Girl with Apple: 8min 46sec, 25/05/2020 by Jamie Wagg
#846
#25/05/2020
#darnellafrazier
#witness
#blmally
#historypainting
#contemporaryart
#entanglementhistories
#theframeiseverything
Framed ink and wax drawing with letterpress on mounting board and typeset on index card, 2020 (From the series The Frame is Everything, 2020 and continuing).
“The imperative to become a witness, to experience an event and to render it knowable to others, is an ever more dominant characteristic of the human condition. The advent of digital and social media as tools of accelerated documentation and communication, and the insurgence of data-based surveillance into everyday life, exemplify the refinement of technologies in response to corporate, military, state and individual needs to make visible, to plot actions, motivations and causalities at increasingly molecular depths. In the popular imagination, an antagonism is forming between nefarious forces of data gathering, weaponised in order to manipulate mass populations, and the capacity of individual ‘testimony’ and ‘lived experience’ to bear moral weight, amplified by new forms of representation”
The video of the murder, by police officers, of George Floyd has started a movement around the world within which institutional racism is being exposed, challenged, confronted relentlessly, and is given no quarter. This is long overdue, and may George Floyd’s death not be in vain.
But without the 8:46 minutes of courage and determination of a 17-year old girl whose vigilance ensured that she, and indeed the whole world, were witnesses to this crime, George Floyd would merely be yet another black man dead in police custody. The 8:46 minutes on the 25/05/2020 may turn out to be, socially and politically, the most important few minutes of recent times.
The archival form of the work’s mount, the typing and indexing of the ink and wax monotype drawing, along with the letterpress Witness, are as much a part of the “drawing” as the drawing. This is to “draw into” the work notions of historiography, “museumification”, and the cataloguing and conformist smotherings that are part of the institutionalisation of a critically disaffirmative contemporary art practice.
This is the latest component of an on-going work-in-progress that will include many such ink-wax monotype drawings, all of which will be placed in such frames. The frames are all original, i.e. late 19th and early-20th century, coming from a period that gave rise to what became known as the Modernist Project. The glass in these containers becomes a barrier, an ending, like a coroner’s specimen held inside a glass slide, placed under a microscope, the better to examine the cause of death.
This work is one short chapter in that book, one short essay in that collection, one image from the family album, one track on the vinyl record.
* Richard Birkett, “The History-Reporting Artist”, in Terry Atkinson, Yale Union, Portland, Oregon, 2015 (also available at https://www.galleriasix.it/terry-atkinson).
