Subversions and Interventions

There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed:

Juliana Huxtable’s Playfully Subversive Lecture Performance at MoMA

Katie Schaag

Juliana Huxtable is a contemporary multimedia visual artist, writer, and performer whose work playfully experiments with form, aesthetic, and technique. Her conceptual explorations of Black trans femme digital subjectivity and (dis)embodiment defy categorization, subvert power dynamics, and provoke active engagement.

In her book Mucus in My Pineal Gland (2017), Huxtable performatively narrates her experience navigating the internet as a Black trans woman. Addressing the reader in a bright blue caps lock font punctuated with hyperlinks, her linguistic and visual style recalls the playful and subversive script-writing techniques of the historical avant-garde. She uses second person address to actively interpellate a solitary reader, self-consciously technologically mediating the transmission of script and performance. She presented one of the works from this collection as a multimedia lecture performance at MoMA entitled There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed (2015). My paper will analyze Huxtable’s conceptual and aesthetic intervention into the genre of the lecture performance toward playfully subversive ends. 

As a Black trans femme writer and performer presenting her work in historically colonialist and racist spaces of art museums and academia – in this case, MoMA – Huxtable playfully challenges power dynamics and instigates new ways of critically engaging with institutional histories and futures. In the context of her critique of white supremacist and colonialist historical narratives, the claim asserted by the title of her lecture performance – “There are certain facts that cannot be disputed” – is at once ironic and sincere. Huxtable is critiquing the hegemonic production and transmission of knowledge – the sedimentation of a dominant culture’s perspectives as facts – but as a lecturer, she also assumes the mantle of subject expert. Her appropriation of scientific diction and syntax at once parodies the role of the scientist, and earnestly takes up the authority of the scientist role for her own ends. Humorously narrating the antics of “Mike the Historian and Archaeologist” and “Bill the Filmmaker and Anthropologist,” Huxtable intervenes in the traditionally sexist, white supremacist, colonialist fields of history, archeology, and anthropology. In doing so, she also bridges the traditional methods of academic archival research with more experimental and contemporary digital methods, and subverts the illusion of linear rational logic with a constellation of associative ideas, moods, and feelings.

Her embodied lecture performance, like her script, synthesizes theory and practice in its performative investigation of digital subjectivity and socially constructed reality. The visual, sonic, and experiential elements of the work are inextricable from its concept. Echoing her lecture’s references to histories of racism and colonialism, she also pasted scraps of paper with fragments from her research around the lecture hall, materializing her archive in the performance space. In her Introduction to “Black Performance II: Knowing and Being,” a special issue of the journal The Black Scholar, Dr. Stephanie Leigh Batiste emphasizes “the ways knowledge is embedded in the environment and drawn out by performers, artists, and scholars cooperating in creative critical love,” and the “capacity of performance to illuminate Black systems of knowing and ways of being.” The dizzyingly complex multimedia landscape of Huxtable’s lecture performance situates her critique in an embodied situation, not only intellectual but also emotional and sensory.

Danielle Bowler

Artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi’s ongoing Gymnasium series opened in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. In lockdown, it was viewed not in the concentrated white cube of Johannesburg’s Stevenson Gallery, but expansively ricocheted between online screens, as the works rippled across digital space. They were propelled by the way the show captures our contemporary imagination and Black experience, and the deep aesthetic pleasure of its subversive and tender softness.

The Tokyo Olympics highlighted the way Black women’s bodies remain under a historically enduring scrutiny in athletics and beyond it. But while the visibility of these athletes is seemingly heightened, they remain concurrently unseen beyond skin and surface, and are barred, bordered and barriered in numerous ways as race, gender and more intersect. Their names are metonym, monument and many. 

In this moment, Gymnasium presents a sharp prism of truth, reality and testimony; as we stand on the edge of the architecture of reason and the question of humanity itself. In sharply precise lines, Nkosi’s work stages an act in imagination, while implicating us all in its intentional, tender and precise enquiry about the conditions of our world, all the while being aware that the artworld she labours in is itself “a political structure”.

Gymnasium deals in duality and multiplicity: the gymnast’s story is also the artist’s, and one speaks of many Others. “The artist, like the gymnast, is witnessed and judged: trying, succeeding, failing”, Nkosi writes in her catalogue notes, questioning the idea of and demand to perform the role of the artist as a Black woman.

In pastel tones and with multiple kinds of blackness stretched in brown across her canvases, she paints black gymnasts, judges and audience against a backdrop of sharp lined architecture – mats, furniture, equipment and arena. It is immediately evocative in a moment where Simone Biles is the image of the sport’s excellence – but the work also extends outwards, beyond gymnastics, beyond excellence, to ask us to think about all spaces and performances of black identity, and ways of participating in, against and beyond defined demands. Therein lies its resonant power: just as it presents visibility and performance, it questions it too. 

As Kabwe writes: “Nkosi asks us to consider what happens when the pressure to perform is diminished, when the performance of blackness is refocused into imagining the spaces we want to inhabit. A simultaneous critique and proposition”.

Nkosi depicts before and afters in the gymnast’s world, away from excellence and the spectacular moments of their dynamic routines. By focusing on the quotidian, she renders her figures worthy of being seen, looked at and witnessed in mundane moments – their humanity is not contingent nor needing to be achieved through performed brilliance.

This paper will consider the artist’s practice, and how she locates, critiques and plays with the idea of performance – considering freedom from the historic and present constraints of both being a Black woman artist and athlete, as her imagination and way of occupying the role of artist in society relentlessly sings with possibility, with what it means to dream, relentlessly, and to create work, ideas, and alternative realities and futures.

William Henry Pruitt III

Allan Edmunds’ 2008 offset lithograph, “200 Yrs.” plays with the early iconography of then President-Elect Barack Obama. It features Shepard Fairey’s famous “Hope” poster prominently at the top and center of its shape and on the top layer of its colors. Yet it is not easily classified as a portrait. It presents Obama’s iconography on a thin layer above many free-floating icons of Black history in the United States, celebrating Obama as the inheritor of numerous traditions, from the eighteenth and nineteenth century abolitionist movements through the twentieth century Civil Rights Movement. This paper will assess how “200 Yrs” presents viewers with an alternative conception of historical time, one that portrays the Obama Presidency as an inherent historical victory even before it has begun. Inspired by James Baldwin and Manning Marable’s wisdom, I view this portrayal skeptically. “And in any case,”  Baldwin professed in 1961, “what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro ‘first’ will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of” (9). In 1983, Marable expressed even less hope in the potential of a Black U.S. Presidency to eradicate oppression. “Visions of a revolutionary Black, radical feminist, or ‘Marxist President of the United States” he wrote in How Capitalism Has Underdeveloped Black America, “are illusions fostered by the implicit logic of the bourgeois ‘democratic’ process among some American progressives” (256). While this paper celebrates “200 Yrs.” for spectacularly eschewing easy narratives of racial progress, it reveals the limits of this offset lithograph’s pro-Black, anti-white supremacist aesthetics. “200 Yrs.” reproduces the “apocalyptic national morality tale,” which Erica R. Edwards identifies as “the presidency of now.” Consequently, it warrants the feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, pro-Black critiques of “Black president hokum” and “charisma in the fictions of Black leadership” that Edwards offers. In the interdisciplinary field of Black Studies, alternatives to hegemonic conceptions of historical time abound. Yet they do not subvert centuries-old interlocking systems of oppression to the same degree. This paper analyzes “200 Yrs.” as a case study.


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