On valuing community over status

What is your definition of utopia?

It’s the project. It’s always trying for something better with great intention, consideration, discipline and love. It’s maybe something you never succeed at, but the process of trying is, to me, the utopian dream.

What are some active ways to work towards that dream?

Whatever is right around me in my everyday life and whoever is near me—I have been trying to care for those things. And that doesn’t necessarily mean actively intervening or engaging, but attentiveness first and foremost. Consideration. Whether it’s a friendship or a project or a collaborative relationship or a garden or the raven I’m trying to defend in my neighborhood, I just try to pay attention and engage on a level that seems mutual, as opposed to based out of my own desire entirely.

Are there things that you build into your daily life that help aid a constant cultivation of that ideal?

When the making of things becomes depleting instead of generative, I have to recalibrate my relationship to those things. That happens when I am straying away from my own values and goals.

I make films, so I’m all about the ocular. There’s a great power in how you make an image. It can be violent, or it can be quite loving. Trying to make images with the intention of helping the person see themselves as opposed to imposing an idea, that’s a very fine line, and it’s something I’m always trying to do. A lot of my artwork… I make very few moves. I’ll just find an object and put it on a table, because I feel like the context in which you see something can shift your relationship to it. And I’m really interested in those shifts. So it’s always really small moves. I wish I could be grander sometimes, but all my moves are really small.

How do you transpose objects or people to shift the perspective and try something new?

I love juxtaposition and relation. I love producing a space where relations can occur. That’s what teaching is too, for me. Information comes through creating relations between the individuals in the class. I’ve learned a lot from teaching. It’s very humbling. I am the kind of instructor who’s always making mistakes, because I’m trying to figure out what this particular group of people are about—and they test me as well, and I often fail. But then I learn so much from the ways in which I’m failing. When I see my students thrive or I see exchanges between them that I feel like I helped facilitate, I get so much satisfaction from that. From day one, I’m like, “You guys are going to have to make a work of art together. That’s the final project, so how are you going to do that?” And then I just lean back and watch what happens. Everyone is like, “I don’t work with other people. I am a painter. I don’t…” And I just watch everybody start talking about who they are. And then they start talking about what they want, and then they start relating to each other, and then they make something. It takes 10 weeks. It’s the proposition of what makes people reveal themselves.

You made the feature film Drylongso when you were in grad school. What was that leap of faith like for you and what were some of the lessons that you learned?

Well, it was naiveté. It’s really good to not know how hard something’s going to be and to just decide to do it. You only get that opportunity once. So when you’re leaping into something you’ve never done before, you might as well go big and be ambitious, because even the failure is going to be super rewarding. For years I thought of Drylongso as a failure, because it didn’t circulate widely. I could never get any traction in the film industry, so I thought of myself as a failure. But I learned so much from it. The thing that I thought I was making was not the thing that I ended up making. The actual intricacy of doing anything—you have to do it. You can’t study, you can’t read, you have to do. If you want to make art, you actually just have to figure out what it is that you want to offer someone else.

It seems like the relationship is the thing.

Relation is everything. The real power of creative work is how much it helps you relate not just to yourself but to others, and to see yourself in others, or to see difference as potential. That adage in contemporary art and modernism in particular, that it’s the singular genius and the interiority of the artist that is of interest, I’ve never related to it. I think it’s also why I came to art so late, because that’s what I thought art was: you just sat in your studio, and then springing from within you is the genius. I’m so happy for people who have that but I don’t make anything that isn’t in conversation with things I’ve seen, heard, read.

Was there a distinct moment you first felt like an artist?

When I realized that trying to make it in the film world was not going to be viable, mainly because I couldn’t wait for opportunities. I had to earn, I had to live. Someone sent me this teaching gig at the University of Texas at Austin, and I was like, “I’ll apply.” Somehow, I got that job, and suddenly, I’m a teacher in the film program. The only person I’m told to meet is Michael Smith, a New York artist teaching in Austin. We hit it off like gangbusters. Mike starts taking me everywhere with him. He’s working on his retrospective and shows me what he’s up to. I show him my work, he gives me notes. And the artists I met through Mike start saying, “Your work makes so much sense in an art context, even the way you talk about it.” I was like, “Really?” They started putting me in shows and then I realized, “Oh, all the things that I loved about filmmaking are more like the questions you ask as a conceptual artist.” It was Mike Smith and a lot of other really amazing artists who helped me figure that out.

What are the questions that keep tugging at you?

How do I help people feel like what they know is really valuable, but what they don’t know is crucial? The thing I really enjoy about people encountering my work is watching them figure out what’s going on and that they earn that. There’s always something we share that’s in the work, which suggests that the work is for all of us. The work is alive when someone is actually finding themselves in it.

Can you talk about the Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band?

Yeah. I made a proposal to this residency that invited artists to make something about Chicago in some way. I had just learned about Sun Ra’s time there and I wanted to do some work around that, because I was falling in love with his music. I’d just been to New Orleans, and had some idea about the relationship between protests and celebration or mourning and joy that the second lines inhabit—these binaries. So I proposed, “What if we did a brass band flash mob of Sun Ra’s music in public spaces in Chicago to celebrate places he’d been?” And they’re like, “Yeah, come do that.” And I was like, “Oh, really? Uh oh. Now, I gotta come do that.” So I go to Chicago, and have to find a band and legitimately know what I’m talking about with all these heads about Sun Ra. That’s when I started learning about relations: going to meet people; asking them for their time, gifts, skills; and trying to make it something that’s worthwhile for everybody.

How has Sun Ra’s ideology helped guide your work?

I don’t know if it will be possible for me to ever stop learning from Sun Ra and his work and the way that he left his ideas in other musicians. The spiritual element of Sun Ra is really interesting, because I’m a bit of a heathen and don’t feel comfortable talking about spirituality. But there’s a cosmological force that happens in everything I’ve ever made beyond my control that impacts it. In that film, when it starts pouring rain, that isn’t the moment of disaster. That’s the moment of grace.

Accepting that there are powers greater than yourself—Sun Ra was all about rising to that. If you are not a virtuosic musician, just be porous. Just listen, harmonize, respond. I loved how he had different levels in his orchestras… John Gilmore and some amateur flutist that can barely play in tune on the same recording. That’s utopian. A high level of achievement has nothing to do with status. It has to do with your powers of contribution. What did I learn from Sun Ra? I don’t know where that begins or ends at this point. I don’t know who I would be.

Have there been moments of doubt on your path that you’ve been able to move beyond in order to thrive?

It’s difficult living in a country that has succumbed to authoritarian rule and wondering if art can respond, if it should. Artists have suffered with this conflict forever. I remember reading Jack Whitten’s Notes from the Woodshed where he talks about protests going on outside the window, and he’s inside making abstract paintings and having to reconcile that it’s not out of a lack of love or care. This is what he can do. And having the humility to understand that maybe your ways of contributing appear to fail to rise to the moment sometimes.

I’ve seen the way economics—the capriciousness of the market—can devastate an artist’s sense of self. I really hate that, because nothing we do has anything to do with money. So how did we get entangled with this rubric? The thing that should matter is that you love the work your friends are making, and they love and respect the work that you’re making. The only thing that matters is your community.

Do you seek outside stimuli from books and films to recalibrate? I think of your Human 3.0 Reading List or your Criterion Closet Picks.

Oh, completely. Sometimes when I’m reading a book, I feel like, “Oh, I don’t know if this author could know how important this book is for me, how this book is saving my life right now.” When you read something that changes how you think and understand yourself and the world, that is endlessly valuable, and endless. We have thousands of years of people who thought about things that we can listen to. It’s amazing. I just saw this film about listening to the past, Once Upon a Time in Harlem. Basically, in 1972, William Greaves invited all of the survivors of the Harlem Renaissance to Duke Ellington’s house to just hang out and have a reunion—Arna Bontemps, Bruce Nugent, Eubie Blake, Romare Bearden and also people I wouldn’t have known, like a bookseller, a librarian, and an activist… Bill Greaves is a smart man; he didn’t have to do anything besides invite them and get them into these conversations and let them circulate and mill about. Everyone comes dressed in their best, of course. This is the Harlem Renaissance generation, so these are erudite people. These people were shot in 1972, talking about something that happened a hundred years ago, and I can watch them argue about it. Having this reckoning with people who I have only read about was cellularly transformative. And it is part of our cultural heritage. These people are part of what makes us us.

What do you hope will be the imprint of your time here?

Oh lord, have mercy! What a question. My films, I guess. Another thing I’ve learned with Drylongso: I started by saying I thought it was a failure, but now it’s been restored and very lovingly re-released by Criterion and Janus Films. And they found the audience for this film, of young people who love it. And that’s not the only film where I’m making it for a future audience. I’m leaving behind the work I’ve made, and I hope it’s of use. And I think about that when I’m making it. Not so much that I want it to be important; it’s about hoping that it survives long enough for someone who needs it to find it.