Holiness is what is dear to the gods.
Who said that? I dunno but it’s not helpful. Never mind, ignore it. Let’s check-in instead.
So, how are you coping? Healthy and sane? My starting position (forced on each of us, black reader and white writer, by this writing and our society) were the sites of the Unfinished Exhibition amid the constants of racist and colonial violence. We covered religious and sacred sites (remember those pray-ers muttering their own Selves, each into their own special hole?), moving to the institutionalizing sites of museums and universities, before turning back inwards to a dialogue with the dead. We searched the past of Modernity, beyond the mainframe of Modernism, through the fine artistic media of painting, sculpture and architecture and now, here we are, on the other side, in the present. You and me.
We only made it to this moment, as a site for cultivating the Self, by scrupulously targeting as a form of Institutional Critique: just as you need sanity to pray for sanity, you also need Institutions to critique Institutions (as Aruna D’Souza notes “Art does not exist as a social concept outside its institutionalization”). Mix right-mindedness with a sense of social responsibility, and bring your pure, honorable heart to church and grace will be yours…for peanuts! In other words, after taking communion under the mango tree, self-renewal will come to you in the stacks of an empty library. As the ‘librarian without a library’ Vincent Tao writes to the head of documenta 14 aneducation, Sepake Angiama:
In a droll inversion of Paulo Freire’s solitude-communion nexus that I’m sure was not lost on Sepake, I left our communion under the mango tree to return to a new solitude in the stacks. You asked us: what remains? Reverberations of your voices, residues of connection. Spinoza would call this spectral force a kind of joy: the remnants of an encounter with a body that combines its relations with my own, increasing my relations to the world. Audre Lorde would call it eros: the power that comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person, the wellspring of collective action not possible before. I suppose I would call it the library.
Like Tao, the library is the site we have been seeking. It appears across the Unfinished Exhibition (and frames this writing). Curators used libraries as spaces of display, artists found, created and remade libraries to be looked at and browsed, and educators formed libraries into active spaces of reflection. Beyond books, other bodies of knowledge cropped up in the form of objects. All the while, their remains – their ghosts – surround this very site of writing.
Below are some snapshots of the many libraries of the Unfinished Exhibition – click on the images to be transported out of yourself.
Coda
Tamir Rice would have turned 18 years old yesterday. He would have been 16 years old when I visited the exhibition A Color Removed at SPACES as part of the FRONT International Triennial in 2019, Michael Rakowitz’s project to remove orange objects from Cleveland (in reference to the orange ‘safety’ on Rice’s toy gun), including installations by Cleveland-based artists Amir Berbic, Amber Ford, Amanda King, M. Carmen Lane and RA Washington.
As I walked through RA Washington’s installation Grief Reads and Toy, a boy saw me taking photographs and spontaneously posed for me in front of the case containing the toy gun that provoked Rice’s murder by police. Beyond sites of any exhibition, unfinished or otherwise, beyond any museum, university or library, my only prayer is that his years are rolling along and that, through a mix of right-mindedness and a sense of social responsibility in those around him, his pure and honorable heart beats on and on and on.
If you can, please make a donation to the Tamir Rice Foundation by clicking on the image above.
[‘A New Solitude in the Stacks’ is an extract from Chapter 1: SITES of the ongoing online project Like Wind on Rushes which drafts a book to come called Whisper into a Hole.]