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  • Jefferson Pinder and the Art of Black Endurance
  • Isaiah Matthew Wooden (bio)

It is an early spring night in 2012, within of one of the long, column-filled stretches of Washington D.C.’s now-shuttered Corcoran Gallery of Art. A man dressed in starched slacks, a crisp white buttoned down shirt, and a silver-clip-fastened black tie stands behind a deejay coffin housing two turntables. A vision of black respectability, he moves his hands eagerly and expertly between two red records, scratching them in opportune moments to fill the museum’s reverberant halls with sounds and rhythms that call to mind the pulse of hip hop while registering as sonically unique. Before the man sits a long, elevated runway with a seemingly simple but rather intricate apparatus affixed to the top of it. The complexity of the contraption, which is composed of, among other things, wood, metal, plastic, and water and includes multiple spots for sitting, doesn’t become fully apparent until six additional men clad in uniforms that copy the deejay’s march one by one toward the runway and position themselves atop the device. Hailing from various parts of the D.C. area, the men each strap their feet to the apparatus before grabbing ahold of the padded rods situated in front of their perches and pulling them as if rowing a boat. Their movements are synchronized initially. However, as time passes and individual commitments to sustaining the action waver, that synchronization disintegrates. Collaborative effort morphs into intense competition, in fact. And, after minutes upon minutes of immense exertion, not even the thrill of victory can motivate the men to continue to put their bodies on the line. The action comes to an end accordingly. But not before throwing into sharp relief the tremendous energy often expended to maintain hegemonic masculinities. And not before inviting spectators to reflect on the exploitation and expropriation that are constitutive of racial capitalism. With his time-based endurance piece Ben Hur (2012), interdisciplinary artist Jefferson Pinder both powerfully explores and draws viewers to grapple with such complex themes. [End Page 74]

First trained as a theatre artist and later as a painter and mixed-media creator, Pinder has focused his art-making practice in recent years on producing video works and performances that, like Ben Hur, ponder matters of blackness, labor, exertion, exhaustion, physicality, movement, struggle, and the imbrications there within. The resulting projects have been quite heterogeneous: from a Butoh-inspired escapist experimental film that, in part, contemplates the aftereffects of the Civil Rights Movement—2008’s Afro-Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise)—to a live video performance that presents carefully choreographed breakdance battles as a way to meditate on the dynamics of contemporary uprisings, such as those that emerged in the aftermath of the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—2014’s Dark Matter. (1) “As an interdisciplinary artist, I create performances, video work, and objects that challenge viewers to think critically about our highly polarized society. I explore the tangle of representations, visual tropes, and myths—referencing historical events and invoking cultural symbolism,” Pinder explains. (2) Reflected throughout the artist’s diverse body of work are his investments in pushing and redrawing formal conventions and boundaries. Many of the artist’s projects also betray a commitment to, as he puts it, “poetically open up a dialog” about racial and representational politics. (3)

Activating the black body in performance has proven an especially generative practice for Pinder. In addition to surfacing further the ways that, as Brandi Wilkins Catanese puts it, “blackness and performance are ineluctably linked,” and, indeed, demonstrating how, as Nicole Fleetwood argues, embodiments of blackness are “always already troubling to the dominant visual field,” Pinder’s engagements with the black body have also opened crucial space for the artist to offer searing meditations on the knottiness of America’s racial past and present as well as the contingency of black identity and racialized meanings. (4) To echo Michael Martin and David Wall, Pinder deploys the black body as both “a site and subject of expression” as well as “a metaphor and metonym for ‘black experience’” in his work. (5) In so doing, he makes...

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