Boogaloo & The Midnite Hours: Jamal Cyrus x Jamire Williams

Jamal Cyrus x Jamire Williams

Boogaloo & The Midnite Hours Feb 9 – Mar 25, 2018

the thing left there to pick up.

by Charisse Pearlina Weston “And so again the nation waited, and its conscience sank to sleep.”

W.E.B. Du Bois. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. 1935.

There’s something about black music.

The late scholar James A. Snead called that something the “cut” that “overtly insists on the repetitive,” on the “skipping back to another beginning which we have already heard.”1 Black performative acts, be them dance, music, or the oft omitted visual and written practices which I identify as always already infused with the performative, distinguish themselves from European traditions insofar as the “cut” is always already there, is always already central: we all know that particular skip and dip of the hip, we all know Bobby’s scratching scream-gurgle erupts from the back of his throat as both the reminder of a call-to-arms and the call-to-arms itself, and we know that black boy’s wobbling ticks and breaks are intentional precipitations and responses to that call, as well. Imbued in its feeling are the reverberations of “an originary scene of possibility” that has come, came, left, and returned again to ensnarl and entangle all the many tracings of its genesis.2 A possibility made possible by the very fact of its intermingled, nameless beginnings and becomings.

For Snead, the ‘cut,’ builds ‘accidents’ into its coverage, almost as if to control their unpredictability.

Itself a kind of cultural coverage, this magic of the ‘cut’ attempts to confront accident and rupture not by covering them over but by making room for them inside the system itself.3

But it would be remise for us to not think about the many uses and misuses of this coverage in relation to the historicity and ongoing trajectories of black song and performance, wherein we are confronted with, on the one hand, “the complexity and opacity of black song and the difficulty of clarifying, with any degree of certainty or assuredness, the politics of slave song and performance when dissolution and redress collude with one another and terror is yoked to enjoyment.”4 And on the other, we face instances where imposed maskings erupt as suppression wherein the opacity built into black sound by and through the bodies of its makers, when reflected back through the eyes of the uninitiated and those in fragile possession of themselves,5 2

transforms into “mischievous and dangerous weapons…which may call together or give sign or notice to… their wicked designs and purposes.”6 Though here we speak of the slave song, we have seen with great frequency some of the greatest of our contemporary performers colliding with the former, felt as a stinging kind of self-betrayal, to further recall Hartman, leaving them no choice but wade back, drift back and begin at one of many beginnings.7 When we talk about then we are always talking about now.

And whatsoever master, owner or overseer shall permit or suffer his or their Negro or other slave or slaves, at any time hereafter, to beat drums, blow horns, or use any other loud instruments […], shall forfeit ten pounds, current money, for every such offence […]8

What can we say of this? Black labor and its suppression rendered as capital. Black enjoyment as manipulated terror. Blackness as always already foreclosed upon. How do we think this as it was then and is now? How do we pull it through, pick it up—this thing that has been left for us to carry— to the present or the future? How do we interpret these constraints which we can call the response, or better, the counter-response to the call that had already gone out and came back again long before the white planters and even before the slaves black workers themselves would hear it and move to its beats and rumblings, in 1739?9 If we strip its juridical masking, would it sound like this: If I (we) can be in possession of the times and intervals and the grammar of your ruptures, of your deviations, of your exclusions, then I (we) can force in through my (our) psychical interference and transference, my (our) own understanding, my (our) own interpretation, my (our) own…my (our) own…

Or perhaps:

A surprising suppression of sometimes needing or wanting the dull, cracked burner of thirst. An

erosion of exterior terrains that relieve the unwavering adherence

of the inside to the out.

Or maybe like this:

Every one that runs away, and is caught, is put in the indigo fields, which are hedged all around,

so that they cannot escape again.10 Or perhaps, at last, arriving here, as this: 3

of one thing I am certain. The breach occurring,

as. we. speak.

is emotionally, spatially, spiritually and temporally

catastrophic,

a rain of fury the likes of which

the world has never seen—in a decade. Since four weeks. Last week.

Two score and seven years ago. Prior to Friday, Last Monday. This

afternoon. Four hours ago. Tonight. Tonight. This just in. Breaking.

Presently

punctuated by primordial calls

to turn back

and begin at the beginning, gone over, churned, as butter is churned, a sprout, the first, left at the bottom. and so until the fourth is gathered every one — laborers— a runaway caught

In and of the infinite outsideness of the thing left there to pick up. beaten off again and again soft bodies made thick and smooth as paste. the kind of paste that leaves grit between the teeth, stains the fingers and the lungs. rendered with paddles cast through the troughs of their discontent. within the thing left there to pick up lungs seize, overcome with black salt, overrode by blue so that they cannot escape again. until

tomorrow or, this just in, a breach occurring nothing ever all entrenched only always almost. until. until to dance blindfolded on high beams, a coherence of the inside and out, tracing with a tip of toe a trench a backsliding a motif, a back beat, an electric hum rhythm for us to move hips, calves, toe tips, shifted shoulders, vibrant hair follicles to.

a collection, here-now of the is, itself, even. of, upon the thing left there to pick up.

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1 Snead, James A. “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. The New Museum of Contemporary Art. New York: 1990, p. 221.

2 Chandler, Nahum. The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. Fordham University Press, New York: 2014. p.17.

3 Snead, p. 220.

4 Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press: New York. 1997. p. 35. My emphasis.

5 I’ve borrowed and reworked a phrase from David Marriott. For context see: “Photography and Lynching,” in On Black Men. 6 South Carolina Slave Code, title 157, article 41, 1740.

7 Here I am thinking of many who, when struck by the realization that fame could not and would not remove their objectification but could only double it, responded in oft self-destructive ways: Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, D’Angelo, Lauryn Hill, Dave Chappelle, the list goes on.

8 South Carolina Slave Code, article 36, 1740.

9 On September 9, 1739, the Stono Rebellion took place in South Carolina. It was the largest slave rebellion to erupt in the British colonies. 25 white people and up to 50 black people were killed.

The 1740 Slave Codes were in direct response to this rebellion.

10 James Roberts, a black soldier from Providence, South Carolina, recalling South Carolina’s indigo fields in his memoir: The Narrative of James Roberts, a Soldier Under Gen. Washington in the Revolutionary War, and Under Gen. Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812: "a Battle Which Cost Me a Limb, Some Blood, and Almost My Life.” 1858. p. 28.

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Jamal Cyrus x Jamire Williams Boogaloo & The Midnite Hours Exhibition Checklist

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01. Foundations_1 (Stop All That Beating), 2018

Chair, microphones, microphone

stands, cord 02. "Til' My Tape Pop", 2018

Yorx stereo, cassette tape, audio 03.

Meshiak, 2017 Acrylic and wax on paper 33 x 24.3" Courtesy the artist and Inman Gallery, Houston

04.

Ritual Mute_1, 2018 Root system, canvas 16 x 13 x 16" Courtesy the artist and Inman Gallery, Houston

05.

Nok Mute, 2017 Earthen ware 12 x 8 x 7.5" Courtesy the artist and Inman Gallery, Houston

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06. Bright Blue, 2018

Blazer, bells, satin

37 x 25 x 6"

Courtesy the artist and

Inman Gallery, Houston 07. Rhythmic notation (Boogaloo gene), 2018

Cut vinyl on wall 08. Mighty Mighty Harmony, 2018

Paper collage on board, plastic

33 x 35"

Courtesy the artists and

Inman Gallery, Houston 09. Foundations 2, 2018

Akai MPC 2000XL, Cinder blocks, chords

Jamal Cyrus x Jamire Williams Boogaloo & The Midnite Hours, 2018

Jamal Cyrus received his BFA from the University of Houston in 2004 and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. In 2005 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and in 2010 he was an Artist in Residence at Artpace San Antonio. Cyrus has won several awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Artadia Houston Award, and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.He has participated in national and international exhibitions, and was recently featured in the New Orleans triennial Prospect 4: Lotus in spite of the Swamp as a member of the artist collective Otabenga Jones and Associates.

in 2016 where he explores the dimensions of the drum set in acoustic and electronic capacities accompanied by his personal paintings. “Jamire Williams shows himself to be an inspired crafter of sound, capable of building entire worlds from just his drum hits.” - Pitchfork His goal is to push the envelope within these creative disciplines by performing in unconventional spaces and creating 2D and 3D still life works that join sound and structure to space and place.

Charisse Pearlina Weston is a conceptual artist and writer who interrogates language, representation, and history through the deconstruction and reconfiguration of Jamire Williams is a world renown text, photography, and archives of black musician and visual artist who has grown experience. Her work been presented to sincerely feel that his purpose is to meld nationally in venues including Project Row these mediums together in an organic, Houses. She has participated in residencies seamless fashion. A graduate of Houston’s at Alabama Song Houston, Atlantic Center acclaimed High School for the Performing for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. & Visual Arts, Williams received his BFA She has received awards from the Santo from The New School in New York City Foundation, the Sally Hands Foundation, in 2006. Since then he has grown into one the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arch and of the leading voices of his generation Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund and was a performing and collaborating with such 2016 Southern Constellations Fellow at artist as Herbie Hancock, Solange, Madlib, the Elsewhere Museum in North Carolina.

Christian Scott and Chassol. He has also Her writing has been published in Art and begun to journey into more conceptual Culture Texas, Pomona Valley Review, Not spaces with abstract painting and curated that But this, and she is the author of The installations. In 2012, he received the Red Book of Houston: A Compendium for the Harlem Stage Fund For New Work grant New Black Metropolis (2015, self-published), and was also an integral contributor to A Vessel. A Case. A Fruit, for Touching (2016, Jason Moran’s BLEED exhibition at the self-published chapbook), and co-author year’s Whitney Biennial. Williams released a of Fantasy Objects: an artist book of text and solo concept record entitled ///// EFFECTUAL images (2014, onestar press).

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Image courtesy of the artists.

Major support for Lawndale Art Center programming is provided by The Brown Foundation, Inc., the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation, Houston Endowment, the John P. McGovern Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and The Wortham Foundation, Inc.

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