounter between, at times, distinctive parts of the performance and sound-scape, create a constellation of overlapping movements that both operate separately as well as through temporal layerings.
Composite Fields, installation still, 2015, Photograph by Toni Hafkensheid, Courtesy of artists and Doris McCarthy Gallery.
Three beginnings. We encounter paggett on the ground, torso folded over kneeling legs. Suit jacket blocking a view of the performer. Within the first few moments, they have worked a way out of the confines of the jacket. Slow, cathartic movements, form gradual flex of arm and shoulder, torso and hand. Flecks in fabric shift and the body moves. The jacket is left behind for the remainder of the performance as a conceptual background. Does the jacket confine Moten’s mu?
Each performance lasts just shy of twenty-five minutes and works its way through a constellation of bodily contusions and comportments. Between these shifts and figurations are contemplative pause, positioned holds and the springing forth of the body. Subsequently a soundtrack of ambient sounds accompanies the movements. Some taken from the Mackey garage, others, impromptu shifts, coughs, rustlings by audience members, documented. Rain. Static. Ocean sound. Hollow sound filling an empty space. These are inflected in the footage.
Composite Fields, installation still, 2015, Photograph by Toni Hafkensheid, Courtesy of artists and Doris McCarthy Gallery.
On movement. Stealth. Singular. Intentional. Slow. Such movements constructed in waves. Cathartic. Synonyms for cathartic include, purifying, cleansing, ritualistic, emotional, excretory and expulsive.[12] Vigorous, purposeful arm outstretched, halo-ed. The possibility. One ponders the agility of holding a pose in pause and flow. Such a sequence gestures to the contours of a vigorous configuration of in-between-ness. To be suspended in a paused movement encumbered by the body’s in/ability to hold fast, enables ‘something’ to unfold. As a triptych, the work functions as a performance within performance(s); these performances overlap and diverge onto each other. Pace. We see movement in fabrics, wrinkles, facial features and gestures frame the corporeal body. A crisp white shirt contours. A tie folds to compensate movement. Then, the body is suspended in air. The upper body cut off from view in one channel, brings raised hands in prostration to foci within another frame.
On color. The video composite moves from neutral and ambient environmental color, to a plethora of filters that hue the space and the body. Green, as the performer moves out of the jacket. Lifting, lifting, lifting, opening up into the space, stretching up on legs, arms blocking face from view. Cyan, teal, blue, lifting still further, sweeping into lunge with arms above. A stride, a gesture, into a swinging reached wrap around returns to neutral, almost, then blue. Magenta to purple, we see a shoulder and foot, before the performer rises. Cocooned into a beginning. In focus, out of focus, we see the jacket again. And yet it slips back out of focus. Background, receding.
Composite Fields at the same time ponders technology and corporeality through the uses of production filtering and camera fine-tuning. Have the movements been slowed and then sped up post performance, through the editing phase? Only after some time does one notice the performance is in real time. Even such an insight is fantasy. In the left and right corners of the frame, the audience sits quietly, motionless, until someone readjusts, twitches. The performer blinks.
Might we read Composite Fields through mu’s spiral? Mu, while located in sound and linguistic, is performative. In the performative then, might mu be a breached gesture? The pause. That which circles around a pause? Pause as motion spiraling onto, into and out of the bounds of the body in movement. A methodology for contestation? The work alludes to a field of motion that may gesture to the titling of the piece. Composite Fields. It eludes linearity. Real time. The work happens in real time, but the exertion of movements is laborious, they require an attention to time and space, a control over the body, its pace and pause that contravene time/space itself. Could an attention to time/space envelope itself as the performer moves? On breach. Disobeyed, ruptured, infringed, penetrated, broken, punctured. Time is contravened. It breaches technology.
3. On running or a meditation on ‘mu’.
Running as sport is often framed as an individualist activity. My desire to run is located in an exploration of the geographical, corporeal and psychic registries that filter through my life. In other words, I do it so that I can maintain a sense of closure and in turn sooth inconsistencies in my own ‘sanity’. Running has been theorized much and in particular, in the west, through the ‘aerodynamics’ of whiteness, even when those that achieve great success in the sport are from continental Africa and parts of the world that mark their bodies defiantly non-white.
My rumination on running then is amassed despite/among a smattering of discourses: weight-loss modalities, ability and general health conscious speak that color a particular debate around wellness and fitness. I am less interested in these discourses and more compelled by the body in motion, the way in which challenge is physicalized at the precipice of ability, fatigue and pain, and also the geographies of difference (physical and psychic) running might have the capacity to transcend.
There is one path, in particular, that I frequently take when my travels find me in Maryland and Washington DC, where my immediate family resides. There is a bridge on this path. The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge (also know as the South Capital Street Bridge) is a swing bridge that carries South Capital Street over the Anacostia River in DC. It is not a particularly beautiful or scenic part of the path. It is filled with industrial buildings, the architecture of development and the National ballpark as a sightline. It is here, at what is often called ‘DC’s forgotten river’—a result of pollution and weak development along its banks—where some conclusion might be offered.
Running might be understood as a process of micro-repetitions that produce macro-results. In my case, lower limbs drive the motion. By consulting a secondary meaning, the action of managing or operating something, we find synonyms that include, consecutively, management, operation, successively, seriatim, administration, controlling, overseeing.[13] Implied in such a meaning is regulation and surveillance.
Running might also be understood through pause and expulsion. Between repetitions, there are micro spaces where action is suspended. Within motion the body expels, unpacks, breaks down. Can the act of running be framed outside of linearity, regulation, and a start/finish, and instead through its forgotten bridge?
How might one engage differently with movement through the use of pause? How does theorizing pause, or ‘mu’, or in my analogy of running, the ‘forgotten bridge’, engage movement differently? Is this the in-, the elsewhere that marks a Deluzian fold?[14] Moving in spiral, through contortion as ritual. Perhaps a breaking down, off and away from a need to know a ‘thing’ at last? This place of exhaustion points to all that is left behind and all that remains to be expelled. What are the limits of expectations that fall outside of an expected outcome, in failure to articulate? It is the nothingness of running.
[1] Silver, Erin in ‘A Conspicuous Twist of the Right Wrist: Gestures of Queerness in Contemporary Intermedia Art’ in Clintbery, Mark, Brendan Fernandez, Ki Kielhofner, Hazel Meyer, Will Munro, taisha paggett, Yann Novak, Elizabeth Price, Emily Roysdon, Alexandro Segade, Mateo Segade and Erin Silver (eds). Temperamental (Toronto: Doris McCarthy Gallery University of Toronto Scarborough, 2015), 5-9.
[3] Moten, Fred in ‘Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)’, South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4, Fall 2013, 742.
[5] Mackey, Nathaniel. Splay Anthem. (New York: New Directions, 2006), ix-xii.
[10] To view the full performance, A Composite Field, 1,2,3. Website. https://vimeo.com/35548722. Accessed February 16, 2015.
[11] Yann Novak. http://www.yannnovak.com/works/installation/composite-field/. Accessed February 16, 2015.
[12] ‘Cathartic’ | Synonyms for cathartic at Thesaurus.com (Thesaurus.com: retrieved February 16, 2015)
[13] ‘Running’ | Synonyms for running at Thesaurus.com (Thesaurus.com: retrieved February 16, 2015)
[14] Deluze, Gilles and Jonathan Strauss in ‘The Fold’, Yale French Studies 80, 1991, 227-247.
Bibliography:
A Composite Field and Composite Fields. By taisha paggett and Yann Novak. Audio-visual, Yann Novak, Performance, taisha paggett, 2012-2015, audio visual installation.
Clintbery, Mark, Brendan Fernandez, Ki Kielhofner, Hazel Meyer, Will Munro, taisha paggett, Yann Novak, Elizabeth Price, Emily Roysdon, Alexandro Segade, Mateo Segade and Erin Silver (eds). Temperamental (Toronto: Doris McCarthy Gallery University of Toronto Scarborough, 2015).
Deluze, Gilles and Jonathan Strauss in ‘The Fold’, Yale French Studies 80, 1991, 227-247.
Mackey, Nathaniel. Splay Anthem. (New York: New Directions, 2006), ix-xii.
Moten, Fred in ‘Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)’, South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4, Fall 2013, 737-780.
Sarah Stefana Smith is a Baltimore and Toronto-based artist and scholar, completing her PhD in the department of Social Justice Education (formerly named: Sociology and Equity Studies in Education), OISE at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the intersections of visuality, performance and affect in Black diaspora art and culture. In 2013, as a recipient of the Bremen International Student Fellowship Program, Sarah guest lectured on photography and slavery at the University of Bremen. She has delivered papers on bafflement, the door of no return and cultural production at the Institute for Visual Art (INIVA) in London as well as the National Women Studies Association. Receiving the John Pavlis Fellowship for 2010, she was an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center in June of that year. A recipient of the Leeway Foundation Art & Change Grant, she completed her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College in 2010. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Sarah has exhibited in galleries and alternative spaces in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Toronto, including 40th Street Artist in Residency (Philadelphia) and the High Museum of Art (Atlanta).