Scrawlspace is such a provocative title for an exhibition that before I saw it I assumed it had to be good. In some ways it is — deeply inquisitive where too many contemporary art exhibitions are merely declarative and well researched rather than organized willy nilly — but the premises of this show are in some instances cliché and a bit contradictory.
Scrawlspace was conceived by Emily Alesandrini when she and her co-curator, Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh, were both earning their master’s degrees at Tulane University. The term combines two words to suggest an area for writing that gives access to hidden parts of our spaces of habitation. Theirs is a straightforward curatorial proposition, as they explain in their brochure essay. The featured artists “examine the historically charged relationships Black Americans have maintained with writing, reading, and language, revealing new possibilities for and beyond words.” Certainly, in a show where the hypotheses are so exacting, these words matter, and they articulate a worthwhile goal. But this emphasis on “new possibilities” for language shows up in too many press releases and exhibition essays. Modernism got drunk on the idea of estrangement in order to make things new, and writers treat contemporary art’s hangover by drinking the same whiskey. Exhibitions can have other objectives: exploration; reminding viewers of forgotten things; sensitizing us to what may be ignored; fashioning something that sustains us.
Alesandrini and Momoh also root the work in a particularly Black quest for freedom. Again from their essay: “Black artists have located room for resistance in writing—scrawlspaces, through which liberation can be felt and fostered.” They surmise from their research that the term originates in some lost or undocumented communication between cultural theorist Fred Moten and poet Harryette Mullen discussing the work of the Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers in an essay examining oppressive language systems. So, the ideal of emancipation is entwined with the term. However, why is Blackness, which is a political designation, a cultural locale, and, most fundamentally, a state of being, confined to being an emblem of resistance and liberatory strategies? This association is asserted so frequently and widely in the contemporary art scene that it goes unquestioned. Yes, Blackness enables the country’s most self-serving PR statements — the Preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence — to approach being true. But as much as being Black should not be restricted to the trope of the magical negro, it should similarly not be constrained to the role of the poet warrior figure. Some Black people just want to make good food and watch their children grow.
Nevertheless, in some ways it makes sense that this exhibition is caught up in this confinement/liberty incongruity, given that writing is itself contradictory. To “write” means to compose a coherent text that is intended to be read and understood by others. Yet it also means to merely make marks — letters, words, or other symbols on a legible surface with an implement. It is about both making sense and making traces or imprints that may mean nothing for those other than the writer, and sometimes, it is coded and can be read only by a select group.
Shinique Smith’s “Firedog” (2006) uses the latter tactic. This work of ink, spray paint, and collage on paper depicts the sweep and rhythmic calligraphy of graffiti. Whether this is a document of actual graffiti inscribed somewhere or just an example of the highly stylized ligatures and curlicues of the writing is unclear. But I imagine someone who grew up tagging, as Smith did, recognizing things here that I cannot.
I do recognize the text in Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo’s “collective survival part one: won’t you celebrate with me” (2022). On a sandwich board with black lettering overlaid by multicolored chessboard motif on one side and many-hued letters interrupted by a black background on the other, the spaces typically present between words are gone, so it’s challenging and fun to read, in the way that Christopher Wool’s paintings can be. But when I decipher it I’m brought back to the beauty and bravery of Lucille Clifton’s lyric poem: “won’t you celebrate with me / what i have shaped into / a kind of life? i had no model.” The words are interspersed with the patterned motif in such a way that they together read as a kind of linguistic/design mosaic that might be its own dialect or idiolect. Despite the ponderous premise, in the show there are other moments like these that are celebratory, carefree, even spendthrift.
Glenn Ligon’s “Study for Negro Sunshine #150” (2023) manipulates the close relationship between written and uttered words, showing how the phrase “negro sunshine” repeated starts to clump up in the space of the frame and lose hold of its sense. You know what this is like if you’ve said a word or phrase over and over again until it dissolves into an audio mist in which meaning is barely recognizable. This combination of oil stick, coal dust, and gesso on paper glints subtly as if the devolution from one state to the other were throwing off sparks in the transition.
I also find myself appreciating Renee Gladman’s ink, acrylic, and pastel compositions on paper because the writing is so small that it’s illegible. It reminds me of how people sometimes whisper to themselves, intoning a koan, or a poem or affirmation. In her “Space Question Vector” (2021) I imagine that she is murmuring the location of these celestial bodies or the secrets of orbital patterns. Sometimes the gesture of having written is enough to indicate serious engagement, serious thought.
By contrast, some works are so archly intellectual that they leave me cold, such as Jamilah Sabur’s paintings, in which neon letters and words are attached to a field of color that contains one smaller photographic image. And there are artists who I’ve been thrilled to encounter in the past, but whose art in this show is not as enthralling. This is the case with Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s pieces, such as “Each Sentence Is a Sponge” (2023), which, the caption tells me, has to do with the religious ecstatic experience of speaking in tongues or automatic writing. The problem is that the scribbles don’t come together as a coherent (that word again) story or documentation of an event. I don’t mind being trapped in an artist’s mind, but I need a bit of cheese to tempt me there. Making a case that the work means a certain thing when this thing isn’t in evidence ironically gets at the alchemy of language, but the artist doesn’t do that. As writers and readers, we are always conjuring things into existence that were not there a moment ago.
Now I think of Audre Lorde’s poem “Coal,” and her explanation of the difference between kinds of writing:
Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows
Singing out within the crash of passing sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart—
And come whatever wills all chances
The stub remains
An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
I believe that Alesandrini and Momoh were after this ragged edge of language, where it falls apart into characters and forms hinting that something else was there, something impelling the act of writing. By exploring how this inflects Black experience in this nation, the show at its best creates a kind of portal to elsewhere.
Scrawlspace continues at the 8th Floor gallery (17 West 17th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through December 7. The exhibition was curated by Emily Alesandrini and Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh.
