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By Essence Harden -- 8.8.18
(An edited version of this interview originally appeared in Performa Magazine, August 2018)
keyon gaskin is an artist at the inter- of disciplines and positions. Corporeal poetics, gestural manipulations, and discursive shouts inform gaskin’s take at performance art, black social/dance, sound, and theatre. The tentative arrangement of gaskin’s time-based work shatters relationships not merely between perceived audience and artist but curator and gallery, land and architecture, trust and supposition. Preferring to not qualify their work (gaskin’s artist statement reads “keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize their art with their credentials”) the assertion of what it is gaskin does is informed by the experiential spectatorship within gaskins work. gaskin is not here for entertainment (though they do entertain) rather their performative based art is a blustery and fervent trip where those echoes of the subjective experience reverberate in the room with them and after.
gaskin and I sat down to talk about their artistic practice on hot Los Angeles summer evening. This conversation begins with our discussion of my first experience attending gaskin’s piece “this is an interactive experience for you/.you are a community/.you are my material/.this is your prison/.leave when you want” part of the Hammer Museums weekend-long exhibition “At night the states” in January of 2017. In this work gaskin moved between the formal stage and the audience floor, arranging and rearranging furniture and people by gesture and voice. Wearing all black, gaskin would form lines of folks reminiscent of a tribunal, rings of people squeezing every closer together, and masses of bodies shifting and swaying to where gaskin seemingly desired. At times reciting prose or direction, at times tossing chairs or placing people, gaskin wound, bent, and graced his body throughout the ever-shifting space. Ending and beginning without fanfare (simply gaskin emerged and began movements at the pieces start time and said it was over when finished) gaskin spun a narrative between and with the audience, the Hammer, the room, and himself for close to an hour.
Our conversation begins here and explores the contents of gaskin’s work, probing moments, and his thoughts on artistry, mastery, and defiance.
Essence: My first experience of seeing you perform at the Hammer Museum in 2016 for “At Night the States.” Not only did I not know what to expect because you don’t qualify what you do with program text or curatorial statements, but once there I found myself simultaneously rolling with laughter and near tears. I think part of it was the intensity of the audience not knowing what to expect and how you moved around the room and engaged with the stage (in this performance you had chairs on the stage that we’re being moved around erratically at times and had audience members sitting on them at times). There was this great force with your movements throughout the room- asking and gesturing for our bodies [the audience] to be closer in proximity while you ground through the new, dense mass of people. There was an older white couple, some kids, and a lot of folks who I would not, in general, find myself sharing such tight and hectic quarters with which made me laugh and feel uncomfortable at the same time. The experience was really one of a collapsed space wherein expansion and intimacy seemed bound up in it.
What is your process with this kind of work? What was the process for this piece? It’s not black social dance, but it is absolutely black social dance, It’s not performance art but it’s absolutely performance art, it’s not theater, but it absolutely is.
keyon: i like that. Initially, i go back to when i started making solo performance pieces—i say “solo” which is funny because, while I’m the initiator, instigator, and primary performing figure, it's important to recognize the active role of the audience in my work. Early on, i realized that i like to center what's happening in that room at that particular moment; we can look at it as a microcosm—if not of the world then at least of art scenes or institutions. In performance, what's happening in the room is always indicative of larger social, political, historical ways of engagement.
i try to use the information in the room to highlight how those social structures are present. i think that my role is important, but it's also important just to have the space to be in tune with, and very much listening to, the room. With that older white couple, i didn't want to move them from the front row, and i made a point not to disturb them, but there was really violent action going on around them. They were a little shook, and everybody else moved farther away from them. It was this thing of seeing that couple, seeing where they were placed, seeing that there was space around them that i could engage in an action, and how that will bring something to light. And i think we all became aware of us differently. We became aware that they were sitting in the room, that they chose to sit in the front row. We became aware of the absence of bodies around them.
Essence: In my memory, they were on the stage, by virtue of the activity around them.
keyon: It highlights them no matter where they were in the room. you know, the stage is so not tired but also tired in a way. I’m not one to be like anything is dead necessarily, i think everything has space to be enlivened and the stage is doing work in whatever vein that it’s in. I don’t think theater has nothing to offer but the stage is so easily trope-ish, problematic, and indicative of oppressive systems of power. i also think a lot about how the stage centralizes focus, as opposed to a softening or opening of focus, what i think of as feminist gaze. What are you choosing to look at? Is it the most interesting thing in the room? Or is the thing that’s actually happening what’s happening on the stage or is it actually the person breathing heavily and making comments under their breath two rows back that you barely hear that are hopefully influencing your experience. i think I’m often trying to just highlight these other things.
And i’m not into mastery either. i’m always in that space of defiance when it comes to regulations, regimes, and boundaries. i have a multidisciplinary background in theater, art, and dance. All of these things are things that I have at some moment been much more invested in their “pure” form. i definitely studied theater, studied dance, and for years i was invested in learning as much art history, color theory, etc. as i could. i feel like it’s cool to invest in things and then be able to not hold that preciousness and allow these art forms to integrate into my experience and my body.
Essence: Yeah, because preciousness is precarious, right? And I don’t believe in, the notion that one does one thing for the entirety of their existence. You hit so many things I want to follow-up with so I’m going to work a little bit backward. You mentioned the troubling of spectatorship, macro, and micro-engagement, disentangling of borders and boundaries within disciplines and rupturing the seams that form them. Like the stitches in a pillow, you show us the binding that holds this discrete structure together, and then you rip it up and leaving us, including yourself, with the mess of what it means to create a kind of comfort in this disarray. And I’m so interested in how we think about going to something that’s being marketed as a performance, as spectators, and you being in their actively dispelling that.
I would love for you to talk to me more about that idea of troubled spectatorship, wherein the audience members and the institution are both implicated.
keyon: Well, first of all, everything is site-specific. i feel like it’s more of a thing in dance and theater where the stage is seen as this somehow universal or neutral space that you can take these things that you’ve made in a box somewhere else and just plant them and it just magically works with her. i don’t believe that because of all the things around space and place… what else was this building used for? Whose things inform what’s happening.
With making this abstract, experimental sort of work i can’t wholly know or predict what every person coming is bringing, and i’m not giving (via a curatorial or artist statement) a specific narrative for folks to follow so i know that everyone’s subjective experience is totally influencing whatever “it” is. This goes to the thing with spectatorship for me. It reminds me of something that i’ve been thinking about lately, which is objectivity is not real. As a theory or concept, i get it, and perhaps there are non-human being/s that are objective. i don’t think it’s humans. Everything we receive comes from the subjective and we can’t think beyond our own existence. So that layer of how i know that everybody’s coming with their subjective thing and everybody’s going to read what they read into it, especially because this is kind of abstract, experimental thing. Even if i am working in specific concepts, i’m not necessarily interested in folks needing to take note of those things. Which is why I don’t give a lot of language before my performances because i think that the experience that we have in that room, which is based on all of our subjective experiences, is what is informing the work as well. And though i understand that as the artist who’s invited people here, it’s my role to initiate, instigate, engage and provide an offering, and that offering can look as many different ways as there are different people, plus the multitude of ways as to do what we will with that material after we leave that room.
And that to me is the juice or the meat of it. That possibility, the potential that this thing that we’re engaging within this room right now can snowball or turn into or amalgamate or slip and leak into something else through our engagement with it, through having been in that room and now talking about it. Or sleeping on it and having some sort of dream that arises from that. Or having that experience inform how you tell your little cousin something three years down the road. That’s really the potential of anything that we’re doing.
Essence: Yes! It really feels like you’re remarking on the world. Being in the room with you, you, Keyon, are the initiator, but we in attendance are also the initiator for even coming to the performance in the first place. There’s a level of autonomy happening because you came.
keyon: Right! Exactly. Also, there’s this thing of responsibility. As though, “i’m responsible for you and what you receive now because you made a decision to come here tonight?” Whether you spent money or not, you made the decision to be here as well, and i am here offering something, whether you read it as an offering or not.
To get back to spectatorship and experimental abstract work, …this isn’t entertainment.
Essence: You will not be sitting here passively with your popcorn.
keyon: Exactly.
Essence: Try to have that popcorn, it’s going to get snatched out of someone’s hands!
keyon: Exactly. And now i will be having some, and we can talk about what it means for me to take your popcorn. i’m so here for those things coming up. i also love when something that happens that i didn’t expect. i work in improv, i set up structures—the score of that piece from The Hammer you’re talking about is actually the title of the piece. At that time it was called “this is a performance.” Now it’s called “this is an artwork/this is for you/you are a community/you are my material/ this is a prison leave/leave when you want.” That’s the only text that i give for the work. That poem is the score that i’m working from. i used that poem to come up with physical ways to engage those things. i’m starting with a specific thing, and it shows up with me moving bodies around and emphasizing other bodies. i’m highlighting the prison of the institution, the prison of us being here, the prison we trap ourselves in, and with each other.
i don’t like to talk about stuff too much because i feel like saying “this is a prison” to me leaves it open enough without trying to make these direct correlations between our institutions and the prison industrial complex, which feels absurd in some ways to make. i’m not saying that’s what’s happening here in the art industrial complex, but i am saying that having that word in your head and being in this space together thinking through or feeling that that can do something, can open us up to how we think about the space we’re in.
Essence: I think it’s interesting to think about the use of not only a poem as a score, or as a type of corporal reality which is so brilliant, but also the way of language. I’m thinking of Kristina Sharpe’s book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and the many ways of “wake” in thinking on and of black ontology– the space between and collapsed into a word.
I notice with your titles you have that forward slash spacing between groups of words (this is for you. / you are a community. / this is my performance. / you are my material. / this is a prison. / leave when you want.), and I’m thinking about that break, and the space in between language and the multiple meanings of a word like “prison”– to be in jail, to be imprisoned in your mind, a type of physicality. It’s a multitude of beings, and while we assume language to be particular and universal within many contexts, it’s actually your own assumptions that guide that assumption.
keyon: Thank you! That’s your own assumption. i’m talking about a de-centering of objectivity or objectivity as an impossibility. We need to deal with the fact that we’re coming to this world through our subjective experience. The more we can say, “okay, maybe i’m seeing it this way,” and acknowledge that we are seeing it one way and that it may not be the way it is, then we are more available to engage with one another across boundaries.
Essence: Even our colonizer language.
Keyon: Yep.
Essence: Or black folks constantly signifying and re-mapping language–from “kink” to “funk,” to “nasty”—meaning is remade.
keyon: Ha that part too! i mean i’m black and i love it. i like a lot of theorizing, black theory, and the critical race theory that’s happening now. i love that so much theory or the things that have come to me through theory are talking about the expansive nature of blackness. i just read Dawn Lundy Martin’s “A Black Poetics: Against Mastry,” and it was a trip. What i took from it was the correlation between blackness and the impossible, blackness to nothingness, and equating that to creativity. Mastery is to be bored. To know something so completely is to be bored. Creativity always comes out of a place of not knowing anything, and I don’t think that means being unfamiliar or wholly ignorant of it.
Essence: Right, but it does mean being uncomfortable.
keyon: Without a doubt. It means not knowing what the outcome is going to be. For my work, i may come in with a certain score but it’s important for me not to know who is going to be there. i have specifics that I’m working for, but it’s super important that i, as the person who has invited us here, do not know how this thing is going to turn out. That thing in my work you pointed to “is it this or is it that?” i don’t even know what it totally is. i often feel like i’m pulling from all of my experience, a lot of times from all of our experience–including the experience of the room–in ways that i couldn’t have known.
Once i was performing in a theater that used to be a horse stable, and i swear to God so much horse shit came up that night. It was the piece “it’s not a thing” that i’ve been doing forever, but i always adapt to specific spaces. It’s one of the pieces that i tap dance in, and i had this other collaboration with Sidony O’Neal called “Dead Thoroughbred,” so there was all this wild corollary coming up. Between horses and blackness, being sold, tamed, and broken, these sorts of things came up in the work that night. It wasn’t just me holding that either—i talked to other people after that didn’t know the history of the space, that had experienced things around horse-ness. i think that the room influenced that, and when i do that piece in other countries, there’s a part in that piece at the beginning where i talk to the audience and hire a translator in front of everybody. i bring $10 with me, and i’m like, “who’s willing to translate for me for $10?” The translator tends to have so much influence as well—these ways in which to work also escape me— to be able to throw all these things out, but also wrangle it all as well.
My friend visual/sound artist Adee Roberson talks about me being the trickster or the fool, and i identify with those roles. We think of the fool as cunning, and i think that coming at things from the side, you can get at something without holding the full responsibility of it. You’re like, “Oop, yep i said that” and now what happens, now where does that go? There’s something to that archetype that resonates with me.
Essence: Absolutely. The Fool is also the first card in the Tarot deck and has this primary social presence. I think of The Fool as the person who can talk trash to the King and remain in grace. And then the trickster through black folklore with this crafty genius level of intelligence—to be able to live, survive, and even thrive in a world where you’re abject. To survive by virtue of not being seen and holding up various mirrors, offering a reflection for someone else, society, or for a room. But then here you are gesturing, dancing, and performing beyond it, behind it, remaining just out of reach. One can try to pin you and your work down but you’re going to be wrong, and when you find yourself being wrong, you’re going to find yourself being seen and seeing your own reflection in that dance of mirrors.
keyon: Something else about The Fool is that it’s also someone who positioned as such, but makes the best of that position. i think about this so much about being “burdened” and overdetermined when it comes to black folks, queer folks, but primarily with black people, especially in America. Like, “oh, okay, if you want me down there then i’m going to not only make the most of that space, but i supersede what you even thought that was possible.”
Essence: And I’m unpinnable. Try as you may, you always fail.
You mentioned the exhibition I curated “black is a color” and your performance for the closing, which was beyond anything I could’ve ever hoped for. We had toured the gallery the day before, (the gallery had the main floor with artworks arranged on the walls with three smaller installations by artist Adee Roberson, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, and Texas Isaiah and a smaller, room behind it with a single installation by Azikiwe Mohammed. Upstairs were the administrative office and downstairs, in the basement, was another show (Alexander Rebe, Wax Chromatic) and you touched a few things and scanned the room asking if some areas like the stairwell or the desk were sturdy and that was that. I had no idea what you were going to do…only that I had faith in your artwork. Then the night of the performance hits and we’re all here and it’s happening and I’m like, “Oh, keyon is about to climb down the rail of this 15 or 17-foot high staircase,” and after that, it was just on. One of the first things that resonated for me was how blackness appeared in these disembodied forms—there was the cast iron skillet you were wielding, the black sweats you were wearing, and your black high heels—the way that blackness appears as a color.
keyon: And that’s that piece too. It’s also a rumination on the color black. So when you invited me to “black is a color,” i was like, “i have the perfect piece!”
Essence: I would love for you to talk specifically about it in the context of the Charlie James Gallery, but also, how has it formed at other locations?
keyon: That piece is called It’s not a thing. i should say that the piece develops through performance—i do a lot of performing of a thing; i think about a thing, i start with a concept or idea or something, etc. So it actually started with doing things that i didn’t want to do in performance or things that i have contention within performance.
Essence: Like what?
keyon: Like drag, dancing to music, using race as a specific material for making, using personal trauma or experience as material for making. These are all things that i have contention with, not to say that they’re tools that i don’t use, but they are things that i have contention with, primarily in contemporary art and performance. There’s a whole list of things that come out of the opening monologue…
Working with race as a material was one of the things i didn’t want to do that i started to trip out on and landed me with blackness— thinking about blackness, thinking about this thing of using personal material, lived experience, which i think we all do always. That’s the thing about subjectivity– everybody is making identity work. Damien Hirst is making very white male informed work, you know what i’m saying? This is the thing: we’re all making from our subjective lived experience, so my contention with it isn’t necessarily that i don’t want to be it, but that i don’t want to be pigeonholed.
Essence: In recognition of what tends to happen to black folks making work, when you say (or don’t say) anything about black people or being black, you’ll only be put into conversation with blackness as a ceiling, a limit, an unfixed homogeneous experience.
keyon: Exactly. And so yeah, i was on this trip on and about blackness. i started thinking about what we do culturally with the color black—black magic, black snow, black space, black holes, etc. i like minimal things, minimal aesthetics. i prefer to walk into the room with just my body and in it’s not a thing, it’s the literal hammer i walk in with. If i use objects, they all need to hold weight and have multiple layers of access. So the cast iron, for instance, is, to me, a literal black hole if you look at it. But i also think of it as a feminist weapon. i think about my grandmother threatening folks with hot grease out of the cast iron, or it being the first weapon she’d pick up if somebody came into the house.
i also think about movement a lot in that piece and the way that the movement affects my body and takes my body out of control. When i start with the cast iron skillet way up above my head and then swinging this thing down i’m at once handling it but it is simultaneously handling me. That’s just to say that all the objects i bring in need to have multiple layers of access and have a life or experience that can be witnessed– that i could just walk in and put the cast iron down and be like, let’s consider this skillet. We could go hard on it, there could be a lot to come out of that, you know?
Essence: Especially a cast iron for some reason, right? It feels like slavery and present life…it’s past/present and it has this multiplicity of use-value. When you were talking about your body being led by it as you also were leading it, I was thinking of earlier in our conversation when you spoke about moving chairs around the older white couple and the sense of discomfort that’s built in a room around brash movement.
When you hit the window at Charlie James Gallery with the cast iron, I assumed it wasn’t going to break. But, after I thought about it, I questioned myself about the security of your actions, like “why do I think keyon thinks this won’t break?”
keyon: i love messing with that relationship. We immediately give trust and respect to spaces by virtue of their existence, without asking why. Years ago i used to talk about the rules of engagement in art. What are these rules that we’re all agreeing to? But especially when we’re coming from a radical, queer, black perspective, and we know that we don’t trust this shit, so why don’t we challenge these rules? Why do we not challenge that when we come into a theater, we sit down and allow for whatever the person onstage is going to do? And trust that we won’t be harmed?
Why? Because the institution told you that you should? Because we assumed that this person wouldn’t do anything? So that role in challenging and questioning those norms (did i know the window would not break?) with people trusting me, without challenging what i was doing, since no one grabbed the skillet out of my hand. i’m always interested in troubling and challenging.
Essence: So much of your practice, what i’ve experienced at least, is about what you get out of the tension between bodies and space? And even in your biography or curatorial statement, or lack of them, the tension produced in a limited space, the possibility of productivity. i just love how much you mess with our senses, sensibility, and space that you offer via discomfort. How it’s a real opportunity for engagement.
i wanted to ask what, for you, is the purpose of an exhibition title, artist biography, or artist’s statement? i’ve been thinking about an earlier conversation we had where you described using a black box in lieu of an artist statement when responding to a galleries request.
keyon: My sister recently told me that she’s been coming into her own more, speaking up rather than staying quiet. She’s seen my work, and she knows me (I am a contrarian, I have no problem saying, “nope”) and she’s like, “it does feel good and empowering to use my voice and not to be so hurt when people are offended.” But she did ask me, “how do you do it? How do you keep holding that space?” I know it feels hard for her (and other folks especially black womxn) to make the room uncomfortable because it is truly uncomfortable feeling. It’s hard for people to disagree. But I’m not into group think. I was the president of my college Student Government Association and went in on them on my second week, and let them know, “people need to think for themselves and we’re not here to collectively agree with one another.”
Essence: This is what democracy looks like.
keyon: Yeah. And i do think that more voices, multiple voices taking the time to consider, to sit with things, and be uncomfortable actually reap a more holistic space. But i realize that part of my training and part of how i am is that i can hold that space…i can be the person who makes it difficult and uncomfortable, and i can sit in that and with that, and it doesn’t throw me. i think it’s generative, and i don’t think it gets offered enough. i do feel like since i can, and since i have the inclination to, i do. And again, i’m a contrarian, i am not one who’s here for someone saying, “this is the way it is because i said so.”
Essence: So the way that you use your artist bio or if you are curating your curatorial statement is a way of pushing back?
keyon: Exactly, they’re ways of challenging and pushing back at that thing. When i first did the bio thing i got so many artists being like, “Oh shit, that’s dope!” or “i wish i could do that” or “How do you do that?” For me, that felt super affirming that people needed that. People need to know that we don’t have to take the shit that they give us on their terms. For example, in institutions’ bio samples, they tell you flat out how they want you to present yourself, and there are no bones about it. People rarely question it? That’s wild.
This new piece is a self-portrait, but the title is the color lavender. Literally, i want it to be a block or swatch of the color lavender, or the title of the pieces is a swatch of lavender. Everybody gets a book when they come in the room with a little bit of lavender painted on the cover, and this is the title. It’s been difficult to make that happen with institutions, who say, “well we use words,” but in the age that we’re in, do you really? And even if someone has to put “a swatch of lavender” in brackets my having to fight with institutions about that, i feel like, is doing some work. Why are titles necessarily that way?
Institutions also ask, “well how are we going to get people here?” Those are rules you’ve made imagining how and why people attend shows. People come to things for a lot of different reasons. There are so many ways to get people to a thing. i’m not super invested in capitalism, i’m not invested in your organization making whatever amount of money tonight. i’m going to get paid the same amount, which sometimes that’s nothing or sometimes that’s the amount that you’ve agreed to pay me, which you already wrote that grant to get, baby. i don’t necessarily care if this house is packed right now. But I’m very invested in what’s happening in the room. i care about who comes to the room that night.
Essence: There are people who see a strip of the color lavender in the space of the exhibition title and say, “I want to go to this.”
keyon: Exactly. The black box thing, i’ve had several people who were not in the arts—a couple from Switzerland, quite a few people from Berlin and New York—who came up to me after that and said, “I didn’t know you, I didn’t know your work, but when I saw a program description that was a black box and no words, I knew I had to come to this.” And that’s what i’m talking about.
Essence: Right, who do you get? Who do you engage with? And how do you also respect your audience? To think that people might have some inkling of desire outside of the words you’ve written down. I think so much of what you’re talking about goes back to the idea that you will not get better or different things if you keep accepting what you’ve been given and imagining it as permanent.
keyon: Exactly. You helped me a little moment ago with a piece that i’ve been working on. It started with Alf actually, the show about the alien, and then it was about Alf and Jesus.
Essence: I always thought Alf was black.
keyon: i have a whole thing around Alf being black. They kept Alf in this backhouse where he would not come out if anyone else was over and while he wasn’t helping out necessarily he was around for the family’s morale. He was like this pet that was brown and an immigrant. i was thinking about it as these figures that actually do provide a lot, but that are also subjugated, oppressed and objectified. i think that’s why Jesus as a historical figure came up for me. Jesus was a savior of people and murdered for such beliefs, and then what we do posthumously, right? It’s crazy. Anyways this conversation is helping me gig through that more.
But getting back to what i was saying, i’m thinking about something Fred said in reference to Fannie Lou Hamer, which was that her practice was her statement and the statement is “refuse that which has been refused to you.” i think of this a lot when doing my bio.
i haven’t always had access to this world, being in my body, being how i am and not into professionalism. It has everything to do with being a radical punk, anti-professional, anti-capitalist and these sorts of things. So i’ve been refused this level of access the whole time, and now you want to access me. So no, you can get it how i decide to give it to you, but you can’t get it like you want it. Now what? You’re gonna have to take it as is or you won’t get it.
But i’m also not invested in my success, and this is also a big part of my practice that i feel like i have to hold onto. Look, i can die poor and nobody can know my work. i like living, i like my friends, i like eating, i am a very resourceful person, and I’ll be fine. i don’t need your institution to validate me.
Essence: Absolutely. People say that they don’t care, but the reality is that 90% percent of us do care, and I’ll put myself in there. I have to remind myself that if I want to do something quite outside institutional norms, then I will likely not be able to garner success economically in relation to an institution.
I think that we’re in a moment where the term radical, as in someone existence or in an image they take or the superfluous language they use to describe themselves/practice is in a particular type of vogue. However, there are no guarantees that one’s mere existence as black or queer person is somehow a project towards or of liberation. I’m much more interested in what is practiced, challenged and active in our existence. Not in Fannie Lou Hammer as a mere symbol but in her actual radical practice. I think the desired recklessness in your work, the way you engage with what it looks like to “not care” is such a profound move towards disinvestment.
It’s risky and uncomfortable, but still, the risk is necessary, and it’s actually something one can do. And the punishments vary for deciding to not belong or to pretend to belong, or to desire to belong, but there is a type of worth in it. It’s encouraging to my spirit to really ask, what does success look like?
keyon: i’m glad you asked the question because i’ve been grappling with the art world’s investment in failure which makes me wrestle with what we mean when we talk about success. If this idea of “failure” exists in a binary relationship with success, then this means that there are measures of success, which I don’t know if I really believe. i think this is the thing about making work and performance, that every time i make work, it’s not going to be something that everybody wants.
Essence: But is that then successful?
keyon: Is it or is it not? i don’t know. Or is it just what happened? And do we have to assign measures of value to things? i don’t judge this thing—this thing happened. That’s all I know, that it happened, and i feel all sorts of ways about it all of the time—whether it was well-attended or made money or black people were there or not. We can talk about things i desire out of a performance, and i don’t even know what that entirely is. i am about what happened and what is happening right now.
Essence: Presence.
keyon: What is supposed to be happening and what needed to happen right now. So i would never say it was a success or failure because it happened. It is what it was and i don’t need to judge it.
Essence: They do feel like moral qualifiers —one imagines their life trajectory bending towards justness and non-inherent values like economic wealth and capitalistic acceptance. If it’s not doing that, then we can lean on the hope of success a failure contingent upon the eventual success of the thing. What then does it look like to take up the task of living without a qualifier?
keyon: Because if it, one’s life, one’s work, is being measured on a scale of success or justness, then i’m so hopeless. This is also a big part of what i’m doing, i don’t have hope—i don’t think “success” is ever possible. The world we live in is so violent and heinous all of the time in everything that we do and have is born of it. We are sitting here with our phones and Apple computers to make this conversation happen, which i love and i’m so joyful about that, but it’s contingent upon various forms of abusive labor practices, including children in central Africa. How can that be a success?
And if you’re performing anywhere in the United States, guess what? You can never have a successful event because it’s happening in relation to Indigenous Americans genocide and displacement. Whether we acknowledge it or not in our daily lives, and i know it’s impossible to do that every moment of every day), but it is there. It just is.
We get these boxed in ways of looking at the world based on our society, and we make up ideas of success based on a limited version of what’s happening, and that’s just false to me and it feels foolish to do so. If i was judging on those scales, then i would have to talk about all of the ways that there’s no way the work could succeed because of all of the ways that it’s failed, outside of my control.
Photo by Iris Alonzo
