Intercessioner

Hardly a career … much of my thirty-one years of writing as a floating against the foment of structures [1] was set in place at once to obfuscate personal presences, twist imaginaries, and reduce the marginalized to the past rubble of simple forms. The curve of the long game of how white supremacy in Canada and its cultural sphere has been part conduit and part buffer has led to a certain transcendence in my career, and been one of seeking a certain tenderness while at once playing the short game of constant vigilance against the white firmament. The strides have been long and the material gains sparse. Yet, within this constant tunnel of personal enlightenments, a constant chiaroscuro inside of immaterial abodes [2]—hardly a career—but certainly an archive has been elaborated: an archive of my words.

In 1994, I wrote my first official article as an art critic—an interview with Grammy award-winning hip hop group Digable Planets, and, in the early spirit of a ramping up against such foments as cited above [3], I proposed the notion of complex social identity, hence making our presences less essentialist, more solidified, thereby exploring complexity in any kind of rendering of identity. Thirty-one years after that article, my overarching purpose remains: soliciting, seeking out, and examining the larger horizon of (complex) identities that emerge like wildfire in a valley of normative airs. This first interview having been a necessary flame, which I needed to spark a “career” of words, we will return to it in a future post. Here, what I wish to evince is where I have gone, how I have sought to hover above the bastards, so to speak, and, in so doing, turned to something “more than human” in my interests. A crafty child of a deep Roman Catholic upbringing, playing with the “signs taken to wonder” [4] of that religion, it might have been evident that ceremony, gesture (mark-making) in the visual arts, and seeking out the new gesture-making/new social-gesture-making in the performing arts—the elaboration of “interior landscapes” [5]—were all interests pursued in my thirty-one year trajectory of looking into the (primordial) scaffoldings beneath the multiplicity of complex identities that reigns supreme in the era of globality and globalization.

One of my latest “art essay,” being a kind of long-sought-after apotheosis (on my part) of thinking/writing, that could rise above the veil of necessarily constituted identities and take the work of an über-gifted white Québécois woman artist—a set of canvases that implode with dialogues around gender and “identity” in a “visual-social” commentary—examines her interior palettes/landscapes with aplomb. My writing on Catherine Morin and her quixotic world forms the culmination of a thirty-one-year search to broach simple notions of identity, expunged, imploded and set on fire, and giving way to seeing the scaffolding that constitutes the human, and the residues of the nonhuman, embedded in us. Morin—a fellow traveller along the inner rims, moving between the intermittent flashing lights of what I name “sub-violence.”

For along that journey of thirty-one years of editors and institutions using every means of anti-black exclusion, it has not so much been a frontal assault but rather one of a certain sub-violence—the silent, or not always so silent violence, its structure and sub-structure.

Morin’s figures intimate the nightmare, pleasantly ingested, of living between the human and something not quite monstrous (non-human), the figures appearing rather as elfin full lives basking in living within an in-between: “small heads on outsized, awkward” yet “human” bodies, paw-like anthropomorphic hands with sharpened claws, legs ridden with crayola-sclerosis.” Morin evokes, for me, that mid-region of allegory and quasi-symbolism/carnivalesque, which has come to be my ultimate go-to in terms of what has pulled me in over the last thirty-one years: be it a James Ensor, or my own infusion in the universe of Carnival societies (Brazil, Trinidad, recently Haiti), and my obsession with “cosmological” primordial underpinnings [6] and the sacred.

Besides the “anthropoid ghoul,” like in Paul Bril’s Fauns in a Wooded Landscape (after 1620), I wrote about a penetrating stare of preternatural figures and whether, in this latest instalment of my writing/research, it has always been the figure returning the stare in which I have been interested. Whether in the foundational Handsworth Songs by the Black Audio Film Collective, with its five-second freeze-frame of a Caribbean activist defiantly confronting the police during a riot, in the returned gazes of Rashid Johnson’s Anxious Audience depictions, or in Beckett’s The Lost Ones (1970), where a light appears at the end of the tunnel leading to Fanon’s defiant “wretched,” these moments of resistance and liminality remain central to my concerns.

This latest essay, then, is another installment in this ongoing engagement—one that, as with much of my writing (and my life trajectory), turns toward what I describe in Morin’s figures as “in-between heaven beings” or “in-between types betwixt the human and non-human.” And “below her oeuvre are characters/creatures living between the solitary and promiscuous—emissaries—of what we are not so sure.” [7]

My continuing interest in this incongruity/congruity in being, my continuing interest in the optical unconscious of the social and of its associated cultural objects, and my writing on Morin’s dramatic personae all point to their “substrate level, they are tacit presences of what feel like heathen beings”—heathen in the sense of the complex strata they inhabit, below the layers of a violence they intimate. If hardly a career “has occurred” for long stretches over the course of the Dominion of Canada, this artist whom I write about evinces a momentous challenge to a simplified version of the “great white north.” The “white senior citizen, winter Floridian or ‘snowbird,’ whose skin bends effervescently golden leathery ‘under the sun’ down South,” the “travelers in her realm” looking toward “some” unseen horizon—the numinous virtuosity of all of her figures is grounded in whatever they are “doing and feeling—poised.” Such subjects form an apotheosis to a “career” spent writing about the undercurrent.

In many ways, these protagonists align with my interest in an “agency” that I have had all along those thirty-one years—in alterity, in the marginalized, in the neurodiverse, in difference and, ultimately, as a name in this latest essay—an interest, all along, in what I refer to as intercessioners, poised, looking back at the voyeuristic gaze with the dead-on stare and even deepening that visual engagement in “contestation” by imaginative trespassers, soothsayers, all engaging with, around, and/or beyond “a static and potential violence.” [8] I recognize the always same yet not same of violence and its subsets beyond its merely static articulation; my essay on Morin consolidates a career-long and still very present interest of mine in moving beyond the “rage for ideals” [9]—“intercessioners as those who abandon engagement (in its obvious tones), intercessioners as those ‘stuck’ comfortably in the in-between, intercessioners as the numinous beings of the in-between”—my consolidated interest in figures depicted as “protagonists silently intimating the chassis underneath violence.” [10]

In this tense moment of greater disappointments, vis-à-vis promises, for institutional change in the post-BLM-march era, we as BIPOC, neurodiverse secessioners of the present, many of us OGs of the cultural scene hope for a certain divination (culled via our contestatory agency). After thirty-one years of a virulent anti-black hatred as a literary writer and art critic, by many of the institutions operated by the majority populations [11], as it also is in our own daily fight, that we add the well-wishing of the diviner. This latest of my essays in the line of my writing trajectory, of which I can comfortably say I am proud and into which, as into others, I dive not just logically but also via a certain corporeality—and to which I refer in opening my eponymous writer file at Artexte—it is in this first instalment that I refer to what I have most recently learned in my writing: learning and well-wishing—to someday come close to “the diviner’s stare being not direct, oblique, askew in the sense of not looking directly into but rather being that of a looking into an oblique form that mediates that initial stare and then turns it into something else.” [12] These glorious thirty-one years of writing have led me to this “something else”!