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Evil Nigger @ 52 Walker: Experiential Art Criticism 001
In this ongoing project I viscerally imbue positionality into art criticism through voice and imagery. In a two-part performance this presented script would function as a live reading, supported by a video installation.
“From the subway I emerge, and the sun’s light returns. From the stream of bodies I maneuver to an opening and break free. Up the incline, I go as my focus gets closer and closer; “Glenn Ligon and Julius Eastman” glisten in black vinyl across scaling glass windows. I find the door, like muscle memory.”
[a] “Evil Nigger” is scribed upon the white wall and a vast space awakens.
The work of Glenn Ligon ignites the room like portals, while four pianos lay dormant.
Sleeping.
The piece the show is named after comes from the “Nigger Series”, a body of work by Julius Eastman. Spanning 21 minutes and 5 seconds in notated clock time, this piece can be performed by any instrument of the same group. Although it premiered on Northwestern’s campus in 1980, “Evil Nigger” can be experienced once every hour as I read at the front desk.
[b] 1 to the power of 13 echoes “speak” as it ricochets from wall to sight; flickering on and off. I begin traversing Eastman’s handwriting, images and notation that span from floor to ceiling. Pages and pages of “Thruway”, his final unpublished series, configure themselves in a bricolage of reproduced patina. As I observe, the flat images seem to let out a long breath that reaches me 35 years after Eastman’s last.
A Homecoming.
[c] “negro sunshine” radiates towards me and the work of Ligon ramps up. Now entering his arena the obscuring of perception sends a shudder up my spine. “AMERICA” arrives upside down and charred. Dark black organic forms consume a canvas while a quote hides in plain sight tipping overhead. Silence. Silence is all I need and is proposed by the four still pianos. Whirring, the neon lights alert the grounds and create their own machination.
[d] I wait and walk to the center. “Sth Tsh Sth”. I read in a neon red and blue, mirroring my impatience. I follow the hues as they spill onto the floor.
The colors meld into the substrate for which they stand and I wonder how I have become a medium within the space.
[e] The note of A rumbles out and footsteps hover. This note flutters and launches twisting to a lower register, then plunging lower and lower. Now Swelling, its former counterpart, joins the cacophony. 1..2..3..4, tin surrounds me as metallic sounds resonate in a once hearty arena. A high note stays tightly by twanging outwards only to return back to center.
No energy in the circle of matter is lost, just subsumed. Something sounds familiar and I float towards it but it dissipates and I am set on fire. I return to open my eyes and clap but the piano hauntingly gyrates up and down an ivory vertebrae-
there is no player in sight. Four sit before me while only three play, the brown one is silent –
But does it lack? Because in the end none of these pianos are being employed, the other three just pretend. My experience is earth shattering yet I feel hollow and the repetitive dissonance chugs me on to a no man’s land.
[Evil Nigger 1979. 2025] 52 Walker opened in October of 2021 in Tribeca, but more importantly is its position within the art ecosystem. Director, Ebony L Haynes pronounced her plans to hire an all black staff and it spread awry within the front pages — but what could be confused or debated?
This curation by Haynes between Glenn Ligon and Julius Eastman involves the extremes of sensoriality. Always sifting, no two comprehensions are the same. From the initial “quiet” to the eruption and descent — all cylinders fire.
The pianos positioned front and center propose an expectation yet lay dormant. One presumes their purpose and incoming transformation yet the printed word whether in neon, coal or ink seems endlessly accessible.
Imagine if the auditory performance never stopped…
“Would you allow it to fall to the background?”
This presentation questions the inferred stability of either state.
Haynes within her slow-paced exhibition programming allows the work to breathe and waft within our socio-political and aesthetic climates.
So, what does it mean to have this juncture in time and space?
A time in which there is,“A New Zwirner Gallery With an All-Black Staff” *according to the New York Times* and a show of Glenn Ligon and Julius Eastman called “Evil Nigger”. In a world where language is increasingly used to spur difference and derision,“Evil Nigger” at 52 Walker reminds one of the openness of surface and perception that cannot be diminished.
All footage is taken at 52 Walker Tribeca, the video contains audio.