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HANNAH BLACK
PRESS
ARCADIAMISSA.COM 35 DUKE STREET
INFO@ARCADIAMISSA.COM LONDON , W1U 1LH
02/12/2020 Hannah Black’s Year in Review - Artforum International
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PRINT DECEMBER 2020
GO OUTSIDE
Hannah Black’s Year in Review
ALL RIOTS EMIT A WORLD-HISTORICAL SHINE, but the George Floyd uprisings were extra
radiant because they opened the doors of the world. The riots saved social life by proving
that it was possible, with masks and moving air, to spend time together outdoors without
getting sick. The riots reconstructed an outside of the home as they enacted an outside of
capitalist social relations. Before the riots, even before the pandemic, it often felt as if life
stopped just before the point where other people began.
The opening of the outside was an accidental effect of the uprisings. Although the
uprisings were a mourning practice, a riot is also the undirected intersubjective power of a
crowd, just something that can happen when a lot of people are outside in the same place.
By providing new uses for public space—by uprooting street furniture, smashing plate-
glass windows into piles of jewels, and pedestrianizing highways—the riots demonstrated
that all objects can be transformed by collective play. A riot can’t resurrect the dead, but it
can resurrect the dead spaces of cities, animate the streets—“Our streets!” as the chant
goes, a civic-anarchic cliché that makes sense in the moment, as the streets get used
differently. The physical sensation of taking a street stays even after the street is
reconquered by everyday traffic.
It’s important to go outside because you feel different when the weather touches you
directly and because there are people there. Social life is the substance that revolution is
supposed to work on, so it’s no surprise that the brief, disgusting history of the police is
founded not only on the slave patrol but also on crowd control. The police exist in
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02/12/2020 Hannah Black’s Year in Review - Artforum International
passionate opposition to crowds. Unlike riots or an idea of art, the police are filled to the
point of obliteration by purpose, so that in the practice of policing they don’t act as people
at all. They are against escape and against gathering. The streets are the frame and context
for working-class social life, so the police limit the pleasures that can be experienced there.
Their job is to smash the informal life of the streets in all its manifestations: street vending,
loitering, all the nothing crimes that hurt no one through which the police project of racist
harassment gives itself legal form. Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation was the
spark that began the Arab Spring, was a street vendor; Eric Garner was a street vendor.
The banning of loitering is similarly paradigmatic, as it potentially criminalizes being
anywhere at all.
A riot can’t resurrect the dead, but it can resurrect the dead spaces of cities.
In New York in the first week of June, when the city said everyone had to be indoors by 8
PM, the chants of Fuck your curfew began as the hour struck. Whoever had really been out
stayed out. No one was conscious of being brave; they were powered by the electric
currents of collective energy that constitute courage. The police tried and failed to prevent
groups of a few hundred or a few thousand people from congregating at random around
the city. It was wild how close New York came, that month, to defeating the NYPD. This
was achieved without weapons, just physical presence and fire.
After the riots, before the winter, the city was like a creature in between exoskeletons. It
turned out everything could happen outside. In summer, the parks were dense with people
and competing musics. Grill smoke and weed smoke and Pop Smoke outlined the spectral
presence of the New York commune that lived a second ghost life after its erasure by
politics. I walked dark streets with people I had met on apps and navigated suddenly
ornate boundaries of touch. On Jacob Riis Beach, we swam at night and interrupted
someone else’s sex. Groups of young abolitionists still high on outdoor life congregated
fleetingly in different parts of the city to eat and talk. It was romantic to see how everyone
had grown into one another. In Prospect Park, we lay in the bowl of the earth and watched
the sky tear itself into sunset. “I’ve been out every day,” a friend told me in October, “since
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02/12/2020 Hannah Black’s Year in Review - Artforum International
the first day of the riots.” With winter coming, we rediscovered fire, as if rewinding back to
the first language-animals who lived when history had yet to happen. I remember in the
image of riot the hyperadaptability of being.
Communism is a movement away from the state and toward each other. Everything that
happens in the street is a lesson because it is a point of contact. Conversation and
confrontation are a real education. Signs and wonders remain, the names of the dead
graffitied on a building, broken windows like breathing holes in an airless world. The
government does nothing worth anything for anyone, and on good days, it feels as if the
state could just evaporate overnight. When the young people say, New York will breathe,
or, Abolition now, they mean it—they go outside, and, for a few hours, they make an
image of the present condition of freedom.
Hannah Black is an artist and writer based in New York.
All rights reserved. artforum.com is a registered trademark of Artforum International Magazine, New York, NY.
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Hannah Black’s “Ruin/Rien” - Features - art-agenda 26/10/2020, 23:44
ART AGENDA
REVIEWS
Hannah Black’s “Ruin/Rien”
by Harry Burke
February 29–July 28, 2020
Arcadia Missa, London
July 24, 2020
View of Hannah Black’s “Ruin/Rien” at Arcadia Missa, London,
2020. Image courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa. Photo by 1 — 10
Eva Herzog.
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Hannah Black’s “Ruin/Rien” - Features - art-agenda 26/10/2020, 23:44
A 2001 paperback edition of The Black
Jacobins (1938), C. L. R. James’s study
of the dialectical relationship between
the Haitian and French revolutions,
rests on a plinth in Hannah Black’s
exhibition “Ruin/Rien” at Arcadia Missa
(Ruin II, all works 2020). Its cover
features a detail of Anne-Louis
Girodet-Trioson’s romanticist 1797
portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, a
freed slave who attained the rank of
captain during the rebellion and was
the !rst Black deputy elected to the
French National Convention. The artist
has placed a post-it note on the upper-
right corner of the cover. Written on it,
in yellow pastel against a blue
background, is the word “RUIN.”
By revealing that the Haitian rebellion
—which overthrew French colonial
rule in one of the most consequential
slave uprisings in history—was central
to the upheavals in Paris, James
argues that the question of slavery
underwrites modern de!nitions of
liberty. “Ruin/Rien” features a
heterogeneous suite of new sculptures
and videos that draw connections
between these revolutionary events
and the idea of the autonomous
artwork. The bricked-up window of
Bastille, for example, references both
minimalist sculpture and the Bastille
cell in which the Marquis de Sade was
imprisoned and where he wrote The
120 Days of Sodom, pages from which
are interleaved with the bricks. Tracing
Belley’s gaze across the gallery, we see
Oof. This oil-on-canvas rendition of the
post-it cartoon that appears on the
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Hannah Black’s “Ruin/Rien” - Features - art-agenda 26/10/2020, 23:44
book is a scale appropriation of Ed
Ruscha’s iconic 1962 painting OOF:
Black’s version announces “RIEN.”
With essayistic reach, this exhibition
digests the visual politics of
contemporary art to explore how
institutional structures—from French
nobility to contemporary art museums
—are legitimated by practices of
signi!cation.
In his 1993 book On the Museum’s
Ruins, Douglas Crimp contended that
artistic strategies of reproduction and
appropriation—such as those found in
Ruscha’s artist books—undermined
the “originality, authenticity and
presence” that had previously been
“essential to the ordered discourse of
the museum.”1 Black’s detournément of
“oof” to “rien” reframes these
conversations by demonstrating that
social reproduction, a line of inquiry
often valorized in postmodern
critiques of the museum, is itself
neither neutral nor universally
inclusive. As indicated on a printed
text skewered on a fake deer antler in
the wall-mounted sculpture The Hunt I,
“rien,” or “nothing,” was King Louis
XVI’s aloof diary entry on July 14, 1789,
the day the Bastille was stormed. His
surreal, paradoxical jotting—which
may have been referring to an
unsuccessful hunt earlier that day—
anticipates the semantic nihilism that
many artists would later diagnose as a
product of industrial alienation.
While Ruscha’s work can be read in a
lineage of artists who identify such
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Hannah Black’s “Ruin/Rien” - Features - art-agenda 26/10/2020, 23:44
alienation as characteristic of urban
life, it was Charles Baudelaire,
observing Georges-Eugène
Haussmann redevelop the
cobblestoned streets of medieval Paris
in his 1857 collection Les Fleurs du mal,
who de!ned this spirit. Lorraine
O’Grady explored this genealogy in
her 1998 photographic installation
Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, a
series of cibachrome diptychs that
superimpose Baudelaire’s poetry and
images of him and Jeanne Duval, the
Haitian actress and dancer who was
his mistress and muse, upon details
from Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon (1907). “Ruin/Rien” evokes
this self-re"exive critique of the
entanglement of modernist
appropriation and colonial
expropriation.
Nearby to Oof, the soundless, four-
minute video Ruin I (2020) loops on a
"at-screen monitor. Closed caption
text recounts a scandal concerning a
“well-intentioned artwork” that, the
viewer is informed, heedlessly
perpetuated a global system of racial
violence. Black does not reanimate the
spectacle of the artwork—a white
painter’s depiction of Black su#ering
displayed in the 2017 Whitney Biennial
in New York—by naming it. The viewer
instead learns that a critical response
to the artwork’s complicity in “bringing
ruin to lives” was met with contempt,
eliciting debates concerning the
“inviolability” of art. The proximity of
Ruin I and Ruin II to Oof assesses a
cultural logic in which Blackness is
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coded as nothingness at once inherent
to, and externalized by, the production
of value. “How to de-create value?” the
video asks, querying contemporary
art’s genesis in the conditions of racial
capitalism.
Though written mostly in the third
person, the video’s diaristic voice
channels the activist vernaculars that
have characterized recent discussions
of institutional liberation, in which
Black has participated.2 An entrancing
run-on sentence concludes it: “I still
believe that revolutionary collective
practice / will one day remake the
world / but it is too late for a lot of us /
some dead and some still living.” The
sentiment appeals to what Christina
Sharpe, drawing on the work of poet
Kamau Brathwaite, has termed “to
dream Haiti”, meaning “to enter and
inhabit the dream and reality of
revolution.” 3 Black’s brief, thoughtful
parable appears over grayscale
footage of water churning in a
hydroelectric dam—an oceanic
re"ection on the dynamics of
transference through which power is
produced.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harry Burke is an art
critic based in London.
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Missing Galleries Amid Covid-19? Check Out these Exhibitions Behind Closed Doors Each day for the next month, we’ll highlight a different exhibition that’s affected by the Covid-19 crisis F BY FRIEZE IN FEATURES | 20 MAR 20 Hannah Black, Bastille (detail), 2020, bricks, pages from Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, 1785, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist and Arcadia Missa, London Hannah Black, 'Ruin/Rien Arcadia Missa, London In Hannah Black’s current solo show ‘Ruin/Rien’ at Arcadia Missa, one of the windows of the gallery is bricked up, blocking the outside world. Pages torn from a book are sticking out, wedged between the bricks. The installation is called Bastille (2020), and the book is The 120 of Sodom (1785) by the Marquis de Sade, written while the libertine was staying at the infamous prison. The original manuscript was found by a protestor, tucked inside the cracks of the wall in the Marquis’s former cell. Bastille playfully nods at this anecdote while also evoking the pure formalism of minimalist sculpture: the claim that art means nothing, and that its power comes from lack of meaning. – Justine Do Espirito Santo, Associate Director
+
Contemporary Art Daily
March 30th, 2020
Hannah Black at Arcadia Missa
Contemporary Art Venues
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1646
The Hague, The Netherlands
Artist: Hannah Black
Venue: Arcadia Missa, London
Exhibition Title: Ruin/Rien Metro Pictures
New York, United States
Date: February 29 – April 22, 2020
Click here to view slideshow
Kurimanzutto
Mexico City, Mexico
Galerie Buchholz
Berlin, Germany
Martos Gallery
New York, United States
Seventeen
London, United Kingdom
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Bergen Kunsthall
Bergen, Norway
Images:
Bel Ami
Los Angeles, United States
Images courtesy of Arcadia Missa, London. Photos by Eva Herzog. Essex Street
New York, United States
Press Release:
Ruin/Rien links together a cluster of events associated with the French Revolution in the late 18th
century and the concept of the autonomous artwork.
On the day of the storming of the Bastille, King Louis XVI wrote a single word in his diary: “rien”
(nothing). This has been interpreted as a sign of the aristocracy’s disconnect from the activities of the
proletariat. But it is more likely to have been simply a reference to the day’s hunt, in which the king killed
nothing. The word “RIEN” appears here as a six-foot painting based on Ed Ruscha’s famous painting
Oof. Ruscha was part of a movement of artists who played at the boundary of two ideas: that art draws its
power from a kind of semantic emptiness, and that this emptiness itself characterizes everyday urban life.
During the storming of the Bastille, a protestor found and rescued a manuscript tucked into the walls of a
xE - Exhibition Space of the Academy of Fine
prison cell. This was the work of a recent inhabitant, the Marquis de Sade, who had been moved from the Arts Vienna
Vienna, Austria
Bastille just 10 days previously. Bastille playfully reconstructs this anecdote in brick and paper, blocking
out part of the outside world and evoking both the autonomy of minimalist sculpture and the prison cell.
De Sade was a scion of the aristocracy but was sprung from his class position by his perverse sexual
desires. A facing work, The Ruler, repurposes the cover of a famous heterosexual dating manual offering
“capture”, gesturing to how, just as much as some desires can dislodge us from social norms, others can
fuse us more closely to them.
Recent protests around art institutions have experimented in making art accountable to its subject matter,
and illustrating how the forms of financial valorization that take place in art echo wider social structures.
These protests have inspired various defenses of the inviolability of the artwork and the autonomy of art
from the social. The text of the video Ruin I is a fragment taken from a longer reflection by the artist on
her experience of one such controversy. A partnering work, Ruin II, is simply a copy of CLR James’s
Air de Paris
seminal work The Black Jacobins labelled with a post-it. On dramatically different levels (the Haitian Paris, France
Revolution began modernity, whereas recent art controversies have simply marked a minor new era in
cultural production), both works gesture to how, when social critique is articulated through blackness, it
is received by the liberal mainstream as if threatens total destruction.
-HB, in the third person
Link: Hannah Black at Arcadia Missa
Tags: Arcadia Missa, Hannah Black, London
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Copyright 2008 — 2020 Contemporary Art Daily Portland, United States
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New York, United StatesHannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46 SLANT AN INTERVIEW WITH JABARI BRISPORT June 10, 2020 • Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport This interview was conducted before the insurgency in New York City that began on May 28; in a brief update on June 4, Jabari added: “This is the city of Amadou Diallo, the city of Sean Bell, the city of Eric Garner. We’ve been pushing to defund the NYPD by $1 billion over four file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20wi…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 1 of 13
Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46 years, out of their total budget of $6 billion, but the situation is now moving so fast that it feels like maybe we should go further than that. I saw the proposal to dismantle the police department in Minneapolis; why not in New York?” ABOUT A THOUSAND YEARS AGO in experiential time, Bernie Sanders ended his bid for the Democrat presidential nomination, centered around universal healthcare. This was just before the coronavirus deepened the massive inadequacies of the US healthcare system, resulting in (at the time of writing) 114,148 deaths. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor put it in The New Yorker: “Reality has endorsed Bernie Sanders.” More recently, Sanders has failed to endorse reality, refusing to support even reformist demands to defund the police in the wake of the recent US uprisings. The sphere of the political has lately moved to the riot, which makes everything else look irrelevant. But the New York primary is coming up on June 23. If socialist and radical left candidates can win power at state and local levels, they would be in a position to convey the demands of grassroots solidarity movements. These are the politicians most likely to feel accountable to the streets. The political power of the police also needs to be tackled, especially in New York, where the police union runs the mayor and governor. Radical local politicians could take up the torch of street movements and help to transform baggy buzzwords like “defund” and “dismantle” into real gains for the people and reductions of police power. The pandemic makes its own case for universal healthcare, and a pathway to this still remains at state level. The New York Health Act passed the state assembly four times only to be struck down by the state senate. The state senate’s new Democratic majority—which includes democratic socialist Brooklyn senator Julia Salazar—gives it a new chance of passing there. This would be a huge achievement in itself, and some are even cautiously optimistic that winning single-payer in one state could be the first step to nationwide free-at-point-of-service healthcare. Jabari Brisport is hoping to join Salazar in fighting for this and other progressive legislation. The thirty-two-year-old middle-school teacher and former actor is running for New York State Senate in District 25, which comprises a big chunk of Brooklyn, including the neighborhoods of Boerum Hill, Fort Greene, Red Hook, Bed–Stuy, Sunset Park, Gowanus, and Park Slope. His campaign, endorsed by Sanders himself and supported by the Democratic Socialists of file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20wi…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 2 of 13
Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46
America, has had a lot to contend with in the coronatime. Not least, there’s been confusing
back-and-forth around how to conduct elections without risking new infections. The city’s
initial plan to send absentee ballots automatically to all voters ahead of the election on June 23
was nixed, but if you live in New York you can order yours online here by June 16. Jabari has
been campaigning over video and phone calls from his apartment in Prospect Heights, where
he lives with two roommates and a dog. With the pandemic constantly producing new
emergencies, Jabari has been delivering groceries via a local mutual aid network alongside his
election campaign, and his volunteer phone bankers spend many of their calls just checking in
on people’s immediate needs.
The June 23 New York primary alone won’t decide our fate. But in pandemic times, fate
expands its terrain. If socialist and radical left activists can win power at state and local levels,
they would be in a position to convey the demands of grassroots solidarity movements and to
cushion the impacts of what looks likely to be a very difficult near future, both economically
and spiritually. No matter what happens in the national election in November, a major
recession looks unavoidable and the eldritch white-power energies channeled by Trump are not
going anywhere. Money will have to be found somehow, whether through taxation or
expropriation. Or else we will see death and suffering on an even more massive scale.
I recently spoke with Brisport about the New York Health Act’s chances, the future of New
York City, and why governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2 percent spending cap is the reason hundreds
of thousands of New Yorkers waited weeks for their unemployment check. As with my recent
interview with economist Philippe van Parijs on Universal Basic Income, I remain ambivalent
about both reformist strategies and our medium-term chances of collective survival. But I’m
open to hearing about any direction away from this latest abyss.
— Hannah Black
HB: How did you start out in politics?
Jabari Brisport: I never planned to run for office. I got into politics fighting for same-sex
marriage in New York in 2009. I was just twenty-two, and I was like, We can make this win!
And then we lost. I felt really shitty about it, like a second-class citizen. It came up for a vote
again two years later and I just redoubled my efforts. I was organizing friends, doing phone
file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20wi…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 3 of 13Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46 banks, making calls to state senators, and we won! I started getting involved in the Black Lives Matter movement a few years later. Just seeing those images of people getting gunned down in the street . . . I began to help organize rallies and protests. We did a lot of know-your-rights training: talking to protestors and letting them know what to do if they get stopped or harassed by the police. Around 2016, I got into the Bernie Sanders campaign. It was the first time I saw a politician who made me think I would have to protest a lot less if they got elected. I fell in love with that campaign. I had never canvassed for a candidate, but I ended up knocking on doors for Bernie and exploring what it meant to be a democratic socialist. I realized I was a socialist in mid-2016. After the Sanders campaign folded, I was thinking about the intersections of race and capitalism and it dawned on me that slavery was an example of capitalism, it was black people slapped with price tags and brought over as commodities and traded in literal markets, and that’s what capitalism is—price tags on things that shouldn’t have price tags. Why are we putting a price tag on people, why are we putting a price tag on healthcare, on the land itself? Some people saw the Bernie and Corbyn defeats in the US and UK as proof that the radical left has been misled into getting involved in electoral campaigning. What do you see as the role or promise of electoral politics right now, especially at state level? I think if anything we are closer than ever to the change we want. I saw Bernie Sanders opening up the floodgates for a ton more candidates. His campaigns gave us the tools to organize a campaign. Bernie was not just running to win the presidency for himself. When he says, “Not me, us,” that’s what it’s about—making sure that he has helped prepare the next generation of political leaders to carry that torch. The Democrat Party is institutionally very regressive and reactionary, and there’s obvious pushback to serious change. As you say, treating every aspect of life as a commodity is fundamental to capitalism and there are deeply entrenched interests against changing that. What are your thoughts on this problem? I was frustrated to see Bernie suspend his campaign. But the Democratic Party had to throw file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20wi…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 4 of 13
Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46 the kitchen sink and everything they had at Bernie to stop him. Obama was making calls behind the scenes just to get people to drop out and endorse Biden. It was a concerted effort: I wish I had seen them apply the same pressure to stop kids being detained at the border in cages. And they barely succeeded in stopping Bernie Sanders this time. I can only imagine what would happen if another strong progressive ran in 2024. So you see the defeat as a proof of concept—people like the policies and that’s why they have to be directly repressed. Yes. In my experience of phone banking and canvassing for the Sanders campaign, voters only wanted to talk about Medicare For All. Occasionally other things would come up, like student debt cancellation, but M4A was what people could really relate to. So I’m interested to know if you still see a path for M4A at a national level. I also want to hear whether the New York Health Act could be a path to universal healthcare. There’s an idea that if one state can win it, that could unfold from there: In Canada, single-payer began in one province. Medicare For All is not happening at a national level. Biden does not support it. Trump does not support it. And one of them will be president. That’s not to say it’s never happening, but it’s not going to happen in that way. The state level is where we can go. The New York Health Act has a lot of momentum. It has passed the State Assembly multiple times. It didn’t pass the State Senate because it was controlled by Republicans until 2018, but now we have a Democratic majority and we are electing more socialists to state legislature. We could make New York the leader in the nation. California almost was. It tried to pass its own single-payer bill, but Assembly speaker Anthony Rendon voted it down. New York could show that it works. It would save money by reducing administrative costs and allowing us to bulk purchase drugs and medical supplies. All workers deserve healthcare and paid sick leave. What does that look like given that Cuomo is big on austerity and so popular right now? The perception is that it will be hard to get the NY Health Act through because it’s seen as expensive, even though, as you say, there’s an argument that single-payer is in fact far less expensive. How do you see that fight playing out, the nuts and bolts of trying to get this file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20wi…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 5 of 13
Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46 legislation through in a hostile situation? It’s gonna be hard. Cuomo has an artificial spending cap: You can’t raise spending on any state program by more than 2 percent a year, and that keeps us from increasing funding for things that we need. We have to fight against that. He refuses to tax the wealthy. It’s not even in his orbit. During budget negotiations in early April, he said, “We can’t spend what we don’t have,” as if we couldn’t expand the pool of money we have by raising taxes on the wealthy. That’s where the money is right now. They need to step up and give their fair share. With the coronavirus crisis, more people are crying out to tax the wealthy. People are talking about debt cancellation and Universal Basic Income. I’ve seen other politicians in the state legislature saying, “Let’s pass this multimillionaire tax, let’s pass this pied-à-terre tax. Let’s get money from the ultra-wealthy in our state to fund the social services that we need.” I was at a candidate forum last night and every other candidate was also saying, “Tax the rich.” It’s on everyone’s mind, but it’s not on Cuomo’s mind. He’s out of touch with New York. What’s your theory on why Cuomo is so popular? He has presided over so much death and suffering. It’s a masterclass in marketing. If any other governor had the most deaths by far in their state, the press would say they were doing a terrible job. But Cuomo is somehow seen as the leader in the crisis, such a great contrast to Trump, despite all the deaths. He is a Machiavellian genius. He knows how to be feared. We’ve seen what he’s done to the Working Families Party: He gutted their union support and funding because they didn’t endorse him in 2018. He’s a bully and politicians are scared of him. At the same time, he gets on his press conference at 11 AM every morning and makes sure people know that he has a plan for everything. And so he’s seen as Trump’s antithesis. But similar to Trump he seems to prove that, in a patriarchal society, people are trained to like vindictive bullies. Maybe that’s working in his favor. Maybe, yeah. Do you worry about capital flight? There’s worry about the reliability of the tax base if file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20wi…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 6 of 13
Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46 property values tank and a long pandemic compels rich people to leave the city. Taxes used to be higher and the rich didn’t leave. They always threaten that if we raise taxes, they’re out. But where are they going to go? If all the billionaires move out of New York, who’s going to buy their $10 million home? I do think there might be flight, but I don’t know if it’s the wealthiest who will leave. I am worried about the middle class who are squeezed out and don’t see any reason to stay in an overpriced city that was also the epicenter of a pandemic. I am worried about losing those people. And I’m worried about small businesses that are shuttered and may not reopen. I don’t know if this counts as capital flight, but I’m worried about having a New York of just big box retailers and department stores and chains because we had a mass extinction of mom-and-pop shops during this crisis. Do you have policies in place to help small businesses, such as galleries? Yes, two things. Commercial rent control would help stabilize their costs. It helps if the landlord for a small business can’t just jack up the rent from $5,000 to $10,000 or $20,000 or $40,000 a month. And also, there is the NY Health Act. If every single person in New York has access to healthcare, small employers don’t have to worry about providing it to their workers because it’s already handled through the state and through taxation, rather than payroll. That alleviates the burden on them too. Covid-19 has seen an increase in mutual aid and tenant organizing. What’s your take on that? What’s really awesome is we’re seeing alternatives to capitalism bubble up. My campaign has partnered with a mutual aid network called Bed-Stuy Strong, which is located in the biggest neighborhood in my district and makes sure we can get food and medicine and supplies to people in the community. I’ve been doing drop-offs for elderly people who are not able to get to the supermarket. It’s been incredible to watch people figure out that there are alternatives to the way we live now, founded in solidarity. That’s also true of the rent strikes: We’re in the biggest wave of rent strikes since the 1930s; those earlier rent strikes helped win rent control and rent stabilization in New York City. We’ve been in a housing crisis for a long time. About file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20wi…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 7 of 13
Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46 half of New Yorkers are severely rent burdened, paying way too much of their income in rent. Rent strikes are one way to say that this is unsustainable. It’s funny, the wealthiest people are always the first to complain—“We’ll leave if the taxes are too high!”—but no one seems to worry about renters leaving if the rents are too high. It’s always, Let’s keep jacking up the price and someone will pay for that apartment. But in the end, here we are, with rent strikes around the city and across the country. I wondered if you had any thoughts about the relationship between this type of organizing and what you are able to do at State Senate level? You can definitely support that at the state level. Any legislator can support organizing in their district. If there is a strike, you can be on the picket lines with them. You can help build union density by compelling projects to use union labor. In terms of tenants’ rights, you can support people who are organizing inside their building and trying to build a tenant union. You can be there with legal support if they’re harassed by their landlord. We don’t have grants yet for mutual aid networks but maybe that’s something that could happen. There have been attempts in art institutions, for example at the New Museum, to block workers from forming a union, bringing in union-busting firms. Now that everyone is furloughed, it’s hard to know what’s going on. But are there ways that, at state level, you can help people in their efforts to form unions? There are a few ways to make it easier to unionize. One way is to prevent management from holding closed-door meetings. This is where they hold a meeting on company time to tell the workers why unions are terrible and will make them lose their jobs and why they should be scared of unionizing. We can ban those types of meetings. Also, this isn’t really a union thing, but a worker co-op thing: If a small- or medium-sized business is closing, we can give first right of refusal to the people who work there. Giving employees the chance to collectively own the business will build more worker co-ops, which I think is great. It’s fun to imagine blue-chip galleries becoming worker co-ops. Could you explain the impact of having one democratic socialist in the State Senate already, and what that’s file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20wi…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 8 of 13
Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46 made possible? I think it would be helpful to understand the potential impact of having leftist politicians in power at state level. In 2018, we succeeded in electing Julia Salazar to the State Senate. Even though she’s the lone democratic socialist, she’s been very effective. She was crucial to passing eight incredible pro- renter housing reform bills. She’s been great on decriminalizing sex work and increasing labor rights. My election would double the number of socialist state senators. And we have three or four more at state assembly level, making a socialist bloc. So we can advocate for more. We can advocate for the New York Health Act. We’re all on board with the Public Power Campaign to bring energy under public control, to get it out of the hands of private companies and, in that way, help shape New York’s Green New Deal as it’s implemented. Can I talk about the DSA slate? If you want to. I do want to! Phara Souffrant Forrest, a union nurse from Crown Heights, is running for state assembly. Housing organizer Marcela Mitaynes is on the ballot in Sunset Park, and Zohran Mamdani, who is a foreclosure prevention counselor, is campaigning in Queens. Salazar is part of the slate. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is part of the slate. And Samelys López up in the Bronx running for congress. It’s an incredible group, all people of color, many of us immigrants or the children of immigrants and all deeply rooted in our communities. We’ve collaborated in an unprecedented way. We released a joint platform on decarceration and housing. We print out joint literature, we do joint phone banking and joint fundraising. It’s all deeply interwoven. That’s what socialism is to me. It’s solidarity and working together, it’s not just about one person. That’s what we’re gonna take to Albany. Are you in a group chat with AOC? No, but I would love to be. Can you speak a bit about the violent racism and classism in how social distancing is policed? It has been distressing to watch. Whenever the state ramps up enforcement of anything it’s black and brown people who get harmed. That’s what happened with the war on drugs— file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20wi…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 9 of 13
Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46 white people do tons of drugs, but the people who are impacted by these laws are predominantly black and brown. We see police walking through parks in wealthy neighborhoods giving out masks and making sure people are OK. And then we have videos from other places of officers stepping on somebody’s neck with their knee after a scuffle over social distancing. The summonses are going to black and brown people. The enforcement is uneven, and it’s disconcerting. Could you tell me about the criminal justice reforms you’re supporting? The rest of the DSA slate and I released a joint platform in January with the goal of radically decarcerating New York. We want to establish a committee that would look into best practices to reduce incarceration in New York down to 1950 levels, back before the war on drugs—a 75 percent reduction in people in cages. There are bills we’re supporting that are already in the state legislation, such as decriminalizing marijuana, decriminalizing sex work, and enacting something called elder parole—letting people over the age of fifty-five out of jail, especially right now, when keeping older people locked up, where they’re very likely to contract the virus, is a potential death sentence. Then we pushed beyond things already in the legislature, such as repealing mandatory minimum sentences and decriminalizing all simple drug possession. Drug use should be addressed by social workers and counselors, not police. You’re also a middle-school math teacher. How does that influence your platform, especially the education aspects? The biggest issue facing our schools is lack of funding. There was a big class-action lawsuit about fourteen years ago arguing that the public schools in New York City were owed about four billion dollars in miscalculated funds. That still hasn’t been delivered. I teach in a school where we often don’t have textbooks for the kids. I have to get my own supplies. We have four counselors for 1,400 kids. Funding schools is important but so is fighting privatization in the form of charter schools that take funding and space from the public school system. New York has one of the most segregated school districts in the country, especially in gifted and talented programs and specialized high schools. Very few black and brown people end up in those programs. Do you have any thoughts on the crises at New York’s public university systems, CUNY and file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20w…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 10 of 13
Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46 SUNY? It all goes back to funding. We have a stupid 2 percent cap on how much we can increase funding and meanwhile our public colleges are starving for money. They can’t hire enough teachers. Students are taking out larger loans to pay off college debts. There was a time when CUNY and SUNY were free—I believe in making them free again. A public college is a public service, like a fire department or a library. It should be subsidized through tax dollars. People have been encouraged to accept an austerity and scarcity mindset. The question is often, How will we pay for that? As we anticipate a big economic contraction, do you imagine that attitude getting worse? There were 112 billionaires in New York before the crisis. The wealth is still there. We’ve all been hit by the coronavirus crisis but there are still billions of dollars concentrated at the top that are being used however the wealthiest people in the state choose to use them, whether that’s buying their third or fourth or fifth home or a yacht or however they choose to amuse themselves. We could be using that money to fund a more just and robust society in our state. They need to pay their fair share. An economic contraction looks different for a billionaire than for someone making $50,000 a year. Lately, I think a lot of people feel hopeless when they look to the future. How do you see your platform as answering that feeling of despair? It’s often at the darkest times that we get some of the best policies. Look at what came out of the Depression. We got the New Deal, an incredible expansion of government services and protections for working people. I think we’re about to see something similar. The longer we go without taxing the wealthiest people to fund services, the more people will rise up to say we need a radically different system. What’s your vision of that different system? Let me back up. It sounds mundane, but Cuomo’s spending cap has a domino effect. A lot of people cannot get unemployment right now. The lines are jammed. I had a friend who reached out in mid-March and didn’t hear back until late April. This is a staffing issue. They should have seen this coming and hired an additional one hundred, two hundred, five hundred people file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20wi…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 11 of 13
Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport - Artforum International 26/10/2020, 23:46 to handle the influx of claims. But the state couldn’t hire that many people because we have this spending cap that says you can’t rapidly expand a social service. It’s so frustrating. That’s the microcosm of what we’re seeing now.In a just New York, spending would be based on human need, not a random 2 percent prescribed by the governor. We would have robust protections for workers, with sick leave. We would have hospitals with all the beds we needed. We would have a world where we did not use law enforcement to do the work of social workers or public health workers. I would like to see a system that is more proactive than reactive, that has a fully funded social safety net, and is decarceral in that it doesn’t equate safety with more police. When people vote for you, they’re really voting for themselves. People imbue their own personal hopes and dreams into a candidate. That’s part of why politics gets so nasty sometimes and why people get riled up. When they’re voting for you, they’re voting for the things they believe in. You give people a chance to feel like they’re participating and have a voice in government, especially at a time like now when people feel silenced and distanced from each other and forced to be alone. I don’t know exactly who reads Artforum, but I imagine some of them are wealthy. Maybe the rich are beyond persuasion, but just out of curiosity: What would you say to a hypothetical rich person reading this who says, “What if I want to have five houses?” We all derive our wealth from the people around us, from working with the communities around us. That’s not a hippy-dippy thing to say; that’s just economics. Every single dollar that comes to you has been generated by someone else. It flows out. Whether you’ve amassed five thousand dollars or five billion, you have to give back in some way to the society that got you where you were. Everything comes from the interconnectedness of our lives. The New York primary is on June 23. The application to vote by mail due on June 16; New Yorkers can order their absentee ballots here. ALL IMAGES All rights reserved. artforum.com is a registered trademark of Artforum International Magazine, New York, NY. file:///Users/niinaulfsak/Downloads/Hannah%20Black%20talks%20w…%20Jabari%20Brisport%20-%20Artforum%20International.webarchive Page 12 of 13
Eschewing the traditional press release, Hannah Black’s Aeter is accompanied by six short citations referring to slav-
ery, cannibalism and psychoanalytic
pair of clay sculptures, Clay Aeter 1 and Clay Aeter 2 (all works 2018), resemble termite mounds in a process of disas-
sembly. Each is sitting on a plinth. Over the course of the exhibition a gallery worker scrapes handfuls of clay from one
entangled – like lovers, or analyst and analysand – each sculpture is always either cannibalising or in the process of
Suspended in front of the shuttered gallery windows are three white plastic masks (Shame Mask 1, 2 and 3). Vaguely
these masks’ function: whether they are made to celebrate and disarm individual shame; or, rather less comfortingly,
as a means of excising it, or passing it on elsewhere. Referring to a passage from the Book of Genesis used histori-
wall, it has two eyeholes cut into its surface, making it resemble both a perfunctory ghost and a member of the Ku Klux
Klan. Looking through the holes, suggestive of a two-pronged Étant donnés, we see a piece of paper tacked lightly to
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suming as we look, shame here is the at-times nauseating self-awareness of the gaze.
In the projected videoworks Aeter [Sam] and Aeter [Jack], two interviewees recount separate kinds of cannibalism: bone transplant and
compulsive nail biting, respectively. Alongside these, three further videoworks, Hey 1, 2 and 3, play out on stocky monitors sitting on the
out, like awkward or conciliatory text messages: ‘Hey. Baby. It’s Just. Hey...’ Received on its own as an SMS, the word ‘Hey’ can strike fear.
this waiting: pushed into anxious intimacy, we feel ourselves slowly siphoned away too.
in an overwhelmingly white artworld, this idea is productive; even more so as an artist known to vocalise the failings of that same world,
prompting it towards a kind of adulthood. The Situation (2017–18), an orderly pile of ash placed atop a small pile of carpet, refuses the
terms of this exchange. Sharing its name with a book made from (already partially redacted) conversations with Black’s peers, and shown
as part of her 2017 solo show Some Context
new work seems to say, and without shame: whatever the book said is no longer being communicated – at all.WARREN B. KANDERS DIDN’T EARN HIS PLACE as vice chair of the board at the Whitney Museum of American Art
through his good taste alone. He has also used some of his estimated $700 million fortune to make tax-deductible do-
nations to support exhibitions at the museum. What successful enterprise has made this generosity possible? Thanks to
body armor to police and security forces including the IDF and the NYPD. But let’s talk about the tear gas.
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this year in Khartoum, Sudan; and the thirty-seven people killed by tear gas in the back of a police van in Cairo in 2013.
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Cedeño, a nine-year-old girl teargassed at the demonstration.
The Biennial is a prominent platform, and the teargassing of asylum-seekers, including children at the US-Mexico bor-cleanse Kanders’s reputation. Outside of the sphere of career artists, the movement against Kanders has been remark-
missed.
and demanding, among other things, that leadership “consider asking for Warren Kanders’ resignation.”
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and discussion. This ignores art’s ongoing transformation into yet another arm
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What has made refusal seem inappropriate or impossible? There has been resentment among artists,
art activist organizations Decolonize This Place and W.A.G.E.—the latter derided by some as the pet project of just one
celebrated in this majority-minority Biennial, and second, an expression of class privilege, because “artists must eat.”
as opposed to its main driver. Opportunities to collectively refuse are not unfair burdens but continuations of collective
resistance. The insistence that artists alone — unlike teachers, incarcerated people, and Uber drivers—are unable to act
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hoods, or that political commitments among artists are blandly congratulated and even
encouraged?
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life, including commercial organizations and cultural institutions, is not productive or healthy.” For Kanders, both the
race struggle, no gender
seems all the Whitney can do is exacerbate them.one director colleague describes the contemporary museum, it is ‘a safe space for unsafe ideas.’” That “director col-
her husband Stephen Peel, of NSO Group, a
It is naive to believe that history proceeds according to a moral calculus. Things happen contingently, accidentally,
extent true that, as people like to say, “all the money is evil,” i.e. capitalist accumulation has as its basis the exploitation,
should take every opportunity given to us to act.
The current struggle represents the culmination of years of research,
the present and catastrophic spectacle at the border. The movement against Kanders is not random or impulsive. The
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is impossible before it happens.
particular leaders.
desirable, as institutions are treated like an omnipotent, irresistible force.
submitted a
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escalating crisis.
love, and our grief.
no.
— Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, Tobi Haslett‘The Painting Must Go’: Hannah Black Pens Open Letter to the
Whitney About Controversial Biennial Work
Alex Greenberger
“She has nothing to say to the black community about black trauma.”
Dean, and critic Mostafa Heddaya are among the signees.
OPEN LETTERAndrew Ross
REVIEW BY: NINA POWER NOVEMBER 2017 Chisenhale Gallery 22 September – 10 December 2017 HANNAH BLACK, SOME CONTEXT On the cover of the 1985 Pelican edition of D. W. Winnicott’s 1971 book, PLAYING AND REALITY, there is a picture, by Lawrence Mynott, of a teddy bear with a missing plastic eye. Winnicott is famous, of course, for talking about teddy bears. He writes: ‘the object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated’. One must, he notes, ‘recognise the central position of Win- nie-the-Pooh’ in the life of the child. Teddy bears without eyes and Winnie-the-Pooh-type creatures turn up quite a bit in Hannah Black’s SOME CONTEXT (2017). There are sev- en TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS scattered about the gallery space. These visionless fabric animals, some bears, some dog-like, one elephant-like (the latter hung up on some metal hooks), are filled with shredded copies of a text called THE SITUATION, 20,000 copies of which (bar those that have been taken and/or shredded) form a strange temple-like monument in the middle of the room, guarded by an animal with long silky hair that looks like someone’s idea of an Afghan hound if they had never seen one. The floor, entitled CARPET, is covered with already-shredded pages from the book, and in odd clearings, there are CREATURES made of modeling clay – some are faces, some are eyes, perhaps the missing eyes of the toys – and others are figurines, clutching at the side of the fabric animals. One is just a smear, though perhaps it has been stepped on, as differentiating the curious crunch of shredded paper from the partly hidden modelled objects makes wandering around the show rather delicate. In three sites, menac- ing paper shredders, switched on and full of eaten paper, add an air of dangerous possibility – should I shred the book? Is that what the machines want? Is that what the artist wants? On the back of the book two small diagrams show a bear-like creature throwing the book up into the air as it appears to explode, and another shows the bear walking off with the book under its arm. I followed the second bear. All this anxiety, uncertainty and possibility is perhaps part of the point – after all, what is ‘the context’ that this show demonstrates ‘some’ aspect of it? What exactly is ‘the situation’ that the book describes? Comprised of interviews with many people – some with their names obscured and some mentioned at the back, and none tied to the body of the text so you don’t know who’s speaking – the book both is the show and is about the show. The transcripts, sometimes tentative, sometimes impassioned, often blacked out as if censored, speak of many different kinds of ‘situations’. Some of these are structural (patriarchy, sexual and physical violence, colonialism, racism, capitalism, environmental destruction) and others institutional – the relationship between artists of colour and art institu- tions – though it is hardly as if institutions are separable from the structures that dominate them. As one voice puts it: ‘Maybe the situation is a question of reparations in the representational context’. Black’s show poses this exact question in multiple ways: what is the relationship between reparations as a political, historical and economic demand, and reparations in the context of art? Are they separable? What do different groups of people owe objects, transitional or otherwise, and what do they owe us? What do we owe the written word, and when should we read, and when should we destroy? By posing the possibility of the destruction of the words of black artists, shredders awaiting, Black points to uncomfortable realities, both historical and current. Is assimilation and invitation (always selective, of course) just the latest iteration of the long history of insti- tutional neglect, theft and exploitation of black artists? As one interviewee in THE SITUATION puts it: It’s like this Malcolm X line in the Fred Moten book … something like: ‘what we have to remember when we’re dealing with the white man is that we are dealing with a very silly man.’ These are very silly people. They’re easily disturbed by minor things. You’re fine, don’t worry, no Nazis are going to burn any of your books. The teddy bears of SOME CONTEXT are perhaps a (disturbing) comfort, but the time has come to put away childish things. Play- ing and reality – ‘the situation’, played out in multiple ways, is the horror of reality, the reality of violence against blackness, the reality of representation as intimately tied to racism, colonialism, capitalism, whiteness. SOME CONTEXT is strange and idiosyncratic, but also a deeply collective work – not just with the speakers in Black’s book – but also with the collective experience of childhood. But who gets to grow up, and who doesn’t? If there is an object here, it might be white infantilism, and if there is a subject, it is a double one of the black child, killed as if they were an adult, and the black artist, forced to negotiate the dangerous, because easily disturbed, silliness and power of the white man and his white cubes.
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