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Earlier this year, in a live Zoom conversation (the ultimate 2020 medium) aired to launch One Long Black Sentence, Renee Gladman read Fred Moten’s little note to her as a spell. It said:

I think the ideas come in the drawing, and in gathering, and in drawing for one another, in the drawing of water, or wine, as well as in the movement of a pen, or line, the overlap and recursion, the curve and blur, the contrapuntal swerve, and tangental brush, above all the gathering, the commune, and to move beyond the virtuality and virtuosity of it or, as The Godfather says, ‘we got to get together’. Prose Architectures as the model for a whole bunch of little experimental bands is the funky precedent.

Here, Moten’s charting of Gladman’s drawings as ‘funky precedent’ to ‘little experimental bands’ speaks to the book’s capacity to generate small new artforms, but it also speaks to 

indexing                                 itself.        

                                                                   index: you make cuts, cut doors                                                                                     index: you ‘ride around’                                                                                   index: pointing at things!                                                                                                  index: tiny manicule. tiny                                                                                     index: scissorfingerwork.

                                                                                                          ☛ to clarify (obscure), Moten wrote an index for Gladman’s latest book of drawings, One Long Black Sentence. Unfolding the mechanics of this process (how do you index a book with no language?), he describes his relationship to indexing the book as having                  affinities and entanglements with  

a c c o m p a n i m e n t ♬♫♪ - - -

 - - -both in the sense of the Black musical tradition (piano: jazz comping, gospel music), and relating to the legal work of scholar and activist Michelle Castañeda.

             index1:            michelle castañeda is an Assistant Prof. 

in the department of 

Performance Studies 

at NYU,       who has 

written on------------       

ACCOMPANIMENT 

& ‘choreographies of 

legal procedures   as 

they play out in immigration 

courtrooms across the United States.’        

              (Ecologies of Migrant Care. accessed 14/12/20)

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July 28: Renee Gladman and Fred Moten in conversation — PCG Studio

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Ja’Tvoia Gary, Citational Ethics (Saidiya Harman, 2017), 2020.

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Policy is not the one against the many, the cynical against the romantic, or the pragmatic against the principled. It is simply baseless vision, woven into settler’s fabric. It is against all conservation, all rest, all gathering, cooking, drinking, and smoking if they lead to marronage.

Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (81)

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“I like to read, and I like to be involved in reading. And for me, writing is part of what it is to be involved in reading.”

Fred Moten

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Fred Moten at Weeksville Heritage Center (2019)

Photo by RJ Eldridge

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Interview with Wu Tsang and Fred Moten

Conducted on the occasion of the exhibition “Wu Tsang: The Luscious Land of God is Sinking” at 356 Mission, this conversation took place in September 2016. Wu Tsang and Fred Moten collaborate and cohabit the roles of performance artist and poet. Recent projects include films “Miss Communication and Mr:Re” (2014) and “Girl Talk” (2015), and an upcoming Performance in Residence commission, “Gravitational Feel” for Edition VI for If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam.

Fred Moten: So first of all, in my experience of seeing the performance, and then seeing the drawing, or let’s say the transcript of the performance, and then this archive of materials that went into the performance and film, and the film itself, and then recognizing the scale of it all, from something very large, like the canvas of the transcript, to the very small particularities of the materials in the archive—all of it combines in my mind to make me want to ask a question. There are two kinds of spans that I’m constantly thinking about with art. One is a span from lightness to density, and the other is from something more cosmological, in terms of its scope, to something really small. It’s a four-fold: lightness and density; largeness and smallness. The ones who can traverse and maintain movement along those axes, are those who I end up thinking of as being great. Really the first question is: Do you know that you’re great?

Wu Tsang: Haha, Fred!

FM: I wonder what it’s like. It must be a difficult thing to have to deal with. Not so much in terms of living with your own brain, but being able to move on all those different planes and scales. It makes me think of a term Charles Rosen used in regards to Schoenberg’s work: chromatic saturation. There’s certain moments in a composition in which it feels like every note that could be played is being played, a tremendous marshalling of the possible musical material in a way that’s still connected compositionally, without anything having to be left out. Rosen thinks about this with regard to music, but it also connects with color. Your film is just so colorful. There’s this one particular moment where you and boychild are on a boat, and the boat is traversing this canal with the neon… and there’s another moment where the pattern on boychild’s headband becomes almost like a flag and is waving and is almost fading or melding with the image of the water. That richness is what I would talk about in regard to density in your work.

WT: I appreciate what you’re saying, because there are so many choices when it comes to moving-image making. Especially with the all available technologies and formats, it means that you can chose a lot of different ways to communicate. For example, when I made Girl Talk with you we ended up just shooting on an iPhone. I realize now, it was because I wanted the image to fall apart, or be barely there, and also to reference intimate daily communication. There’s not a systematic way of working—I’m not just trying to make something look as fancy as possible by default. But definitely with Duilian there was a choice, at a certain point, to sort of… go for it. What it meant to take on this subject-matter in this context, became about honoring the size of the material, even if it meant having to hustle to make it possible. There were certain things the material demanded, for example filming on a boat in order to be floating between space-time and geography. Working collaboratively with many people to coalesce the poetry translations required a lot of time and energy. I wanted the film to feel like an exquisite corpse, to destabilize identities and narratives. We have talked about art in terms of an axis of lightness and density, but also in terms of an axis of beauty and horror. When I’m working, I’m always searching for a certain kind of pleasure and humor combined with devastation, and the stakes have to become high in order to make a decision.

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