H...Held in the Possible

Instructor Introduction

Idris Young’s essay, “H...Held in the Possible?” reflects on his visual art practice with such profound depth and such an attention to subtly and nuance that reading his essay truly envelops you in the rich materiality he aims for in his work. Reflection is an important genre for creative research as it allows practitioners to establish the new knowledge emerging from their creative work. But Idris’s writing not only meets the expectations of the reflective mode by using focused inquiry, addressing specific evidence of his practice, and analyzing his work. His essay includes such vivid descriptions and such a strong voice, it has a presence as immediate as a painting while also diving into analytical depths that writing does best. His essay goes beyond reflection; it tackles complex philosophical theories and addresses important artistic precedents, while weaves in moving scenes from his personal life. Throughout the essay, he reveals ideas about race and disability and art and the intersectionality of these subjects from a surprising perspective based on his life and practice. In his words, he is “refusing to present the Black disabled body in traditional ways that fix racial difference” in order to “reimagine what it means to critically engage with art objects, spaces, and the violence of othered bodies.” What Idris discovers in this essay does indeed hold us in a state of imagining what is possible, while inviting us to marvel atwhat he has achieved through the act of translating artistic practice into text.

— Jennifer Metsker

H...Held in the Possible

Growing up in Buffalo, New York, a place known for its winters in which spirals of lake effect snow piled higher than doorways, summers were the exhales of a breath held past capacity. It was in the early days of summer, this brief and tentative absence between inhales and exhales, that my mother and I would travel to Lawrence, Kansas to visit my grandparents.

As a child with a stutter, periods of transition, whether temporal or circumstantial, were met with increased intensity of my stuttering moments. My body underwent a sort of seasonal hardening which started in my lips before spreading to my teeth, jaw, and hands. I remember describing the feeling of stuttering to my mother as having “fists and bone for a mouth”. This ossification did not solely inhabit my mouth but would also seep into the ground and whistle through the pages of my sketchbook. It was an awkward jolting and pulsating that pulled at my collar bone and left me sore. This was the summer when many of my baby teeth were coming loose from the nerve endings and gum lining. The quiet ache of my gums nestled under the soreness of my stutters. Awaiting the severance from the lining, awaiting the reunion with my grandparents, I would twirl and prod the teeth with my tongue.

Upon deboarding the plane, I immediately saw the proud and tall frame of my grandfather from beyond the security gate. My grandfather was a professor. A tidy and observant man who always kept a pen in his front shirt pocket, his Seiko watch ticked with a gentle tautness that caused your body to follow the golden clock hands. He immediately noted the wiggling in my speech, cheerfully recognizing the loose front teeth. It was late and I was tired when we arrived. Mustering all of my remaining excitement, I asked if I could sit with him in the morning.

Every morning he would pray at an altar which was located in the small corner of the house near the back porch. The bedrooms were upstairs and I could hear the creak of the wood steps and the gentle rubbing of his shirt cuff against the railing as he made his way downstairs towards the altar. He would begin prayer with a ring of a metal bell which echoed and fluttered throughout the house, it was simultaneously an invitation and an offering. Hearing the invitation, I would quietly scurry downstairs and sit beside him, mimicking the gentle posture he held with such ease. As he prayed/sung I would hum, fearful that the hardening of my speech would surface. Praying with him was a site of shame as I grew afraid that I could not match his gentle fluency. However it was also a sitting with my ancestors who’s layered and rumbling voices have formed mine.

My grandfather ended prayer with a blow of a conch. I felt the high pitched but deep tone in the back of the head before it began creeping into my eardrums. I envied the way my grandfather seemed to be able to pull sound from the conch with such tenderness, I longed for the smoothness of the conch’s sound and surface. Instead I was forced to sit with a sonic tension that stretched from my mouth into my lymph nodes. My grandfather was careful not to make me feel less than. Instead, he made time for my tentative words and gave me the conch repeatedly. We shared the fragmented fluttering of the lips, the foregrounding of the tongue, the reverberation held within the teeth. I began to understand my voice within rather than in opposition to its undulating currents of in-definition, flux, and delay. Something arises from my grandfather’s care, the belly of the conch, and my embodied hesitation…An embrace, …a moment when anything can exist… When the voice is not made to choose between being heard or spoken.

As an artist, I’ve been trying to make sense of moments such as the one I experienced with my grandfather and the conch. What does it mean to occupy a black body that maneuvers through the world differently? What are the alternate ways of understanding race, disability, and the sonic as a visual schema? Can a new form of stuttering grace and care lie in the rejection of linearity and an embrace of the awkward, opaque, and delayed? My grandfather was incredibly articulate and gently commanded the spaces in which he occupied. He took care to acknowledge that he could never understand the painful difficulty that arose in between my sound being heard and spoken. He also knew that as a South African Indian, he could not stand fully in my shoes as an African American. However, he insisted over and over on lovingly relating to my difference while respecting what Édouard Glissant in his book Poetics of Relation terms opacity. For Glissant, opacity is the right to an unknowability that challenges the supposed transparency of visual frameworks of race, gender and sexuality as transparent (Glissant, 1997). An ethical strategy against colonialism, slavery, and racial subjugation, my grandfather loved and listened across ability and being, not to arrive at a fundamental truth but instead to make space for that which we cannot see but would look straight back at us it could. I cannot understand my body within frameworks of concreteness and finality. Even in moments of ‘fluency’ my body still braces itself for what may or may not…surface.

The earlier stages of discovering alternate ways of understanding blackness and disability as a visual schema took the form of fantastical corporeality and hybridity. African artists such as Wangechi Mutu and Eastern European 19th and 20th century printmakers served as the visual framework for my compositions. Mutu’s pieces such as Le Noble Savage (2006) with its hybrid bird, snake, and mechanical forms influenced me in its departure from conventional depictions of the human. Albin Brunovsky’s delayed and contorted figures with mouths agape, Denis Forkas’s fading and hesitant figures, and Vladimir Gazovic’s suspended and hunched bodies situated in curated settings gave hints into the landscapes the figures endured in order to arrive at a finalized image. Thus we see in these bodies not an aftermath or fledgling but a mid-becoming.

Miracle Of The Black Leg was one of my most successful endeavors into hybridity and the black fantastical. The piece is based on the history of the Roman church and aims to understand the body as a site of interracial amputation/transplantation. According to the MoBL, a Roman church official dreamt that the saints Cosmas and Damian amputated the healthy limb of a “swarthy” and recently deceased “Ethiopian” in order for it to be transplanted onto his own ailing/cancerous body. The church official awoke from the surgery pain-free, amazed to see that he now housed the leg of this black body. The diseased white flesh was then reattached to the black corpse, subtly highlighting white mindsets surrounding black fungibility and the legitimization of enslavement prior to the rise of racialized slavery. Artistic depictions of the Miracle began to appear in the thirteenth century however flourished between the fifteenth and seventeenth century in Italian and Spanish artmaking traditions. Accounts of the MoBL vary. The history highlights the means in which white integrity is constituted through black corporeal loss and the convolutedness/variety in accounts is fascinating in thinking about the instrumentalization of flesh both living/dead, delineations of whiteness and expanded definitions of the “human” itself.

After creating this painting I became increasingly frustrated with my engagement with blackness and disability. The work was hyper-figurative and reduced any discussion of race to a literal black body which perhaps commodified it in process. One of the biggest limitations was external perceptions of these worlds/ hybrid bodies I was creating. Audiences oftentimes misconstrue tension, hybridity, and awkwardness with monstrosity–which reinscribes normalcy and able-bodiedness. While I think it is important to consider and encourage viewers’ different perspectives, I want to be careful that I don’t affirm the violence I aim to refute. Is the audience’s misconstrual of my intentions generative?

The third major hurdle regarding my artistic methodology at this point was one regarding surface. Pieces such as Miracle of the Black Leg were created on bleached white canvas. The choice to use canvas felt less like an active one and more of an expectation within traditional and historically white artmaking practices. White canvas stretched on wood frames and then gessoed even whiter prior to underpainting was extremely intimidating and unsatisfying. I had to enact everything onto the surface. The canvas unconditionally accepted my movements. There was no resistance. The surface I was painting on had no agency. Painting on these physically and culturally white surfaces while being influenced largely by post-war white artists oftentimes made me feel distant from my own making/process.

Through these frustrations of surface and perceived monstrosity, I began to realize that my art practice was not only a visual/representational one but also a way to make objects that have their own corporeal agency. The art object itself can breathe, speak, stutter, and refuse to produce the images we as viewers/consumers may desire for it. Through making, I began to make sense, not only of what it means to have a disability but what it means in relation to racial subjectivity. The complexity of my identity–two black parents from different continents with a South African Indian grandfather whom I resemble meant that as my practice developed I had to think beyond stereotypic representations of blackness in order to depict the ever-becomingness of blackness itself. Simply relying on figuration and reproducing images of black bodies could not be the endpoint of my practice. Instead, I began asking questions about the temporality of blackness. Theorists such as Alison Kafer’s discussion of crip time shows us how linear, progressive time is fictive and how disabled, black bodies experience temporality in different ways. My developing practice foregrounds questions about how to depict black bodies, how does blackness function alongside other racial categories, and what does it mean to articulate oneself using a different vocabulary that centers the stutter within its hesitancy, fluttering, and stoppages?

In order to engage with and provide a framework for understanding these largely abstract notions surrounding embodiment and temporality I wish to propose the importance of the idea of “not-yetness” (a perpetual and non-linear state of transformation marked by tensions, hesitations, and opacity). The concept of not-yetness as I describe/understand it has its origins in affect theory. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg in Inventory of Shimmers argue for the term as a relationality that “has a rhythm, a fold, a timing…[and is] a passage of intensities” (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). In positioning liminality/ temporality in relation to affect theory we may begin to understand its significance when applied to spheres of art/artmaking and my work particularly.

The artist Carrie Yamaoka has been crucial in the development of my thinking and making surrounding not-yetness. It is difficult to categorize Carrie Yamaoka’s work within traditional artistic frameworks. Given my insistence on conceptualizing non-stereotypic and non essentialist blackness, I want to think through comparative global strategies of artistically dealing with experiences of colonialism and racial othering. For nearly thirty years Yamaoka has been creating paintings using reflective polyester film (Silver Mylar) as ground. These paintings arise out of attempts to challenge conventional limitations of the medium. Sometimes she mounts the reflective polyester film onto wood panel, at other times the film is allowed to exist in its own bendable and flopping state. When mounted, air bubbles often form in the space between the Mylar and the wood panels. Yamaoka labels these moments as “surface incidents” which are allowed to exist in their seeming textured disfluencies (School of Visual Arts, 2022). The reflective nature of the polyester film causes the work to embody a form similar to that of a warped and rippling mirror. While one can physically see oneself in many of Yamaoka’s works, the viewer struggles to recognize themselves. The distortion makes the viewer feel as if their body is constantly rearranging itself. The image, as discussed by Jean-Luc Nancy ‘is therefore not a representation: it is an imprint of the intimacy of its passion (of its motion, its agitation, its tension, its passivity)” (Nancy, 2005).

There is an aspect of fiction involved in describing Yamaoka’s work at all. Her work doesn’t necessarily “exist” in the traditional understanding of the word. In describing her work there are few elements that are stationary/concretely present. The lights and darks that emerge within many of her compositions are not imposed on the image physically, but rather are ever-changing reflective products of the space the work is housed in. One of the most helpful tools in understanding the failures of text and image in describing Yamaoka’s work curiously manifests in the artist’s use of the tripod. Yamaoka’s tripod is used to photograph the artwork which I will discuss below. Due to the reflectiveness of her surfaces the tripod is intentionally visible in the work itself and becomes significant in the overall composition. If you were to see this work in person, the tripod which is so crucial in understanding photographic images of the work, would be absent. Thus Yamaoka asks questions about the documentation process of art itself: what constitutes the actual art object, how do photographs lie, how does language fail when confronted with the ever-morphing art object? Can the deceit involved in the documentation process itself be enriching? Lastly, this inclusion of this both imagined and concrete object also speaks on the artist’s refusal of naturalized racial representations and her foregrounding on the interactive, temporally-disruptive qualities of making art that insists on the right to opacity.

In Yamaoka’s piece titled 14.125 by 11.625 (#32), a dark blue shape provides a compositional guide for the eye to follow. It bends towards the right, bobbing up and down slightly near its right point. Upon further investigation of the work the viewer realizes that this form is actually the artist's tripod used to capture the very image we are gazing upon. The reflective nature of the surface causes the work to embody a form similar to that of a warped and rippling mirror. The slightly beige environment the work is housed in, is dragged into the composition itself and spat back out rearranged. More subtle textural moments form near the top edge where raised and sporadic speckles resemble braille. These dots, presumably caused by small air bubbles trapped underneath the surface, seem desperate to pop yet are held mid combustion underneath urethane resin casting. This movement is contrasted by a static indentation on the middle right edge of the piece which looks like the fossilized remnants of an archeological dig. While being static, the mark still engages with the rippling happening beside it. The work is never really complete and is constantly being formed through interaction. Yamaoka herself states, “I want the viewer to lurk in that limbo, that place before an image was arrived at…The viewer is placed at the intersection between a record of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in the fleeting and unstable states of transformation” (School of Visual Arts, 2022).

My Current Work

Works like Halfway to the stars I stopped— turned, spat—it’s too late, baby … , pictured above were inspired by Carrie Yamaoka and her paintings which position themselves within not-yetness. Halfway to the stars I stopped— turned, spat—it’s too late, baby … was created by stretching aluminum blanket material over a past oil painting. The oil painting featured underneath depicts a man with his mouth agape held mid utterance looking towards a light beam. The original painting was bluntly figurative and I felt a need to disrupt the visual transparency and ease in which viewers could gaze upon, digest, and interpret the image. While using my solvent-covered fingers to even out the glue used to adhere the reflective material to the wood surface I began to notice that the continuous rubbing stripped the chrome from specific areas. The first recognizable detail from beneath the surface was an eye. Amidst these frictions and irritations…translations and mistranslations the image morphed from an eye, into a cyclops, into a star, into a face, into a… What would have happened if I continued to break at the surface? Would the painting transform back into its original state or would something else occur along the way? The piece nestles itself in its potential for what it’s yet to be.

Following experimentations with mylar I decided I wanted to engage with not-yetness and surface through more conventional materials and directly representational subjects. Notions of dusk, mirages on ocean horizons (opaque/in definite joint between sky and ground) and vehicles captured in indiscernible motion through their cropping/framing were on my mind leading up to a trip I took to Bath Abbey in England. On the east facing facade of the Abbey, I encountered two narrow and symmetrical rows of stone which frame the structure. Carved limestone angels are depicted mid ascension/descension on Jacob's Ladder (bridge between heaven and hell). The awkwardness of the bodies alongside the indiscernibility of the end of the climb due to my position directly below the figures led me to experiment on how best to depict the not-yetness of the climb and the not-yetness of the fall in which bodies are suspended in an architectural window between action and inaction. The climbing and downward crawling angels captured the liminal space between descension and ascension. This is particularly relevant when considering narratives of enslaved bodies as they navigated between notions of flight (Flying Africans) and falling as a form of being held in the possible, awaiting a different tense of being. Anna Williams is one such example who searched for the possible by jumping/flying out of her slave master’s window in Washington D.C. in 1815. My piece attempts to capture a black fugitivity that oscillates between descent and ascent, falling and flight, postcolony and metropole.

Due to viscosity differences of the paint throughout Angels of Bath (how much linseed oil is in the pigment) the surface shines & reads differently from different orientations. Figures flicker in and out of legibility depending on the viewer's physical relationality to the work. The piece features two angels who climb in opposite directions. The darkness of their bodies intertwines with the darkness of the ladder, blurring the lines between figure and object. More transparent architectural figures, through their symmetrical horizontal positioning, frame the center. Two vertical blue dots are imposed near the midriff of both angels providing a visual suggestion of the delineated passage which the angels are undertaking.

My reflective and opaque works are an active refusal of traditional viewing practices. Through an emphasis on materiality, my practice points towards understanding artworks not as stagnant and fluent objects but rather as textured and ongoing acts of becoming. Refusing to present the Black disabled body in traditional ways that fix racial difference, I attempt to reimagine what it means to critically engage with art objects, spaces, and the violence of othered bodies. My work interrogates temporality itself, stressing alternate corporealities and rhythms.