Rerendering Freedom

Reflecting on Luke Williams’ words — speculations and observations of the artist Michael Richards’ sculpture installation titled Tar and Feather — this is what comes up for me. What if we re-member we are already free?

We are all ready to live freely.

They say people who are incarcerated find god in that cell. “If god is a prisoner, what kind of prisoner are they?” someone said to me.

To me that question says, “If we are free beings, what kind of freedom are we?”

Who has the power to put god in a cell? Who has the power to grant our freedom? Both questions yield the same answer.

Abstract:

The artwork of sculptor, draftsperson, and installation artist Michael Richards (1963 – 2001) challenges prevalent assumptions about the physical properties, and therefore the aesthetic application, of suspension in Black cultural production. As an African American of Jamaican and Costa Rican descent, Richards grappled with questions of citizenship, racism, and freedom, frequently using motifs of flight and gravity. Although Richards created his work before his untimely death in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, his piece titled Tar and Feather nevertheless anticipates the possibilities, and important limitations, of suspension as a theoretical framework. When placed in conversation with the theoretical discourse that now exists surrounding suspension, Richards's material sculptures and archival sketches posthumously anticipate the limits of conventional strategies for Black possibility. This paper argues that Tar and Feather illustrates the asymptotic imbrication of blackness and freedom, which renders the plot as both a diagram of forces and an abstract aesthetic geography from which to create.

Quotes that I resonated with:

Inversely proportional, the higher the bucket of tar rises, the more impossible its escape becomes, making freedom practically and theoretically impossible for Black people to reach. This suspended aesthetic relationship between blackness and freedom decouples the assumption that freedom naturally leads to, or springs from, social elevation. Tar and Feather guides viewers by mechanically demonstrating the gravity of blackness held in place by invisible limits, visualizing blackness and freedom in an asymptotic relationship. Plotting the outer limits of the asymptotic trap articulated in Tar and Feather, I read the work as questioning the very gravitational forces of up and down, flight and falling, rising to freedom and plummeting toward failure.

A close reading through the free body diagram, a system of annotating force vectors in physics, fundamentally sets in motion a means of speculating what it means to be free.

Although the wings are symbols of flight, Richards has described flight “both as freedom and surrender.” Held between the story of the flying Africans who, legend says, could fly out of enslavement and back home to Africa and stories of the enslaved who threw themselves overboard rather than enter forced bondage, African American flight oscillates between freedom and surrender—as it does at the conclusion of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, with Milkman Dead's ambiguous suicide-as-deliverance, when she writes, “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” Yet, the wings in Tar and Feather don't hover weightlessly; instead, they dangle from the pulley system, anchored to a bucket of tar.

To think about diagramming, I turn to Lauren McLeod Cramer's practice of “diagramming blackness” through icons of catastrophe, whereby visualizing the latently racialized architectures realizes the means of suspending bodies through natural properties. The diagram is helpful precisely because it disaggregates between, as she writes, “the visual effect of suspension (hovering and lightness) and the process that creates suspension (force and pressure).” Equilibrium, consequently, shifts from indicating a state of ease to a state of balanced tension. Suspension is one such example of a form of equilibrium: the object appears weightless not because force is absent but because the present force is equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.

Thus, for Richards, suspension is neither exclusively grounding nor elevating, but it rather expresses a condition of deep ambivalence that keeps blackness fixed in place. He often depicted his subject as stuck: in tar, as is the case for Are You Down?, or in place, as suggested by the Escape Plan series and the life-size casts.

Drawing upon Newtonian physics rather than from architectural theory, the free body diagram emphasizes the imbalance of forces that govern the body's ability to move. If the free body diagram depicts a net vector of scalar force, then the object is in motion, perhaps moving with enough velocity to escape a system. When brought into Richards's visual lexicon, escape velocity represents the necessary force to overcome the opposing force that would otherwise keep it in place. The free body is represented neither through the free-floating figure nor the figure who balances competing forces; rather, the free body is the one with enough force to destabilize and thus overcome the balance of a system. The necessary forces might be thought of as the force that percolates the “catastrophic chaos,” disbursing blackness and despatializing the categorical philosophies of antiblackness. The question then is what force (and in what amount) is required to destabilize, disturb, or otherwise disrupt, even for a moment, the architecture of forces that hold blackness in place.

The more weight given to freedom, the more impossible blackness becomes.

“Freedom,” Hartman argues, is “the site of the re-elaboration of that condition [of the slave], rather than its transformation.” Tar and Featherrepresents the limits of emancipation not as a fixed point but as a curve yielding flexibility and, therefore, precluding an easy rupture. The re-elaboration of the condition of the slave occurs again and again along the asymptote to ultimately trace what can be thought of as freedom's limit.

Asymptotes are plotted as lines on a graph that define the outer limits of the curve—the domain beyond suspension. As is sometimes said, evil often carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the asymptote provides the seeds of destruction in the form of the plot. Following Sylvia Wynter, the plot and plotting define a zone of orientation as well as the fugitive activities conjured up in response to oppression and control. While it is a space deeply imbricated within the history and logic of the plantation, the plot was also a zone of self-sustenance and creative production. In turn, “plantation logic,” as Katherine McKittrick defines it, is a “time-space” that links the plantation to contemporary geographies and blackness alongside freedom. It is the logic of this time-space that Richards captures in Tar and Feather: the poetic rendering of freedom's dependence on blackness, and the deceptive impossibility generated via their joint suspension. Yet, Tar and Feather shows also the negative space above the bucket of tar and beyond to the spatial plot. And it is in this negative space that other possibilities are being charted. Plotting, as J. T. Roane conceives of it, registers the insurgent collection of survival strategies that “create a distinctive and often furtive social architecture rivaling, threatening, and challenging the infrastructures of abstraction, commodification, and social control developed by white elites before and after the formal abolition of slavery.”

It is in this place of impossibility where the unthought position of blackness might find reprieve. In the case of Tar and Feather, plotting the asymptote engages the structure's limits, that is, an aesthetic space to reimagine ontologies of blackness beyond the discourse of freedom.

If freedom is not available in our current state of being, what arrangement might actually offer it to blackness? Outside of the trap we might find more fruitful ontologies of blackness to fortify ourselves, if only we can plot our escape.