(lively music)
(bass plays)
- I've always resisted the idea
that somehow my practice is archival.
It's about using the material that's available to me,
and that material is incredibly rich material.
(upbeat music)
It's not archival to me any more than the fact that,
you know, when a composer sits down to make a new piece,
the notes are there.
(upbeat music)
Beethoven, Bach, Cecil Taylor, Duke Ellington,
they're not creating new notes,
you know what I mean?
They're sequencing the notes.
(upbeat music continues)
Do they just amplify the same frequency?
It just got louder. (upbeat music)
You know, is it a counterpoint to that frequency?
At its core,
it's just about how do you make a thing of beauty?
(upbeat music)
And a thing of beauty to me is a thing
that you wanna look at.
And then in conjunction with that,
maybe you do other things like say,
"Hey, Black people are human beings too."
(upbeat music continues)
(birds chirp) (traffic passes)
A lot of what I do is just
a kinda structured free association.
"Mickey Mouse was a Scorpio",
it's Mickey Mouse and Damballah
and even though they couldn't be more different
on a certain material level, one is an animation,
the other is a photograph of a witch doctor.
But when you see those two,
it's very clear you're looking at
the same entity in two different iterations.
That's a fundamental thing I'm interested in.
Like, that's sort of very specific
and local big bang that happens when you put one,
I would argue, Black being next to another Black being.
Like, what is engendered by that?
(intense music) (background chatter)
Even the films or the videos are just extensions of that.
It's like, what happens when you do that?
- I know that every person walking this planet.
- [Arthur] And then you do it again.
- Came from a womb and because I have one of those.
- [Arthur] You know, you have one big bang,
you put it next to another big bang
and then another big bang,
then another big bang.
- Bitch, I'm a mother, no drama.
The fact that y'all think that being a woman
is about cosmetics lets me know
that y'all don't know the hell y'all talking to.
(tranquil music)
- And the picture unit is just another way
to sequence images. (tranquil music)
You know, I call it a maze,
but it's less of a maze than a kind of guided tour.
You know, with a certain possibility of
insights into relationships
that wouldn't necessarily be available to you.
(intense music)
As you physically move through it,
you know, if you go forward a step,
you're gonna see another thing
and people just say like, they saw this gruesome image,
and they just like put their head down
and just moved forward,
but only to be confronted with another gruesome image,
you know what I mean?
And the thing about it is like,
they are quote unquote gruesome images in it, for sure.
You see this gruesome scene,
then you see an image with a Black woman
with a piece of wood in her hand.
Like, what's the relationship?
(intense music)
What's the nature of,
you know, absorbing or being subjected to violence?
(intense music)
Every time I open this shit up,
it's just like that is a thing.
So now I'm trying to figure out what to do with it.
I think it's in here.
It may not be in here, but let me see.
I think I put it in here.
That's "Apex".
Now I just basically had a file that had stuff in it,
and then at some point I started putting it in order
and I would just do this while I was talking about it.
And then at some point like,
oh, let's just put it on a timeline
so you don't have to click,
you know what I mean?
(electric music)
"Apex" is about a rock band in the future.
The story happens during the course of the world
as we know it coming to an end.
(electric music)
The so-called fine art space,
it's mostly interesting because it's so flexible,
like in terms of what it is, you know what I mean?
I can't imagine another space
that's better in terms of playing with these sorts of ideas.
(soft music)
I studied architecture at Howard University.
Realized pretty much two years in
that I was ambivalent about that
because it was hard for me to imagine
what it was gonna look like on a day to day.
But my interests very quickly
were consolidated around the idea
that I think initially I understood
as being related to architecture.
You know, and it would be something like,
if Kind of Blue was a house, what would it look like?
Or if Electro Ladyland was a house,
what would it look like?
Using Black music as a preeminent example,
of Black aesthetics in action.
What I've come to understand is that
that impulse to demonstrate the breadth
and complexity of transposing
Black aesthetics to anything you do
is what I was kind of interested in.
If you look at where Afro-American culture is strong,
it is in the spaces of immaterial expressivity.
You know, music, dance, things like that,
things that you could do on your body.
♪ This is a God dream ♪
♪ We on an ultra light beam ♪
- Black people wore raw materials
so the whole notion of making things,
meaning being able to utilize material
wasn't so straightforward.
Black people remake things by using them differently
than they were intended.
The appropriation thing
allowed me to maneuver in a way that made sense
for me as a Black person, given my,
as I pointed out,
relationship to material.
Taking this and putting it next to that
it is like saying I don't have to have material.
I don't have to make material.
I don't have to make anything to make something.
- Yeah, no, I got you, bro. - I'm about to break away.
- No, no, no, I just wanted to come get some love.
That looks great.
- Yeah, it's a, again,
it's a artifact for my alternate universe
because she never had a record, you know.
It's just a still from a video, man.
- [Officer] Turn away.
Walk backwards, keep your hands up in the air.
Keep going.
- [Officer 2] Come on back, come on back.
Keep walking backwards.
- As I like to say,
we are the canaries in the mine shaft
of Western civilization.
Nobody wants to be where we are.
Nobody wants to be Black.
But at the same time,
when they see Black people, almost paradoxically,
we also exist as a kind of emblem of the possibility
of transcending profound constraints.
You know what I mean?
Like everybody has their foot on our neck,
but we constantly stand.
(electric music)
So given we've come through it
and it's generated this thing we call Blackness,
Black music, Black dance, Black life force,
all these kinds of things,
how do we mine that? (electronic music)
It's less that the playing field is uneven for Black people.
It's more like the playing field
is just more complex for Black people.
You know what I mean?
That's an opportunity to contend with a landscape
that's more interesting than a flat landscape.
(mid tempo music)
(piano music)
It is not about, it's a handicap.
It's not a handicap.
It's an opportunity to,
it's so funny, it's like opportunity to levitate.
(slow piano music)
♪ Oh (indistinct) ♪
♪ When you hit that fog ♪
♪ And it'll start for y'all ♪
♪ You say that I know we'll all do well ♪
(slow music)