Reflections of a Conceptual Expatriate

1.

I don’t know maybe it’s my energy. I don’t know maybe if I had been good at math, or majored in those things which make you good at capitalism. Maybe if I had stayed bi. I don’t know — I don’t fit here. I don’t work here. There is no flow to my shine, reciprocity, and my motto is: Ubuntu, panhumanism, linked fate. Regardless, I had to create myself into a conceptual expatriate because the United States was closed to me. I kept trying to be where I thought I ought to be: art and academia. But what would actually happen? They would invite me out to twitch at me, talk down to me. Where was the kinship, mentors, open doors? Where’s invite, welcome? Where’s bonding and communion? Where was love? You expect my solidarity without loyalty? Because you’re shallow — and I look like I should be the loud bald Negro shouting about sports on ESPN? Why are you stunting me? Why must you force isolation and loneliness? What is the Americanness behind this? Is there any space for failure, vulnerability, uncontrolled feelings, and random conversations? No, we suffocate. Can we speak about the depth without becoming impassioned to the point of rancor and bitterness? No, it’s like the foreign artist I met who said even political art in the United States comes from a smirk. I just wanted to make experimental, abstract, esoteric, abstruse art, game-changing transcendent work of viscera, and frisson. I have masterpiece in me: can you see me?

Why am I blocked? Caveats; shadows; thresholds; vectors; speeds; careering; careering; celerity: Barriers.

I wasn’t just blocked, I was underwater. I was blocked because all I knew was what I knew, and what was told to me. It is and was deprivation you don’t even realize and then when you do all that void of terror from recognition, unfulfilled, longing that had been Eden on empty. On some level it’s puritanism. We don’t give or receive, we just take — USA. It’s a test I turned into a performance piece just for myself. The last few years I find every man. How they all come back to me: that’s the test and the art. Yes, I generalize, but systems hold up, at least from my lived experience, and one can glean the patterns.

2.

Death is a spectrum. The topology of threshold — every breakthrough another base and divide, limit and ceiling, line and maximum. Impermeable permeability. The boundary recesses like the tide but the waves remain the wall between shore and depths. And yet: Whiteness is black hole, cannibalizing, sucks up everything. Erasure, erasure, Gilliam, Whitten, Patterson, Philando, Alton,

And even then we only protest when he is a cis hetero black man — all other intersections haven’t been thought of yet because they are from the future, and we think in capitalism, basic AF.

What lies outside?

Beneath the conceptual expatriate is the need to be decolonial in action and deed. My work deals with atheism, death, competition, bonding, density, and utopia. I am here to disrupt social construct, which is often misconstrued with normativity and essentialism. I blame myself. Two liberal arts degrees and looking for a third: I studied the expatriate but never put it together for myself. That is such an American disconnect, subaltern reckoning, runaway slave. I know how centuries back Henry Tanner, the first, basically the first black American expatriate who got himself to France where it was easier and fathomable to be fully realized . I never saw the through line between him and me — but also no one told me either.

Those without this matrix don’t know how to police me, they don’t know the symbols I carry, different paradigm, different gaze – there’s loophole. Yet the shadow to that light: I am cliché. The world without has always looked to the black  expatriate to explain USA, the role of Magic Negro on steroids and DMT.

3.

Yes there is nuance and no monolith, but still, I have no self. I am unselfconscious. Light, Gossamer, Eerie. I’m whatever your projection tells you. Your subjectivity is relational and interactive, codependent and inter-reliant. Your imagination > your projection! You were like, what are you?! And I was like, I am fractal, moiré, and iridescence inter/bisected by scintillating mirrors/coruscating screens, hyperdimensional, time immemorial — ∞.

I am more than social sculptor – I am social engineer. Overseer – when the canary in the mine (Cassandra / Oracle / Vanguard) stops being passive and starts being lead (beacon / Firestarter / spearhead).

I created my art practice to make myself a conceptual expatriate. Until I find a way out of USA to move overseas for good, I have used my enterprising, entrepreneurial, self-made, American can-do spirit to build a space inside of New York City that is without USA: like the United Nations, physically in New York City but technically without belonging to all nations; a small space, without the exploitation of the exotic, where a man can be a prophet in his own land. That was the goal — to build an allegorical United Nations of artists, a creative think tank, called Communitas, an art practice that creates new art from new connections with artists from around the world, across disciplines, across gazes, people from all walks of life, many professions, colors, cultures, nationalities, subjectivities, Ubuntu, linked fate. And together, we are building a global panhumanist collective influencing art, aesthetics, optimism, pacifism, iconoclasm, thought, imagination, and vanguardism.

4.

I created Communitas  for myself, and for us: those who feel all of the aforementioned from deep within their interiority, the commons anew, beyond neoliberalism, beyond western matrices. What lies outside? What is our own gaze? To process the decolonial, my art and thinking navigate this idea of non- and super-human spaces. Communitas is both high philosophical art, and non-art but community think tank. We create at least two dimensions in any creative act: context and contours in process of the artist, making the new as conceptual expatriate and toward the decolonial as well as a world of the work of art, which members of an audience are invited to interpret and respond to, consequently shaping and making aspects of their own contexts and contours.

5.

My goal as a conceptual expatriate — a nonentity creating a nonspace, as if digital life were real life — was to launch a global arts movement of new ideas and vanguard works of art through a creative think tank, a quarterly downtown Manhattan salon, and an interdisciplinary arts collective. To create the next worldwide frontline of art, including from sports art to STEAM (STEM plus arts), through developing artist partnerships and relationships. Our next step, an upcoming apocalyptic sports video piece called “The Halcyon Sublime,” will esoterically and abstractly focus on the erupting shadow of the sins of colonialism and ‎the Capitalocene. The aims of Communitas are the subtext made corporeal, question made flesh, and reconciliation of compartmentalization.

We shall see what’s next. You coming?

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