The Sound of Rioting: Twelve Notes on Lawrence Andrews
Through June 29th, EAI is pleased to feature two works by artist Lawrence Andrews. "and they came riding into town on BLACK & SILVER HORSES" (1992) is a video-essay on racism, crime, the law, and media, centered around the eye-witness accounts that sent an innocent man to prison. The piece mixes interviews with the participants, appropriated TV images, text by Aimé Cesaire, and more. The second work, mythicPotentialities (2021), is an exploration of the murder of Emmett Till and the trial that followed, examining the way these events have been mediated through documentary texts like Eyes on the Prize. By particularly honing in on the depiction of Moses Wright, Till's uncle, Andrews examines the limitations of predication, drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notion of the "whatever being."
Andrews' works are presented alongside a new text by poet, artist, and curator Anaïs Duplan titled The Sound of Rioting: Twelve Notes on Lawrence Andrews. In twelve sections, Duplan discusses Andrews' approach to constructing narrative out of "dark noise," the relationship between legality and legibility, and the complexities of communication at large.
Lawrence Andrews, "and they came riding into town on BLACK & SILVER HORSES"
1992, 29:53 min, color, sound
Closed captioning available.
The viewing period for this work has ended.
Lawrence Andrews, mythicPotentialities
2021, 59:40 min, black screen, sound
Closed captioning available.
The viewing period for this work has ended.
THE SOUND OF RIOTING: TWELVE NOTES ON LAWRENCE ANDREWS
by Anaïs Duplan
1.
The beginning of Lawrence Andrews’ “and they came riding into town on BLACK & SILVER HORSES” is as I remember it: we’re travelling into the woods. I can’t tell whose voice I’m hearing. I remember the man sitting on a rock next to the ocean.¹ I remember how we move, so musically, between images.
2.
Watching Andrews’ work, I manage to construct narratives out of “dark noise.” “Dark noise” as Andrews calls it, is an alternate truth-building system. The idea of dark noise as a sort of failed reality, a “swarm of particles”––or in other words, dark noise is the area outside the truth that the justice system would suggest is real. Dark noise is our light.
3.
Both mythicPotentialities and BLACK & SILVER HORSES feature poetry, narration, and formal labeling––as when Andrews verbally describes a structural component of the work, e.g. the next section, interview, or an epilogue. Both also make use of a similar style of storytelling. A little instance of rhyming in Andrews’ narration in mythicPotentialities reminds me that such textural treatment of language in the lineage of experimental film is possible. It reminds me too that I’m not, as I’m listening, reading into how exactly the language is being treated but what it’s saying. In other words, I’m listening for testimony and not for poiesis.
4.
What is the documentary impulse? Testimony purports to be useful and documentary purports to tell a truthful story. As I interrogate my fear of being misunderstood by others, I find my own documentary anxiety: a pressure to relate to others that, in turn, allows others to push me toward legibility.
5.
The need for meaning-making control––i.e. to keep human activity contained within a singular locus of truth––drove slave owners to prohibit enslaved people from communicating with each other. Reflecting on this, I suspect, as I always have, that the problems of communication and legibility may not be located within me. I’m not their cause. Both as a person and a writer, I needn’t try to anticipate my own legibility. I can’t pretend that legibility is some truthful, external point.
6.
While listening to it, I begin to wish that I’d engaged with mythicPotentialities around the same time that I was writing about Shaun Leonardo’s Central Park 5 series. Both Leonardo and Andrews are examining what reality is, in response to the justice system’s claim that reality really is a certain way, or that reality can be “read” according to a series of semantic rules. Of course, people who have been failed again and again by the justice system know this is false.
7.
Fear can take hold of our ability to comprehend reality. The kinds of fatal decisions, for instance, made by police officers under pressure highlight the importance of not acting from a place of dread. In BLACK & SILVER HORSES, a white police officer² explains the use of deadly force. She’s trying to explain to Lawrence how to act in an encounter with the police, telling him to telegraph that he’s unarmed by raising his open hands over his head.
8.
The ideas of justice and legibility are friends. Accordingly, there are many other forms––forms closer to traditional documentary and journalism––that mythicPotentialities might’ve taken that would’ve prioritized the legible transmission of information. Rather than seek legibility (i.e. justice via the law), Andrews works toward the truth of embodied poiesis. His choice to bring different voices into the singular materiality of the work reflects the way Andrews characteristically weaves in and out of text³, voice, and image. This weaving reminds me of my body: what it is to be embodied and to need to jump between the senses to create a total experience.
9.
In interview number nine of BLACK & SILVER HORSES, a white man draws the face of a Black man being described by an unseen person. The white man, who is being interviewed by Andrews, is a police artist––as in, he draws crime suspects as described by the victims of those crimes. The police artist is obviously very good at rendering faces, but this kind of “judicial artistry” seems, nonetheless, an archaic and even folkloric process. I can’t imagine the justice system ever relying on “art” in this way.
10.
The multiple voices of Lawrence Andrews are the real primary sources and archival evidence of mythicPotentialities. What does it mean to have multiple voices going at the same time, as backup, digression, or transgression––as when the narrating voice interjects and Andrews tells it not to? One challenge of interpersonal communication is making out what meaning is coming from inside us and what’s external to us. What am I being asked to do as I listen to you speak? Anxiety makes it difficult to listen.
11.
It’s such delicate work to do meaning-making right. The way that citations––alternate voices––float in and out of mythicPotentialities speaks to its porousness and yet, the multiple voices in the work overlap in a fairly tame, legible manner, suggesting that we’re supposed to know what’s focal at any given moment. mythicPotentialities would be a much less legible piece if there were more external voices included in it and if its voices overlapped more. While listening, Andrews’ is the only voice I can make out.⁴ This, ostensibly, creates interiority and coherence.⁵
12.
Does the drive to create experimental moving image revolve around critique? A propensity toward social critique where need and fear to be understood have commingled? Anxiety, the out-aheadness that fear creates, is our ancestral gift. Standing in our unknowingness and speaking anyway is agreeing to miss the point together; it's moving away from our anxiety about death, which keeps us from truly listening.
¹ A minute into the work, I realize that I haven’t had my sound turned on as I’m watching. I wonder what sounds I missed in the first minute but I don’t go back and check.
² I suspect it’s important for the video that she’s a woman in law enforcement. She remains somewhat marginal.
³ Having seen a number of video art and experimental film works, I’m surprised to find myself thinking of poetry––Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos––rather than video as I read Andrews’ words on screen in BLACK & SILVER HORSES.
⁴ Perhaps there’s that Siri-like voice that isn’t Andrews’.
⁵ I think of Kalup Linzy’s manipulation of his own voice and image in his body of work––the way he elects to play all of his own characters, nonetheless changing costumes and distorting his voice to create differences among them.
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020); two full-length poetry collections, I NEED MUSIC, forthcoming on Action Books and Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016); and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). Duplan has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and St. Joseph’s College.
His video works have been exhibited by Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2021. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One.
Lawrence Andrews is an artist, and currently an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media Arts University of California, Santa Cruz, CA. His work has shown extensively throughout the U.S. and internationally in museums, galleries, and major festivals including the Whitney Biennial, The New York Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, and the American Film Institute, as well as on cable television.
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading resources for video and media art. As we celebrate this milestone, EAI will present a rotating series of video features from across our collection and publish a series of oral histories with key figures. To keep up to date on our anniversary activities, please sign up for our e-mail mailing list.