I came to this erasure with the idea of mimicry: how could I mimic a useful thought without plagiarizing it? I wanted Baldwin’s voice and intent to remain legible, while using the black strips (which I chose over a white-out approach) to imply sound and to push the reader to see the black space and black speech as endless. The original essay by James Baldwin, written in 1976 and published in the New York Times, was a turning point in writings about the “problem” (I put problem in quotations to gesture towards a particular school of thought which authors like Baldwin & Toni Morrison despised) of race.
The original essay makes clear that Black language, Black sound and Black expression is a problem for whiteness because the jazz of it all is a direct blow to the language of whiteness itself. I had no interest in changing the core narrative, but was rather interested in that alchemical process of language becoming language and redundancy as resistance.
After the first draft, however, I realized that redundancy was in some ways just redundancy and I had not yet defined the critical utility of redundancy (which makes sense, since the word itself is defined as uselessness), so that was gonna fall flat.
So I started thinking about how the body might experience redundancy. We experience repetition but do not identify as useless, just doubled, or tripled, or stacked -- textured, basically. That’s what led me to thinking about physicality, materiality and how to present the body with a redundant but satisfying conflict.
(WHEW I am talking A LOT)
Anyway: when I make any kind of visual art, it usually starts with a curiosity about what I’ve got laying around. The MFA program at Bard, where I studied, is interdisciplinary with artists working across all genres and mediums. This meant there was a lot of simple and complex material laying around. I became obsessed with tape named for its use, or after the occupation that requires it, like Plumber’s tape (which is teflon) or Electrician’s tape (which is vinyl). These tape materials were about the dialectical relationship between utility and use, and about the dialectical relationship between labor and extraction.
So boom I pretty much decided to print out the essay on huge vinyl paper with the words at a particular font size so that the page would be both illegible and legible at the same time. I decided to do the erasure with tactical material versus digital. I used the electrician’s tape as the black out material (vinyl on vinyl = a redundancy), tacked each piece to the wall, and then set up four chairs facing the pieces. From that vantage point you really couldn’t see it. You had to choose to get up and get close to it to read it. Most of the people who came in to see it sat. Most people got up and got closer after sitting. Everyone had to get close to the material to see Black language. This meant that their typical expectations of how they should receive language (visible at a distance, comfortable up close) would be disrupted, and that my mimicry would come more like an echo than a redundancy, ultimately achieving all of the things I wanted to do with the original erasure.
So yea. This was a draft that did see a radical transformation in its revision. However, you can see that the actual text never changed, or the erasure patterns, just the medium. . See below for photos of both drafts. Share if you find this useful!
First draft:
Final Draft: