Life is Endless

Some Notes on "The End of My Beginning," An Exhibition by Jamal Cyrus

I was asked to give a talk on my take on a Jamal Cyrus exhibition now showing in LA. The work ended up evoking some thoughts on black music and witnessing.

I.

The noble burden of bearing witness is treated like a black privilege. In turn we get to scrutinize all evils imposed upon black life and inflect our behavior with this hawklike sense of injustice that is often neutered by every apparatus we would use for testimony. What spaces do we use for testimony: Church, the kitchen, the yard, the porch, the telephone, the song, the show, the concert, our clothes, our hair, our tattoos, our blue moods, the radio, the joke. All of these nooks of almost liberation seem to be present in the work of Jamal Cyrus, however the temperament is reclamation and refusal to function as an ennobling witness. The theater of witnessing is off limits and therefore the habit of being studied and watched as we go around noticing things is also displaced. Spectator’s chairs are pierced with metal poles and turned into a sculpture of tortured refusal. Jamal calls one piece “The Eroding Witness” to further assert disenchantment with the role. See and name the trouble yourself so that black people don’t have to be masochists forever, looping, suffering and snitching until we forget the pleasure of keeping secrets. 

II.

The grotesque fabulousness of the house shrouded in a low afro for me conjures Abbey Lincoln’s scream on Freedom Now! Suite. It also speaks to Kanye’s Donda tour where he recreates his childhood home and sets in on fire, purification by fire or root system for when we’re all submerged in a sheltering rubble of yesternow, reluctant entombment as preservation. Kinky hair stuck to the sink basin after your man shaves or trims his pubic hair before a dick appointment, inverted into this rudiment of sky. I can paint the sky black one obscure rapper announces. Here it is, nappy black cloud through which it’s gonna rain. Love rain down on us while we are at the house making some food together, cannibalizing terror and replacing it with unrelenting hunger for something new and rare, something that tastes better, less acrid, less pasty and flavorless. I think that’s a police officer or FBI agent near the door pretending to be a guard so he can navigate this nappy garden. Get him. Knock his burden down with big drums. Like Max Roach used to knock Abbey Lincoln around off stage, and then they’d make love or go collaborate. Our ruins are our collaboration with whatever we allow to call us by wrong names, the record of what we allow to deteriorate as it destroys us. This toy bomb shelter, is something MF DOOM would put on the cover of an album and address with affectionate rudeness until it comes to life; it’s the fortress that the drums sitting over there were invented to demolish and reassemble over and over. 

III.

The concept of fugitive archives and digging them up out of impossible witnessing is becoming a trope, thankfully. That digging, and the subsequent harvest of destroyed nutritious things is a lot like working with the land they tell you is barren to grow your own food. When you succeed and become an honorary magician, no hearsay will ever work on you again, you will try for yourself from now on and a pathological agency comes over everything. You can terraform your reality, you can witness something unseen and never tell, you can make your own library, your own sound, your own musical instruments, your own speech, your own listening, your own food, your own lawless economy of loops. When it starts to feel redundant, that’s when it’s becoming natural, finally, we’re all secure enough to bear witness in private and not give it all away as affect. Instead, let me show you what I saw, you might not catch the code or decode it for bounty like I did, but here it is—try. Do you notice a pattern? Books silenced by the skin of drums, drummers stuck in a mummified afro while the instruments sit out pitifully vacant and immaculately ready. Cymatics so determined to reshape their environment that they go mute except for texture, tapestries of denim, brass, and battery. No more burden, now the work is intoned silence, uninflected soul music, black passages that resemble a fleet of ships coming over with you on them, or at the bottom of the Atlantic haunting their passage. At this stage what’s wonderful is how aloof it can get at the thought of its own intensity, how loose, until there is a legacy of improvisers dead and alive in the room and none of them mention seeing one another to the audience, who might not notice who all is there.