Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance,” lecture, Museum of Modern Art, September 25, 2015, YouTube video →.
The writing in this essay has been deeply informed and influenced by Anthony Huberman’s Cooper Union IDS lecture “Bang on a Can,” February 8, 2022 →; and, in turn, by the work of Fred Moten. Neither party bears responsibility for any of the many flaws that follow. With sincere thanks to Leslie Hewitt and Omar Berrada for organizing such a rich and inspirational series of convenings over the years.
Underproduction (2024). Overturned pot, 18 × 21 × 16 inches. Slaves outnumbered owners on the plantation. Slaves were an inherent risk to the plantation. Owners banned slaves from meeting with one another. Slaves met anyway. An overturned pot placed at the door of the meeting blocked the sound of the gathering. The overturned pot protected meetings from the slave patrol. The meetings were negations of the plantation logic of production.
Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2003).
Marina Vishmidt, “A Self-Relating Negativity: Where Infrastructure and Critique Meet,” in Broken Relations: Infrastructure, Aesthetics and Critique ed. Martin Beck et al. (Spector Books, 2022), 40.
See Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “How Slavery Inspired Modern Business Management,” Boston Review, August 20, 2018 →.
See Saidiya Hartman, “A Note on Method,” in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2019).
Bass features the performances of Steve McQueen as director, and Marcus Miller, Aston Barrett Jr., Mamadou Kouyaté, and Laura-Simone Martin on the bass.
“On the ground, under it, in the break between deferred advent and premature closure, natality’s differential presence and afterlife’s profligate singularities, social vision, blurred with the enthusiasm of surreal presence and unreal time, anticipates and discomposes the harsh glare of clear-eyed, supposedly impossibly originary correction, where enlightenment and darkness, blindness and insight, invisibility and hypervisibility converge in the open obscurity of a field of study and a line of flight.” Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance.”
See Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” in “On the Archaeologies of Black Memory,” special issue, small axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008).
See Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” in “Black Women’s Labor: Economics, Culture, and Politics,” special issue, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 18, no. 1 (January–March 2016).
Tina Campt, “Introduction: Listening to Images—An Exercise in Counterintuition,” in Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017), 7.
Note the subtle interanimation and syncopation of Pfeiffer’s multiple shadows with Bruce Nauman’s rhythmic, pathological cascade of falls in Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1 (1968) →, a work made in the same year that Nauman assumed blackface in Flesh to White to Black to Flesh (1968) →. See “Paul Pfeiffer on Bruce Nauman,” YouTube video, posted October 9, 2024, by Dia Art Foundation →.
See “Leslie Hewitt,” June 24, 2022–June 4, 2023, Dia Bridgehampton; “Tony Cokes,” June 23, 2023–May 27, 2024, Dia Bridgehampton; “Delcy Morelos: El abrazo,” October 5, 2023–July 20, 2024, Dia Chelsea; “stanley brouwn,” April 15, 2023–2025, Dia Beacon; “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” April 5, 2024–Spring 2025, Dia Beacon; “On Kawara,” long-term view, Dia Beacon; “Senga Nengudi,” long-term view, Dia Beacon.
“Reinhardt reads blackness at sight, as held merely within the play of absence and presence. He is blind to the articulated combination of absence and presence in black that is in his face, as his work, his own production, as well as in the particular form of Taylor. Mad, in a self-imposed absence of (his own) work, Reinhardt gets read a lecture he must never have forgotten, though, alas, he was only to survive so short a time.” Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 190 →.
Renee Gladman, “Untitled (Environments),” e-flux journal, no. 92 (June 2018) →.
Plot (2024). Easement, one acre in Beacon, New York. Black people were prohibited from being buried in cemeteries. These prohibitions were applied to both free and enslaved Black people, in both the North and the South. They were meant to make the degradation of Blackness permanent. Black people were buried in unmarked slave plots and unregistered Black burial grounds. For many Black people these Black mass graves were extensions of Black life. As Sylvia Wynter describes, Black mass graves were a point of connection to the “permanent future” and the “historical life of the group.” As Wynter writes of the provision grounds where slaves grew their own food, the burial plot was also “an area of experience which reinvented and therefore perpetuated an alternative world view, an alternative consciousness to that of the plantation. This world view was marginalized by the plantation but never destroyed. In relation to the plot, the slave lived in a society partly created as an adjunct to the market, partly as an end in itself.” Black people used funerals and burial grounds to plot escape and rebellion. In response, laws banning slave funerals and grave markers were passed throughout the Caribbean and the North American colonies. As former slave John Bates said, masters who prohibited slave funerals would “jes’ bury dem like a cow or a hoss, jes’ dig de hole and roll ’em in it and cover ’em up.” Unmarked Black burials are frequently disinterred during real estate development. This has been the case for numerous burial grounds in New York State and throughout the country. Construction frequently continues despite these “discoveries.” In 1790, the US Census recorded nearly as many slaves in New York State as in Georgia. The land that Dia Art Foundation currently owns in Beacon, New York was owned by slave owners and slave traders from 1683 until the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827. The easement between Dia Art Foundation and Plot Inc. conveys the rights to a one-acre section of the institution’s property to Plot Inc. for the purpose of protecting the graves of enslaved people who may have been buried there. This burial ground easement runs with the land and requires Dia and all future owners to relinquish the rights to use, disturb, or develop this section of the property. The plot will remain unmarked. It will degrade the value of the institution’s property. It challenges the assumed absence of Black burials on sites of enslavement by assuming their presence. See →.
This mooted trio comprises both Plot as contract framed on the wall, Plot as easement sited in degenerative growth on Dia’s grounds, and Estate (2024). Per the artist: “Estate (2024): Dia Art Foundation Real Estate, 1974–2024. Books, $10 each. Schlumberger Limited, established in 1926, is the largest oilfield services company in the world. Descendants of founder Conrad Schlumberger used their shares in the company to create the Dia Art Foundation. Schlumberger Limited was the primary source of funds for the first decade of the institution. During this period, Dia purchased the majority of the fifty-nine real estate properties it has owned during the past fifty years. The properties were purchased for artists, for artworks, for offices, for exhibition spaces, and as rentals. Many of these properties were given away. Many were sold at a high rate of return. A number continue to function as rental properties, which generate over one million dollars of annual income for the institution. Dia does not retain information on the history of these properties prior to the twentieth century.”
“If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperilled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.” Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2007), 7.
See Kathryn Yusoff, “Mine as Paradigm,” e-flux Architecture, June 2021 →.
Gladman, “Untitled (Environments).”
The intricacies of this dimension of Rowland’s practice, and the deeper analytical, political, and artistic implications of them, are substantive and wide-reaching, deserving of a greater level of sustained attention than this register of response can realistically or ethically accommodate. See Eric Golo Stone, “Legal Implications: Cameron Rowland’s Rental Contract,” October, no. 164 (Spring 2018); and Zoé Samudzi, “Rethinking Reparations,” Art in America, Fall 2023.
See also Jack Whitten, Atopolis: For Édouard Glissant (2014). Acrylic on canvas, eight panels, overall 124 ½ × 248 ½ inches →.
Vishmidt, “A Self-Relating Negativity,” 30.
Vishmidt, “A Self-Relating Negativity,” 31–32.
Increase (2024). Bed frame, 46 × 42 × 78 inches. Under slave law, partus sequitur ventrem stipulated that the “child follows the belly.” When slave owners bought Black women, they also purchased the rights to what owners termed “all her future increase.” Saidiya Hartman describes the centrality of this principle to the system of racial slavery: “The work of sex and procreation was the chief motor for reproducing the material, social, and symbolic relations of slavery. The value accrued through reproductive labor was brutally apparent to the enslaved who protested bitterly against being bred like cattle and oxen.” This status was constructed to last forever. What Jennifer Morgan names as “the value of a reproducing labor force” has ordered the continuity of this sexual violence. Domestic work has been a principal vector for its preservation. Live-in workers have been made perpetually available to their employers. Refusals of this availability are criminalized. Christina Sharpe makes clear that “living in/the wake of slavery is living ‘the afterlife of property’ and living the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb), in which the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother. That inheritance of a non/status is everywhere apparent now in the ongoing criminalization of Black women and children.” Non/being constitutes a position whose modalities of life and death are simultaneously structured by and unrecognizable to the capture of ownership. As Hartman writes, “The forms of care, intimacy, and sustenance exploited by racial capitalism, most importantly, are not reducible to or exhausted by it. These labors cannot be assimilated to the template or grid of the black worker, but instead nourish the latent text of the fugitive. They enable those ‘who were never meant to survive’ to sometimes do just that.” This fugitivity is an inherent threat to the value of increase. See →.
Linda Villarosa, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis,” New York Times Magazine, April 11, 2018 →.
Ciarán Finlayson, “Perpetual Slavery,” Parse Journal, 2019 →. Emphasis mine. See also Ciarán Finlayson, Perpetual Slavery (Floating Opera Press, 2023).
Finlayson, “Perpetual Slavery.”
Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness: Mysticism in the Flesh,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 778–79.
See Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010).
Commissary (2024). Scythes 59.5 × 52 × 16 inches. Rental Sharecropping was debt peonage. It was instituted to replace slave labor. It operated in explicit violation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s stated ban on involuntary servitude. Sharecropping contracts were designed to keep Black people bound to the land, which their labor made valuable. Violations of the contract included leaving the plantation without permission; being loud, disorderly, drunk, or disobedient; having an “offensive weapon”; and misusing the tools. Violations were grounds for dismissal, eviction, and forfeiture of the share. In addition to cultivating the land, these contracts could include obligations to do the washing “and all other necessary house work” for the landlord’s family. Sharecroppers were forced to buy food, clothes, tools, and other necessities on credit from the landlord’s general store, also called the commissary. The commissary charged up to 70 percent interest. Debts were deducted from the cropper’s share. The contract and the commissary kept sharecroppers in perpetual debt. W. E. B. Du Bois describes the terms of this labor as “a wage approximating as nearly as possible slavery conditions, in order to restore capital lost in the war.” Many sharecroppers were former slaves. Many sharecroppers were the children of former slaves. Slaves used scythes as tools of rebellion in Henrico County, Virginia, in 1800; in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831; and in Coffeeville, Mississippi, in 1858. In violation of their contracts, croppers armed themselves as well. The tools of perpetual debt were also the tools of Black riot.
See Stefano Harney’s remarks as part of Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Hussein’s panel “Strike MoMA: A Conversation with Sandy Grande, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Jasbir Puar, and Dylan Rodriguez,” beginning at forty-three minutes in the following video, and note in particular his deployment of the term “precinct” at 43:28 →.
See Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton University Press, 2011).
Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Four Theses on Aesthetics,” e-flux journal, no. 120 (September 2021) →.
Rizvana Bradley, “The Difficulty of Black Women (A Response),” Artforum, December 20, 2022 →. See also Rizvana Bradley, “The Black Residuum, or That Which Remains,” chap. 4 in Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023).
Bradley and da Silva, “Four Theses on Aesthetics.”
Gladman, “Untitled (Environments).”
Tavia Nyongo’o, “Habeas Ficta: Fictive Ethnicity, Affecting Representations, and Slaves on Screen,” in Migrating the Black Body, ed. Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez (University of Washington Press, 2017), 288.
We would do well to think of the Palestinian people here, and of the forcible suppression of Arab speech at the US Democratic National Convention in August 2024.
Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance.”
Gladman, “Untitled (Environments).”
My sincere thanks to Solveig, Rhea, Tom, Anthony, Ben, and Aaron for their patience and generous support. Thanks to the artists for the special dispensations in the video piece. Lastly, and most emphatically, my thanks to Emily Markert and the team at Dia Beacon, who spent their weekend hunting down echoes in the galleries.