Black Secret Technology: Coding For Alternative Futures

To initiate this interview with the painter John Singletary, I first asked how he imbues a sense of earnestness and intentionality into his work. He immediately described a method of “coding” his work to reflect an interest in religion and “protection”.

…

DB: I’m interested to hear you talk about coding, because I agree that religion does an extremely good job of codifying  beliefs and ideas visually, and even just in terms of actions and engagement amongst a group of people. So I'm interested to hear why religion interests you and what kind of things you try to integrate into your work by considering religion.

JS: Um, first of all, were your parents religious?

DB: Uh, no, not really. Which is ironic given that I’m from rural North Carolina.

JS: Okay. Damn. That's crazy, bro. <laugh>

Wow, that's so interesting. Um, but yeah, first religion interests me because of my parents. My mom was Baptist. My dad was Pentecostal, his dad was a pastor.  They had such a unique, heavy Christianity. It wasn't an option. That was just so heavy. It was kind of a creative Christianity though and being raised in that, I think just off the jump made me “interested” in it just because it was there.

As I grew up though, I started to try and frame it for myself and trying to understand what religion is for myself. I guess probably in college is when it started happening, but I just like studying other religions and I supplemented that with other folk tales in general. There's this through-line, and at the end of the day it's just beautiful stories. I think the idea of truth kind of started stripping itself away, and that's when I really started to like really fuck with religion for myself. Whatever Christians are today, that large group, they are really, really to a fault, interested in truth or whatever truth is, and that makes it really divisive. And so when I climbed out of that, and just kind of saw everything as– it actually doesn't quite matter if something [in the story] physically occurred or did not physically occur, like day to day, just our perception in general. So I think when I started to think about truth in that way, and, you know, “everything is everything”. Everything's true and untrue, right. I think seeing religion in that way, it was like, “okay, these are just stories and it's not telling me to do anything. It's just telling me stories of human shit”. Like people wrote this, you know what I mean? It's just deeply human writings.

Going back to my dad's father and my grandpa, knowing he was a pastor at a young age, and also knowing that he was abusive, like extremely abusive. That, off the jump, is just something that sticks. So then as I get older, there's just this dichotomy that I fucked with in Christianity in the Bible where these kind of figures that are selected for whatever reason are really fucked up. And they're like really, like, really fucked up. I think about David a lot in the Bible and he's like super fucked and he's super dramatic and emotional and a piece of shit and, and dude, he's just fucking human is what it is.

I think when I started to actually study the Bible instead of reading it religiously. I also started looking at more of black history in America and I got into hoodoo and understanding what hoodoo is and that made me even more interested in Christianity. Hoodoo is like if, using Christianity as the language, black people were able filter the religions that they took from Africa and like siphon it and stuff it into Christianity. So, that's why southern black churches and shit are so much cooler <laugh>. There's all the crazy music and dancing and shouting and like, all that shit's from Hoodoo. Right. And so that's, that got me into like, reading Hoodoo and just all the linkages between all these different religions. But I think in terms of codifying, uh, I think that just naturally happens when people are just being fucking human. When someone passionately writes something, uh, if they like, fully passionately believe in a thing and write about it, whether it's true or false or good or bad, it's fire because it's either a commentary on them as like a soul or it’s informational. All these stories in the Bible are just so sick to me because it's either the flaws of the people in the story or the flaws of the writer.

In terms of coding, I just see it as a way for me to put people or things that I care about and I want to honor and I can kind of stuff them in to Christianity or whatever folk tale I'm thinking about and people will see it and absorb it. It kind of becomes a mirror, rather than them projecting onto my piece.

DB: So that makes me want to talk about my favorite painting of yours. The Elijah and the Seven Trumpets –

JS: Oh word. I have to actually go find which one that is. Is that the Sage or the Chief Keef? Yeah. Yeah, that's Keef.

DB: Yeah. Talk to me about that one. What are you thinking around that work?

JS: Okay, this piece, man, I gotta start writing notes. Off the bat, I was thinking a lot about how this, this goes like deeply into– whatever. Okay. So my, you know my father and he's like this famous black football player. Yeah. Just the concept of being famous and black is so interesting to me. When I was younger, you really only made it if you were a musician or an athlete, and those are like the two places where you're owned – you’re owned and consumed in this very unique manner.

Seeing it with my dad, it was always kind of unsettling. He's a fucking unique, he's a unique human being. When I was younger, it was like, this dude's like a fucking superhero. But then when I saw him around white people, in my subconscious, it was like, you could feel that they feel like they own him, no matter what. So just as I got older, I was able to pinpoint what it was. That concept in general is just really unsettling to me. I've made a lot of pieces with that kind of root.

The emotion of it is essentially this flaying of a black man and, and it's Keef. I wanted it to be just bare, and I wanted it to have the viewer be questioning these things and questioning how you consume black people in general. At this point, I don't know if I'd make a piece like this.

<laugh>

DB: Why not?

JS: Just because of – Okay. Another thing. I was at SAIC and I was doing an interview with this dude for the graduate program, and he saw the Frank piece. He was just this white dude. It was a one-on-one meeting and we were just looking at it together and he was talking about how sexual it was. And so again, I don't think this one is, is coded well enough, and this is something I'm struggling with right now. Like, how much do I care? How much do I have to care?

DB: If people are going to misinterpret it anyway?

JS: Mhmm. <affirmative>  When I know that the black body is gonna be mishandled, how much? Right. Like, no matter what you think, it’ll be mishandled. Right now, I believe there's a way to do both, to have it massively, you know, emotionally impactful for me and also protected.

So this one, I wouldn't do this again, but I like it.

Elijah is someone who in the Bible, he was one of the only people who didn't die and he went to heaven in this chariot, it was like heaven and [the chariot] came down and like took him and went up. So there's two pieces I have that are named after Elijah and the other one is the Sage one. Yeah. And that's what happened in the Sage piece where he’s kind of rising. So you can see in both these pieces where there's this movement in the arms and you can see that they're being lifted. There's this kind of crucifixion relation when you are lifted up and your arms move up. It's playing on this idea of dying and liberation. I think there's a Nina Simone song that I've been listening to a ton and it's on the Nuff Said album. She is basically saying towards the end of the song, and like the fucking crazy fucking crescendo, she's like “in the moment when you die, you know what life is”. You finally are free, the moment you die, you finally know what liberation is. She keeps saying it over and over again. I think that type of sentiment is here with the black celebrities, you know, you're consumed regardless. But, um, I think that there's this moment that can happen where you're liberated from that, even if it's a death of some sort.

DB: So I mean, obviously the first time I saw this was when you tweeted it. That was how I was able to try to avoid “misinterpreting” it, since I had the advantage of knowing you and I could ask you about it on my own time.

JS: Wait, sorry to interrupt. I will say though, everything is right.

DB: It’s not definitive.

JS: Mm-hmm. The definition of this piece is unfinished. Part of what I've tried to learn how to do is is to make it so every possible interpretation is right. So the sexual thing that the dude was talking about, like it's unfortunately fucking right.

<both laugh>

JS: Essentially, yeah. It's my fucking, it's my fault, but he's right. Um, <laugh> and so anyway, continue.

DB: I was just saying that I think just because I knew I had that advantage of engaging with this work with you directly, I was able to appreciate it in a way that I thought would've helped me avoid not doing it its due diligence.

That's how I feel about a lot of work that I like, you know. I'm lucky enough to know a lot of artists whose work I like, so I can kind of choose when and how to engage with it. I don't necessarily need to see it in the gallery. Me retweeting it doesn't have to be the end all be all, which is obviously not the case for the general public.

You were talking about codes and mythologies. I'm interested in what kind of role you think this development of black codes plays in creating either new/alternative futures? There's an album that I really like by A Guy Called Gerald called Black Secret Technology. And it's –

JS: Wait, his name is just Gerald?

DB: A Guy Called Gerald. This is, uh, the full stage name.

JS: It’s so fire.

DB: It’s fire, right? Yeah. He's so sick.  It's like a jungle/drum & bass album.

I think what's been lacking in critical assessment of that album is the idea of the break as kind of functioning, how you say, as a code, and the usage of those breaks in defining an entire genre is a kind of, how he says in a title – It is kind of a black secret technique. It is a secret and interesting world of knowledge that is unbeknownst to others. It comes from the sentiment of “talking drums” from Africa and communicating via drums. We can see that traced all the way down to this album.

So, you know, hearing you talk about codes, I wonder about the utility of codes and how we can put them to the best use.

JS: Coding is so fucking important, especially in this age. Actually, I have to say something first before I go into this . For some reason, I feel so annoying when I do this. I have to say, whenever I talk about my work. What separates like painting from other types of work is the actual paint, and the way you physically interact with the brush and the literal different times that the paint exists on the canvas. So a lot of the meaning is not communicable, I guess. So, which is why I say you can't talk about it necessarily, like in full. It's in the viewer’s or my own mind because it's another language. So I just have to say that's incomplete. Me talking about it is always incomplete because it ignores what the paint is and images that are imbued in the piece itself and trigger the images in your own mind and whatever.

But anyway, coding in the current age, especially – Man, this shit makes me depressed. When I think about how entrenched in surveillance and predictability we are, to have any type of future that's fruitful or to alter the path that we're on, we have to become so good at coding. That's the only way out, if there is a way out.

I think coding in all its forms, in art of course, like what you're talking about now with this drum break, and, I don't know, this fucking magic, you know what I mean?

I think so many musicians are doing that type of shit. MIKE has that type of thing, even though white people fuck with him too, but like, there's a level of [intrinsic relation] to it where you're like, you [white people] know, but you don’t know [the way black audiences do].

I think about him a lot when I'm thinking about coding my work because he, like, you see how much he talks about his mom? Or even has voice recordings of his mother on the album, or on certain tracks. I won't speak on how successful or whatever I think it is, but I do think there's a level of coding there. I don't know how much coding. I feel like I'm kind of consuming too much from her, but I do think that there's allowance from him in putting her there, which is another thing I'm struggling with.

I don't know. I don't know if I think about coding too much. I just think about protection a lot. For how much he puts his mother in there, you can just feel, even if he's not doing something specific to code it, he has such a care and an authenticity that kind of barricades that topic or that subject from being consumed in a negative way.

It's a protection that's there. I don't know how he does it. I think it's just care. It’s just deep care. Yeah. All those voice memos, all this bars about his mom, and the beats that accompany them, there's so much coding there that goes on in a metaphysical level too.

Moving forward in, in any type of insurrectionist type movement or even just a gradual cultural shift or anything like that, the preparation has to be coded. I can shift from here to talk about like, um, gatekeeping is the easy way to say it. Just another form of protection.

The Black Panthers, right? The reading you had to do and the training you had to go through before you were allowed to consider yourself like a black panther. Right. These folks were like smart as fucking –outside of being smart, they were studying actively. Gatekeeping is so necessary. Protection of movements is so necessary. Another thing my dad used to talk to me about because he did a bunch of civil rights things within the NFL, he would just talk about how fucking coonish people would be all the time and like that you have to protect. He probably taught me this to a negative degree, but just how fucked people can be and how quick people can switch on you. If you're having some sort of movement, you have to code it so well, making sure that every step of the way that negative [detrimental] shit can't latch onto what you're doing. Coding is a way of allowing outer layers so that things can just bounce off. In a movement going forward, coding and gatekeeping, for lack of a better term, is so fucking important.

DB: As far as what I was talking about earlier, about supermodernity, it's characterized by an excessive time, but not in a sense that you have too much leisure time. More so in a sense that there's more things that demand our attention. Accelerated history – there's new historical events happening all the time and we're expected to keep up with them. Loss of memory, obviously with historical revisionism. Foreshortened space, which refers specifically to this idea of globalization. Additionally, multiculturalism as a result of developments in technology as far as the internet and whatnot.  So the question I wanted to follow up with, you know, talking about all this gatekeeping – a lot of people I think assume the consumerist definition of gatekeeping in the sense of “Oh, like you don't want me to know about this product” and whatnot. What we're dealing with is a more politically edged gatekeeping in a sense of ensuring community safety. It's annoying honestly because whenever black people talk about this idea of security and gatekeeping, we get met with criticism that is based in the sentiment that multiculturalism and globalization is intrinsically good. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how gatekeeping opposes that, and if you think multiculturalism has any benefits at all.

JS: Damn <laugh>. What a good question. I think, uh, <laugh>, I'll go back and forth on this. I will say shouts to Earl on the multiple truths thing. [Multiculturalism] is amazing and it's horrible at the same time. I guess I could say that because of capitalism, because of mass industry and because of the connection we all have, it becomes, I will say all negative . This is something that I understood first through painting and studying different movements and studying how adoption of culture led to genocide. First people started to travel from Europe to the Middle East. So first came travel, then came this romanticization, and then through that comes art. Right at this point – right between entering into the new space or new world, between that and the creation of art with the inspiration of that place or culture – there. There needs to be the gate because <laugh>, because without that gate romanticization exists and when you leave out the humanity, and you leave out their specific code, or you leave out the entirety of their culture, it gets fucked because they become non-human and they become an object.

So what happened is these people they go, they, they start painting these areas. They paint these things, they take liberties in their paintings and they bring it back and everybody's like, “Damn, that shit's beautiful. We gotta go.” Then they colonize it and fucking murder everybody.

In this industrial era, you can share media so freely and you don't have to study it or like, know about it– you see it. That's pretty much it. I think there's too much erasure that happens. I mean, I hate that fucking word <laugh>, but there's too much erasure that happens there, I guess. It becomes too dangerous. Cultures become eradicated through that. In my ideal world where there's no fucking internet and there's just tiny groups of people, like, I actually don't think it matters that much. But when it comes to physical gentrification and, you know, physical death, that's where it matters, and stuff actually leads up to that. That's when it actually matters.

DB: Because like, like existentially it may not really matter. Right. But it's like, kind of what you pointed out was that behind these things that we can observe visually, as far as, you know, “multiculturalism”, there's always some sort of agenda behind it, totally. I don't know if [consumers] are completely unaware of it. I don't even know that it's necessarily their fault, but the kind of agenda behind these things is hidden in some way, which is how it's supposed to work because it can't quite work otherwise. So behind all these visual cues, there are these capitalistic imperialist agendas that make contemporary multiculturalism, in the form that it is currently, perhaps inherently bad, like you said at the beginning.

While the general like full scope idea of globalization and multiculturalism might not necessarily be intrinsically bad, the way that it's being utilized in the contemporary moment, specifically under supermodernity is in fact bad. I like what you said also about the holding multiple truths in contention. That's also the core of what I'm trying to address in my art praxis manifesto. The way I'm approaching it is based on like the radical flank theory in politics. While I think that it is sometimes a farce, in terms of dealing with artwork, I think that it can be at least a little bit more generative in a sense that I might disagree with a lot of the contemporary uses of post-modernism oriented art practice, I can find utility in it. It doesn't necessarily mean that people who use it are wrong in terms of how they go about their practices, but it also doesn't mean that I'm right. So we have the skill to be able to pick and choose what is generative us and let go of what no longer productive or beneficial to the collective whole.

JS: Yeah, that's a really good point. This conversation is nice because of that base. Like, nothing I'm saying right now is even true. It's all like true and untrue and I can have an opinion on something, but it's definitely like all the shit I say online, all the shit I say in general. The second I sit my foot down, I'm bullshitting. Right. Like immediately <laugh>.

As the web spills over into a different dimension, image production moves way beyond the confines of specialized fields. It becomes mass postproduction in an age of crowd creativity. Today, almost everyone is an artist. We are pitching, phishing, spamming, chain-liking, or mansplaining. We are twitching, tweeting, and toasting as some form of solo relational art, high on dual processing and a smartphone flat rate. Image circulation today works by pimping pixels in orbit via strategic sharing of wacky, neo-tribal, and mostly US-American content. Improbable objects, celebrity cat GIFs, and a jumble of unseen anonymous images proliferate and waft through human bodies via Wi-Fi. One could perhaps think of the results as a new and vital form of folk art, that is if one is prepared to completely overhaul one's definition of folk as well as art. A new form of storytelling using emojis and tweeted rape threats is both creating and tearing apart communities loosely linked by shared attention deficit.

Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art

DB: Hito Steyerl describes the potential for a new form of folk art that is native to the internet. It's kind of hard to decipher how she feels about in from her writings in Duty Free Art. She kind of seems opposed to it because in her words she talks about how in order for internet native folk art to exist, you have to deconstruct your meanings of both “folk” and “art”. Um, and that's kind of where I disagree.

JS: Say that, say that part again.

DB: I’m sorry. Yeah, no worries. In order for internet native folk art to exist, we have to deconstruct our ideas of both “folk” and “art “ in their entireties respectively. I kind of don't agree, at least because in my idea of folk art, it is this kind of localized community that is making work relative to their sociocultural position. When I think about folk art, the first thing that comes to mind, at least for me, just from being from the South, is like when I go to a small ass gallery in rural North Carolina, I expect to see local landscape paintings, paintings with fish and paintings of like, you know, peanut fields and shit. To me that that is folk art, right? <laugh> Yeah.

JS: Yeah, yeah.

Author’s Note: In transcribing this and revisiting the text, I see now that Steyerl is referring to a specific visual culture related to existing online that is different from what me and John are discussing as the culture of artists posting images of what they consider to be art objects online. However, I have chosen to include this part of our conversation because it was interesting, if a bit off-target from the initial textual reference.

DB: Thinking of the work I see online through that lens is – I also wanna steer away from saying that all folk art is “bad” art . I’ve also learned now that I don't think all paintings must have some sort of argument or must have some sort of political agenda, right? So, in learning that I've been trying not to hate so much on the paintings that I see online, but I don't want to infantilize the work by calling it folk art. I want to kind of find a way to celebrate it through this lens of folk art. Right. Even if it’s work I don't like, or if I don't think it has any depth, there’s the possibility of finding value in it through this idea of internet native folk art. As you know, we're both haters, and there's definitely a lot of work on the internet that could be easily written off as lacking depth and certainly lacking political agenda. With that in mind,  I'm interested in hearing your thoughts.

JS: People know that I'm blunt to a degree in certain situations and especially when it comes to artwork. But with my students, the first thing I do – because they haven't really done critique before –  I teach 'em how to do critique. I put up pieces that are traditionally shitty and I will have them tell me genuinely, not as a joke, what is good about this, you know what I mean? Right. Tell me good things about this piece. Then I find works from “masters”, whatever that means, and tell them to do the opposite.

Folk art I think is sick. Especially like when I started teaching kids, uh, I started teaching ages five years old up to like high schoolers. During that time is when I really started to absolutely love folk art in general.I really started to hate traditional artwork. But again, it’s all whatever lens you put on it. If I'm gonna critique somebody, I ask them, “what is your goal for this piece?” I can't critique something in a vacuum. I have to know, like, what do you want?

Because everything can be good. You know what I mean? Every single piece can be amazing depending on where you want it or what you want it to do. Folk art in general, that's how I feel about it. I think <laugh> and I think it's sick for the main reason being, it's for their fucking community. You know? If I could, that's my ideal world is to not have known about other places so deeply and to not have known about other forms of artwork and to be able to have created without being kind – it’s a harsh word –but like tainted by western art norms and a new way of thinking what is good or what is bad.

That was the hardest part about teaching those kids. They were already so fucking good and I had to like, make them bad again too <laugh>, so then they could become [even better]. At first they don't think about if they're good or bad. They're just making artwork, and then you start to train them in a specific manner that says “this is the wrong way.” I try to not do it like this. I have complicated feelings about that. But, in terms of the internet or social media being a new art, I remember you posting something about that. I read it and I was trying to think it through for myself.

Every person in general has, and I don't think they realize this – at least the conversations I've had – have such vastly different ideas for every word, especially in art. Anytime you have a conversation about anything at all, you have to define it for whatever you two are talking about. But there's no greater definition of folk. In general it’s like, communal, small. That's pretty much it. I see social media, like people's [existence] on social media is so like disembodied I think in a broader sense, like of course [Hito Steyerl’s writing] is true because it's a community of people, but you'd have to think of it as a community of people, which I don't necessarily– I don't know. I don't know if those are people like <laugh>. Right. Yeah. I don't know.

DB: Because it's also not like a real community in like the true, meaning of the word. Right. [The group of internet users at large] is just a collection of people and I don't know if that's necessarily a community.

JS: Right. Yeah. Totally. I don't know how much of these people's interests align. It's so vast. I guess in that vastness, you could consider it like a whole community. In your question, I wonder if the next step of the question, like, are you trying to decipher if it's like a good thing, a bad thing or a productive thing, or kind of how to work with that reality? What's your thought process?

DB: I'm less concerned about whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing. I think it can be either neutral or both. It might be something that we can consistently observe, and I chose to use that phrase instead of “true.” One thing I think I've noticed, or like I've attempted to observe and keep track of online with the work that I'm coming across from people that I don't know, is that the work is related in the sense that all of these people exist online. All these people online exist together in a similar way.

It's tangential to the idea of an influencer, right? There's a very specific way that artists behave online, and that is the cultural through-line that brings them all together. So while it might not necessarily be a community of people who are involved in their collective group interest, there is something similar about their mode of existing, specifically online, that impacts both the visual aspects of their work and their behaviors and ideology behind it. In that I find some sort of semblance of folk art.

JS: Right. So, yeah. I agree. I think for mostly worse people have such similar motivations in, I guess posting artwork online or like, uh, that phrase sucks <laugh>, but yeah. <laugh>. In general, unless the artist is like operating mostly offline and just happens to post online, in that case, I think it's a little different.

Everybody's retweets muted. Half my people I'm following are muted. I don't see any work, but, when I did see it, it was all the same. It was all the same language, for sure. You could see that it was the same language.

DB: I think I’m trying to do service to the work in identifying this because I feel like in the grand scheme of like art theory or whatever, or like the fine art hegemony and whatnot, it’s not given attention. You know what I mean? Like you have to be chronically online to really make this observation.

JS: Yeah. <laugh>.

DB: But I think there's something, uh, you know, for the two of us, formerly trained artists, I think there’s something we can get out of it.

JS: Man, I hate, online art and I hate– I mean, of course, again, these statements are void kind of, but digital art in general, it's hard for me just because so much is removed,. There’s no body in. I think that people appreciate it because of that. So, I get that. But yeah, there, it all seems replicative. This is something that I'm going to talk to my students about. I was teaching this drawing course, but now I gotta <laugh> teach like Photoshop inDesign and I do not fucking know anything about InDesign <laugh>.

I wrote this down the other day trying to think about how to talk to 'em about this, but, with digital art, it's perfectly replicable. There's no unique stroke. It’s just absolutely replicable and you can't imbue it. You're so separated from your medium.

DB:  Because you're not the pixel, and you can’t touch the pixel.

JS: Right, right, right. Exactly. And everybody has the same pixels, you know? You're in the same Photoshop or whatever you're using as somebody else, and you got the same fucking colors and you got the same, like, everything to a degree. There’s these limitations– which I do love limitation, but, uh, yeah. That, I can get like an old man about that situation. <laugh>. Seeing the work, it's hard for me to get around to it, like any digital art at all. It doesn't breathe to me.

But I like thinking about it how you mentioned. When you analyze like some sort of text or like religious texts or whatever, you see these people, like the beauty becomes these people online, less so the artwork that I'm seeing. The beauty becomes what they're doing,cthe tragedy of what they're doing. I think that there's a lot of beauty in that. When you see this, you scroll through like a bunch of these pieces, what comes through, probably not what they're wanting to come through, but what comes through is that deep fucking, deeply capitalist crazy sadness that is inherent in making a piece like that, or making a piece online. It's like this deep post-capitalist emptiness and I think that's kind of beautiful.

That does help me appreciate it more, thinking about it in that light. I don't know if I even made a statement right there, but–

DB:  Yeah <laugh>, no, I figured it's just also just something I was thinking about and I was hoping to have gotten some sort of insight. It's definitely worth at least thinking about.

In this Adrian Piper thing that I was reading– the title is Critical Hegemony and Aesthetic Acculturation–she talks about the people who make up the “fine art world”, right. Their formalist interests in terms of what a visual work looks like and how it was produced and how you talk about it and how, well, specifically how [white elites] talk about it and how critics talk about it, and who those critics are even, is informed by their identity and sociocultural status and the socioeconomic framing of the art world in general. Essentially their whiteness is at work.

I was asking you, on my Twitter Circle about like, do we need black art critics essentially? The thing I liked the most about art school, you know, I feel like I talk about it all the time, but the critique environment is just so unique compared to the educational experience of an engineer for example. When I think about all the weird stuff people had me doing in art school and for performance pieces and watching crazy videos and then having to talk about 'em. And I've been thinking a lot about what I think I can offer in the art world outside of music. Um, ‘cuz I don't know if it's something I'm gonna be doing my entire life, which is cool. I also don't know if I'm gonna paint or draw again. Even though I have awards or whatever, they don't really mean much to me. I don’t really think of myself as a great visual artist. I think I can talk about visual culture well, and I know a lot about digital studies for sure. I'm just trying to figure out a way to use my skills in the most effective and generative way. What I'm realizing that my skill is kinda what we're doing now. The exchange of ideas and whatnot.

I just wonder, in relationship to the manifesto, how we can encourage this kind of behavior. Can we take what we're doing now and on a large scale kind of integrate this culture of investigation into our creation of alternative black futures. I wonder what role this mode of investigation plays in both anointing works, criticizing works, and identifying common threads between smaller groups of people within the black community and trying to move forward with that.

So I do wanna double back to what we were talking about on my circle about the idea of the critic. I want to hear more of your thoughts on that. Do you have any ideas on how to achieve what I was talking about as far as this culture of rigorous thought and investigation in black art production and consumption?

JS: I saw a few people at the same time, a few black people on Twitter at the same time kind of craving the same thing. Within like a week. It was like KeiyaA and you and I think it was another person, I don't remember, but all talking about wanting real critique. It's probably easier to say critique, uh, forms of critique rather than a critic. I don't know if a critic is necessary, you know, I don't. That's inherently “someone who critiques.” That’s what they are. That's what they do. I don't know if I need somebody like–

DB: I’m sorry to interrupt, but Adrian Piper kind of addresses that in this paper. Well, she talks about how as an artist in the contemporary fine art world, as a “professional artist”, because of this hegemony you're expected to forego all of your like “critic sensibilities” in order to embrace being a person of artistry. Critics, then, are expected to forego their artistry to embrace their position as purveyors of critique.

JS: Interesting. What do you think about that?

DB: I definitely agree that it is observable and probably true. Yo, I definitely agree with her. It's mostly because of that thing we were talking about earlier about multiple truths. People, we have this like culture of, of like <laugh>, I use this phrase a lot, but it's like “credential checking”. Whenever people are trying to review a work, especially with music, people are like, “Oh, what do you know about music? You don't make music.”

JS: Right, right.

DB: That's usually like the biggest critique of critics is that it's like,”Y'all niggas don't make art. What do y'all know about art?” Yeah.

It's definitely possible to have a thorough investigation of a painting without being a good painter yourself. I don't think that not being a painter disqualifies you from investigating a painting, but I do think it can only enrich the experience if you are also a painter. There's this  sense of it being– and this comes from the fine art world just being a capitalist landscape– there's this sense of a conflict of interest where you have an art critic who makes their living off of talking about artworks. If they were to go and post their own artwork. People would be like, “Oh, now you're just trying to shill your own work.” You know what I'm saying? You're trying to game the system. In its current state, it's kind of impossible for both artists and critics to share each other's jobs. So recognizing that, I wonder if there's a more effective and generative way to do it.

JS: Um, okay. I think multiple things. First of all, I don't think an artist should be a job, but I also don't think being a critic should be a job. I don't see the point of a public online critique. I don't like public online anything. People making money off of critique doesn't really make any sense to me. It makes sense in the context of like capitalism where you're providing a service. I do think it's like a good <laugh>, I don't know, it's both content and kind of helpful for artists, possibly. Not really in the way that it's done right now, but it could be helpful for artists by doing something that helps people or that people want to consume, you know, in capitalism that means you make money.

In the landscapes I try to imagine, I try to remove everything. I don't wanna see it as a job and I don't wanna see it online because I don't want online to exist and I don't want people to be being paid money, in my ideal future, in the future that I wanna build. Right. I don't want that to be the landscape, so I'm not gonna dream of that.

It should be a one-on-one or a group of people in person. That's pretty much it. I think that good critique can happen online. You can learn from shit online. You can learn from someone else's critique online. You can, there's so much good shit that can happen, but I don't see it's best form being online.

Author’s Note: My original question on my Twitter Circle was “Do we need black art critics? Do we need a popular black art critic?”

In your original question (on Twitter Circles), you changed the phrasing, but in response to the original one, what I was saying is I don't want to imagine the art sphere being what it is now. When I'm trying to imagine like critics, I don't wanna have to adapt to [the current hegemony]. I don't want a black critic because critics are fucked up in what we understand critics to be now. I don’t want a black this or a black that. Anytime you're gonna put a “black” in front, I don't want that. <laugh> I don't want whatever it is you're about to say. Because that structure already exists and there's no reason I should adapt to it. It should be a new thing entirely. Hopefully it would spread to more than just our work in general. A critique of ideas can be healthy. I think that it should all be this thing that happens as a small community. Any type of good and lasting effort happens in a small community at first. It's the only way it can be controlled and like gate kept as we were talking about before, that's the only way that that can happen. You have to have this form of training that goes on. That can only happen in small groups, uh, slowly.