William Villalongo in conversation with Torkwase Dyson TD: I’m compelled by the use of flora and fauna in the work and it’s metaphorical relationship to “black being” as not only necessarily unfixed but tragically liminal. Can you talk about what it means to be between visibility and invisibility in terms of triumph and resistance? WV: Well in my previous body of work the flora and fauna filled the borders of the paintings. It was decorative and menacing. It existed on the margins of the vignette. Those paintings tried to reexamine the idea of the Western muse as black women building structures out of various abstract painting styles. The women existed in the vignette underscoring hypervisibility and desire. So in the new work I was thinking through the masculine as the adjacent space, the border or margin. A liminal space. It was a way to think about blackness as enigmatic space or condition. It seems that black masculine visibility in our times is underscored by desire and loss on repeat. Great achievements almost look like anomaly against how black men are visible or imaged. Visibility in a sense comes at the intersection of loss. Loss of life or loss of kin. A place of being there and not there at the same time. Given this metaphysical imperative, it was important for me to call on the notion of animism with regards to flora, fauna and decoration. That these motifs be reconstituted as living force, by which black male figuration might have agency over image. To image is to capture and I wanted to push against the closing down of that. In a sense this figure rides the natural forces to his advantage. To become and not become. His body is only embodiment. It makes a way out of no way.
TD: Physiology, environmentalism and the violence of white supremacy have much to do with time. I’m thinking of Rob Nixon’s work on slow violence here. For me “Keep On Pushing” deals in the act of slow looking and the fact that violence is often an anti-spectacle occurrence that is acute and gradual. Your painted surfaces, insistent cutouts, collage, text, and play on shadows both graphic and expressive speak to the time it takes to resist in the wake of systemic dense violence. Can you talk about works in the exhibition such as “No Conviction”, “Vanitas”, and the Free, Black and All American series as they might speak to policy and law in relationship to time and environmental racism. WV: In so many ways, no other people have sacrificed more in the pursuit of Euro-American freedoms and wealth than black folk. And I am connecting the notion of American freedoms to wealth, because in as sense freedom is mostly symbolic and requires a vehicle to manifest. The struggle for Euro-American freedoms has historically been connected to the acquisition of land and the subjugation of peoples to work it and, in that, a clear line is drawn marking for whom such freedoms belong. We speak about these ideas of freedom as if they were born out of some universal “human will” unmarked by competition and avarice. That is why in all of my work and in this work more explicitly, body and nature are intertwined physiologically. All of the work you are asking about points to this in different ways. In “Vanitas, “ I was thinking about late seventeenth and eighteenth century European paintings which depicted black servant boys presenting their masters with ornate trays of fruit often surrounded by pets and other affects of their wealth. These images were extremely popular. What image could express white freedom more than these? Historical painting genres such as, ‘vanitas’ or ‘memento mori’ were also popular as ways to speak to such arrogance by the invocation of the certainty of death. For me, Dylann Roof’s crime immediately recalled the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963. Though I am much younger, my childhood was filled with stories that marked The Civil Rights Movement in this country. There was a collapse of time that felt palpable. Roof shows us how far we have come since 1964 and we can talk about progress in policy, but justice, in theory and not practice, is an incomplete justice. It is the image of Roof and those like him that is the mirror we need to confront, not an image of the slain.