ART WRITING & CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP THIS IS NOT: Months Later, Crystal Z Campbell’s Performance Piece Still Haunts Tulsa by Liz Blood First there came a loud clanging. It was rhythmic, intentional. A mix of chinking and clanking. This beginning to Crystal Z Campbell’s performative work, Model Citizen: Here I Stand, felt appropriate inside of Living Arts of Tulsa—a space made of brick and large-pane windows, concrete and exposed pipe. It sounded like someone might be building something inside, or tearing it apart. Then a naked black man appeared. He was holding two long, yellow metal rods like staffs and hitting them on the floor. Then another naked black man appeared doing the same. They walked and glided in uncertain patterns around the gallery, which was broken up by large red, concrete pillars. A third black man appeared and continued in the same way as his colleagues: spinning around the room, banging and clanging, swirling the steels staffs on the cement floor like metal detectors searching. They swept themselves beneath banners inscribed with different declaratives: THIS IS NOT A MONUMENT THIS IS NOT EQUITY THIS IS NOT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT THIS IS NOT ORIGINAL
The men (performers Nicos Norris, Daniel Pender, and Kolby Webster) scraped the concrete floor, the walls, wielded the rods like large paintbrushes—arching them over columns and walls and scraping them down corrugated metal doors. Audience members expressed almost every kind of reaction you might imagine. They raised eyebrows, stared at the performers, looked away, moved out of the way, goaded each other, left, looked at their phones, took pictures, laughed, whispered, and two people even bowed. I wondered what kind of audience member I was being before realizing that must be part of the point— thinking about how a work works on you. You become part of the show. Performance work is easy to avoid for this reason. It can hold up what feels like too large a mirror.
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In this work, the performers looked like they were searching for a mass grave from the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 (also called the Black Wall Street Massacre), above which Living Arts is rumored to be built. Each clang recalled the massacre and what it must have been like to hear (bullets raining down on the streets and the people of Greenwood—one of the most affluent black neighborhoods in the U.S.), to see (wooden-wheeled wagons cart off the dead), to smell (the firebomb smoke). To live with those memories for the rest of your life. I wanted Campbell’s piece to be over almost immediately once it had begun. That tells me more about my whiteness than much else I’ve considered. It was difficult to stay, and not just because it went on too long—which it did. It started late and lasted an hour and fifteen minutes, rather than the publicized length of one hour, including an artist talk. The same effect could have been achieved in the shorter amount of time. Despite the length, the piece was shot through with beauty. Occasionally, one of the performers stopped to kneel, or to raise his hands up and wide as if in a prayer. These moments felt sacramental and, during a few of them, I blinked back tears. Imagine what it means to have an art gallery on top of a mass grave—the willingness, the willfulness, the whiteness necessary for that kind of moving on, forgetting, and erasure. Half a year later, I’m still thinking about the show, considering how close the word whiteness is to witness, and how easy it is to be one and not the other. The three men moved about freely in an area of Tulsa where they once would have risked death by doing so. The massacre began because of an alleged assault of a white elevator operator, Sarah Page, by Dick Rowland, a black man. These men glided about the room in a perfect display male vulnerability, something rarely
given public space. This space, layered over spaces of death and racism, felt rare, raw, and strong. It also felt old. Near the end of the piece, piano music began. The composition, written and played by James G. Williams, was an interpretation of “Ol’ Man River,” which Paul Robeson sang in 1936’s Showboat. Campbell was clear in wall text and online about her piece’s inspiration: figure drawing, surveillance, and the life of Paul Robeson. Unsurprisingly, Robeson isn’t someone we typically learn about in the Oklahoma educational system. The internationally-known vocalist and actor was active in the Civil Rights Movement and, during the McCarthy era, was blacklisted and interrogated by the U.S. House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee. For years until his death, Robeson was heavily surveilled by the FBI. During that Committee interview, he said that it was in Russia where he felt for the first time like a full human being. He didn’t feel the pressure of color there as he did here. A congressman asked why Robeson didn’t move there. “Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country,” Robeson replied. “And I’m going to stay here and have a part of it, just like you.” n Liz Blood is a writer and editor whose work engages with place, memory, contemporary art, and social justice. She is a 2019 Tulsa Artist Fellow and a 2018-19 Oklahoma Center for the Humanities Fellow. Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist and writer of African-American, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell’s practice ruptures collective memory, imagines social transformations, and questions the politics of witnessing using physical archives, online sources, and historical materials. Campbell is a 2019 Tulsa Artist Fellow and recipient of the Tulsa Arts Integration Award.