When Julie Henson and Seth Curcio invited me to write for Daily Serving in 2009, I never imagined that one day this international community of artists and writers would be entrusted to my care. Over the last seven years—first as an occasional contributor, then columnist, then managing editor, and finally as editor in chief—I have been incredibly fortunate to be a part of Daily Serving’s growth and development. Now I am eager to concentrate on my own artistic and writing practices, and thus am stepping down from my current role.

Our writers, editors, and admins—too many to name here—deserve my unending thanks for helping to shape a publication that amplifies regional creative practices. Daily Serving’s exhibition reviews bring attention to art production in both well-known and underserved regions; our open-submission Fan Mail column highlights emerging artists; Help Desk is a guide to the often convoluted workings of the arts; Shotgun Reviews allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to publish an exhibition review—no pedigree required; and #Hashtags (soon to be a book) focuses on the work of artists from traditionally underrepresented communities. Additionally, our new Arts Publishing Residency, the first iteration of which is just wrapping up, provides one more way to welcome new voices to publishing. Through these programs, we support a broad community of arts workers.

We have a lot to be proud of, and it would be remiss of me to fail to mention in particular the way in which our current team has shaped Daily Serving to reflect progressive values and concerns of equity and representation. We track the articles that we publish, and between September 6, 2016, and June 2, 2017, we published 192 original articles; 62% of our features presented artwork by, or highlighted the voices of, diverse arts workers and people of color. We value the contributions of diverse perspectives and recognize our role in actively responding to the dynamic arts community by creating space.

Since May 2013, when Patricia Maloney purchased Daily Serving to be a sister site to Art Practical, we on the administrative team have discussed amalgamating the two sites in order to eliminate redundancies. Over the last four and a half years, Kara Q. Smith, the editor in chief of Art Practical, and I have experimented with the location, timing, and format of the articles that appear on the two sites, each year tweaking the arrangement to see what suits our audiences best. This tinkering only strengthened our resolve to combine the best of both publications into one, and beginning in October, Daily Serving’s columns and West Coast reviews will be published on Art Practical (the current site will remain as an archive). Our stalwart editors and copyeditor will also transition to Art Practical; and in order to give this combined publication a new vision, Daily Serving’s current senior editor, Vivian Sming, will become the new editor in chief. I have enormous confidence in Vivian’s leadership abilities. She will bring innovation and a fresh perspective to this enterprise, while maintaining Daily Serving’s vision for an equitable and accessible art world.

I’m reminded of the words of author Susie Hinton—she of The Outsiders fame—who said, “How a piece ends is very important to me. […] I love to write ending lines; usually, I know them first and write toward them.” None of us involved in the nearly eleven-year history of Daily Serving knew how or when it would end—we only knew we were working toward a sum that was greater than its parts. Now that we have created a successful model, it’s time for a fresh challenge. I hope you will join me in being part of Art Practical’s readership this October, when Vivian and the Daily Serving/Art Practical team unveil the next iteration of trustworthy and brave critical arts discourse.

Kemang Wa Lehulere. Kemang Wa Lehulere: Bird Song; installation view, Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, 2017. © Kemang Wa Lehulere, Sophia Lehulere, Gladys Mgudlandlu. Courtesy of STEVENSON Cape Town and Johannesburg. Photo: Mathias Schormann.

C&: What do you think of this whole idea revolving around decolonizing knowledge?

Kemang Wa Lehulere: Decolonizing is basically about dismantling this system of power. One piece at a time. I believe the education system is the most important aspect to begin with because it is where people are shaped. At the moment and for a long time the educational system has not produced people that think critically, but rather people who fit in the system. There is a new generation of people acting against this, coming from the Black consciousness movement or Pan-Africanism. There is a resurgence of political philosophy that aims to break down the system, including the education system. Not only is it about changing the curriculum, but also about accessibility to that educational space. This is something I have always been concerned with. For instance, I could not afford to go to university. As a result, I had to do projects here and there in order to get the funds for my studies. And this took away the time I needed to study.

To bring it back to the show here, the materials I worked with are old school desks. I have always been interested in pedagogy. In school I complained to my English teacher because the curriculum was concerned only with English and American perspectives. This same teacher developed a special curriculum outside of the official one for me and a friend of mine. So, while she showed us carefully selected books by writers from African contexts, we would sit and discuss this material during lunchtime. At the end of the day you have to ask yourself where you fit into the normative body of knowledge, then to demand visibility, and at the same time to dismantle symbols of power in how they remain colonial and carry Western White patriarchal elements.

C&: So for this show Bird Song in Berlin, you used deconstructed school desks. What does the idea of installation mean to you? Why did you choose this format, these materials, jazz music, and other media?  

KWL: I always try to search for the materials first. For me it is like a journey. It has been only two years that I have been working with the materials the way I do now. In the beginning it was wood and then the metal components of the desk came in. Aside from that I am currently developing pieces that can be mobile. They would operate as sculptures within performances. In addition, the exhibition catalog includes a pamphlet as a supplement, i.e. a publication in a publication. It is a correspondence with an architect I have been working with. This is going to be the second edition of the pamphlet series. I also had the idea of including some jazz music in the show that a friend of mine, a jazz musician, composed specifically for this project.

Read the full interview here.

Euridice Kala. A Conversation I, Entre-de-Lado, 2013. Courtesy of the Artist and C&.

C&: What were the artistic influences that you experienced growing up?

Euridice Kala: My childhood was a training ground for what I do now. Although my mother, Ana Arrone, was not an artist herself, she exposed me to art. She would bring me books to read, musicians to listen to—she was a reference for the tastes I developed in music and for my visual preferences. She would talk about how young people were feeding their thirst for culture, music, and art in the early days of independence in Mozambique. We listened to Bob Marley, Kool and the Gang, [Queen’s] Freddie Mercury, Prince, and many others. She was able to provide me with an entire world to which I would escape whenever the real world became too rough or too stale. And this entry into a trans-cultural space and language has influenced the manner in which I am approaching life. Although she passed away in my late teenage years, she was able to instill an insatiable curiosity in me. She was magic…

C&: Your work Will See You in December…Tomorrow portrays a conversation with your grandfather about his memories of colonial Mozambique. What was that like for you? And what kind of stories do you want to tell through the different media you use—from photography to video to performance?

EK: My relationship with my granddad (Armando Arrone) is one that has remained with me over the years. We’ve always been friends and shared football matches and time in his carpenter’s workshop experimenting with wood, while he would tell stories of colonial Mozambique. I am a proxy war child, born during a period that was very challenging for all Mozambicans. Maputo was crowded by UN workers and the country was on the brink of democracy. I have inherited a city and a country that were formed without considering people like me. Our constitution and laws took a long time to develop—such as the legality around same-sex relationships, which was only revised in 2015; or the rape laws that decriminalize the perpetrator if he marries the victim; or, last but not least, the late developments in family law that were, until very recently, governed by the Catholic church. Outdated laws passed during the colonial era still pervade my experience as a Mozambican living today and give me insight into colonial times. The work Will See You in December…Tomorrow mirrors these connections with our colonial history and explores what has been unconsciously appropriated or adopted into our national constructs.

Continue reading the conversation here.

Tabita Rezaire. Portrait from Cunty Party. Courtesy of the Artist and C&.

An Paenhuysen: You call yourself a “warrior–healer.” Could you tell us a little about the wounds you’re healing with your art?

Tabita Rezaire: Survival hurts, for every conscious being. Yet, for some it’s harder as the society they live in devaluates their existence or consistently persecutes their lives. Internalized and accumulated pains from generational, ancestral, or experienced traumas make one’s ability to navigate the world a struggle. These traumas may manifest in different ways, but I believe they all stem from severe disconnections. We are disconnected from the earth, from each other, from our own selves, and from the universe. A warrior–healer is seeking to restore energetic balance on all those levels. Because fighting alone is consuming and draining, if you don’t have tools to nurture your energies you’ll burn out.

AP: The mind-spirit-body pollution inflicted through White Western dominance is a topic in your work on all levels: from visual language to food. Yet your major focus and tool is the internet. Why?

TR: Well it isn’t, I just get asked about this more. All realms of our realities need to be decolonized. Because it is our health that needs to be politicized. And our health is equally threatened by our diet, the shaming of our cultures, the fetishization of our bodies, the murders of our siblings, and the technologies that we use. I don’t impose a hierarchy on what needs to be dismantled. It is the whole colonial-capitalist-patriarchal-scientific-technological-medical-penal-educational complex that needs to be taken down. For this to happen, we need to reconnect and decolonize on all levels and become response-able. That is a commitment and a long journey: Healing takes time. Healing is hard. Healing hurts. And it is not linear. We’ll collapse again and again, but each time we’ll be able to deal better with what’s to come.

Read the full conversation here.

Taus Makhacheva. Delinking, 2011; three color photographs; installation view at Sharjah Biennial 11. Courtesy of the Artist, Laura Bulian Gallery, and Sharjah Art Foundation.

C&: Decolonial aesthetics is a concept you have developed in the process of your reflections and work. How did this come about?

Walter Mignolo: First of all, this one, as any concept of the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality collective project, is a consequence of collective conversations. It was introduced in the conversation by Adolfo Alban Achinte, perhaps toward 2003, when he was still a PhD candidate at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito, Ecuador. It came out of conversations on the colonial matrix of power: What is the place of aesthetics in the colonial matrix? We have been talking about coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being, political and economic coloniality, or coloniality of religion trapping spirituality, coloniality of gender and sexuality, coloniality of ethnicity (from which racism sprung). But we had not yet touched aesthetics. And the reason was that none of us up to that point were artists or art historians or art critics. But Adolfo was, being an artist and activist from the Colombian Pacific, Afro-Colombian.

It was in the summer of 2009 that the issue exploded. At that point Adolfo was already the assistant to the director of the program, Catherine Walsh. I have been a professor and collaborator of Catherine Walsh since the beginning of the PhD program. Pedro Pablo Gómez, from the School of Fine Arts in Bogotá, was working on his PhD but was also the general editor of a new publication, CALLE 14. Revista de Investigacion en el Campo del Arte (“STREET 14. Journal of Investigation in the Field of Art”). He invited me to write an article for the journal. The article. “Aesthesis Decolonial.” was published in March of 2010. But, while the article was in production (I finished it in the fall of 2009), Pedro Pablo suggested to co-curate an exhibit-cum-workshop with the title “Estéticas Descoloniales” (“Decolonial Aesthetics”). The subtitle became, in the process, “Sentir, Pensar y Hacer en Abya-Yala” (“Sensing, Thinking, and Doing in Abya Yala”). We emphasized “sensing, thinking, and doing,” breaking away from the European 18th-century distinction and hierarchy between “knowing, rationality” and “sensing, emotions.” Meanwhile, Adolfo was in Argentina participating in a workshop organized by Zulma Palermo, in Salta, a member of the collective. Zulma was also working with some of her colleagues and students on the question of an aesthetics/aesthesis.

What is crucial to keep in mind is that “coloniality” and all the concepts we have introduced since then are concepts whose point of origination is not in Europe but in “the Third World.” That means that all these concepts emerge from the experience of coloniality in the Americas. Entangled with modernity to be sure, but no longer “applying” European-born categories to “understand” colonial legacies. On the contrary, we have converted Europe into a domain of analysis rather than a provider of “cultural and epistemic resources.”

Continue reading the interview here.

Zina Saro-Wiwa. The Invisible Man, 2015. Courtesy of the Artist and C&.

Artur Walther: We have known each other for over fifteen years. You have a long history as a curator, a writer, a scholar, and a teacher. You have made significant contributions to the study of modern and contemporary African art—and African photography and video art in particular. How do you conceptualize your own personal trajectory in relation to the development of these fields?

Okwui Enwezor: Often histories converge, intertwine, diverge, and move in different directions. The development of contemporary art and contemporary African art—and photography and video specifically—has similarly moved in a non-chronological, non-linear fashion. As with any field of study, new ideas emerge and new research illuminates gaps in our information, and provoke new readings, considerations, and revisions. All of this is part and parcel of why one remains engaged and interested in a set 
of ideas, as well as the underlying principles around which these ideas are formed.

Walther: How did you begin in the field? When would you say the critical mass started developing?

Enwezor: Well, let’s think about it this way—about twenty-five years ago, if one were to pursue a frame for African photography, you would have found very little that specifically relates to photography as an autonomous practice. Photography in relation to Africa was oftentimes assigned to the terrain of the ethnography, as documents providing secondary information to more primary information observed in the field. Photography was seen to be an aid to the art, not particularly a part of practice. What I believe, without making any claims of who did it first, is that in the 1990s, a generation of curators, writers, and thinkers who were Africans—and I want to underscore this—made a bid to shift completely away from this ethnographic lens, and its spotlight. We found that the way that this lens thought of Africa was completely at odds with the content.

Read the complete interview here.

Image courtesy of Contemptorary.

Emmett Till is dead. I don’t know why he can’t just stay dead. – Roy Bryant

This is what our dying looks like. – Jericho Brown

What can one say, in response to Dana Schutz’s Open Casket? To say even this, out loud, would sound, without further inquiry, like a reference to a funeral service, a wake, or a viewing. To say this loudly, while out and about, before the uninitiated or uninformed, would sound like a question about a eulogy for the artist. No color, no texture, no context, no points or lines or planes in the medium of the vast space-time continuum. What was the cause? They would ask that, among other things, because they would care about all of the above. They would care even if they only overheard the opening question: How to speak well of the dead?

Emmett Till, a fourteen-year old black boy from Chicago, was abducted, tortured, and killed in Money, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955, by two local White men. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam (and perhaps others) murdered and mutilated him and attempted to disappear his body in the Tallahatchie River. The violence done to him was not unique, but its meaning and significance, its symbolic and material force, may be uniquely obscure. Till has been the subject of voluminous literary and artistic output among African Americans over the last half-century or so, much as an accompaniment to the Black freedom movement that Till’s martyrdom, as it came to be known, would help catalyze.

Read the full review here.

Image courtesy of Contemptorary.

1.

Despite my disdain for predictability and repetitiveness, I have found myself starting all correspondences with friends and loved ones with the same greeting:

I hope you are surrounded with lots of love and support amidst fascism!

Although I am aware that no amount of love or support may protect one from fascism, I find that starting in this way sets the tone for an acknowledgement of the climate where, as a friend once said, “how are you?” is no longer pertinent.

I wish you the same here as well, although I don’t believe some of you, some of us, are exempt from having contributed to the creation of either this regime or the desire for it. I have previously spent long periods of time in limbos of visa and immigration processes, waiting for decisions to be made for me. This one, though, doesn’t feel any more comfortable than the many I experienced to gain the “alien” status I was granted in this country.

Continue reading the essay here.

Ana Mendieta. Volcán, 1979 (still). From Bhanu Kapil’s blog post on September 20, 2016, with caption: “This image comes closest to what I could not speak in Ban.”

contemptorary: How have you, and do you, wrestle with the power of the savior narratives of The Artist?

Bhanu:

To pre-empt the sacrifice with the auto-sacrifice.

To become the meat in advance.

Or to note the feeling that you are meat.

In the corridor.

To say aloud as you exit the building, which is often a university building: “I am the meat.”

To delete the book in its final stages.

Delete, delete, click.

Update: in the corridor, I involuntarily growled.  I growled like a tiger, faintly so.

Update: I just came from Philadelphia, where I gave a reading at Penn Sound, introduced by the poet–scholar Lucas de Lima. Because I cannot pretend anymore that anything is okay, I couldn’t begin. It was a terrible moment. A moment that I couldn’t integrate and that I understood that I would pay the price for on the aeroplane, as a dump of shame: “I am bad,” versus “I did a bad thing” (guilt) a la the Brene [this should be accented but I can’t figure out how to do that in google docs] Brown TED talk my co-teacher for First Year Seminar recently screened. My only solutions were to look only at Lucas, and then, because I have vowed never to leave a stage feeling ashamed. I recollect a performance I gave at my workplace in 2005, after which my White male colleagues and their wives or ex-wives in the front row of the theater—did not clap. They looked away and down as I got off the stage. And I calmly floated out of the large space with about 100 people in it, perhaps more, to the hotel room the university had booked nearby, as it was a festival, and late at night. And I lay down on the bed and I throbbed lightly, excruciated by this other writing of the body, by having sung to them, by having worn a sari so beautiful that had been stitched with real silver and gold in Pakistan then smuggled back to India. Or perhaps at that time I had not formed or honed my hybrid form to be a healing one, one that would return to a White audience their feeling, too, of being animals, because they like that stuff.

Read the full conversation here. 

Codex, 2017. Courtesy of Mari Matsuda. Photo: Reese Kato.

contemptorary: We are so grateful for your existence and presence in the world. We have been avid readers of your critical race and legal scholarship—and we were so excited to learn that you also have an art practice. We were curious what the field or the practice has offered you. So we wanted to ask you about your legal studies and art relationship—there seems to be a small tradition in which legal experts take up (and take apart) representation; we’re thinking, NourbeSe Philip as the most contemptorary example.

Walter Benjamin describes the necessity of “The Author as Producer”—where the writer of the photograph not only provides the captions and the text, but the labor involved in photography in order to unsettle artistic categories and remain in solidarity against the function of management. Is this how you might describe the dynamics between your legal scholarship, your theoretical work, and your art practice: as an undertaking that unsettles labor and author categories?

Mari Matsuda: No one has ever opened an interview with me expressing gratitude for my existence. Blessings to you for your existence as radical women art and idea generators.

Poet lawyers abound—Elizabeth Alexander, Pauli Murray—some of my absolute favorites. Many of us chose law because it is a tool for justice. A problematic tool, but not one to dismiss lightly. Critical race theorists came to understand law as an ideological support system for inequalities of all kinds. Law allocates wealth, power, life itself. As Woody Guthrie said, some kill you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen. Understanding how law worked as an ideological system, what lies it told, how the lies seduced, how they were resisted, was our work.

Entering the art conversation late, I find art questions are basically the same as law questions. Like Walter Benjamin, I don’t see aesthetic value as separate from value in the human struggle for just and beautiful lives. My art making is not so much what you are calling unsettling categories (although it ends up doing that) as it is taking sides.

It is no surprise to me that women who are warriors in law would also make poems, or that the anti-racist historian Nell Painter switched to art. The project doesn’t change. It is about describing a world inhabited by humans, with all its pain and all its possibility.

Read the full conversation here.

FEMelanin. Bedtime Stories of White Supremacy; performance stills, November 15, 2015, at Mana Contemporary, Chicago.

First, we must name this phenomenon that keeps popping up in our social-media feeds: the idea that the lived experiences and perspectives of historically marginalized people pose an existential threat to the foundational values of liberal democracy, freedom, and culture. Let’s call it “Dominant Culture Persecution Complex.” We see it on the Left when Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine, laments the return of the “language police,” who supposedly enforced an anonymous code of proper, non-racist or non-sexist conduct in the 1980s and ’90s before “going into remission.” Now they’re back, and Chait catalogs what he perceives as restrictions on “free speech” from the academe to Twitter and other social-media platforms.

In this respect, the Right is in agreement with the Left. On his widely read blog The Dish, commentator Andrew Sullivan is equally aghast at the “extreme identity politics” of responses to Chait’s essay. “Freedom of speech” is repeatedly invoked, even though, for all the deeply problematic metaphorizing of “policing,” marginalized groups are not in structural or state positions of power to enforce censorship. The authors assume that the default White-dominant culture’s status quo should enjoy protected status, and the mere expression of other perspectives is an affront to the founding principles of the U.S. Constitution.

Read the full article here.

Apollo Insurance

Apollo Insurance is in Highland Park, a Los Angeles neighborhood, which in the last five to ten years has gone through the predictable ramifications of neoliberal gentrification—all as blandly expected as the redevelopment.

As related to me by a grad student whose thesis contradicts his implicit participation within the stealth neighborhood high-jacking: “Art students run the streets, zip to MFA programs in energy cars, coffee shops serve something called a ‘flat white,’ and families living in houses across three generations are forced out to ____? to accommodate web-series writers, leftist intellectuals, x-Eurozone artists, and architects with midcentury furniture.”

Apollo Insurance offers low-cost auto and home insurance. When the DP rolls by on his skateboard for a rigged dolly shot, a man inside wakes up, opens one eye wide, and shuts the door. Potentially a money laundering front, it will be at least a half-decade until its actual owners succumb and realize at a porn factory somewhere in the Valley that the building itself presents a worthy profit.

Insurance: a means of protection from loss.

Read the full text here.

1. Rewind

Former CIA official Cofer Black jump-started the use of medievalisms in relation to the War on Terror when he swore to Russian officials in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: “We’re going to kill them. We’re going to put their heads on sticks.” Shortly after, Bush’s unscripted speech on September 16, 2001, at Camp 73 Davis about the “crusade—this war on terrorism” was confirmed by Bin Laden within a month:

This is a recurring war. The original crusade brought Richard [the Lionhearted] from Britain, Louis from France, and Barbarus from Germany. Today the crusading countries rushed as soon as Bush raised the cross. They accepted the rule of the cross.

Medieval scholar Bruce Holsinger notes that one of the dangers of post-9/11 medievalism is that it oversimplifies an incredibly nuanced conflict by weighing the antimodern medievalists of the Middle East against the forward-thinking and modern West. And while the Bush administration initially identified itself within this medievalism, language was quickly twisted to outcast and vilify a “technologically sophisticated band of medieval barbarians,” whose backward ways could only be defeated by the neomedievalism of the West. Because, in the words of former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, unlike “these barbaric, medieval types in ISIL,” whose shrewd use of social media is said to revive 7th-century conquests in the name of Islam, the West claims not to impose Western values but to fight against a historical regression. Like Bush, Obama has been explicit in his struggle to advance Western democratic views as irrefutable universal values. Shortly after the Paris attacks on November 13, 2015, Obama announced:

Once again, we’ve seen an outrageous attempt to terrorize innocent civilians. This is an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.

Read the full text here.

When It Hurts So Bad

As someone who is constantly falling in love, whether it is reciprocated or not, I can assure you that being in love is just as tortuous as those times when I am not in love. It’s basically like all the same shit, always. And that’s not my heartfelt sentimentality finally giving way to cynicism. No, it’s just the actual reality of things. All things have a little bit of good and a little bit of bad. Some things are more good than bad, and vice versa, but when it comes to love, it is all completely insane, and it is the one thing that will start and end a war all in the same breath.

I just bought the new Alabama Shakes album, Sound and Color, and overdrafted my bank account for it because their last album, Boys & Girls, was kind of another love/love lost anthem for me. And from what little I heard of this new album, I knew it was going to be a good follow-up—the perfect soundtrack to this current moment. Maybe I should just put art on hold and start writing music again.

Did you know that before going to art school, I pursued a music career? I played open mic gigs and coffee shops, stuff like that. Played my acoustic guitar on the streets and subway platforms à la Tracy Chapman circa whenever that was. In any case, I don’t even know who that person is anymore, but it was totally real, and I was so 100% all about it. Maybe love is kind of like that: So real when you’re in it, but looking back, you’re like “LOL, bye.” Like the studio apartment you shared with your boyfriend when you were 22 years old, not quite a child anymore but barely an adult, still referring to him as your “friend” when your mom asks through the phone, “Who’s that?”

Continue reading the essay here.