to win the war you fought it sideways
At the front desk, they were doing a Lord of the Rings themed word search.
Igshaan Adams - Lynloop
It’s based on aerial images of some footpaths south of where he grew up in, I assume, Cape Town, South Africa. I mean, he was born there. He was born in 1982 so it was the last days of Apartheid.
Zoe Pettijohn Schade - Attempts at Self Organization: Prevailing Bonds
This was on the third floor lobby, where some rarely go. It’s made of gouache with silver, aluminum, copper, gold, and palladium on marbled pape (sic).
Art by Firelei Baez
(once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and becoming)
inspired by the Sans-Souci Palace in Milot, Haiti, built in the 1810s for Henri Christophe revolutionary and self-proclaimed king of Haiti and was then destroyed in an earthquake in 1842 and went to seed. Sans-souci means carefree in French. It’s still a ruin today because Haiti is one of the worst places for environmental disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes.
Firelei Baez is from the Dominican Republic and is of mixed Dominican and Haitian heritage. The Dominican Republic and Haiti have some, ahem, history. And I'm ninja editing this in because right now there's a manufactured outrage involving felinophagy that goes all the way up to Ted Cruz.
Retablo (españa in las Americas)
Cibyl
Anayansi
Wanderlust demanding recompense
Sans-Souci (This threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body)
Under Spanish rule, the governor of New Orleans ordered Creole women to cover their hair with knotted head scarves. They wore luxurius and bejeweled, beribboned, befeathered scarves in an act of malicious compliance.
Memory Board Listening (June 7); Fire wood pretending to be fire, February 12, 2012; All I know (July 6)
Baez poured paint on Yupo paper. And sometimes since they look like faces, she put eyes on them.
Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to the Fan Test for the Month of July
For every day of July, she’d cast and trace her shadow onto paper. The paper bag test is a test to see how black you are and whether or not you should be admitted in polite society. The colors match the skin tone of her forearm.
The fan test refers to hair texture.
Natural Grooming
Those Who Would Douse It
Vessel of Genealogies
Ode to la Sirène (and to muses beyond Jean Luc Nancy’s Canon)
Invokes Lasiren, the Vodou water goddess and Yemayá, powerful òrìṣà.
CPT Symmetry (echoing Marie Laveaus’s manipulations of the elusive mirror image of matter)
Man Without A Country (aka anthropologist wading in the Artibonite River)
225 book pages from obsolete or old engineering, art, and architecture books. I noticed that one of them has an integral table. Each drawing depicts the history of Hispaniola.
Linyon (Las fuerzas opresivas del pasado se vuelven frágilese y debilitades)
A motor with medicinal function
To write fire until it is every breath
Òya, òrìṣà of storms, fire, wind, revolution, and renewal.
given the ground (the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it)
an irreducible singularity (speaking to the space you fill and you keep)
right is first. I wrote that note to myself because the sign was for two paired paintings.
untitled
temporarily palimpsesitive (just adjacent to air)
Untitled (United States Marine Hospital)
The hospital depicted in this painted-over diagram was built for sick and injured seamen in the Merchant Marines, converted into a psychiatric unit, and then was damaged after Katrina.
Untitled (Les tables de géographie réduites en un jeu de cartes)
These horses are wild. Or feral. Actual wild horses are a bit more derpy and only live in China and Mongolia.
Black counter gravity (Carte figurative et approximative des quantités de coton en laine importés en Europe en 1858 et 1861)
On rest and resistance, Because we love you (to all those stolen from among us)
She’s reading Parable of the Sower, which is set between 2024 and 2027 and depicts a world wracked by climate change and other social problems.
the trace, whether we are attending to it or not (a space for each other’s breathing)
Constellation (Movements reimagined)
Adjusting the Moon (the right to non-imperative clarities): Waxing
Adjusting the Moon (the right to non-imperative clarities): Waning
I went right first. Which is how it should be because the moon waxes before it wanes.
You can look off into infinity.
Untitled (Marine Hospital)
A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways)
Drexciya was an electronic music duo that did afrofuturist concept albums. The name Drexciya also refers to an underwater country populated by the children of black people thrown off of slave ships who adapted to breathing underwater in their mothers’ wombs. The paintings depict Haitian queen Marie-Louise Coidavid and her daughters.
Untitled (Temple of Time)
which, obviously has nothing to do with that Temple of Time and everything to do with a chronological chart of world history from 1846 created by Emma Willard, which does limit history to just western history and groups appropriated by western civilization, that is to say, the ancient Near East.
Tone total time (or an economy of care)
Madeleine (Rupture rapture maroonage)
This is a reference to Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of Madeleine. You can see the face behind the explosion.
Untitled (Terra Nova)
Brasil is a mythical island off the coast of Ireland and the fact that it shares a name with the country Brazil (and even the spelling in the Portuguese language) is a coincidence. Brazil is named for the brazil tree, which is not the tree that the brazil nut grows on.
Truth was the bridge (or an emancipatory healing)
The Gun Violence Memorial Project is when they take the relics left by victims of gun violence and encase them in plastic bricks. 700 of them total which is the approximate number of people who die every week to gun violence. It’s not just who they are, it’s who they could have been.
And I hope this guy becomes Mithridates the Lone and torments the NRA endlessly.
Tau Lewis - Spirit Level.
This is not The Procession, which was at the Watershed in East Boston which closed before I could get there, which is closed until next spring/summer and it’s not by the same artist.
The Handle of the Axe (behind)
Not to be confused with the House of the Ax. The figure is based on St. Benedictus of Palermo and Samuel Sharpe who led a slave revolt in Jamaica and is honored with his portrait on their 50 dollar bill.
“when the axe came into the forest, the trees said ‘the handle is one of us’” which appears as the epigraph in The D- Poems of Alice Walker, who is somehow still alive as of the time I wrote this. Did I ever tell you the story of how I asked an AI to write the lyrics to a county song about squirrels and it gave me some nonsense about a squirrel coaster and included a random rap bridge? Well, that’s what Alice Walker’s poetry is.
The Last Transmission (front)
This is the title of a Drexciya song. Maybe a coincidence, maybe the ICA paired these exhibits because of that.
the Doula
A portrait of the sea. In the guidebook illustration, he looks like he’s devouring his son.
The Night Woman
An apparition from Marlon James’ novel The Book of Night Women, which takes place on a Jamaican plantation some time in the late 18th century or early 19th century, in which the protagonists wonders whether to remain submissive or to burn it all down.
The Reaper
It is colored like autumn. The head is an anglerfish. Don’t fear it.
The Miracle
Resembles a jellyfish. Specifically, the immortal jellyfish which can revert from medusa stage to polyp stage indefinitely but in actuality gets eaten.
Wordplay.
Lorna Simpson - ID
Guadalupe Maravilla - Mariposa Relámpago Retablo
He retraced his own migration through Central America as an eight year old from El Salvador.
I was reading about a tech utopia in Honduras and I’m wondering if the future is authoritarian states but with a expatriate technocratic elite who are exempt from harsh laws.
Also on the subject of Central America, I found OctoberOmicron on Twitter and I was surprised about how racist he is and then I remembered that the ruling class fetishizes whiteness and that Guatemala even committed a genocide against the Mayans. Still. I never interacted with him much myself but he was pretty well-liked there.
Tavares Strachan - I Am
It’s a scaled down version of an artwork in the deserts of California. “There is no you without the whole. There’s no individual without the group and no group without the individual.”
The path of the soul is an eternal one-ever changing, ever seeking its own source.
Souls are wrought of shadow or of light; harmony, of a balance between the two.
The soul is vessel to the Divine. Divine will fills it, and through it is truth expressed.
The soul's journey has no end. The truth it seeks lies hidden deep within.
The soul is without boundary. It exists in all places, at all times.
The soul is eternal. Never dying, never fading, it evolves in perpetuity.
The soul's transitions are the impulses of the Divine. All life is sifted, sorted, blended, and made one once more.
The soul is one in number-both all and nothing.
The soul defines existence. Its expression is found in feeling, choice, and action.
Expression of the soul creates ripples that travel far and wide. Those ripples quicken life throughout creation.
The soul seeks opposite extremes, and rends its fiber in so doing-at once craving autonomy and yearning to be part of a greater whole.
The soul must maintain balance. To be apart from the whole is to foment discord
The soul thirsts for knowledge of the truth it hides within. Yet this truth can only be perceived in the solitude of conflict and discord.
The path to enlightenment weaves throughout the valleys of the soul's nexus. At its end, as at its beginning, lies primal knowledge.
Part the veil of emotion and intellect. Discern the true nature of that to which the soul gives rise.
The soul is as the soul is meant to be. Resist not the flow of its will, and all shall be as ordained.
Renée Green - Space Poem #1
Shepard Fairey
guns and roses - mr. spray - peace bomber - lenin stamp - mothership - mujer fatal
print and destroy (printing press) - proud parents - OBEY fist - Afrocentric (power & equality), lightning bolt - marilyn warhol
peace goddess - malcolm x - jane’s addiction - obey pole - obedience problems - vintage poster
The actual list was a bit more confusing. It was just a list.
Roni Horn - Key and Cue, no. 299
That’s from a poem by Emily Dickinson
Glenn Ligon - Untitled
Kenturah Davis - The Bodily Effect of a Color
something something labour intensive techinques something something figuration
Joe Wardwell - If You Got the Money Honey
Juxtaposes lyrics by Guns N’ Roses with quotes from cultural figures with ties to Massachusetts.
Riviane Neusnschwander - Zé Carioca e amigos (Um festival embananado)
It’s a comic book you can do your own art and text in.
Jennifer Bartlett - The Jar
Jenny Holzer - Enclosure
Hey, did you know that Jenny started out as a diminutive of Jane? Which is why you see things like Jenny Haniver long before the name Jennifer became popular.
Taylor Davis - Be Attentive
Tschabalala Self - Grape Soda
The camera does not see these lights the way the eye does.
Rachel Perry - Karaoke Wrong Number
One of the docents said that some of his coworkers have the script memorized. it’s about 7 minutes long.
Kaju Barfi was playing near the steps outside. Kaju Barfi is a mashup of mellow vibey shoegazey stuff and dancey Bollywood music with a beatboxer in lieu of drums. Sometimes they have a violinist but not today. Sometimes he runs his beatboxing through an array of distortion petals. Aside from one song in Spanish, they sang in at least one Indian language. Tamil already sounds a lot like beatboxing. Otherwise, I can’t tell Gujarati from Kannada from Meitei from Nicobarese from Ahom from Nihali.
One of the songs had a chorus of “ikatara” or something.
I had West African meat pies with potatoes and dipping sauce of red pepper and crispy okra on the side.
Of course, the people who were probably there to drink were chatting with each other rather loudly.
And I met a few doggos.
burning question: what do people who live in techno-utopias do for fun?
Igshaan Adams - Lynloop
It’s based on aerial images of some footpaths south of where he grew up in, I assume, Cape Town, South Africa. I mean, he was born there. He was born in 1982 so it was the last days of Apartheid.
Zoe Pettijohn Schade - Attempts at Self Organization: Prevailing Bonds
This was on the third floor lobby, where some rarely go. It’s made of gouache with silver, aluminum, copper, gold, and palladium on marbled pape (sic).
Art by Firelei Baez
(once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and becoming)
inspired by the Sans-Souci Palace in Milot, Haiti, built in the 1810s for Henri Christophe revolutionary and self-proclaimed king of Haiti and was then destroyed in an earthquake in 1842 and went to seed. Sans-souci means carefree in French. It’s still a ruin today because Haiti is one of the worst places for environmental disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes.
Firelei Baez is from the Dominican Republic and is of mixed Dominican and Haitian heritage. The Dominican Republic and Haiti have some, ahem, history. And I'm ninja editing this in because right now there's a manufactured outrage involving felinophagy that goes all the way up to Ted Cruz.
Retablo (españa in las Americas)
Cibyl
Anayansi
Wanderlust demanding recompense
Sans-Souci (This threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body)
Under Spanish rule, the governor of New Orleans ordered Creole women to cover their hair with knotted head scarves. They wore luxurius and bejeweled, beribboned, befeathered scarves in an act of malicious compliance.
Memory Board Listening (June 7); Fire wood pretending to be fire, February 12, 2012; All I know (July 6)
Baez poured paint on Yupo paper. And sometimes since they look like faces, she put eyes on them.
Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to the Fan Test for the Month of July
For every day of July, she’d cast and trace her shadow onto paper. The paper bag test is a test to see how black you are and whether or not you should be admitted in polite society. The colors match the skin tone of her forearm.
The fan test refers to hair texture.
Natural Grooming
Those Who Would Douse It
Vessel of Genealogies
Ode to la Sirène (and to muses beyond Jean Luc Nancy’s Canon)
Invokes Lasiren, the Vodou water goddess and Yemayá, powerful òrìṣà.
CPT Symmetry (echoing Marie Laveaus’s manipulations of the elusive mirror image of matter)
Man Without A Country (aka anthropologist wading in the Artibonite River)
225 book pages from obsolete or old engineering, art, and architecture books. I noticed that one of them has an integral table. Each drawing depicts the history of Hispaniola.
Linyon (Las fuerzas opresivas del pasado se vuelven frágilese y debilitades)
A motor with medicinal function
To write fire until it is every breath
Òya, òrìṣà of storms, fire, wind, revolution, and renewal.
given the ground (the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it)
an irreducible singularity (speaking to the space you fill and you keep)
right is first. I wrote that note to myself because the sign was for two paired paintings.
untitled
temporarily palimpsesitive (just adjacent to air)
Untitled (United States Marine Hospital)
The hospital depicted in this painted-over diagram was built for sick and injured seamen in the Merchant Marines, converted into a psychiatric unit, and then was damaged after Katrina.
Untitled (Les tables de géographie réduites en un jeu de cartes)
These horses are wild. Or feral. Actual wild horses are a bit more derpy and only live in China and Mongolia.
Black counter gravity (Carte figurative et approximative des quantités de coton en laine importés en Europe en 1858 et 1861)
On rest and resistance, Because we love you (to all those stolen from among us)
She’s reading Parable of the Sower, which is set between 2024 and 2027 and depicts a world wracked by climate change and other social problems.
the trace, whether we are attending to it or not (a space for each other’s breathing)
Constellation (Movements reimagined)
Adjusting the Moon (the right to non-imperative clarities): Waxing
Adjusting the Moon (the right to non-imperative clarities): Waning
I went right first. Which is how it should be because the moon waxes before it wanes.
You can look off into infinity.
Untitled (Marine Hospital)
A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways)
Drexciya was an electronic music duo that did afrofuturist concept albums. The name Drexciya also refers to an underwater country populated by the children of black people thrown off of slave ships who adapted to breathing underwater in their mothers’ wombs. The paintings depict Haitian queen Marie-Louise Coidavid and her daughters.
Untitled (Temple of Time)
which, obviously has nothing to do with that Temple of Time and everything to do with a chronological chart of world history from 1846 created by Emma Willard, which does limit history to just western history and groups appropriated by western civilization, that is to say, the ancient Near East.
Tone total time (or an economy of care)
Madeleine (Rupture rapture maroonage)
This is a reference to Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of Madeleine. You can see the face behind the explosion.
Untitled (Terra Nova)
Brasil is a mythical island off the coast of Ireland and the fact that it shares a name with the country Brazil (and even the spelling in the Portuguese language) is a coincidence. Brazil is named for the brazil tree, which is not the tree that the brazil nut grows on.
Truth was the bridge (or an emancipatory healing)
The Gun Violence Memorial Project is when they take the relics left by victims of gun violence and encase them in plastic bricks. 700 of them total which is the approximate number of people who die every week to gun violence. It’s not just who they are, it’s who they could have been.
And I hope this guy becomes Mithridates the Lone and torments the NRA endlessly.
Tau Lewis - Spirit Level.
This is not The Procession, which was at the Watershed in East Boston which closed before I could get there, which is closed until next spring/summer and it’s not by the same artist.
The Handle of the Axe (behind)
Not to be confused with the House of the Ax. The figure is based on St. Benedictus of Palermo and Samuel Sharpe who led a slave revolt in Jamaica and is honored with his portrait on their 50 dollar bill.
“when the axe came into the forest, the trees said ‘the handle is one of us’” which appears as the epigraph in The D- Poems of Alice Walker, who is somehow still alive as of the time I wrote this. Did I ever tell you the story of how I asked an AI to write the lyrics to a county song about squirrels and it gave me some nonsense about a squirrel coaster and included a random rap bridge? Well, that’s what Alice Walker’s poetry is.
The Last Transmission (front)
This is the title of a Drexciya song. Maybe a coincidence, maybe the ICA paired these exhibits because of that.
the Doula
A portrait of the sea. In the guidebook illustration, he looks like he’s devouring his son.
The Night Woman
An apparition from Marlon James’ novel The Book of Night Women, which takes place on a Jamaican plantation some time in the late 18th century or early 19th century, in which the protagonists wonders whether to remain submissive or to burn it all down.
The Reaper
It is colored like autumn. The head is an anglerfish. Don’t fear it.
The Miracle
Resembles a jellyfish. Specifically, the immortal jellyfish which can revert from medusa stage to polyp stage indefinitely but in actuality gets eaten.
Wordplay.
Lorna Simpson - ID
Guadalupe Maravilla - Mariposa Relámpago Retablo
He retraced his own migration through Central America as an eight year old from El Salvador.
I was reading about a tech utopia in Honduras and I’m wondering if the future is authoritarian states but with a expatriate technocratic elite who are exempt from harsh laws.
Also on the subject of Central America, I found OctoberOmicron on Twitter and I was surprised about how racist he is and then I remembered that the ruling class fetishizes whiteness and that Guatemala even committed a genocide against the Mayans. Still. I never interacted with him much myself but he was pretty well-liked there.
Tavares Strachan - I Am
It’s a scaled down version of an artwork in the deserts of California. “There is no you without the whole. There’s no individual without the group and no group without the individual.”
The path of the soul is an eternal one-ever changing, ever seeking its own source.
Souls are wrought of shadow or of light; harmony, of a balance between the two.
The soul is vessel to the Divine. Divine will fills it, and through it is truth expressed.
The soul's journey has no end. The truth it seeks lies hidden deep within.
The soul is without boundary. It exists in all places, at all times.
The soul is eternal. Never dying, never fading, it evolves in perpetuity.
The soul's transitions are the impulses of the Divine. All life is sifted, sorted, blended, and made one once more.
The soul is one in number-both all and nothing.
The soul defines existence. Its expression is found in feeling, choice, and action.
Expression of the soul creates ripples that travel far and wide. Those ripples quicken life throughout creation.
The soul seeks opposite extremes, and rends its fiber in so doing-at once craving autonomy and yearning to be part of a greater whole.
The soul must maintain balance. To be apart from the whole is to foment discord
The soul thirsts for knowledge of the truth it hides within. Yet this truth can only be perceived in the solitude of conflict and discord.
The path to enlightenment weaves throughout the valleys of the soul's nexus. At its end, as at its beginning, lies primal knowledge.
Part the veil of emotion and intellect. Discern the true nature of that to which the soul gives rise.
The soul is as the soul is meant to be. Resist not the flow of its will, and all shall be as ordained.
Renée Green - Space Poem #1
Shepard Fairey
guns and roses - mr. spray - peace bomber - lenin stamp - mothership - mujer fatal
print and destroy (printing press) - proud parents - OBEY fist - Afrocentric (power & equality), lightning bolt - marilyn warhol
peace goddess - malcolm x - jane’s addiction - obey pole - obedience problems - vintage poster
The actual list was a bit more confusing. It was just a list.
Roni Horn - Key and Cue, no. 299
That’s from a poem by Emily Dickinson
Glenn Ligon - Untitled
Kenturah Davis - The Bodily Effect of a Color
something something labour intensive techinques something something figuration
Joe Wardwell - If You Got the Money Honey
Juxtaposes lyrics by Guns N’ Roses with quotes from cultural figures with ties to Massachusetts.
Riviane Neusnschwander - Zé Carioca e amigos (Um festival embananado)
It’s a comic book you can do your own art and text in.
Jennifer Bartlett - The Jar
Jenny Holzer - Enclosure
Hey, did you know that Jenny started out as a diminutive of Jane? Which is why you see things like Jenny Haniver long before the name Jennifer became popular.
Taylor Davis - Be Attentive
Tschabalala Self - Grape Soda
The camera does not see these lights the way the eye does.
Rachel Perry - Karaoke Wrong Number
One of the docents said that some of his coworkers have the script memorized. it’s about 7 minutes long.
Kaju Barfi was playing near the steps outside. Kaju Barfi is a mashup of mellow vibey shoegazey stuff and dancey Bollywood music with a beatboxer in lieu of drums. Sometimes they have a violinist but not today. Sometimes he runs his beatboxing through an array of distortion petals. Aside from one song in Spanish, they sang in at least one Indian language. Tamil already sounds a lot like beatboxing. Otherwise, I can’t tell Gujarati from Kannada from Meitei from Nicobarese from Ahom from Nihali.
One of the songs had a chorus of “ikatara” or something.
I had West African meat pies with potatoes and dipping sauce of red pepper and crispy okra on the side.
Of course, the people who were probably there to drink were chatting with each other rather loudly.
And I met a few doggos.
burning question: what do people who live in techno-utopias do for fun?