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  • On Three Works By Sondra Perry
  • Kelly Filreis (bio)

I can't go around telling you I'm right or good when the dictionary is telling everyone around the world that everything black is evil and wicked. So then I come and say yes, so what? Yes I'm wicked. Yes I'm evil. … Why should I be good?1

The zine accompanying Sondra Perry's 2016 exhibition at The Kitchen in New York City uses as its epilogue these potent words of jazz musician and philosopher Sun Ra, recorded when he was a visiting lecturer at the University of California–Berkeley, in 1971. The surviving recording bears an additional, and significant, trace of his pedagogy; chalk taps and scratches against a blackboard as he performs permutations of words and Bible verses, transforming their spelling and pronunciation to reveal an underlying meaning; for instance, history becomes his-story.

What interests me in Perry's citation of Sun Ra is the embrace of the wicked, a critique of the myth of white Christian American morality that is weaponized and reinforced through language. To be good is to conform to the demands of those who hold power. To be evil is to refuse, to break apart language, to glitch, to misuse technology, to construct a different future. This should not be mistaken for what has become the tech industry rallying cry of "disruption" for disruption's sake. Rather, it is a means to show how one might circumvent the expectations for and presumptions of "good" representation of blackness in visual culture. The stakes of this can be seen throughout Perry's video works, wherein she combines found footage, sound, and digitally generated imagery to address the visibility and circulation of blackness in contemporary culture. "I also consider blackness [End Page 47]


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Figure 1.

Sondra Perry, Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016), Video, bicycle workstation, 9:05 min.

as technological in a way," Perry has stated. "Blackness shift s and morphs."2 These varying tactics of appropriation throughout her work—while this essay addresses just three examples—are not an effort to fix in place one particular reading of subjectivity but rather to reflect its own fluidity in the internet age, wherein "origins" or "originals" are not always immediately known. Her videos, often exhibited as part of immersive installations and sculptures, provoke affective, sensorial, and at times, overstimulated responses.

We are told we should live up to our potential. But productivity is painful, and we haven't been feeling well.3

These machines are wicked. The chamber of a rowing machine is filled with a thick blue Eco Styler hair gel that adds more resistance with each pull. An exercise bike's pedals are installed backwards, and its verticality forces the user into an uncomfortable rigidity. These are some of Perry's "Workstations," sculptural assemblages that dramatize the otherwise mundane activity of work. Like the workers who assembled the equipment, and like the artist who produced the videos, the users of the Workstations are engaged in a form of iterative labor as they enact and re-enact the gestures prescribed to them by the machines. Approaching them, I [End Page 48]


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Figure 2.

Sondra Perry, still from Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016), Video, 9:05 min.

already know that any attempt to use them might be difficult, even futile. Why even try? What benefit might it provide, and for whom?

The bicycle, titled Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016), brings the viewer into an uncomfortably close proximity to the vertically arranged monitors. The video begins with a blinking avatar of Perry set against a Chroma blue backdrop, reflexively describing the components involved in the making of the machine. The voice, however, is not Perry's voice, nor does it claim to be the artist. Rather, the avatar emits affectless, robotic speech synthesis and uses the first-person plural "we." The avatar seems to speak as the animated unconscious of the machine that can now look back at us, explaining early in the video that their physical appearance is the...

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