ISSUE 01

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Jessica Lynne

"A letter written on
a day without the sun"

(2020)

Alice Coltrane,  Journey in Satchidananda

Dear ________,

If you are reading this, it means that it is sometime in the future, after a prolonged season of grief, death, and mourning.

If you are reading this, it means that I am somewhere far from you physically, but you should know: I am thinking of you always. In fact, this letter was written in a moment of foresight, a sudden burst of inspiration or, better yet, an ache.

If you are reading this, then you have found yourself in a time consumed by crisis and the consequences of crisis. At the time of this writing, I kept thinking to myself: maybe there is a chance that we won’t fail you. I hope we haven’t failed you.

Because if you are reading this, then by now you have most likely arrived at a moment of clarity. That this is a hard, tough world and the very attempts to make this world anew are harder and tougher. To be truthful, the “we” is deflection, an excuse to not say “I.” That is to say, I hope I haven’t failed you.

I thought that some missive from me to you would help to calm whatever anxiety you are feeling right now, because these are the types of gestures that held me together in my time of crisis. It is hard to know where to start and how to move sometimes.

I thought you would want to know that it is okay to be scared. I think I spent too much time avoiding that truth for myself and I think that, often, fear can motivate us to action. Not all of the time, but sometimes. What real wisdom can I offer you? Perhaps nothing more than the lessons I tried to hold onto from people much wiser than myself.

When they say organize, they also mean study.

When they say organize, they also mean fight.

When they say organize, they also mean refuse the compromise. The one that tells you to keep quiet or appease those who cause harm or consider “both sides.” There is great danger in this myth.

I am writing this to you on a day without sun, at a moment when summer gives way to fall and the coastline is threatened by the hurricanes of the Atlantic. I have been trying to remind myself that another plane exists. A place that is not riddled with food insecurity or housing instability or extrajudicial murder or . . .

I am writing this to you in a time of my own transition, where heart work meets the sharpening of my political self. Alice Coltrane, my score.

I am writing this letter the way I might say a prayer, which is something like a meditation. These acts live beyond any conception of linear (Western) time. Have you realized this yet? That when we pray, we are time traveling, and so it is my prayer that this finds you—in a time that is no longer my own—with fervor.

Gather with the healers, the activists, the teachers, the spiritualists, the protestors, the artists, the mothers, the young folk, those who refuse the ongoing suffering of others, those who are tending to the earth, those who are mindful of the elders, those who map futures against the state, against white supremacy. All of these things must be named.

I am writing this to you as a way of reminding you of your own mortality. That the human plane is finite and listening to Alice always reminds me of that which comes after and beyond. I wanted to put my humanness to good use because you were on your way. I wanted you to be proud and also to know that humanness is fragile.

There are departed saints, like Alice, who will get you through. And the righteous who are still living—the healers and the activists and the teachers and the spiritualists and the protestors and the artists and the mothers and the young folk.

You are reading this, and I hope, in some way, that you are ready for what is coming next. That this is a hard, tough world and that the very attempt to make this world over is harder and tougher. But, I am still praying that a new world is possible.

Onward,

____________

Appendix:

Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Art in America, The Believer, BOMB Magazine, The Nation, Frieze, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2020 Graham Foundation Research and Development award and is currently at work on a collection of essays about love, faith, art, and the U.S. South.

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Paul Pfeiffer

"Caryatid"

(2015-2020)



























Appendix:

Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, HI, in 1966 and grew up traveling regularly between Hawaii and the Philippines. He moved to New York City in 1990 where he attended Hunter College and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Pfeiffer’s work in video, sculpture, and photography revisits the history of popular mass entertainment to explore the role of images in shaping individual and collective consciousness. Reworking clips from YouTube, cable TV, and increasingly his own footage, Pfeiffer delves deeply into the aesthetics of non-linear editing to elucidate the hybrid forms of space and time that define day-to-day experience in the contemporary world. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions around the world. For the Performa 19 Biennial, Pfeiffer presented his first live performance in collaboration with The Georgia Redcoat Marching Band from the University of Georgia, at the Apollo Theater on November 11, 2019.

Caryatid (Broner), 2020. Digital video loop. Chromed 32-inch color television with embedded media player. 26 3⁄4 x 29 1⁄2 x 19 in. (67.9 x 74.9 x 49.1 cm).
Caryatid (Cotto), 2016. Digital video loop. Chromed 12-inch color television with embedded media player. 9 1⁄2 x 10 1⁄2 x 14 1⁄2 in. (24.1 x 26.7 x 36.8 cm).  
Caryatid (De La Hoya), Digital video loop. Chromed 20-inch color television with embedded media player. 23 5⁄8 x 23 5⁄8 x 19 3⁄4 in. (60 x 60 x 50.2 cm).
Caryatid (Duhaupas), 2016. Digital video loop. Chromed 21-inch color television with embedded media player. 21 x 20 x 19 in. (53.3 x 50.8 x 48.3 cm).  
Caryatid (Marquez), 2016. Digital video loop. Chromed 21-inch color television with embedded media player. 21 x 20 x 19 in. (53.3 x 50.8 x 48.3 cm).  
Caryatid (Mosley), 2015. Digital video loop. Chromed 12-inch color television with embedded media player. 9 1⁄2 x 10 1⁄2 x 14 1⁄2 in. (24.1 x 26.7 x 36.8 cm).
Caryatid (Hatton), 2015. Digital video loop. Chromed 21-inch color television with embedded media player. 21 x 20 x 19 in (53 x 50.8 x 48.3 cm).
Caryatid (Rios), 2015-2016. Digital video loop. Chromed 12-inch color television with embedded media player. 9 1⁄2 x 10 1⁄2 x 14 1⁄2 in (24.1 x 26.7 x 36.8 cm).  
Caryatid (Maidana), 2017. Digital video loop. Chromed 12-inch color television with embedded media player. 9 1⁄2 x 10 1⁄2 x 14 1⁄2 in (24.1 x 26.7 x 36.8 cm).
Caryatid (Pacquiao), 2015. Digital video loop. Chromed 12-inch color television with embedded media player. 9 1⁄2 x 10 1⁄2 x 14 1⁄2 in (24.1 x 26.7 x 36.8 cm).  
Caryatid (Stiverne), 2018. Digital video loop. Chromed 32-inch color television with embedded media player. 26 3⁄4 x 29 1⁄2 x 19 5/16 in (68 x 75 x 49 cm).
Caryatid (Bradley), 2016. Digital video loop. Chromed 32-inch color television with embedded media player. 26 3⁄4 x 29 1⁄2 x 19 5/16 in (68 x 75 x 49 cm).
Carytaid (Margarito), 2015-2017. Digital video loop. Chromed 12-inch color television with embedded media player. 9 1⁄2 x 10 1⁄2 x 14 1⁄2 in (24.1 x 26.7 x 36.8 cm).  
Caryatid (Kirkland), 2016. Digital video loop. Chromed 32-inch color television with embedded media player. 26 3⁄4 x 29 1⁄2 x 19 5/16 in (68 x 75 x 49 cm).  

All works © Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

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3

Jibade-Khalil Huffman

"Niagara"

(2015)

    

On the first day
of the poem

we perform
a trust exercise, on
the next day we all

start dancing in the street.

There is a moment
of silence
during which

everyone traded clothes
you were just beginning

to come into your own
when you have to adopt the speech

of a telemarketer. When
we all come to

you say, “it’s been so long
since I’ve had

a good laugh
at your expense

when was the last time
You told a joke

that wasn’t a veiled reference
to your beliefs?”

On the third day of the poem
the graph showing our decline

is played by a tarantula.
The boy is played

by a method actress.
Our theme song

is the Star Spangled Banner.
On the surface of nature

is an argument
for crying your eyes out

and a coupon
for more disaster.

On the fourth day
of the poem

we retire into
a glacial haven, pleasantly

as an asthmatic
Gladys Knight impersonator, as

an Elk of the earth, a Shriner
of the earth, a husband

of a daughter
of the American Revolution.

I will spend
part of infinity

as a migraine
colored rush

barreling as always
into a room of children sleeping.

I am secretly in love
with a girl who tells me

“I haven’t heard
a saxophone breakdown

in a while
so I’m going to put on

this Carly Simon record
and see what happens”

I’m going to carry
the tune

of an imaginary latitude.
As the star of

an undercover operation.
At a time of

a scarcity of gloves.”
Ominous territory

in which a middle aged
everyman coming unplugged

inside a wall of sound
inside your asshole

otherwise I imagine
the rest of the bad guys

hiding as they have
in the wild west

burying their name
for the internet

then appearing
as that person

in real life.
I haven’t been attacked

for a long time or
for a similar beginning

or else I’ve
torn down the sign

and started over
with a different parachute.

I am in love
with a girl

who calls everyone
into a huddle

and gives a speech
to motivate them

into believing
they are rich

and tells everyone
to put their hand in

and say “Antartica”
on the count of one hundred.

At the count of five thousand
everyone ought to

pour buckets of Gatorade
onto the fire.

I’d like to
give myself enough hand jobs

until I can forget
I’m in love

with a girl
who says

“Before Gossip Girl
there was Edith Wharton”

Norman Mailer and
Vietnam started out

at the same time.
In a declension of assholes

in the middle of
a frenzied weekend

of mapping
the Bermuda triangle

in the time when
Jupiter disappeared

at the dawn of
the life of its many moons

every day
a new brand

of vodka
is invented

in America.
Nothing matriculates like surrealism

where I go into
a different octave

and say “it’s all over.
Anyone can see

the planets are
inedible bodies of work”

and you tell me
that’s the highest thing

I’ve ever said.
You don’t know

if I’m really
there anymore

to tell you about
what happened

on the last show
in a special

twenty part episode
of Judge Judy.

We only
talk about blasphemy

to distract ourselves
from the tension

in the air.
To a build a fortress

around our hearts
I don’t know

why I do the things
I do.

I’m going to
go to sleep

and wake up
and watch “Daria”

for a while I’m sure
you know

where you have been
and can describe it for me

in several languages.
I know what you did

last night and the
night before Christmas

You can barely
have one, how can you

tolerate both or even
several of them

in a knife fight?
Much as I fantasize

about having hate sex
with captains of industry

same as I’ve taken
to fleeing to the edge of town

my life
is the opposite of yoga

the same as
jogging when

someone is chasing you

On the first day
of the poem

we perform
a trust exercise, on
the next day we all

start dancing in the street.


There is a moment
of silence
during which


everyone traded clothes
you were just beginning

to come into your own
when you have to adopt the speech

of a telemarketer. When
we all come to


you say, “it’s been so long
since I’ve had

a good laugh
at your expense


when was the last time
You told a joke

that wasn’t a veiled reference
to your beliefs?”


On the third day of the poem
the graph showing our decline

is played by a tarantula.
The boy is played

by a method actress.
Our theme song


is the Star Spangled Banner.
On the surface of nature

is an argument
for crying your eyes out


and a coupon
for more disaster.


On the fourth day
of the poem

we retire into
a glacial haven, pleasantly

as an asthmatic
Gladys Knight impersonator, as


an Elk of the earth, a Shriner
of the earth, a husband

of a daughter
of the American Revolution.


I will spend
part of infinity

as a migraine
colored rush

barreling as always
into a room of children sleeping.


I am secretly in love
with a girl who tells me

“I haven’t heard
a saxophone breakdown

in a while
so I’m going to put on

this Carly Simon record
and see what happens”


I’m going to carry
the tune

of an imaginary latitude.
As the star of

an undercover operation.
At a time of


a scarcity of gloves.”
Ominous territory

in which a middle aged
everyman coming unplugged

inside a wall of sound
inside your asshole


otherwise I imagine
the rest of the bad guys

hiding as they have
in the wild west


burying their name
for the internet

then appearing
as that person

in real life.
I haven’t been attacked


for a long time or
for a similar beginning

or else I’ve
torn down the sign

and started over
with a different parachute.


I am in love
with a girl

who calls everyone
into a huddle

and gives a speech
to motivate them

into believing
they are rich


and tells everyone
to put their hand in

and say “Antartica”
on the count of one hundred.


At the count of five thousand
everyone ought to

pour buckets of Gatorade
onto the fire.


I’d like to
give myself enough hand jobs

until I can forget
I’m in love

with a girl
who says


“Before Gossip Girl
there was Edith Wharton”

Norman Mailer and
Vietnam started out

at the same time.
In a declension of assholes


in the middle of
a frenzied weekend

of mapping
the Bermuda triangle


in the time when
Jupiter disappeared

at the dawn of
the life of its many moons


every day
a new brand

of vodka
is invented

in America.
Nothing matriculates like surrealism


where I go into
a different octave

and say “it’s all over.
Anyone can see

the planets are
inedible bodies of work”


and you tell me
that’s the highest thing

I’ve ever said.
You don’t know


if I’m really
there anymore

to tell you about
what happened

on the last show
in a special

twenty part episode
of Judge Judy.


We only
talk about blasphemy

to distract ourselves
from the tension

in the air.
To a build a fortress

around our hearts
I don’t know


why I do the things
I do.


I’m going to
go to sleep

and wake up
and watch “Daria”

for a while I’m sure
you know


where you have been
and can describe it for me

in several languages.
I know what you did

last night and the
night before Christmas


You can barely
have one, how can you

tolerate both or even
several of them

in a knife fight?
Much as I fantasize

about having hate sex
with captains of industry


same as I’ve taken
to fleeing to the edge of town

my life
is the opposite of yoga


the same as
jogging when

someone is chasing you


Appendix:

Jibade-Khalil Huffman is a poet, author, and visual artist based in Los Angeles and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His work, spanning photography, video, installation, and performance, has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford (2020); MoCA Tuscon (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2019); the Kitchen, New York (2018); Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta (2018); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2015), among others. Huffman has also participated in group exhibitions, including C.R.E.A.M. (curated by Sable Elyse Smith), The Highline, New York (2019); Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, Michigan (2017); Speech/Acts at Institute of Contemporary Art at University of Philadelphia (2017); Tenses: Artists-in-Residence 2015-16, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016); Against the Romance of Community, Swiss Institute, New York (2016); and Made In L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014).

Jibade-Khalil Huffman, "Niagara," in Sleeper Hold (Hudson: Fence Books, 2015), 12-46.

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Johan Grimonprez

"dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y"

(1997)

Appendix:

Johan Grimonprez is an artist whose work blends practice and theory, art and cinema, documentary and fiction. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work seeks out the tension between the intimate and the global. Grimonprez’s curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and MoMA. His works are in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and Tate Modern, London. His feature films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997, in collaboration with novelist Don DeLillo), Double Take (2009, in collaboration with writer Tom McCarthy) and Shadow World (2016, in combination with journalist Andrew Feinstein). He has published several books and delivered lectures at art institutions and universities around the world.

dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997. 68 min. Digital video, stereo. Courtesy of the artist.

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Jason Moran

"Upon Reflection"

(2020)

Wayne Shorter,  Atlantis

2005

It was two hours before downbeat, and I was shaving in the hotel’s bathroom. Wiping away the mirror’s vapor as the towel squeaks. Lathering the shaving cream in my hands, I was preparing for a dive. I could never be “ready” for this moment, sharing the stage with legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter. He asked that I join his band for two concerts in Melbourne, Australia. I flew from NYC to DC, DC to LA, and then down to Melbourne. This was the farthest I’d ever flown. Farther than Japan when joining Cassandra Wilson’s band in 1997. Countless hours in the air across country, then across the ocean. Here I was, looking in the wet mirror, raking the razor across my chin. Blood poured. My nerves had taken hold of my hands.

I depend on the precision of my hand movement for every touch of the piano keys. My right hand dabbed the streaming blood with toilet paper as my left hand fumbled around for a Band- Aid. Is this what the concert would feel like? Would my hands, my mind, roam to a more dangerous place? Was there any way to control my hands? Shit, I was already late. I yanked my pinstripe suit on and rushed downstairs to join the band. We rode silently from the hotel to the venue. I didn’t talk about the blood; I only spoke of the nerves.

A life in improvised music revolves around the faith in taking the plunge. There will be consequences. Will the bandleader hate what I play? Will eyebrows raise in confusion? Will I ever get hired again? Will I die broke? In the documentary Imagine the Sound, Cecil Taylor says. “When you are out there making art and accepting the final responsibility that your livelihood depends upon it, then you go forward into it. BUT . . . you also come to understand that nobody really asked you do to this.”

Taylor speaks of a calling in music, a spirit that propels the musician to make decisions and let the consequence of sound be laid bare. Harnessing those convictions is something that, over time, we have had to trust. Fleeting intuition. The fear on the stage versus the fear outside. I have faith in making music, where our sound translates intention. How do we say it . . . then, how do we play it? For centuries, Black folks have been coding melodies that unlock revolutions. This night would be no different.

The promoter steps onstage to announce the band. The band waits in the wings in darkness with the stage door cracked. The muffled sound of the promoter thanking the audience and the sponsors. Then the door swings open and the sound of applause washes over us as we enter the stage. Seventy-two-year-old Wayne Shorter graciously receives his standing ovation. Shorter’s sound is assertive and penetrating. He pulls you into the bell of his horns, making you feel his every inhale. A real Virgo.

A few months earlier Wayne Shorter mailed me a package of music. Grand staffs filled. To break the ice, he called up on the phone to ask if I had any questions. During the conversation he said to me, “Learn all of the songs, but we might play only one measure.” In a song that is thirty-two measures, he implied that it was possible we might only perform around the idea loaded into only one of those measures. I asked, “What happens after that one measure?” He replied, “We go swimming.” My eyes widen while holding the red phone to my ear. I grew up with a pool in my backyard. I love the sensation of water filling the ear canal, interfering with every sound. Above and below, what would the sound be in Melbourne, near the ocean, on a stage? Wayne sips and breathes fire. His tone torches. I’ll follow his sound under water.

It has always been within the humble square footage of a stage that Black performers have battled not only stage fright, but also the fears of those they perform for and against. When Albert Ayler uses his saxophone to growl, or Sun Ra slides his palms across a synthesizer to wail, the ear is challenged. They make the sound clip, overheating your ear. Clipping is when the sound level is too powerful for its speaker. A distortion forms, and leeches onto the sound. Inevitably the sound becomes brittle and cracks. In this crack is the new unknown, a new world. Every master finds their way to the edge by applying more design into the time. They sculpt a mosaic out of shards never intended to exist. There are consequences. Some masters have their light tragically dimmed early. Others live past their prime into obscurity. “Play like it’s your last time, because it just might be.” That has always meant “don’t be afraid to be as true as you need to be.” It might hurt, and maybe, the more it hurts, the better it will be.

I often think of this concert with Wayne because, before the downbeat, I had already shed blood. The composer Butch Morris said, “I’ve seen people choke on freedom.” On the other hand, Wayne is about baptism. Take the music and the musician to the water, hold their hand, let the water envelop them, wash away the sin, listen, and seek the divine.

Downbeat . . .

Wayne whistles while the bass (John) and drums (Brian) rumble into a loose rolling formation. Seated at the piano, I close my eyes. The dark room falls. The band paddles out from the shore at dawn. Crepuscule. The whistle is a call, a warning, a ping. The message: the water is cold and sharp. I hear this. Wait, my skin needs to acclimate to the temperature. They are leaving. I need to start paddling. I stutter through a few notes, slapping at the water. They are stretching with each glide farther and farther out into the ocean. We reach for each other, calling to one another against the sound waves. Wayne disappears. He dove under. This is the moment he spoke of over the phone. I dive too, but I don’t see him. Don’t panic; send out a sound. The air bubbles tag along to my phrase as it floats to the surface. He responds, but, judging by the sound, he is free diving leagues away. The distance. The quartet is beneath the surface. We are looking for the slower, colder, ice age current that has pushed the earth’s rotation forever. When we find it, we ride the current. I can never see the band, only hear them. Occasionally Wayne says something like, “Shark ahead.” I push out nine notes in a cluster, he twitches his head, then slowly spreads each of those notes across the ocean flood. Earlier that day at soundcheck he says to me:

“I’m not into composition, I’m into decomposition.”

Break down the song, break down the barriers. Every once in a while, he takes a break and listens to the band, listening to us swim. You’ll see him twitch his head quickly when he hears something peculiar, point a finger, and utter “Aah!” in delight. Active listening. When he returns to the song with a bloodcurdling scream on his saxophone, that terror is what blends the music together. The shock of sound is a battle.

Five minutes can feel like five hours. The first five minutes of this concert were the most profound of my life. Within five minutes, a lifetime, a quaternary of Black culture. We prepared to pressurize steam.

This concert was a sweaty reclamation. In 1985, Wayne Shorter released an album called Atlantis. On the title track, you hear the dive, even through the melody’s ascension, like air pockets. His soprano saxophone is a dolphin leading the pod. In the ocean, the stage is in the round. He has spent decades diving into meditation, into pressure, into freedom. He is unafraid to send out a click with the distinct understanding that sound waves travel almost five times faster under water than they do through air. He cured tempo one chant at a time. The song, a sermon on facing fear through faith. Free dive.

Appendix:

Pianist, composer, and artist Jason Moran hails from Houston, TX. He studied with Jaki Byard at the Manhattan School of Music and with Andrew Hill and Muhal Richard Abrams upon graduation. Moran’s 18-year relationship with Blue Note Records produced 9 highly acclaimed recordings. His groundbreaking trio, The Bandwagon (with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits) is currently celebrating their 20th anniversary.

Recent awards and fellowships include the MacArthur Foundation, US Artists, Doris Duke Foundation and Ford Foundation. Moran collaborated with his wife, the mezzo-soprano/composer Alicia Hall Moran, as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial (BLEED) and for the 2015 Venice Biennial (Work Songs) and Carnegie Hall (Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration).

Since his first album, he has produced fourteen additional albums, created scores for Ava DuVernay’s films Selma and 13th, and author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ staged and upcoming film adaptation of Between the World and Me.

In 2018, Moran’s first solo museum exhibition opened at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Moran is currently the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center, teaches at New England Conservatory and curates the Artist’s Studio series for Park Avenue Armory in New York City.

ISSUE 01

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