The Outside Meets the Institution: The Carters' "Apeshit" Video

Using the figure of the anamorphosis, this essay explores the critical labor of the music video for The Carters' "Apeshit" (Ricky Saiz, 2018, United States). By playing off the canonical artefacts of the Louvre collection, "Apeshit" stages a stunning array of lessons in contrast, thinking through blackness in relation to ontology, capitalism, and aesthetics. With "Apeshit," The Carters claim blackness as an aesthetic and affective force of sociality incompatible with canonical archival methods. Instead, the genre of the contemporary music video emerges as a form of radical archival practice.