Being black is belonging to a state organized according to its ignorance of your perspective a state that does not, that cannot, know your mind. Bryan Wagner

One: Legal Abstraction; Super Capitalism and Madness.

Systems of capitalism have historically deployed a type of abstraction that leaves humanity illegible, with Black and brown bodies in particular illegible through lenses of white supremacy. The state constructed a system of illegibility that Bryan Wagner refers to as legal abstraction. Legal abstraction was concretized by falsely representing Black being through newspapers, language, laws, paintings, space, slave codes and naming. This system was made operational through weaponized policing. As a painter, conceptualizing capitalism starts by thinking through abstraction as a comprehensive condition related to industrialization, slavery, globalization, patriarchy, space, but also liberation. Racial capitalism is capitalism, and in the face of legal abstraction providing the infrastructure to capital madness, I offer more Black imagination. I offer more acts of autonomy, self-defense, poetics, activism, creativity and more abstractions from the deep Black mindful architecture of Black being.

Two: Illegal Abstraction: Methods in Liberations and Abolition

That brings me to the question: As a painter, what does it mean to produce an illegal abstraction as dissent? To recognize that the illegal measures of action in a police state are actually the actions of moral grace against super capitalism. I offer illegal abstraction as a tool for the immeasurable presence of Black perception. A language that regards our methods of liberation as unpredictable, genius, improvisational, structural, hauntological, smooth and acute. I am certain that the beauty in Black indeterminacy, from sound to science, from architecture to migration, will continue to guide us toward liberation. Im interested in forms that are deeply spatial, generous and where the spectral presence defies the narrow proposition of life and death by the hands of industrialized white supremacy. A second question for my practice: If Blackness is already an architectonic developed out of liquidity (ocean/the middle passage), how can the work embody this phenomenon and offer sensation (sensoria) at the register of liberation?

Three: I Am Painting What I Am Doing and Doing What I Am Painting.

Legal abstraction is reinforced by the domination of a police state protecting systems of super capitalism. An abstraction of dissent needs to be named and practiced as a contribution to the traditions of Black radical imagination. I argue these issues through painting because of its ability to awaken truth between the mind and the brain. Its time for a new relationship with abstraction, an illegal abstraction developed out of the condition of new world-building toward liberation and revolution. An illegal abstraction where Black perception, ideas of scale, space, and the immeasurable are embedded in art experience. Art projects that are new conceptualizations of these histories and assert these by their presence. Objects that are not autonomous or referential, but phenomenal. Id like to address abstraction comprehensively in terms that are responsive to the breath/breadth of this unmeasurable presence of Blackness. We are always.

Closing: Now

In this moment of environmental precarity we will need to be both liquid and mountains, bird and lava. And it is the density of Black grace that will always be the thing that keeps us in our own humanity. Thinking through the histories of Black liberation, these are the victories that fortify my being in the objects I make. The paintings are true because the history of Black triumph is true. These are histories of illegal abstraction.

Link:

12 Artists On: The Financial Crisis - The New York Times