“I found myself with 15 years of Western painting and art history studies under my belt, but suddenly realized that my own autobiography was more important to me than the 400 years of Western painting history that I had learned. I urgently wanted to figure out a way to abandon that conceptual sphere and to find something concrete that mattered to me.”
Alexandra Giniger interviews Jacolby Satterwhite.
THE TRIPLE-POST-MODERNISM OF JACOLBY SATTERWHITE
Vibrations of the Outer Cosmic World
While walking through Soho late one night, exhausted from the multitudinous art openings that sparkle as the City’s stars, I heard a loud, explosive, “bang” from behind the floor-to-ceiling glass window of a small, store-front space. A seemingly external force drew me to investigate, and I soon found myself transfixed. Previously on the verge of sleep, I awoke, refreshed and reborn, inside of the experimental world and mind of the much talked about, more-than-performance artist, Jacolby Satterwhite. Satterwhite was in residency at Recess, the experimental studio/ exhibition space, and I had stumbled upon a workshopping session for his new piece, Grey Lines, part of The Matriarch’s Rhapsody series. Wallpapering the space were hundreds of pencil drawings – different scenarios and plans for the future – and each visitor was asked to select one work and enact it, in the now, in front of a camera and a green screen. Try as the aliens to Satterwhite’s world did, no one could embody each scenario and enact the potential in the present like the artist himself. Completely unpossessed and unaware of the building crowd, Satterwhite seamlessly danced and moved on, an extraterrestrial being descending upon our present, to guide us towards what might be: a new, Afrofuturist planet being formed before our eyes.
Jacolby & I caught up in a Harlem speakeasy, over the soundtrack of saxophone…
Jacolby Satterwhite, The Matriarch’s Rhapsody (still), 2013.
Courtesy of the Artist and Monya Rowe Gallery, New York.
Alexandra
When I first viewed the drawings hanging on the Recess walls, I assumed that they had emanated from your mind and had been drawn by your hand. As it turns out, these drawings are some of the hundreds continually produced by your mother, which you not only bring to present life, but also endow with an immortal future through your art. Did you always view you mother’s drawings as belonging to the world of fine art, and when did you decide to include her work in your practice? Further, at what point did you feel the urge to embody your mother’s concepts physically, thus bringing them to the immediate consciousness of your artistic audience?
Jacolby
When I was a child, I witnessed my mother creating her drawings and I was amused at the idea of them representing an entrepreneurial venture, or adventure. I told teachers at school that my mom was making all of these drawings for the Home Shopping Network and for QVC, and I was incredibly inspired by the idea of her taking an independent role in our household through a very raw, essential and stripped down place. That was very interesting to me. I studied drawing as a 7-year by copying manga comics and anime, and eventually my mother allowed me to assist her and to use her materials and crayons. As I became more sophisticated with my skill set, I deviated into my own painting studies. When I matured into adolescence, I decided to go to boarding school to study art and then continued to undergrad and grad school, at MICA and UPenn, respectively. I found myself with 15 years of Western painting and art history studies under my belt, but suddenly realized that my own autobiography was more important to me than the 400 years of Western painting history that I had learned. I urgently wanted to figure out a way to abandon that conceptual sphere and to find something concrete that mattered to me.
My artistic process at the time was based on a crisis with paintings, an obsession with politics and the black body, the white body, the Asian body; and my work just became so post-structuralist. Instead, I wanted to find something that was completely fragmented to work with, which turned out to be my own autobiography. So that’s when I decided that my mother’s work was important – when I looked at her drawings and realized they were really sophisticated and very beautiful. I began to see, as I was carrying her drawings around, that they were made from a place that was necessary and a place that allowed her to survive. I wanted to find a way to have a relationship with art in the way that she did. The body is something that you have a full and personal autonomy over, so I began to experiment with performance art. I wanted to figure out a way to use her drawings as performance scores, and eventually, through a lot of failure, trial, and error, I came across a few animation processes that allowed me to trace and construct her drawings in a 3D sphere and so create arenas within which I could perform. That’s how it all came to fruition.
Jacolby Satterwhite, Reifying Desire 4 (still), 2013.
Courtesy of the Artist and Monya Rowe Gallery, New York.
Alexandra
These drawings by your mother, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, are acutely familiar to you, having been a part of your everyday life from a very young age. Yet, by dissecting and then expanding these formerly familiar objects and imagery, you make them unfamiliar to yourself and to your audience. Through this act, you are able to draw out new meaning and envision a future galaxy from your own and your mother’s lived and collective past. Do you feel that your work embodies the Afrofuturist movement in that you take your mothers’ plans and diagrams for her “American Dream” and both imbue them with possibility and ground them in [sur]reality? Why do you feel that her entrepreneurial inventions can only see life within a cyborg and space-like, animated world?
Jacolby Satterwhite, Country Ball 1989—2012 (still), 2012
HD digital video and 3-D animation
Courtesy the artist.
Jacolby
Through desperation, a part of your soul comes through, a part of your id, a part of your psychology. I’m not didactic in my work, but I am a surrealist. I strive to operate from that arena. To me, reification, the process of going from a place that is completely empty and making it concrete, is all about honesty. Honesty comes from allowing yourself the process of trying to merge things together that don’t necessarily seem to belong. That’s why I chose to title my work, Reifying Desire. My mother’s drawings are usually abstract, and crystalline, and sometimes completely confusing, and I’m trying to make them real. I’m trying to make sense out of them through repurposing her work. The process of communicating with ideas and objects and bodies and space, and then making further content out of these things, is actually the realization of an alternative universe.
I think the main motif of my work is incongruency. My work is where symmetry does not exist. I’m trying to force things to find some kind of alignment, no matter how asymmetrical they are, and to make abstraction concrete through reification. My mother’s drawings are a good fraction of my work, but so are the live bodies that I’ve outsourced and the live performances that I have archived. I take these incongruent archives and force them together to make narratives, to make content. When I stitch things together within these otherworldly spaces that I create, politics and desires, all that weird id stuff, becomes revealed.
Alexandra
You identify your art as “queer,” but not necessarily in the straight-forward sense of the term that one might expect. To you, queer embodies everything non-mainstream, non-normative. Your work brings to mind a quotation by Sun Ra: “Subtle Living Equations/Clear only to those/ Who wish to be attuned/ To the vibrations of the Outer Cosmic Worlds.”[1]
Jacolby Satterwhite, Country Ball 1989—2012 (still), 2012
HD digital video and 3-D animation
Courtesy the artist.
Is it a challenge to operate as an outsider within the Western world of the culturally, or racially “normative” art world elite? Do you find it paradoxical to present your solutions for an outsider world within a context that would not be inclined to pay attention to such “vibrations,” and whose world does not necessitate the creation of these alternate future universes?
Jacolby
Queerness for me is not sexual. It’s about otherness; and otherness is relative. I think more about phenomenology and animism – the spirit of the object and the spirit of the space. When I think about queerness, I think about how we really dissect the poetic relationship between the individual being an object and the individual existing in space. I feel like as human beings, we are content, we are objects, and we are spatial parameters, in the same formalistic nature that makes up painting, sculpture, shapes, lines, and planes. As a post-modernist, I think about subjectivity in that way – bodies, names and people, identities and sexualities, all as formalist properties. And I guess because I’m a millennial child, I think about data in my work too. I think about it all in a cold, somewhat scientific way. Even my relationship with my mother and my family and my art – I have a non-objective relationship with the content. I’m just trying to make a really beautiful crystal.
Jacolby Satterwhite, Reifying Desire: Model It (performance still), 2013.
2-channel video installation; painted wooden platform, spandex catsuit and live performance. Dimensions variable.
Courtesy the artist and Monya Rowe Gallery, New York. Installation shot: Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo: Scott Rudd.
So that’s what I mean by queer, is that I don’t see things as belonging to the real world or to the normative world, or to the heterosexual world, or to the United States, or to the Earth. I just think about everything as very empty objects that have a politic. But the politic for me is that I have a certain removal.
Alexandra
The complex nature of performance art that is meant to be exhibited in a space for a prolonged period of time, begs the question: how does one make the audience aware of the extremely important presence of the artist’s body, even when the artist is not physically present? You seem to do an excellent job of this, both through your video and installation work that is an integral backdrop to your performances, and also through the items used in your performances and which are then left behind. I am specifically reminded of your piece in the Studio Museum’s Fore exhibition. I was not fortunate enough to see you perform in the space, but your presence was still made absolutely clear by the empty bodysuit draped in front of the video work, which made the viewer crave for someone to fill it. Can you speak more about how the performance artist chooses to imbue the space with his presence beyond the moment when he is in the room?
Jacolby
With Fore, I wanted to express how I consider my body as a sculptural object. I think of myself as a social sculpture. I performed, durationally, six hours per week at the exhibition. And I love the costume because it showed the rawness of the blood, and the sweat, and the scars, and the spandex ripping. Having the costume vacant and empty on the platform was a relic of every time I entered the costume and gave it marks and gave it sweat and gave it history; almost like an abstract expressionist painting, where it’s all about the evidence of the body. When you think about de Kooning and Pollock and the time during which late Modernism was dawning, everyone was thinking about the body being the most Modernist space. I’m the Triple Post-Modernist of that movement. My performance strategy is such that every time I perform, my sweat, my marks, the holes on the platform, will leave evidence of my body. The performance will also be mediated by the virtual space I performed in, expressed by my video work. In a way, I’m just trying to fragment the language of performance. It’s not about a staged, linear experience. It’s more about the material – a very disparate material that involves the triangulation between live performance, relics of performance, and the documentation of a performance. It’s about then using all these essences of performance to make one unified, sculptural moment. That was what Fore was about.
And… that’s my story!
Jacolby Satterwhite received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, after graduating with a BFA from Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art in 2008. He has participated in several residencies, including at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Fine Arts Work Center, and Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Monya Rowe Gallery, Radical Presence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and New Frontier at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Satterwhite was selected to participate in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, on view through May 25.
Jacolby Satterwhite, Reifying Desire: Model It (performance still), 2013.
2-channel video installation; painted wooden platform, spandex catsuit and live performance. Dimensions variable.
Courtesy the artist and Monya Rowe Gallery, New York. Installation shot: Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo: Scott Rudd.
Alexandra Giniger holds a Master’s degree in Art & Museum Studies from Georgetown University, with a focus on Modern and Contemporary Art & Business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. Her writing has been published in ArtSlant, Studio Magazine, and GLXY Magazine (forthcoming). She currently manages the Brooklyn-based studios of Wangechi Mutu.
[1] Sun Ra, “Cosmic Equations”.