Notes on Diamond Stingily: Orgasms Happened Here

“I arrive slowly in the world; sudden emergences are no longer my habit. I crawl along. The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me.” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks)

“From Fanon we learn about the experience of disorientation, as the experience of being an object among other objects, of being shattered, of being cut into pieces by the hostility of the white gaze.” (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology)

Patinated memories congeal into this hopeless and hapless nostalgia that refers to no-thing. Stingily’s rendering of an individual, singular iteration of Black American ‘suburban’ manages to ache in that cavity behind the sternum for many Black Americans who crawl their way through each work in the exhibition at 52 Walker. There’s no material antecedent for these works as they diverge from representation into (perhaps just past) the limits of representability and the psychosis of conceptuality.

Even at that limit, at that psychosis, Stingily addresses the violated child which is assailed by the impositions of (anti-)Blackness in America. These drapes, these bats, these hanging white shirts, these stained glass glows, these severed iron gates, these closed doors…There is a privacy to their meaning, they are private in their meaning, they mean privacy. Contrarily, contradictorily, yet inescapably, these works are revealing and exposing: they are open closets, doors with nothing to hide, transparent glass cases, sheer chiffon curtains. Perhaps we can be asked to rethink (anti-)Blackness (and Black childhood) with these realizations: always privatized, never allowed that privacy. Cannibals, consumption…the Black imaginary (before the Black flesh) is an edible treat for those that hunger; it is also reviled slop, abject detritus that the anti-Black throat regurgitates instantly.

How is one to know that there is Blackness if that Blackness is not revealed and offered on a platter? How is one to know that Orgasms Happened Here—to avoid, to be disgusted, to contemplate, to study those ‘orgasms’—if they are not revealed, pasted on the closet for others to see?

@ima_beat_yo_ass_on_dis_train's
Orgasms Happened Here open at @52walkerstreet until September 14.

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