People mattered to Fred
Moten when he was growing up in 1970s Las Vegas. As a black kid living in a
segregated area of the entertainment capital of America and beyond, Moten and
his friends made their own fun. At home too, growing up with his janitor
father, a school-teacher mother who campaigned for desegregation and a lively
coterie of activists, artists and bohemians, the social scene on his doorstep
was an important influence on the man named by Art Review as the tenth most globally
influential people in the arts.
“I grew up around people
who were really interested in the arts and beauty, and who always had
interesting things to say about it,” says Moten. “As a kid as well, I was part
of this really intense social group, and we would always embark on these
collective projects with bike ramps or whatever, and we’d do things together,
which was great. I’d much rather do something together with someone than by
myself.”
It’s not difficult to
see the long-term effect all this has had on Moten’s work as one of the most
forward-looking thinkers of his age. Since his first publications appeared at
the turn of the century, Moten has explored black identity and culture in a
discursive and engaging way that can flip from Charles Mingus to Hannah Arendt
in a sentence. Recent books include Black and Blur, Stolen Life and The
Universal Machine. While deeply radical in their thinking, they are rooted in a
need for shared emotional experience that goes right back to Moten’s early days.
One can see this in
particular in Gravitational Feel, the artwork Moten has created in collaboration
with artist Wu Tsang, and which is shown in Glasgow for the first time next
week. This forms part of Episode 10: A Means Without End, the latest long
weekend of discussion, provocation and sharing of experience organised by
Arika, the ever-expanding public forum initiated and led by Barry Esson and
Bryony McIntyre, the duo previously behind Glasgow-based experimental music
festival, Instal.
Gravitational Feel is
nominally a steel, wood and rope construction given its emotional impulse by the
audience who move among it, brushing, strumming and stroking it in a touching interactive
display.
“We call it a sculptural
performance,” says Moten. “You could call it an installation, but it’s also a
performance in terms of the way people interact with it. Sometimes it’s me and
Wu interacting, but largely it’s about how other people experience it. That’s
the main thing. Wu and I began working together about six years ago, and came
out of our friendship. A lot of it comes from us not being in the same place,
and I guess I’m interested in non-local communities.”
At Tramway, Moten will
also take part in several other Episode 10 events alongside contemporaries
including Brazilian philosopher and artist, Denise Ferreira da Silva and
Berlin-based artist and film-maker Arjuna Neuman. Poet Nathaniel Mackey and
Colombian mathematician Fernando Zalamea will also appear alongside Moten.
This is the third of
Arika’s Episodes Moten has taken part in. The first, Episode 4: Freedom is a
Constant Struggle, saw him in dialogue with poet and playwright Amiri Baraka
and trumpeter and composer, Wadada Leo Smith. Moten’s second appearance was at
Episode 6: Make a Way Out of No Way, when he appeared alongside grassroots
community organiser Charlene Sinclair and Miss Prissy, the self-styled queen of
black working class dance form, Krump. Moten also took part in Arika’s
week-long series of events in 2012 at the Whitney Biennial in New York.
“They were a lot of
fun,” Moten says of the events. “I was working with a lot of people from the
U.S., but it took us all to be in Scotland for it to happen.”
Despite co-creating
Gravitational Feel, Moten is loath to call himself a poet or artist, and
actively resists definition in those terms, both for himself and others. The
things that matter in terms of shaping his thinking remain much closer to home.
“There are people who
are called artists or writers,” he says, “and it was musicians I encountered
first. People like Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Earth, Wind and Fire,
all the music my Mom was playing. And there were writers, like Amiri Baraka,
Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Gayl Jones. But in terms of, let’s say, my
relationship to the aesthetic, which is bigger than art, I would say my
relationship to my Mom and the people who I grew up around, who fed me and
schooled me, they’re more important. It wasn’t an academic thing, but it was
intellectual. These people thought deeply about what they said and what they
did, and it was a social thing.”
All of which not only
relates to Gravitational Feel, but to Arika’s line of inquiry in bringing
people together in a public space to interact in ways that the work of Moten
and others enables them to do.
As Esson puts it,
Moten’s thinking about how communities exist in everyday opposition to
prevailing power structures “has had a
profound impact on our own thinking, ways of collaborating and even just the
kinds of things we believe could even be possible with the events we organise.”
Moten put it even
simpler.
“In the work that Wu and
I do, there’s a sense of community,” he says, “and it’s a more detailed form of
social life. And I guess once you start thinking about social life, it becomes
more mysterious and more miraculous. It’s a miracle we’re constantly trying to
understand, to get people together to try and understand it, and to keep on
asking questions.”
Fred Moten takes part in Arika’s Episode 10: A Means Without End
at Tramway, Glasgow, November 20-24. Events Moten will take part in are All and
at once with Denise
Ferreira da Silva, Arjuna Neuman and Wu Tsang on November 20, 8.30-9.45pm;
Poetry, Mathematics, Debris, with Nathaniel Mackey and Fernando Zalamea,
November 22, 8-9.30pm; Discussion on Mathopoetics, with Fernando Zalamea,
November 23, 2-4pm; Gravitational Feel runs from November 22-24. An opening
performance takes place on November 21 from 7pm to 8pm.
The Herald, November 14th 2019
ends
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