This performative lecture – edited version of the full transcript – has been given to 75 emerging artists from 27 different countries in the context of the VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK | Co-Creation Live Factory Prologue 1, project curated by Francesca Carol Rolla and VestAndPage in Venice, 2017.
FIRST STATION
(Preach R Sun opens the lecture reciting Public Enemy, Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos)
For me it’s about realness. It’s about just trying to cut through to what’s real. I’m not an artist. I don’t really believe in art in that way. My work is a commitment. It’s a life process. My praxis is freedom, simple. I want to become free, I want to get free.
The portal to my freedom came – which a lot of people are annoyed by that and they don’t want to hear it often – through race. Racialized existence. Immediate racialized existence creates the condition for self-activity, as Fanon would say.
How many of you know about W. E. B. Du Bois? When he talked about double consciousness, and he talks about that moment when you realize that you are an other, and you realize that you are black and that your blackness is a problem.
For me it was at the age of 8. Me and my best friend running across the streets in Kansas City, Missouri, playing with toy guns. At that time I used to look at the police and we would call them Officer Friendly. And they would give us candy and things. Me and my best friend were playing toy guns, and we were just walking, and the police pulled up, stopped us in the middle of the street, drew their guns on us, and told us to get down. Had it not been for my best friend’s father, who came out and screamed: “They’re just children and told us to just get down.” I probably wouldn’t be here to tell the story because my first inclination was just to hand them the gun to – it’s just a toy. They would have shot me.
That was the first time I realized that I was different. That was also the first time I realized that, the police showed me that, there was this sort of passage that I had transcended, that I had crossed over. I was no longer an innocent child. I was a threat.
Next time something like that happened I was in high school, coming from a store. Just hanging out, had done nothing wrong. Police pulled me over. They threw me in the back of the car, they were just driving me around – and I asked them what did I do, and they wouldn’t tell me.
“You need to tell me what the hell did I do, you don’t have the right to do this. I didn’t do anything wrong, you don’t have a right.” “Shut up boy. We can do whatever the fuck we want to do to you. We can take you somewhere and you disappear and nobody would care. And who would believe you? We’re the police. You’re a nigger.”
When you look at my work and the only thing you see is black or white or race, you do not understand. That is my portal. That was my cause. That was what triggered me. I had to get free.
As Frederick Douglass would say: “Those who claim to [want] freedom and deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. […] Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and it never will. Find out what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of wrong and injustice that will be imposed upon them. […] The limit of tyrants is prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Alexander Harbaugh© Alexander Harbaugh
So, when I came to you, what I try to get you to understand is you have to find your place in the pain. For me it’s race. What I understood by trying to free myself of this racial objectification, trying to prove myself to be or become the man that I knew I had to be, that I knew I was.
My whole praxis – everything I would do in performance – would be geared towards freedom. It’s not about performing. I HAVE GOT TO GET FUCKING FREE. So I live my work. It’s not a game for me.
Somebody would say to me the other day: “Art, we understand, we’re all artists. But as artists, we’re not on the frontline, we’re not the activists, we’re not there, we do the work so that the activists can take from us” – that’s bullshit with me.
I am on the fucking frontlines. I live on the frontlines. I go right out there by myself and I put my body on the line, and that’s when I say for any of you here who are questioning how do I use this work to further, to get out and make a change? And people tell you: “That’s not your job, you are just an artist.” That’s bullshit. That is your job.
Now, I am not saying everybody has to agree with me. If you want to just do work about flowers, if you want to just do what you do, that’s your right, that’s the beauty of this thing you call art. It has many functions. But for me this is some shaman shit, you have.
I don’t call myself an artist, what I call it is conjuring. We conjure. And the name I put on it is also ‘fugitivism’. Because I am a fugitive, I am a fugitive because my crime is freedom.
Maybe you understand, or not, we all are slaves to the system. Mine might be race as the first place I saw, but it’s sex, it’s gender, it’s class… This system keeps us all from our humanity. It’s the blocks.
The reason why we’re living the way we are and there’s so much suffering is because our humanity is in crisis. We’ve used the word humanity, we say we are human but we don’t know what humanity is. The essence of humanity is FREEDOM – and you are not free.
You cannot be free if you have to obey these sorts of blocks. I cannot be free as a black racialized being, because by the very nature of race, it alienates us from our humanity.
It says I have to obey this, I have to be black, you have to be white. You have to be a woman, you have to be a man. You have to be gay or straight. You’re rich or poor. Those are the blocks. In order to get free we have to break through the blocks.
But I ask you, what is universal? Who dictates or arbitrates universality? It certainly isn’t the philosophers that y’all read about and y’all tell me about in your art history books. Philosophy attributed to the very condition that I’m fighting against, because philosophy and history it says I don’t exist. I didn’t exist in your world. And you don’t know that.
© Mohosin Kabir
When I bring up race, and it makes some of you so tense, and then you say, “I don’t want to hear….” You are playing into the very thing that I am saying, you think that I am trying to separate, no! I’m trying to bring us together!
But you’re defensive, because you’ve been conditioned to obey and hold on to your block. And you don’t want to let it go. And I challenge you, because I’M UP IN YOUR FUCKING FACE!
Now blackness is not where it stops. That’s just the initial phase and I had to learn that. That’s a necessary phase, just like if you’re gay, or if you’re bi, or if you’re a woman and want to survive… Your struggle is necessary but that’s not the final destination. The final destination is the universal element and it is through those portals that we ALL share the same struggle.
Oppression and exploitation, it’s all the same thing for everybody, because it’s all geared against one object – and that is man.
It denies us of our right to be men. And I am not saying men versus man/woman. I am saying human beings. We have a responsibility to each other.
What’s your experience? Let’s share, let’s talk to each other. When we confront each other, then we break through the difference, in order to understand that we have a common goal together. That’s freedom.
So for me, THIS WORK IS LARGER THAN ART. It’s larger than these walls. I do my conjuring in the street.
I think there is a larger purpose to this. I think as the artists that you are – and I’ve talked to many of you – there’s an urgency inside of you that goes beyond just creating objects and putting them in museums.
Everybody in here has a desire to get free. That’s why the artist is so dangerous to society.
But just like I’ve been caught and labelled, and trapped in the cage of my race, you have been caught and labelled, and trapped in the cage of art. They know how to get you.
Think about how the art world operates. “Oh, I’m an artist, I’m a curator, I’m this and that, I’ve done this great stuff, I need this, I need, I need…” – and that’s how they get us with need.
“I need money to survive. I need my title. I need my prestige. I need my job, I need this, I need that.” – But all you need is your commitment, your fight, the immediacy of existence.
As John Henrik Clarke said: “Whatever your passion is, it should be the tool for your liberation.”
© Mohosin Kabir
So no matter what you do, James Baldwin used to say that too, it’s all about being political, it is all about reflecting the times. Nina Simone said the same thing. And when people tell you that you don’t have the responsibility as artists to reflect the times and to challenge, it’s because they are trying to protect the status quo.
You do have a responsibility. If we’re saying the world has to change, it begins with us. And you have power. It runs through you.
Inside the thousand miles of arteries, capillaries and veins that make up that territory that is your body. There’s a map. It’s the underground railroad.
If I line every last one of you up, in your actions, and your performance, no matter how different it is, I guarantee you, I see, it goes towards the North Star. Everybody, all of us together.
Marilyn’s time, she would mark the time for us. VestAndPage would give us intimacy, while we travel through, bring us closer together. Aldo and Marianna would show us how to move through those waters. How to get real, how to go though it, how to flow through it, how to move.
We were made racialized beings, so that we could be seen as inferior beings, so that you don’t have to see us as humans. Philosophy says there was nothing in Africa, there was no history before Europe. So when you hear me getting angry and I have to fight from screaming on your ass, then you know why. Because what you trying to tell me is that I don’t exist.
And I am supposed to honour that. I’m supposed to honour your culture. I’m supposed to honour your standards.
There’s a history to this. You will not deny my existence. And I can love you. I love all of you. But you will not deny me, because I will not deny you. We are better than the blocks.
© Mohosin Kabir
We have to learn to see each other. We have to fight to see each other. This is the language. You have your body. What you do with your body is magnificent. What was Malcolm X term? You get free by what? BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.
Francesca Carol Rolla, in her letter to La Pocha Nostra, talked about what if we lived our existence – to live your life as a work of art.
So if your art becomes about your freedom, about your existence, every day you can live that way. We negate the reality. We negate the system. We negate the structures. We tear down the wall by the very nature of being who we are. We introduce the new world into this world.
We don’t cower away. We don’t hide behind walls, we don’t keep it to ourselves. You gotta take it out, in order to change for real. You have to believe that we can change.
The world has to see you standing, it has to see you doing, what you do out there. You have to paint those streets, with your truth. You have to become what you see inside. You can’t just internalize it. You have to bring it out. And that’s how you free yourself.
And that’s how you free other people.
As Fanon had said: “He who speaks (language) is in a position to grasp a certain syntax or to use a certain syntax and grasp a morphology of this or that particular language. But to speak is also to assume a culture and to support the weight of a civilization.” He goes on to say, “a man who possesses, who has a language, who has his own language, consequently possesses the world that, that language expresses and implies.”
When I realized that we were stripped of our language, the first thing I used to think was like, Oh, I’m going to create my own language in writing. So I started off doing it, and I couldn’t do it because it was already going back to that root. And it’s not until I thought about that quote, that I realized the language is already being created. It’s my work.
© Mohosin Kabir
Those who see that language, they may not understand what you’re doing fully at first. And that’s ok, that’s the whole thing. But I know in time the people that get the language they understand it, they come to it. It’s just like any other language. It takes time.
But you have to have the courage, to use your body, to express your language, to get free.
Texts edited by Francesca Carol Rolla and Preach R Sun
Images:
First photo: Preach R Sun, For Whites Only. Performance at the III Venice International Performance Art Week 2016. Image © Alexander Harbaugh
© Alexander Harbaugh: Preach R Sun, For Whites Only. Performance at the III Venice International Performance Art Week 2016.
© Mohosin Kabir_ Peach R Sun, Frankenstein’s Monster (Made in AmeriKKKa). Performance at the Asian Art Biennale 2018, Bangladesh.