1. I'm leaving in the morning for Atlanta again, so I don't have as much time to post as I'd like. This time I am driving.

2. Sorry the comment links are still off. I'll try putting them back on soon and see if the spam comes back.

3. Many criticisms have been leveled at me and at the Carbonist School. One of the recurring themes is some version of: "You should just go and do your thing. Why make an issue of it? If people don't get it, who cares?" I care. I care a lot. I became an artist not to wrap myself in a solipsistic language of personal sublime radiance. I became an artist to communicate and connect with as many people as I can effectively do. To me that means speaking languages people understand, and if they don't understand it, I either change the language or the context. Either way, it still means engagement, which is sometimes messy and sometimes doesn't go the way you want it to. That said, it's still worth it to me. (above, the 3rd printing of the Carbonist School Manifesto--all these copies have been spoken for and I'll have to print new ones when I get back!)

Last weekend's "After Afrofuturism" talk in Minneapolis went well. The room was freezing, though I seemed to be the only one shivering. Without central heat--or well, any kind of heat--The Soap Factory can only schedule shows from April through October. I find this funny, almost quaint as so few human activities are tied to natural cycles anymore--at least in this part of the world.

This talk was the first time Cauleen and I had presented any of our post-Afrofuturist thoughts in public, although word about the substance of the talk had been circulating on the Internet a little bit for a few weeks before. So anyone paying attention knew what to expect.

I was glad to get our ideas off the kitchen table and into the public sphere. Of course, I saw the main objections coming from a mile away; the nationlists become anxious over the idea of art that won't behave as good political art should.

That there might be art made by a black artist that resists, or even openly defies a narrow political use, is a scary thought to some folks, one that reeks to them of naivete at best and betrayal at worst. And they might be right.

Or they might be wrong. Either way it's wild territory, visited more and more frequently, but still not very well mapped.

A few people kept asking in different variations: "How can your art be put to political use?" And I kept saying in different variations, "It can't; at least not in the service of a political philosophy born 40 years ago." But I guess that's my main point: our social realities have changed and will keep changing. The art we make today has to reflect the reality of today, as complicated, messy, paradoxical, disorienting, and multilayered as that is.

One of the topics I'll be covering in my presentation at the Afrofuturism show on Saturday is the paradox of creating a black subjectivity in art that is central and yet not overdetermined. The typical catch-22 for the black artist is either to avoid any racialized subject at all (see Jerald Ieans or Julie Mehretu) or to risk having one's work be received as serviceable to an understanding of identity--and identity alone--and therefore reduced to a mere political slogan or form of protest art. This art, read as identity-obsessed, then gets separated from the wheat of "pure art" like so much chaff.

I'm leaving aside artists like Michael Ray Charles whose work pretty much does begin and end with identity interrogation. I'm interested instead in a growing cadre of artists--say, a Lamar Peterson or a Laylah Ali--whose work puts black subjectivity visibly at its center, but emphatically not just as a vehicle for wrangling identity politics. In other words, the articulated presence of blackness does not foreclose on other readings of the work.

This strategy is something black artists typically have to think a great deal about in order to succeed at it. It doesn't just happen. As a way of understanding the problem, I considered its opposite. That is to say, what about the myriad white artists who explore whiteness in their work, where whiteness is central and indispensable and yet which fact is usually overlooked in favor of other critical readings? Take Cindy Sherman:

At bottom, Sherman's work hinges on an exploration of whiteness, its myriad forms, its very flexibility to wear different kinds of psychological and historical drag without hinderance. Yet the work is rarely (ever?) discussed in those terms.

A few others:

Jack Pierson


Christian Holstad


The whiteness of these subjects is not incidental; it is absolutely necessary to the meaning and success of the work. Same with Delia Brown (who does by the way sometimes feature black subjects as an interesting counterpoint to her white subjects):



and Tim Gardner


My informed guess is that these artists did not at any point have to think consciously in terms of "strategy" to make this multiplicity of readings possible. The history of representation already works in their favor to make it happen without effort. The identity of whiteness functions as a breaker switch; it shuts itself off automatically when it gets overloaded and reverts to a customary neutral position. Black artists do not have this luxury.

This problem is not limited to black artists, of course; any artist with a so-called marked identity has to deal with this to a lesser or greater extent: Latino artists, women, gays and lesbians, poor people...all the typical ingredients from the multi-culti salad.

Cauleen, Lanneau, Bea and I formed The Carbonist School as a forum in which to share solutions to this problem. A think tank for getting around the dialectic of over- and under-presence. A rubric by which to posit our own universality and flexibility, which white (and male and straight) artists have been claiming as their birthright for centuries. This is why The Carbonist School be.

Going crazy preparing for the talk at the closing of the Afrofuturism show in Minneapolis. I've finally nailed down a hook 3 days before the presentation: my starting point will be to discuss some of the difficulties in editing Electric Skin as I kept running into the question of "what counts as black art?" Does it have to do with the artist's identity? The content? The formal qualities? The target was always moving.

They are the same questions that ultimately point to the need for a more sophisticated analysis of race and art, or at least of blackness and art. The same questions that gave rise to the Carbonist School that Cauleen, Bea, Lanneau and I founded, which is designed to be a rubric for exploring possible answers to those questions.

So this talk is also supposed to serve as an unofficial coming out party for the Carbonist School to the world. I'm nervous about that as we have yet to put together the physical documents we wanted to have ready.

All this, and I'm trying to work on buying that house in Atlanta at the same time--and of course, moving across state lines.

Andrea, my studio mate, tells me that some people have been in our studio to look at her work and several have commented on the small tower drawings I have hanging around, the sketches that are designed to accomplish almost nothing artistically, except work out some ideas. If I could get my head around selling those, I probably would. But God am I far away from that at the moment.

Right here, right now:
Clive Barker's Hyperkind. Not because it's good, but because it happens to be lying around.

Knot Frum Hear: Slipping Through the Perception Gaps, D. Scot Miller's micro-novella.

The Global Brain Awakens: Our Next Evolutionary Leap

Futurefarmers, aesthetic exuberance

Ed Tufte, sublime information.

FMLS listings, Georgia real estate

Mike Krone at Concordia University, more sublime information.

e-mail, specifically Alex's epistles from West Africa (left, Napoleon's March from Ed Tufte's "Visual Display of Qualitative Information.")

When we pick up our story, we find our hero sitting at a desk across from the smiley mortgage loan officer, surrounded by carefully prepared piles of financial documents in manila folders. They've been at this for two and a half hours, but forms are being printed now, papers signed. Things are being photocopied and stapled into packets. It feels like the end of something. Or the beginning.

I've been looking for houses online almost nonstop for a week. There are bargains in Atlanta. Starters for under $100K, small plantations at $150K. I imagine owning property and wince, remembering the lessons from last November: you never own stuff--stuff owns you. Kazki lives in two rooms and has never owned a couch.

2 bedrooms seems manageable. Richard tells me there is such a thing as a 1-bedroom house. Really? No, he's crazy. Maybe in Amish country. 2 bedrooms... well, that's not too much. Less roof means fewer places to spring leaks; small floor spaces are easier to cover.

Stuff owns you. This house should be small and immaculate, I decide, and mostly empty, conducive to the study of philosophy and art. After all, it is the physical instantiation of the INFLUX House. And I begin to imagine: the art/philosophy/science thinktank I've been dreaming of for years. A workshop, a Space for impractical dreams to play out.

It suddenly seems possible. It suddenly seems alive with promise. A reality. A dream. The twighlight of a new brand of creativity.

This update is mostly an effort to force search engines to re-index this site and hopefully throw off the spambots with some modifications I made.

Anyhoo, check out this alert. It's a small step toward redressing the complaints of artists who donate work to various charities and end up feeling undervalued (via Noel Robbins).

Posting will be light over the next couple of weeks. I'm feeling especially caught up in studio practice and it feels too good to get out of.

In the meantime, I suppose I should publicly address the rumors: yes, I am moving to Atlanta and soon. When the curator of a major Austin institution brings it up to me in public as a known fact, then I guess it is...well, a known fact. So anyway, the official word is that I'll move in February or March, but it's looking like sooner may happen. It's about time, really it is.