"You and I don't want anybody to keep us from getting out of control. We want to get out of control." (Malcolm X)
JST BCZ UR PARANOID. . . examines the context of hysteria and paranoia around issues of racial difference. As a bi-racial group we re-frame that discourse around white fears and black desires (or black fears and white desires). A simplistic reversal of white hatreds and fears maintains abhorrent limitations on our conditions of possibility. There is no simple, easy, or correct way to be black (or white). Through a multi-vocal, ambivalent working process we seek to produce a miscegenated, disquieting context for reading the present through the figure of Malcolm X. Texts are drawn from a variety of sources: quotations from Malcolm X, advertising copy "It's the prominence you bring to that which others overlook. Those who find vitality hidden in the margins understand", writers with critical perspectives on the cult of black masculinity. Imagery is drawn from documentary sources, television broadcasts and even Hollywood films with no direct reference to Malcolm X.
"Every time I smile. It doesn't mean I'm happy." (Malcolm X)
We do not project a single unified identity. There is no single, essential, stable, universal subjectivity. No individual experience can guarantee or quarantine the truth of the representations we produce. Neither artist nor audience is in a position of totalized truth or knowledge. The figure of Malcolm X is shot through with contradictions and questions. Is he the man you think you are. or the object you love to hate? Neither? Is he the embodiment of black truth, or the master media strategist? Both? More?
"I'm the man you think you are." (Malcolm X)
"It's the nigga ya love to hate" (Ice Cube)
Our work should provoke questions of identity and identification for the audience. All identifications with a figure as complex as Malcolm X will be partial, multiple, constructed: traces of the workings of desire and fear. The work necessarily contains zones of illegibility. Any "truth" is constructed from limited, provisional statements.
THERE IS A QUEST FOR THE NEGRO, THE NEGRO IS A DEMAND, ONE CANNOT GET ALONG WITHOUT HIM, HE IS NEEDED, BUT ONLY IF HE IS MADE PALATABLE IN A CERTAIN WAY. UNFORTUNATELY THE NEGRO KNOCKS DOWN THE SYSTEM AND BREAKS THE TREATIES. - Frantz Fanon
A structuring absence: Frantz Fanon's `Black Skin/ White Masks' as framed and quoted by Homi K. Bhabha in his essay `The Other Question'. This text highlights the functions of fetishism, stereotypes and "fantasmatic knowledges" in the construction of racist discourses.
"It didn't take me a week to learn that all you had to do was give white people a show and they'd buy anything you offered them." (Malcolm X)
Malcolm X is posed as avenging angel, decorative sign and priest of a fragmented, mediated cult (identification: the ultimate role model). Mr. X is also the serialized signifier that sparks contradictory readings, phantasms of "otherness", a looping of the repressed under the "level playing field" of America (the object some folks love to hate). On this surface of differences hidden under Minister Malcolm's likeness we will stage a series of reflections, inversions, deviations, implosions.
A formal note: the enlarged video scan pattern inhibits the beauty and resolution of the processed images (a still or 16mm image transferred to videotape, duplicated, rephotographed, enlarged). A meditation on the close, partial and distorted readings we all bring to this revered, hated and fragmented figure.
Click Icon To Read More Paranoia.