Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Anna Martine Whitehead’s latest installation of “Endurance Tests,” a column “on current explorations of representation, the ethereal, and compulsiveness by black artists working in the field of performance.” The author notes, “[…] there is no accounting for blackness. It is too vast—it is everything—and can look any way it wants to. Or it can not look at all.” This article was originally published on September 29, 2015.

Perhaps it is fitting that the final program for Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is Xaviera Simmons’ Continent: Dark Sound Blue. The artist is a social practitioner in the truest sense, frequently making work that resists commodification and even documentation, to the extent that it troubles the very notion of what an “art work” is. This is precisely the kind of question one should ask when walking through Radical Presence: How can we understand this as art? How can we understand it as work? How can we reckon with these remnants as anything other than traces of blackness after the historical fact of the performance?

There are several vantages from which to consider Radical Presence, curated by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s Valerie Cassel Oliver. One viewpoint is to understand the art world itself as a performance of globalized capitalism with performance art as its undercommons, in which black artists participate in dialogues of resistance. Another is to approach it from within the fugitive place of blackness, a perpetually redefined and transmutable no-place of rugged reinvention and hyper-sociality. From this latter standpoint, the art world is not as interesting a subject of interrogation as the question of how blackness iterates itself through performance practices and radical aesthetics.

Read the full article here.