I made a new invisible man video order to own the experience given to me after attending and helping out at a Maggi Hambling talk where some very inappropriate comments where made about slavery. In my previous post I described what I was like to be there and also how I was let down by audience reaction to her comments as they have been my peers for the past three years.
Of course this is not referred to everybody as a few of my fellow students have shared their disgust over the incident but only one person has come up to me to share some empathy and disgust without myself having to bring up the issue.
This leads me on to why I didn’t walk out after hearing those comments. First I was in shock for a few minutes and then I thought from past experience where I have been stopped and searched and I have responded with anger which makes you lose your focus and kind of live up to certain stereotypes. So I sat through the end of the talk and waited for the response from others. In the very few of discussions I have had I have been asked how does slavery affect myself and my family I really thought this was obvious and I am not going to bother explaining my family history. What I can do is describe via my art what I feels like to be alienated in a room so I have created this piece so people can feel that vibe and at the same time see the power of being invisible as capturing in Ralph Ellison invisible man via the french critical theorist Jacques Ranciere’s notions of using shock to raise awareness of framework’s.
While planning to make this piece I found out that designer Eddie Opara also used Ellison’s book for his project stealth.
“I remember reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, when I was younger, and the aspects of identity, especially being black. And also, the idea of being African American in America. The majority of the actual piece, of the book, is set in Harlem that Ralph Ellison is actually writing. One of the sections that affected me a lot, and what I wanted to do was recreate that in a printed piece.
This is:
“I am invisible. Understand simply because people refuse to see me.”
If you go up to it, you cannot see it. This is just an optical play. It’s very intriguing. This part of the text from Ralph Ellison.”
Apart from making this video to own my experience I have also made it to show people the example of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin term carnivalesque in full effect where Bakhtin explains the temporal space of a carnival as a space to do things that you wouldn’t normally do. I very much imagine that if anyone else had said those comments it would have been treated with a different response but because it was someone famous and very transgressive in their actions people went along with the ride. I’m really clutching straws to justify the incident but that what project has been about looking from different points of view and hopefully this video will make others do that too.
It was just the whole scenario about that topic put me in an unnecessary paradoxical situation.
Of course there’s the invisibility aspect of those who responded to those subject matter in that crass manner when the only person working at the talk was a black guy and it just dawned on me today that there where other people in the audience who were just as uncomfortable with the remarks but were looking at me to make a stand by walking out or speaking out….that’s a lot of weight to carry when I’m just a student who came for a talk about art.
So making this work and getting it out there will hopefully avoid that weight being passed on to future students.
Invisible man 2014 – Project 5am
