Flux Without Pause

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

An invisible man makes the invisible…visible!

As Solomon Northup clings on for dear life, his head caught in a noose, outstretched with his feet on their tip toes on slip away from death. His suffering is invisible as his hanging is just another fabric of the landscape of his entrapped surrounds. The sun wistly shines, the wind still blows into the trees that involuntary punish him. The grass is still green that his soul of his feet cannot touch and the conditioned souls of tasks continue to be fulfilled by Northup’s fellow objects once human now immune to the horrors that bestows their eyes.

In my 6th post I talked about the factors that have made Project 5am such an integral part of my life, a realm that I can explore, create, see and respond from. One of a the issues I raised was they the need to have a place of being instead of being on the fringes of other the other. In examples I talked about been in a minority of many situations.

Being black British of the last of the first generation of the wind rush that came to the UK meant that my childhood was lived through the late 80s 90s. My football team was Liverpool F.C mainly because my favourite player was John Barnes. I saw Liverpool play Birmingham city in 1995 and I was in the city and I always remember when the game kicked off and Barnes got the ball, a voice from behind me bellowed “get the black bastard”. A guy next to me said “ignore him he’s an idiot but inside I was raging but at the same time powerless. Being in a minority back then meant you had to take it.

In 2012 I came across and was inspired to make a piece of art work from the book the ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison (who’s 100th birthday would of been on march 2nd) where the author challenges minorities via African-American culture to embrace their invisibility as pathway to enlightenment of self.

Ellison published only one novel in his lifetime but it was a revolutionary work. Invisible Man came out in 1952 when the author was 39 years old. It follows the bleak adventures of an unnamed black narrator from the Deep South through to Harlem. Along the way he tries to impress preachers, teachers, radicals and hucksters. At every step, though, his efforts to forge an identity – to become a visible man – are thwarted by his skin colour.

Ralph Ellison: the man who made Black America visible -Sameer Rahim

Meanwhile I enjoy my life with the compliments of Monopolated light & Power. Since you never recognize me even when in closest contact with me, and since, no doubt, you’ll hardly believe that I exist, it won’t matter if you know that I tapped a power life leading into the building and ran it into my hole in the ground. Before that I lived in the darkness into which I was chased, but now I see. I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility – and vice versa.

― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself … Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.”

― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

It’s fitting that I write about Ellison’s work this week as yesterday I experience the scale of my invisibility as a black man at an art lecture where an inappropriate comment was made during a conversation about the Stevie McQueen film ’12 Years A Slave’

The moment which encapsulated my invisibility was not the remark which was absurd and stupid but the response of my fellow colleagues which was greeted with laughter (albeit awkward laughter). For me this experience was worse than my football match experience that took place in the mid-90s where a working class culture was slowly learning to adapt to a new footballing language. Yesterday’s incident took place in a time and surrounded where those kind of remarks should be shut down by silence, therefore I do feel let down as this put me in a place of alienation.

At the same time this incident has reminded alienation is one of the factors of the afrofuturist and why Project 5am is my gift to learn from any situation and transfer that into my future works thou that is the art of the invisible man

Invisible man -Project 5am