This is What Democrazy Looks Like: Juliana Huxtable’s “A Split During Laughter at the Rally”

A component of the work of both Daniel G. Andújar and Martha Rosler discussed in our last two posts that seems to be missing from both Group Material’s Democracy and the call for papers in the panel “Democratising Classics”, is their use of humor to reveal the problems with democratic institutions, especially at the level of language.

Andújar‘s slogan (“Let’s Democratize Democracy”) and Rosler’s watchwords (“QUALITY” and “ELEGANCE”) both satirize the way language is employed as a short-cut to express democratic ideals that double as a means of control of the people. In both cases there is a split between democracy as an ideal rule of the people and the manipulation of the very idea of democracy to control the people. We know from Aristophanes that comedy may use the language of democracy to focus an attack on the leaders chosen by the demos that does not in turn attack the demos itself, whereby it is those leaders, and not the demos, who are deceitful and manipulative.

What happens when political agency finds its articulation in humor rather than protest? Or, more accurately, in humor at the protest? In other words, what does it mean for the inefficacy of democracy to be the cause for laughter? These specific questions are raised in the video shown at Juliana Huxtable’s 2017 exhibition at Reena Spaulings called A Split During Laughter at the Rally.

(You can watch a 4 minute clip here). Christian Haye writing for MAY describes the work as follows:

The 21-minute video is a montage of a faux rally down some decidedly unpopulated streets in the artist/ hipster enclave of Bushwick, Brooklyn.  The protesters, diverse and gender non-conforming, gather to shout the unfortunately familiar chants—No Trump/ No KKK/ No Fascist USA—which are followed up by a side conversation: “These chants are so lame.” Intercut with the protest are confessional takes where participants speak intimate banalities to the camera. “Obviously because I wanted to change the world.” “What’s so funny? All of our lives are on the line!” “I used to pay attention to court decisions and legislation, but where did that get me?” Huxtable herself is also intercut with this footage, the close-up on her mouth invoking the DJ character from the 1979 film The Warriors (played by Lynne Thigpen and voiced by Pat Floyd), who provided an overarching narrative for the progress of gang members through New York City, in a direct appeal to the listener/viewer. Huxtable’s video mocks the efficacy of protest as tool while also embracing it. The inhabitants of its world are not multigenerational and seem to relay a feeling that their outrage is de rigueur as opposed to inspired.

This mockery of efficacy is grounded as much in the action of the protest, as the language used in them (“These chants are so lame”). This critique is at the heart of Huxtable’s drive to find a new aesthetic to spur political action. By interrupting the hackneyed language of protest with a burst laughter, Huxtable is not belittling the mobilizing of a more direct democratic action. Instead, this laughter is used to provoke a more radical democracy from merely going through the motions at a protest.

To turn this back on to the panel “Democratising Classics”, Huxtable’s work asks whether Classicists are willing to be satirized as a means of their discipline’s own democratization? When discussing The War on Proof, one of the posters that accompany the video in the exhibition, in an artist talk at MOCA Detroit in December 2017 (you can listen to the audio – thanks Diosa! – with a blurry video we made of close-ups of the work at the end of the post below), Huxtable describes trying to find a radical aesthetic akin to that of the Black Panthers and Emory Douglas.

Her answer is to conflate two seemingly irreconcilable positions: the fringe right-winger who follows Info Wars, reads Tacitus and is obsessed by Greco-Roman Empires and their continuity today, while also paranoid about his present lack of masculine greatness, with a Hotep approach to reclaiming the ideal of pre-colonial African history, while at the same time as transposing queerness onto a white European vice of weakness and its cultures of pederasty stemming from ancient Greece. For Huxtable, both figures come from a place of disenfranchisement to raid the historical past to make sense of and generate conspiracy theories out of, their present contexts.

It is out of the shared ground of these two figures that Huxtable recovers some basis for a radical aesthetic, which, like the laughter at the rally, bursts out from a position of vulnerability to forge a way out of apathy with democratic processes. Our question, for both Huxtable and the panelists of “Democratising Classics” is, how do we find a comparable process (and accompanying aesthetic) if the place we start from is not the action of the protest or the symbolism of the poster, but the entrenched model of the academic panel? How can the discipline of Classics itself, with its scholars and teachers, who would use their expertise to reject both the right-wing and Hotep positions, be democratised? Can our remote participation in the panel, as the upcoming sequence of blog-posts, operate as the dose of disruptive laughter and reconciliation of extreme positions we need?