t wi li g ht cit y (di r ec ted by r eece au g u iste, 1989, b l ack au dio fi lm co llec tive), fr am e g r ab o f sti ll by roti m i fan i k ayo d e. “When one of your hands touches self and the body as object in the to be present in the records, in creative production where absences the other, something peculiar world, and the site where desire the galleries, and in the media. can be generative and loss can happens: You become aware of the to move, and for artists to make, be exposed. The centrality of the Inside and Out: strange ambivalence that makes meets its external constraints. Artists It becomes possible to consider how body, both within the record and your body different from all other and Keith Piper— these artists’ formal decisions of as a record, oscillates between the The Open Hand in things. Your hand is an object in the who along with Eddie Chambers scale, medium, and style worked with body experienced from within and world, but it is also something you and organized content to demand a hypervisible the exterior image of the body. Two experience from within. And the the Blk Art Group in Britain in the presence in order to critique the later works from Donald Rodney and the Work of Donald hand you touch is also both an object 1980s—created images that produced paradoxical conditions of social, Keith Piper, I will argue, articulate and a feeling, sensing part of your a tension with external constraints political, and artistic constraint that the unique position of the fold as embodied self. The touched thing of social and political discrimination was denied expression. As outlined articulated by Merleau-Ponty and Rodney and Keith Piper is also touching.” Daniel Birnbaum that dominated the public sphere, by Jean Fisher in her introduction elaborated by Domieta Torlasco. Both on the exhibition Lygia Clark: The including city streets, neighborhoods, to the Living Archive conference works manage to suspend a moment in Shades of Black, reimagining Abandonment of Art, 1948-19881 art schools, and the art world. The between hypervisiblity and invisibility, production of artwork, exhibitions, presence across temporal distinctions as well as the moment of touching and conferences such as the National has become a critical methodology and being the touched thing. for both artists and art historians Kristin Juarez The outstretched hand is a gesture Black Art Convention in 1982, and later the Living Archive in 1997, to account for the processes of For Donald Rodney and Keith that can be located in the everyday, erasure and loss. This, she argues, Piper, the body becomes a site the ritual, the performance, and the suggest that cultural production was for these artists not only a has resulted in a historiography that for archivization of—as Torlasco sculpture. As a gesture of exchange, is deeply invested in the voices of posits—memory and creation, agency, and arrest in the work of question of visibility in the art artists, diverging memories, and translation and invention.3 By 1997 art, it becomes a site of poetic world, but also about making visible conflicting trajectories.2 For many the two artists, who both began resonance. Evoking Merleau-Ponty, the processes by which images deny depth of black subjectivity, artists that began making work in the as painters, were working across Daniel Birnbaum describes the hand 1980s in Britain, the archive provided artistic mediums that resulted in as the threshold for the embodied allowing only shallow surfaces of blackness, as a signifier of difference, a site for critical examination and multimedia installations. Tracing the

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prevalence of art mediums across by Frida Kahlo’s ability to use her practice. This practice can be seen found, both Rodney and Piper’s the 1980s, Kobena Mercer notes that crippled body as a metaphor for a most vividly in the works of the hands are mediated through a a decade that began with painting broken political system. Piper’s early Black Audio Film Collective, Donald hybrid use of artistic mediums. soon saw the rise of independent paintings have been contextualized Rodney, and Keith Piper. As artists filmmakers working in film and video, by the aesthetic sensibilities of captivated by aesthetics as well There are several effects to be analyzed: how the artists use the as well as photography.4 Coming Robert Rauschenberg. Filmmakers of as the history of form and/as the out of art schools, artists were both the Black Audio Film Collective very political, the way in which content image to produce and record the addressing the formal specificity deliberately engaged in renegotiating is delivered cannot be overlooked. way the experiencing body gives of their selected medium and its the language of filmmaking, including way to being the art object; how history. In 3 Songs of Pain, Light and nonlinear narrative structures, In 1997, Donald Rodney produced the images subvert the paradoxical Time (1995)—a film made with the experimentation with sound, as the photograph In the House Of My position of the black hypervisibility Black Audio Film Collective—Rodney well as color. Photographers such Father and Keith Piper produced and invisibility through the use of the notes that in addition to his personal as Joy Gregory, Ingrid Pollard, Hand and Remains for his interactive fold; the significance of technology relationship with Keith Piper, his and Rotimi Fani-Kayode were as CD-Rom, Relocating the Remains. (art medium) as it mediates a radical artistic radicalization was inspired Mercer states—challenging the Both works feature the artist’s own disorientation of the body schema. norms of documentary realism. outstretched hand in a gesture of Rodney’s use of photography to offering. As an image of resistance, document a sculpture and his body By the 1990s, the boundaries the open hand counters the closed (but also a place and memory), between mediums were no longer fist of black power with a radical and Piper’s digital programming applicable. Prompted in large part openness. For Donald Rodney and that document his artwork and (r i g ht) fi g u r e 1: by collaboration, conversations, Keith Piper, the images of their his body (and also bodies under Donald Rodney, In the House of My Father, and exposure taking place between open hands act as the investigative surveillance and enslaved bodies) 1996-7. Photograph, color, on paper black artists, a fluidity emerges by surfaces at the threshold of interiority illustrate a deliberate mediation in mounted onto aluminum, 1220 x 1530 mm, which media, archive, and historical and exteriority of the body. Utilizing which one artwork is understood Tate Britain, (work © The Estate and contemporaneous art images the skin as the archive where visual through another. Their images, in of Donald Rodney), courtesy of the estate get incorporated into a multi-media and avisual impressions can be which their bodies are both centrally of Donald Rodney.

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present but distinctly absent, not honor the limits between process.6 As memories are hidden archiving technology, the photograph the event, there is within the image a destabilize the proprioception interiority and exteriority, but within and exposed as a house, the produces as much as it records the secret archive that is “…never located of the experiencing body as an rather radically folds them into unstable sculpture throws into crisis event.10 In the image, the sculpture entirely on the inside or outside, act of resistance, in which black one another. As Jennifer Barker Derrida’s emphasis on the archive as sits in Rodney’s hand, visualizing the never entirely visible or invisible.”13 subjects are not denied interiority explains, “As the edge between a permanent dwelling that shelters, moment where Rodney is both the Unspoken memory, as Lippit but rather are able to deliberately the body and the world, then, which is also the expression of a touching subject and the touched describes, belongs to the avisual, the withhold complete legibility. the skin functions always as principle of authority.7 Domietta thing. For Lippit, self-awareness anarchive that captures the unsayable “the sculpture both a covering and uncovering, Torlasco elaborates, “Lineage, of radical exteriority, in which his or unarchivable.14 Torlasco describes In Donald Rodney’s photograph In because of its simultaneous inheritance, transmission, according interiority has been brought to the avisuality, or the unrepresentable, the House of My Father, the artist’s proximity to the public world to family or state law—the site that surface, allows the looking subject as a rearrangement of perception outstretched hand holds the fragile transforms and to the secretive inner body.”5 the archive needs to realize itself to disappear.11 As such, the that maintains an obscurity even sculpture of a house made of his Here the secretive inner body as such is inextricably physical and photograph documents a suspended as images make visible. Borrowing own skin (Figure 1). The photograph the physical is the site of his memories as symbolic.”8 As an impermanent site state of disappearance, which from Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and was taken from his hospital bed, well as the sickle cell anemia. marking the passing of his father allows for what Torlasco identifies the Invisible, she explains, “the fold loss of his and is not itself the artwork, but is His skin becomes the threshold the year before, the current loss of as the possibility of “hybrid is yet another name for the chiasm documenting the sculpture titled where both become visible. his skin, and the doubt his illness formations at the threshold of the perception, the intertwining of seeing My Mother, My Father, My Sister, My casts on his future, the photograph visible world.”12 Rodney’s hybrid and being seen, touching and being skin into a Brother. The sculpture transforms As an archive, the sculpture challenges the politically problematic subjectivity reorders his bodily touched—the cipher of reversibility, the physical loss of his skin into a made of his skin makes the “house arrest” that Derrida identifies schema as a fold, where he is both a coiling or doubling back that is in medium, and that production into inner secretive body available as a condition for the archive.9 touching and the touched thing. principle asymmetrical and always medium...” a site of mourning. Rodney uses to the public. His skin becomes unfinished.”15 This is where Rodney’s his skin, which he lost following a a site where the limits of the Mediating the sculpture, the The skin he holds is all surface, gesture becomes one of resistance. surgery, in order to recall a prior representable are expressed as photograph provides the indexical visualizing a radical exteriority by hospital stay that prohibited him what Akira Lippit defines as the trace of both Rodney’s presence obfuscating interiority without As a political body, he rejects the from seeing his father before he avisuality of an archive, or the and the absence he is expressing. denying it. While the photograph always-already-ness assigned to passed away. The sculpture does externalization of an internal According to Derrida, as the acts as an archive, making visible black British subjects. As the site

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where blackness is visualized, the all Black people, who are frequently Without the privilege of skin’s ability to cover and uncover seen as a cancer within white interiority, the home becomes the secret inner body has been society.”18 The collectivizing move a site of folding, providing the historically mobilized to evidence that Rodney performs within his body opportunity for a multiplication of the invisible qualities of race visible. can further an examination of the narratives that includes constraint, It is the site of overdetermination sculpture My Mother, My Father, My displacement, and urban and where folding—as Alessandra Sister, My Brother. Because the skin Raengo asserts—has been employed has become both the archive and the to turn subjectivity inside out, fold, the sculpture becomes a site of refusing black bodies of interiority.16 reversibility, acting as a site of the Further, the medium of photography public’s invisibility, the effects of a (lef t) fi g u r e 2: has been utilized for the purposes public disease. Akira Lippit describes of indexing racial difference, using the slippage between skin and Keith Piper, Cover image for exhibition its technology as way to prove the archive as, “A place at once interior catalogue Relocating the Remains, 1997, indisputable visibility of race.17 and exposed, imaginary and material: 220 x 310mm. Institute of International a public interiority and secret Visual Arts, London (work © Keith Piper, Sickle cell anemia, as Eddie exteriority.”19 As Chambers noted in Institute of International Visual Arts), Chambers has noted, has come to his lecture “Visualizing the Struggle courtesy of the artist, Institute of signify blackness because black of Black Britain” for black people International Visual Arts. people are the primary population the home did not necessarily mean affected by it. Rodney had attempted refuge, it was a site that was both (r i g ht) fi g u r e 3: to use his “diseased” blood as part of private and public as police could Keith Piper, Still from Hand and the artwork Visceral Canker (1990). raid at their discretion. For many, Remains project on Relocating the Rodney described the use of his homes were not chosen, but rather Remains CD-Rom, 1997 (work © Keith blood saying, “The blood serves as places where people were “put.”20 an analogue for all Black blood, or Piper), courtesy of the artist, Institute of International Visual Arts.

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deterioration. In 1987, Piper and and reconstruct images of blackness. rearranges the order of perception.24 in the catalogue, the abstracted are an image of the artist’s face, media…In every manifestation, Rodney collaborated on Next Turn of Suggesting new media art as both Piper then uses the possibilities background is replaced by an image partially obscured by the hand, and hypermediacy makes us aware of the the Screw, a mural painted directly on archive and fold, Torlasco elaborates, of new media to rearrange his that combines loose sketches of an image of a profile etched onto medium or media and (in sometimes the gallery’s wall that commemorated “Here memory comes into being as perceiving and perceived body. human bodies, handwriting, and a it recalling his work, Seven Stories subtle or obvious ways) reminds the black men and women who had a folding of dimensions that cannot world map that are recognizable as from Permanent Revolution (1997). us of our desire for immediacy.”25 In Hand and Remains, Piper’s open been killed in their homes. As an act be simplified or translated into one such but also indiscernible (Figure As a windowed body, his body hand holds a digitally rendered In the image, his hand and face are of resistance—following the silence another without residue: the seen 3). The shadow the hand casts parts function independently sphere made up of Piper’s 1982 both present yet detached from of public officials acknowledging and the unseen, the visible and emphasizes the illusion of depth, and of one another, allowing him to painting Black Assassin Saints. The each other and any other body part. the death of fourteen young people the invisible, the sensible and the suspended between the background simultaneously be the touching discoloration of the hand’s fingertips While the digital construction does in a house fire—civil uprisings intelligible, the future and the past— and the hand are various “stones.” subject and the touched thing. As and palm produce the effect that not seek an illusory trompe l’oeil made the invisibility of mourning it is such an excess of openness part of the remains, the title suggests the hand is pressed directly against There is one other difference effect, the shadow the hand casts and of injustice hypervisible.21 with respect to its own constitution that his head and the other stones the surface of the image. A few between the two versions of Hand emphasizes the physical presence that the heretical archive displays are to be discarded, so the still image versions of this image have been and Remains. The second image, of the hand within the artifice. Here, Central to the hypervisible and and affirms against the violence suspends the disappearance of the circulated online and two are in the which also has the map as a hypermediacy becomes a particularly invisible paradox is the way of definition and the inevitability looking subject. As a result, the image technology mediates the meaning exhibition catalogue, Relocating background, has an additional stone fruitful concept to describe the of forgetting.”23 New-media art depicts a body that is no longer the Remains. As the cover for his that has an image of a black man’s possibilities made available in Hand and immediacy of blackness. As practices as heretical archive confined to its physical limits, and exhibition catalogue, the background face with the word “unclassified” and Remains. Bolter and Grusin mentioned earlier, Derrida believed performs a radical exteriority by as a fold prompts a rearrangement is an abstracted field of blue and written across the forehead. The posit, “Where immediacy suggests a that archivization produces the event means of its self-awareness, and does of the order of perception. The aqua, referencing simultaneously image is manipulated in such a unified visual space, contemporary as much as it records the event. As not make its mediation invisible but arrangement and unclear presence the ocean, the sky, and a nebulous way that it is hard to distinguish hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous such, he continues archivization of hypervisible. Remediation—which of these objects that exist in a cyberspace (Figure 2). The wisps who the person is and gives him space, in which representation is an event is not apolitical, rather, Bolter and Grusin define as the way heterogeneous space, rather than a of color covering the bottom of an anonymity that could either conceived of not as window on to “This is also our political experience in which new media is expressed flat one, suggest that these images his hand suggest that the hand protect the individual or generalize the world, but rather as ‘windowed’ of the so-called news media.”22 The by refashioning of old media— can move fluidly within it and is not in front of, but within the him as “all” black men. The other itself—with windows that open appropriation of the news-media cannot erase the latter, but instead have meanings and relationships stones present in both versions to other representations or other event is central to Keith Piper’s ambiguous matter. In the final image that are deliberately shrouded. practice as a means to deconstruct

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As part of the larger project recur; speech, vision and touch are source in obscurity.”27 Refusing to from physical to virtual space. The in specific histories of embodiment.”31 Relocating the Remains that tangible registers that underpin his accept the historical ways in which remains of objects, activities and ideas By creating images that do not accompanied an exhibition catalogue narratives of difference, subjugation these figures have been denied which at one time exclusively occupied always suppose a denied interiority, for his mid-career retrospective, the and resistance; the complexities interiority, Piper’s interventions reveal the cold space of galleries and other Piper encourages viewers to see CD-Rom hosts the records of Piper’s of desire, of pain and longing are the ways in which they were made places designated for the display of art, themselves seeing as a way to digital projects including video works, inscribed across the somatic field.”26 to be both hypervisible and invisible, have become disembodied, recoded better understand the depth of sound recordings, and research In addition to the interactive projects while reinscribing their position as into digital form. At points these the figures imaged as surface. images. Throughout the visual on the CD-Rom, Piper has included one of deliberate opacity, demanding remains are compacted onto the CD- Donald Rodney and Keith Piper material, the outstretched hand arises an archive of modes of surveillance the right to not be understood.28 As Rom, at others they are set adrift onto as a motif through his work as a site on black men, ethnographic images a result, Piper creates what Torlasco the virtual expanses of the Internet.30 use their own bodies as an act of of offering in works such as as a site for both undiscovered terms the heretical archive, one resistance occurring between the By emphasizing the fluid mobility A Ship Called Jesus (1991), where narratives as well as the historical that “can help us imagine an unruly, hypervisibility and the invisibility of ideas, process, and objects that hands hold coins before a slave ship construction of racial difference as porous, incoherent legacy, one that of blackness in the public sphere. disperse and converge across virtual grounded by water and topped by evidenced in the photographed body. appropriates a certain history rather By performing the fold in which space and physical spaces, Piper the church arch, and The Fire Next than attempting to negate it.”29 reinforces the presence of the avisual Time (1991), where three video works As a multi-media archive that resists in the visible. Like Rodney, the works are projected onto a slide image of the inevitability of forgetting, Hand Further denying the ability to know also fold public interiority and private an open hand (Figure 4). Printed and Remains also includes an archive all of these bodies, Relocating of his body, his past work, and effort the Remains is dispersed across exteriority. As Jennifer Gonzalez on the CR-Rom, two cupped hands (r i g ht) fi g u r e 4: furthered throughout the content an exhibition space, a catalogue, writes, “For Piper, visual images appear to be cradling the disc itself. Keith Piper, The Fire Next Time, 1991, of the CD-Rom. By hypermediating CD-Rom, and an Internet are not, or not only, always already In the publication foreword, Gilane Dimensions Variable, Exhibition view corrupted signs participating in the Tawadros and David Chandler (the these bodies, Rodney allows a figure site. About this dispersion in spectacle that is capitalism; they from A Ship Called Jesus, Ikon Gallery, Director and Projects Manager) to exhibit a radical exteriority that cyberspace, Piper states, can also be the site for significant , (work © Keith explain, “In the past his work has is irreducible to itself, as Torlasco In the case of this project, the act of identifications, particularly for those Piper), courtesy of the artist, Institute consistently invoked the body and claims, acting as “a light which, ‘relocation’ takes on multiple meanings. subjects who are interpellated by of International Visual Arts. its sensory domain: eyes and hands illuminating the rest, remains at its In a literal sense, the relocation becomes them and can recognize themselves

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6 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light, 1 edition (Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press, 2005), 57. the touching subject become the In In the Break: The Aesthetics of insights amplify the radicalism 7 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, 1 edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2. touched object, they both work to the Black Radical Tradition Fred of Rodney and Piper’s works. 8 Torlasco, The Heretical Archive, 1. expose the limits of visibility from Moten indicates, “Constraint, 9 Ibid. within the inner secret body, and mobility, and displacement are, Stemming from Rodney’s 10 Torlasco, The Heretical Archive, 17. 11 Lippit, Atomic Light, 46. body politic. Gonzalez writes, “Race therefore, conditions of possibility deteriorating health and the decay of the post-industrial city of Piper’s 12 Torlasco, The Heretical Archive, xv. serves as an aspect of secrecy in the of the avant-garde. Deterioration 13 Torlasco, The Heretical Archive, 10. logic of publicity, but as an already is crucial to the avant-garde, as childhood, both artists sought to 14 Torlasco, The Heretical Archive, 11. publicly constructed discourse, its well: as a certain aesthetics, as express how a constraining police 15 Torlasco, The Heretical Archive, xvii. 16 Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth, 2013), 43. secrets are plainly evident. This is an effect of disinvestment, as a force, attempts to displace their British identity, and the suppressions 17 Jennifer Gonzalez, “Morphologies: Race as Visual Technology” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New York: International Center of Photography, its fundamental contradiction.”32 psychic condition: the decay of 2003), 341. Rodney and Piper each perform form and the internal and external of public demonstrations affected 18 Eddie Chambers, Donald Rodney: Doublethink, ed. Richard Hylton (London: Autograph, 2003), 33. the individual body and the body 19 Lippit, Atomic Light, 9. this contradiction at the level of environment of regenerative 20 Eddie Chambers, “Visualizing the Struggle of Black Britain” (lecture, National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, GA, September 27, 2014). the body through the seemingly aesthetic production: turning, politic.34 By using their bodies to express the invagination, or folding 21 In 1981 and 1985, cities around Britain experienced the uprisings or riots that responded largely to racial injustice. small gesture of the open hand. vanishing, enclosing, invaginating.”33 22 Derrida, Archive Fever 17. While the image appears to be Moten’s suggestion articulates the that Moten identifies, Piper and 23 Torlasco, The Heretical Archive, xvii. rooted in the individual body, I have processes by which the threshold Rodney produce hybrid forms 24 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 1st edition (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000), 6. of self-reflexivity proposing new 25 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation, 35. argued that in both works enfold of the outside world and the inner 26 Gilane Tawadros and David Chandler, foreword to Keith Piper: Relocating the Remains by Kobena Mercer (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1997), 5. arrangements of perception of private and public, expressing the body produce new aesthetic forms. 27 Torlasco, The Heretical Archive, xvii. conditions of constraint for black Further, by recognizing the fold as blackness, including its mediation 28 In Kara Keeling lecture “Errantry and Imagination in Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi,” she leveraged Eduoard Glissant’s concept of opacity as a position of resistance to reductive and resistance, in the public sphere. concept of the Other. (lecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, October 2, 2014). people in their physical environment. a regenerative aesthetic, Moten’s 29 Torlasco, The Heretical Archive, xv. 30 Keith Piper, “Relocating the Remains (A nomad leaves few traces),” Invia, http://www.iniva.org/piper/RRNotes.html 31 Jennifer González, “The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice,” Camera Obscura 24, no. 1 70 (January 1, 2009): 55. 32 Jennifer González, “The Face and the Public,” 59. 33 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 40. 34 Mercer, “Art Histories and Culture’s Geographies: 1979–1985” in Relocating the Remains, 20.

1 Daniel Birnbaum, “Lygia Clark Museum of Modern Art, New York,” Artforum 53, no.2 (October 2014): 274. 2 Jean Fisher, “Dialogues” in David Bailey, Ian Baucom, and , Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (Durham: Duke University Press Books), 169. 3 Domietta Torlasco, The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xi. 4 Kobena Mercer, “Iconography after Identity,” in Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (Durham: Duke University Press Books) 49. 5 Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, First Trade Paperback edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 28.

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