Jacolby Satterwhite. En Plein Air Vassalage, 2015. Courtesy of Oh Wow Gallery.

On April 30th, the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) debuted a video installation by artist Jacolby Satterwhite which featured Miami-bred rapper Trina. The film was followed with a short performance by the Diamond Princess herself, who performed hits like “The Baddest Bitch,” “Pull Over,” and “Look Back at It.” The collaborative performance is a part of the PAMM’s WAVES initiative, a series of commissioned collaborative performances among a range of interdisciplinary artists. The performance, entitled “En Plein Air,” took place in PAMM Beach, situated in the museum’s outdoor space along Biscayne Bay.

“..WATCH ME BUILD A TREE HOUSE..” a lyric rapped by Trina in her 2013 collaboration with Lil Wayne entitled “Wowzers,” echoed through the speakers. Trina’s lyrics continued: “DICK LIKE A TREE,” playing simultaneously along with the video. The sounds provided by DJ Total Freedom included some of Trina’s most provocative euphemisms chopped and slightly screwed melodically over gigantic bass-bound instrumentals.Trina’s voice was then matched with a visual avatar of the Miami-based rapper created by Satterwhite.

Read the full review here.

Jacolby Satterwhite. En Plein Air: Music of Objective Romance, 2017. Courtesy of SFMOMA, San Francisco. Photo: Charles Villyard.

Jacolby Satterwhite, an African American artist well known for his virtual worlds of queer desire, presented a live performance at SFMOMA’s Gina and Stuart Peterson White Box Gallery on March 17 and 18, 2017. My particular account of this event highlights the incongruence of the museum’s conception of safety that disallowed the experimental and community-making aspects of the piece to fully unfold.

Friday, March 17, 10 p.m.: The waiting crowd is invited to take the elevator toward the gallery. At the entrance, a small sign warns that there will be smoke and blinking lights. Inside the gallery, the space feels like a dance club warming up; people are drinking and conversing.

Satterwhite, wearing a futurist black jacket, jumps on stage. People appear amused by the universe-like, immersive quality of the space, made possible by Satterwhite’s double presence in virtual reality and actual space, projections on the walls, the vibration of the electronic music, pinkish lights, and the dense smoke.

The artist’s improvisatory performance alternates dancing, DJing, and flirting with the audience. On the walls are large-scale projections of Satterwhite’s virtual worlds—a mix of imaginative and real spaces where performance, narrative, drawing, and 3D animation serve in the investigation of Blackness, queer pleasure, and memory, among others. Despite the large audience, only one pair of 3D glasses is available, through which the experience of moving inside these worlds is made visible to all. If the goal here is to communicate by way of one person to the next, this interaction is frustrated by the regulation and physical intervention of a guard.

Satterwhite perceives that even though the music tempts people to dance, something limits this impulse. To break this shyness, the artist invites a White man to dance onstage with him. This seductive play between audience and artist is interrupted as one guard discreetly informs Satterwhite that the man needs to come down; soon after, two more guards remove the man aggressively, shouting throughout. The audience and artist stand disconcerted.

Although Satterwhite’s piece was a part of a performance series attempting to create “epic possibilities for the real world,” to quote the museum, the guards’ actions, even when understood as a measure of safety, appeared brutal and invasive, breaking the promise of a musical romance en plein air.

The question that I would like to put forward is: In what ways can SFMOMA negotiate a concept of safety between artists, guards, and audiences that would allow for more of an experimental relationality to emerge?

En Plein Air: Music of Objective Romance took place March 17–18, 2017.

Sofia Villena Araya is a Costa Rican artist based in San Francisco. Her present work is an exploration of the intersections between drawing and dance.

Jacolby Satterwhite, 2014 (performance still); duration varied. Courtesy of the artist and The Whitney Museum, New York. Photo: Filip Wolak.

At NYU, I knew Muñoz within the fairly rigid context of the Performance Studies lectures he often officiated. Take Ecstasy With Me in many ways reproduced this academic setting. Rows of chairs stacked to the back of the museum’s cafe space formalized the event so that it felt more like church, or a wedding. “Welcome to art in a converted museum restaurant,” joked a member of performance collective My Barbarian while waiting for one of the night’s many tech glitches to be resolved.

As we filed into the lower level of the Whitney’s vestibule, video artist Jacolby Satterwhite vogued nimbly around the lobby carpet in a silver suit and helmet, out of which screens protruded like sexualized mushrooms (an iPhone trunk sprouted from his crotch). Under the harsh fluorescents, Satterwhite was one of the most proactive warriors in Muñoz’s army that night. A literal embodiment of theory, Satterwhite’s movements assertively performed queer futurity into existence on the indifferent lobby floor.

Miguel Gutierrez and I.n. Hafezi, p.49 future fuckup, 2014 (performance still); 5:00. Courtesy of the artists and The Whitney Museum, New York. Photo: Filip Wolak.

Other performances stuck closer to Muñoz’s dedication to a manifesto-like lyricism in affirmation of queerness. Juliana Huxtable, for example, stalked around the Whitney stage like a vision, reading highly personal prose rich with feverish dissatisfaction about the ways in which the world still does not measure up to queer vision, queer desire, queer necessity for survival. In everyday life, Huxtable reigns as a nightlife personality in that subaltern space Muñoz so lauded, and she has been instrumental in generating such space for a younger generation of queer New Yorkers.

Choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and I.n. Hafezi’s p.49 future fuckup led the duo through a spectrum of gelled work lights to a soundtrack of tinny glistening noise and ethereal discordant bells. In effortless but rigidly staged movements, they would race around the space, then stand stock still, one hand up, quickly waving with tightly wound eagerness and expectation. Perhaps they waved to an alien ship; perhaps at Muñoz’s fantastic future as it glistened on the horizon. Such waves were among the most resonant attempts to conjure queer futurity into the present, but the audience ultimately left the symposium still straining towards a utopia untapped.

Take Ecstasy With Me is a testament to the Biennial’s effort to amplify those queer voices, technologies, and aesthetics that continue to profoundly nourish contemporary art. But these were only gestures toward a breadth of necessary future toils. Muñoz invited us to join him in the spaces he wrote about; to actually perform queer futurity in those essential subaltern spaces, like the back room of that East Village bar, instead of merely staging performances in preparation for it. Take Ecstasy With Me is such a sad title. Like Muñoz’s legacy, it is a plea for communion that hangs in mid-air. It is a call still waiting to be answered.

Take Ecstasy With Me occurred on April 17, 2014 as part of The Whitney Museum of Art 2014 Biennial.