During my tenure as a Guggenheim Fellow (2003-2004), the project I'd like to undertake is entitled The Black Factory. The work is a performance-installation built into a panel truck and will also enlist other media; such as artist's books, objects made on site, video, the web, and a promotional brochure (to 'sell' the Factory and encourage new venues).
This project has been evolving within the contours of my art practice for twenty plus years. During this time, my work-process has tended toward the centrifugal; moving out and across a wide variety of media including painting, sound-work, fiction-writing, performance, theater, sculpture, installation and object-making.
The Black Factory is an ending and a beginning. It is an ending because it represents a summing up. It is a beginning because it represents research in order to locate fresh extrapolations, involvements and directions.
I already have a sense of one major direction. I want to make 'crucibles' for blackness. These crucibles are art works that have two functions: 1) to protect, validate and enshrine blackness; 2) to isolate, imprison and obfuscate blackness. The drama of these two opposing forces, at odds with each other, circumscribes a contradictory blackness. This is a cousin notion to the blackness W.E.B. Du Bois was attempting to describe in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903) when he spoke of the negro as possessing a double-consciousness. Du Bois' blackness moved beyond race into social-philosophy and into melancholia. This is the blackness I am after.
To me, blackness is a many-sided hole. Or more paradoxically, a hole within a hole within a hole and so on. When I say this I simply mean an open-ended nature that is not about blackness but the world itself. The Black Factory is the concrete expression of this sort of thinking. It is the experiment with which I will test this very hypothesis.
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Conceived and constructed to fit inside a panel truck, The Black Factory will travel throughout America to bring blackness wherever it is needed. The Factory consists of three compartments that unfold to create an interactive public environment made up of a library, a workshop, and a gift shop.
Through the circulation of promotion material, the web and by word-of-mouth, The Black Factory will make contact with a range of host-communities that invite the Factory to visit. The host will spread the word to the local community and ask them to 'get the black out.' Whether it's the high-school football field or the foot of the steps of City Hall, the location chosen for the Factory to stop and set up shop becomes the drop-site: folks arrive ready to share the objects they've collected, things that reference blackness for them (from copies of The Souls of Black Folk and images of Martin Luther King Jr. to Ku Klux Klan hoods or the ashes of Jacqueline Oasis Kennedy).
This gathering of individuals and their materials will in its ideal realization take on the form of a lively grassroots rally whose very nature will provoke questions about what it means to be different. As the community begins to offer up its 'objects de blackness,' the Factory will assist to channel the exchanges in two different ways: some objects are placed on display on the Factory's library or website; others are fed into the workshop's pulverization area, where they are immediately broken down and turned into the powder that the Factory then uses to manufacture its signature line of products for sale.
While processing is underway, visitors can survey the library's holdings, watch as the work of pulverization unfolds, browse in the gift shop, or stand back and marvel at this playfully seditious community enterprise in which they have become participants.
At once a mobile marketplace that trades in provocation and a nomadic laboratory for crafting consciousness, The Black Factory gathers, shapes, and repackages materials and experiences that challenge us to see the creative potential nested within the polarized politics of race in America. Wherever The Black Factory appears and sets up operations, it catalyzes a participatory process of public engagements with issues of cultural difference. It combines sculpture, installation and performance to pose questions about identity, community, and consumption that attempts to work its way under our skin.
The Black Factory welcomes visitors to begin the process of contemplation and consumption by proffering their own examples of cultural materials that reference blackness. These racialized relics are either included in the library's archive (live or web) or marked for pulverization by the Factory's workshop, where one-by-one they are reduced to pulp. Combined with a little of the industrialized magic of capitalism, this pulverized blackness becomes the raw material for a host of new products: home-made 'treatments,' bottled water, blank books, prayer mats, and souvenir yellow duckies.
By collecting, recycling and peddling the ingredients for re-thinking blackness, The Black Factory transforms the tensions and contradictions of race into a dynamic field of possibility. The Factory will perform an inward-reading outreach effort. It will encourage us to take hold of the stereotypes of race and class which bind us to our indecision and apathy and to turn them inside out. It will challenge us to grapple with the habitual ways in which we consume products, identities, and ideologies. It will extend open arms to those who feel certain that they have already settled all of these difficult questions, as well as to those who are still actively struggling with them. It will ask us to rise to the task of collaborating with the creating of a community built not upon erasing but rather embracing our own differences and contradictions.
I hope it is apparent that I've been thinking about this project for sometime. I understand it is ambitious but I am already at work pushing it through. To this end, I applied for and received a Creative Capital Project Grant for 2001, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant for 2002, and have secured the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art as the first host for The Black Factory in Spring 2004. I am currently seeking additional funding and venue locations, while meetings with product and web designers and the performers who will perform in the project are well underway. In fact I have already bought a truck!