Unruly Poems that Illuminate White Supremacy in Everyday Life

Poet Nikki Wallschlaeger’s new book Crawlspace discovers the violence embedded in our most familiar structures: mortgages, meals, rooms, houses, family relationships, and language itself.

Nikki Wallschlaeger, Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017) (all images courtesy Bloof Books)

The word “mortgage” comes from old French and means, literally, “dead pledge”: an arrangement that “dies” if a promised payment fails. The figure of death is etymologically built in to a very common kind of American debt that belongs to those lucky enough to own property. It’s the death pledge that gives us the right to our homes, the places that nurture and sustain our livelihoods and lives.

Poet Nikki Wallschlaeger is keen on the complex relationship between debt and domestic life. Her new book Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017), a series of sonnets that consciously disrupt their own formal limits, discovers the violence embedded in our most familiar structures: mortgages, meals, rooms, houses, family relationships, and language itself. Wallschlaeger’s poems feel timely, as the links between property ownership, alienated labor, and the history of black slavery in the United States (“Greasy gangrene hamburger wrapper of a country,” in her words) become clearer by the day. She deploys a new vocabulary for talking about the legacies of slavery and white supremacy as they manifest in daily life — a vocabulary that is as damning as it is lush, as rich with sound as it is bright with image.

The sonnets in Crawlspace begin in standard, contained 14-line form, and gradually lengthen and widen themselves to fill pages. Like the domestic spaces her language evokes, these pieces become unruly, revealing the mess behind polished exteriors. A whole world emerges as the pages progress, populated by hyperbolized pieces of reality, such as “fresh Klonopin ribbons,” “King Cotton Casseroles,” “unlikable women,” and “drool rot and toxic sprayed tongues.” Wallschlaeger’s sentences flow and twist, moving between description and history: “George Washington’s mouth comin at you/yappin some bullshit about honesty or was/that Abe Lincoln I dunno they start to fade/into the same knockoff appropriated war/bonnet or kente cloth bathing suit worn on/Cinco de Mayo in Daytona on college break.” She warps old truisms, like “it takes a village to raise a/ child in nude-colored handy cuffs.” Throughout these pieces, there’s a pervading sense that language itself is one of the structures that maintains racism, or “misogynoir grimcrack.” In breaking language’s formal rules, Wallschlaeger appears to also break the rules of systemic oppression.

Nikki Wallschlaeger, I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel

Many of the lines in Crawlspaceappear in Wallschlaeger’s I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel, a graphic chapbook published by Bloof Books in 2016. This book presents portraits of Mattel’s “Julia” Barbie doll (produced 1969–70 and modeled after TV star Diahann Carroll), bracketed by meme-style language. It’s a good visual companion to Crawlspace. The poet’s weariness with white male supremacy and female labor comes through perfectly in the wry face of Julia: “I wish you were a beer/ instead of a colorblind mansplainer,” reads one meme. In these pieces, as in Crawlspace, Wallschlaeger hits a delicious pitch somewhere between tragedy and humor; her singular first-person voice persists throughout the work, narrating the energy she draws, like a phoenix, from her own exhaustion.

With Crawlspace, Wallschlaeger enters the tradition of poets and artists who illuminate black female subjectivity — Wanda Coleman, Carrie Mae Weems, Lucille Clifton, Lorna Simpson. The domestic scenes she makes in her poems complicate clichés of who black women in America are “supposed” to be. The fraught splendor of Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” comes to mind when Wallschlaeger speaks of “Writing under the constraints of your oppressors, whoever they are. / You start to articulate through the gold hippo lick of their loving war.” Hers is a poetry that is attentive to the nefariousness of American debt, that searches out what she as a black woman is owed, and what she is made to pay. She calls out the blood-ties between debt, cruelty, and this place we call home — and she has a great time doing it. Wallschlaeger’s voice is transformative in its capacity to articulate her lived experience. “We, as marked women transform/ ourselves,” she writes. “We are the wood violets & roses stretching in the rain.”

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Crawlspace is now out from Bloof Books.

How Dutch Wax Fabrics Became a Mainstay of African Fashion

The Philadelphia Museum of Art examines the past and present of Vlisco fabrics, a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world.

Installation view, Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (photo by Tim Tiebout, courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art)

PHILADELPHIA — Riotously colorful, densely patterned, and unassailably fabulous, Vlisco fabrics have, for decades, been tailored into shift dresses, power suits, and formal gowns for Central and West Africa’s cosmopolitan elite. Their patterns and palettes evince an instantly recognizable aesthetic. And there are scores of Vlisco imitators: Chinese knockoffs are sold on city streets all over the world. But are any of these fabrics in fact African? The exhibition Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) as part of a suite of shows and programs called “Creative Africa,” poses this question in an indirect but intriguing way, by explaining the company’s origins in the Dutch colonial empire and demonstrating its products’ lasting popularity, in African fashion and beyond. Art enthusiasts, for instance, might recognize Vlisco fabrics from the work of Yinka Shonibare MBE, who has used the them to fashion Victorian-style gowns and waistcoats for the generally headless human figures in his haunting installations. In Shonibare’s work, the fabrics do conceptual double duty: they act as a symbol of “African culture,” for those who perceive their patterns to be indigenous, and as a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world, for those who understand the complexities of their origins.

Textile pattern by Constance Girard for Vlisco on view in Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

The story of Vlisco begins not in Dakar, Lagos, or Accra, but in the small Dutch city of Helmond, where, in 1846, industrialist Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen purchased a textile factory with the goal of selling upholstery fabric, bedspreads, and handkerchiefs abroad. Van Vlissingen began creating imitation batik fabric based on designs from Indonesia — then known as the Dutch East Indies — with the goal of capitalizing on new roller printing technology that could effect the look of batik without all the labor-intensive work required to make the real thing. Batik originated in China and India in the 8th century, and it was refined in 13th-century Indonesia with the development of a new tool for applying hot wax to fabric known as canting, likely an anglicized form of the word tjanting. When Dutch imitators such as van Vlissingen entered the business, Indonesians noticed small flaws in their fabrics — namely a “crackle” effect, the result of small veins of pigment leaking through the wax resist — and the Dutch East Indies even went so far as to ban their sale in the 19th century. But other areas of the Dutch empire provided a ready, if unexpected, marketplace. Vlisco fabrics became a popular item in a different part of the Dutch colonial ecosystem, starting in Ghana, which was then called the Gold Coast.
The Vlisco factory in the 1950s–60s (image courtesy Vlisco)

The Vlisco factory in the 1950s–60s (image courtesy Vlisco)

Between 1855 and 1872, approximately 3,000 Ghanian soldiers served in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. They returned home, as servicemen often do, with a taste for items they encountered abroad. As the story goes, the soldiers had learned to appreciate the look of genuine batik but didn’t mind the crackle of the van Vlissingen version, so they purchased bolts of it for their female relatives back in Ghana. By the turn of the century, despite the ceding of the colony to the UK, the sale of Dutch-made faux batik in the Gold Coast was robust. By the 1930s, it was being adapted to suit Ghanian tastes, not by accident, but by design. According to Dilys Blum, the PMA’s senior curator of costume and textiles who organized the exhibition, the trend was so popular that several companies based in England, France, and Switzerland began producing faux batik fabrics in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Van Vlissingen responded by consolidating its grip on the marketplace and buying up several smaller concerns. Thus, a fabric produced in Europe with Asia in mind never quite hit the mark in its intended marketplace, but found an enthusiastic audience at the opposite end of the empire.

The Virtual Is Liminal: An Interview with Claudia Hart

• by Susan Silas on May 24, 2016

Claudia Hart, “The Dolls House” (2016), 3D-animated loop with music by Kurt Hentschlager, 13 mins, on view at Transfer gallery (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

I first met Claudia Hart in 1995, when she was living in Berlin and I had gone there to do research for a project. A short time after she returned to New York in 1996, we became reacquainted — I think both our professional relationship and our friendship grew out of shared intellectual concerns. Even though our work is realized by quite different means, we both care deeply about content and think about the female body, decay, and historical time.
Claudia entered the world of 3D simulations technology at a time when there were very few practitioners who saw it as a means to create what I would term “fine art.” In addition to being an important innovator in the field, she has worked as a member of the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, teaching and influencing a remarkable cohort of students that has emerged from her classroom to make significant contributions to this new medium. She has helped take a technology that, until recently, was being used primarily for gaming and commercial purposes and subvert its form and content to create hybrid works that are genuinely new — and feminist, to boot.
This interview was conducted on the occasion of her solo exhibition at Transfer gallery, which was founded by Kelani Nichole in 2013 and focuses almost entirely on new-media work. The exhibition, titled The Dolls House, runs through July 2.

*   *   *

Claudia Hart, “Caress” (2011)

Susan Silas: I wanted to begin with a very general question. We know that many of the technologies that govern the internet and new-media applications had their origins in government research and were often intended for use by the military. Forms of these technologies made their way into gaming, which has been dominated by men both as creators and as users and has evolved into a relatively misogynist environment online. When you decided to learn 3D technology 20 years ago, did you understand that the environment was such a masculinist one, and were you thinking about usurping it then for a more feminist project? Or did your project evolve slowly as you began to work with this new technology?
Claudia Hart: In terms of simulations technology, which is my medium, yes, it emerged from the Department of Defense (DoD), and the culture around it was militaristic and astonishingly misogynist. I did not understand that it would be like that and had never experienced that kind of culture. The DoD had developed it for war games and flight simulators. When 9/11 came along, they strategically threw their research to the game industry, relatively small at that time; Pixar and children’s animation was a way bigger industry. But with 9/11, the military shared information with the game industry because they understood that the technology could be expanded there more rapidly.
War games were being produced both by the military and also commercially to cultivate a “war on terror” culture. I could not have predicted the sea change that would occur due to 9/11 when I started in 1997. My reasons for falling in love with computer imaging were purely artistic and theoretical, and had nothing to do with the positioning of virtual media and simulations technologies as both a commercial and military visualization language.

Claudia Hart, “The Brides” (2010) inkjet print of a virtual model on paper (all images courtesy the artist unless otherwise noted) (click to enlarge)

I was astonished and, yes, frightened, when a prize-winning 3D artist at the esteemed Ars Electronica media festival in Linz won with an image of a half-naked woman clamped to a motorcycle with the tail pipe emerging from her anus.
SS: One of the first works of yours I saw after you began to work with 3D technology was a single-channel piece titled “Machina.” The image showed a reclining nude, presented in the manner of a classical painting. Her movements were quite slow, her body languid and also voluptuous — not the hard body of contemporary culture nor that of a cartoon character with a tail pipe up her anus. In any case, she was framed to suggest a painting, and her body type was somewhat Rubenesque, yet she had something in common with Manet’s “Olympia” too, in that she made eye contact with the viewer from time to time, a kind of Brechtian device that disrupted the objectification that we associate with female nudes in painting. At that time, it seemed to me, most 3D art (though not all) was engaged in a self-reflexive investigation of the technology, which produced more formal and abstract visual content. How was your work received at the time? Did you get support from others working with the technology?
CH: My involvement with the digital art community began when I visited Ars Electronica with Kurt Hentschlager, the pioneering Austrian media artist who at that time was part of the duo Granular Synthesis. He has since become my husband and has a significant impact on my work. This was in 1995, and it was and still is the premiere venue for experimental digital media art, the festival that awarded the motorcycle babe a prize (I think that genre emerges from the male and misogynist culture of West Coast comix). Most of the more serious artistic work at Ars — aside from that of Granular Synthesis — was very formalistic and, yes, “gadgety,” meaning more concerned with technical invention and research and the visual possibilities that might be engendered for those.
When I was a young artist, my community was the 1990s identity politics generation. We were very content driven in the sense that the strategy was to deconstruct both media and material culture. I was obviously an interloper in that first generation of digital artists.

Claudia Hart, “PhotoMortifications, Heaven” (2008), lambda photographic print

A Multisensory Trip to Cuba’s Dark, Sugar-Filled Past

by Debbie Hagan on March 25, 2016

Installation view, ‘Alchemy of the Soul: María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ at the Peabody Essex Museum (photo by the author for Hyperallergic) (click to enlarge)

SALEM, Mass. — When Europeans first tasted sugar during the Crusades, they immediately begged for more. However, it wasn’t until Columbus brought sugar cane to the Caribbean to be cultivated that this exotic luxury grew into a hotly traded world commodity, akin to petroleum today. Such sweetness had a price, and Cuba met international demands by bringing enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage and subjecting them to a lifetime of brutal labor. By the mid-19th century, Cuba produced a third of the world’s sugar.
Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir of the Spirits, a large-scale, blown-glass sculptural installation on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, takes visitors on a trip to Cuba to explore its sounds, smells, tastes, and sights, all through this rather dark historical lens. Afro-Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons created the complex, multipart exhibit with her husband and collaborator, musician and composer Neil Leonard.

Neil Leonard and María Magdalena Campos-Pons (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

“It is a multilayered experience that combines visual imagery with sound elements that engage the viewer in more than one sensorial experience — more than just look and see and move quickly,” says Campos-Pons, who has been dreaming about this project for 28 years.
Campos-Pons grew up in former slave barracks in Cuba and played in the shadows of what were once sugar cane factories. She’s of Yoruba descent — seven of her grandfathers were enslaved in Nigeria and taken to Cuba between 1838–66 to work the sugar cane.
Visitors begin their journey to Campos-Pons’s Cuba by entering the museum’s freight elevator, loaded with burlap sugar sacks and a vintage record player. The elevator operator cues up a 45 rpm record, from which a lone voice sings in Spanish about the beauty of his country and how proud he is to be from Matanzas, Cuba’s main port. Campos-Pons spent much of her childhood there.

Exhibition entrance, ‘Alchemy of the Soul: María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ (photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM, © 2016 Peabody Essex Museum)

Those who know rumba music, its urgent drumbeats and African roots, will recognize the voice as belonging to Rafael “El Niño” Navarro Pujada: the Frank Sinatra of the form. Leonard recorded him in his home as he reminisced about the docks, where he sang during breaks from loading sugar. Between his sweet, solitary voice and the lumbering motions of the elevator, visitors can imagine a ferry voyage, cresting the waves and heading toward the port city.
“I’ve been working with Cuban musicians since 1986, since before I met Magda,” says Leonard, who wanted to meet and record musicians who’d worked in the ports and sang songs reflecting rumba’s roots. “They let me record them in their homes without the drums, without their producers, just telling their stories and singing songs they learned,” says Leonard. “This sound of the port is a very iconic sound of Cuba. That’s an aspect of the work that is Magda’s entire life. It’s about what I am seeing in the sugar trade, distilling it, and bringing it back to the work.”
Arriving on the third floor, visitors enter an ethereal, multisensory dreamscape made up of six 10- to 12-foot blown-glass sculptures. Glass piping connects the bulbous vessels, so the gallery looks a bit like a science lab. One unit is filled with amber fluid that bubbles, flows, and pools in glass bowls and kicks up the sweet scent of rum. This is a surreal, skeletal landscape — an artistic interpretation of the ruins left by the 1,000 or so sugar and rum factories that once flourished in Cuba.
“The presence of smell and temperature in the room, combined with the moisture of the fountain and the distillery bring together this experiential idea,” says Campos-Pons.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, ‘Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits’ (detail, 2015), blown glass, steel, cast resin, silicone, and acrylic, at the Peabody Essex Museum (photo by Peter Vanderwarker, © 2016 Peabody Essex Museum) (click to enlarge)

At special events, visitors can try quarter-sized slices of sugar cane. In one bite, the juicy liquid explodes in the mouth. That’s it. Then the sweetness is gone and what’s left is a straw-like, tasteless wad that one can’t wait to spit out. The sweetness and bitterness present an uncomfortable dichotomy.
“Sugar is bittersweet,” says Campos-Pons, referring not just to the cane’s taste but also the harshness involved in the harvest. The plant’s razor-sharp leaves slice workers arms and faces, sometimes blinding them.
“What has been beautiful is that the Peabody commissioned this piece, so it really allowed us to be ambitious,” says Campos-Pons. “This idea has been in my mind since 1988. I was just waiting for the proper place and moment.”

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, ‘Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits’ (detail, 2015), blown glass, steel, cast resin, silicone, and acrylic, at the Peabody Essex Museum (photo by Peter Vanderwarker, © 2016 Peabody Essex Museum) (click to enlarge)

The artists worked with two glass factories — one in Boston, the other in San Francisco — to create blown vessels that fit together like Lego parts. “When you’re making a process that is new, there’s not a notebook for it,” says Campos-Pons. “It’s all about taking risks, and you may fail. Glass is fragile. It could break. This is about process. One of the things that I’m excited and happy about is that [the museum] allowed us to go forward with the process and make ourselves vulnerable.”
Leonard digitally manipulated several sources — saxophone, singing voices, and waves — to compose a sound collage that echoes throughout the exhibit. “My concern for the work is that glass is shiny, precious, beautiful, but glass is also cold and Matanzas is not cold,” says the musician. “How can I put something of the warmth, spirit, and rustic quality of Matanzas into the work in the gallery?”
He takes a single note from his saxophone, cuts off the end sound, and digitally manipulates and curves it as one imagines a glassmaker does with molten liquid. “You hear the saxophone after I’ve stopped playing. It’s ringing into space, a reverberation, very much like reflection — like the beauty of Magda’s glasswork, like what you see through the glass and what you see from the shadows on the floor,” says Leonard.
Life also emerges through the songs sung by male and female voices and the sounds of water. They wash back and forth through the installation like a tide.
“One of the things the piece was intended to evoke, which sort of came out intuitively, was how sounds migrated from Africa,” says Leonard. “In Cuba, [the songs] are transformed, some sung in Spanish, some are secular, sacred things that happened in Cuba that didn’t happen in Africa. They migrate like a spirit in one direction.”
In “Agridulce,” one of a couple of performances held in the museum’s atrium in January, Campos-Pons entered the upper bridge above the audience’s heads, wearing a 19th-century slave dress. A machete in hand, she made swift, violent motions as she hacked at a row of sugar cane. Minutes later, she approached the audience and extended her fresh-cut cane: “Try it. It is sweet.”
The crowd pushed forward, gravitating to the artist, wanting see her up close and receive this gift. I felt honored as she paused before me and looked me in the eye. I took the cane, and my heart ached a little, feeling transported back to a 19th plantation, receiving this humble but weighty gift. “I was trying to juxtapose the brutality of that with the taste [of sugar],” says Campos-Pons. “What I say in the performance is, how could anyone find energy to go home and love a close one after 12 hours of this? What love is left over? What energy is left to breastfeed your baby?”

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, ‘Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits’ (detail, 2015), blown glass, steel, cast resin, silicone, and acrylic, at the Peabody Essex Museum (photo by Peter Vanderwarker, © 2016 Peabody Essex Museum)

Such history may be skimmed over by Cuba travel guides, especially as they’re being updated for a new era of tourism, but those in the know will find traces remaining in the country’s people, culture, and landscape.
“Contemporary art is about daring to make an experiment, daring to try something new, daring to fail, daring to try to go to a place where no one has entered,” says Campos-Pons.
Alchemy of the Soul dares to tell the truth about a beautiful county with a greedy past, desperate to satisfy the world’s craving for sugar.
Alchemy of the Soul: María Magdalena Campos-Pons continues at the Peabody Essex Museum (161 Essex Street, Salem, MA) through April 3. Neil Leonard and Rudresh Mahanthappa will perform an experimental saxophone concert with projected images by Campos-Pons at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (25 Evans Way, Boston) on April 7.

Fabrics Stained with Colonial Blues

by Philip A Hartigan on July 27, 2015




Jovencio de la Paz, “Endless Flight I,” batik, natural indigo and applique on cotton, 44″ x 36.5″ (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

CHICAGO — The color indigo has been used for thousands of years to dye fabric with an inimitable, lustrous blue, the blue of a warm night sky or a shimmering ocean. Manufacturing the color has also been bound up with forced human labor or slavery, whether in India or Asia, where the source plant originated, or the Americas, where it was imported and where indigo production in the late 1700s was as economically valuable as sugar and cotton. (The blue areas of the first American flags were dyed with indigo, almost certainly produced by the hands of slaves in the southern US states.) It is this duality — the color’s beauty and its intimate connection with human degradation — that artist Jovencio de la Paz explores in his current exhibition of batik works, Endless Flight.