I entered this review from components of magical realism, psyche, and magik (or the practice of non-commodifiable energy). I buoyed here because in the stores of inexplicable energy in Davis’ work I found the material of human connection. With respect and tenderness one can transform even the most hardened debates. I speak to this now so that I may distinguish my experience as one of witness to my whiteness.

There are many things in life effected by internalized supremacy. As bell hooks noted in Where we Stand, “Indeed, in the not so distant past the psychological and economic self-esteem of the white working class and the white poor has been significantly bolstered by the class politics of white supremacy” (hooks, 2000, 115). The supremacy hooks spoke to, is the imbalance of the white perspective which has quarried lives and left pits on the inside. From chattel slavery, to globalization, to the prison industry, there is no place I know of where colonialism and now capitalism has not cultivated misery for centuries. Now I swim in the liquid left behind. As this pit gets deeper and deeper in my lifetime I account for that psychology within my scholarship and daily actions.

The malice and enmity of whiteness has forced white people away from the earnest realms of creativity and human connection. I am but able to witness the gaps and outlines of a wholistic life. Ladi’Sasha Jones in 2019 referred to the personal landscape of black artists in A Grammar for Black Interior Art where “…The Black interior…Holding the terror of the never-ending measure of violence, alongside the ever-expanding measures of survival, spirituality, and pleasure” (Jones, 2019, para. g) are the materials and depictions of perseverance that function as the “worldmaking” and “interior time”. This abstract is necessitated from survival and fortitude (Jones, 2019, para. g). There is pain and celebration and unity in it which whiteness cannot know save for being a negation: a construct of malice. This is manifest in the psyche and spirit of the white person, no matter how anti-racist.

Likewise, Jones pointed out that black interiority does not hide out underground “but advances the underground as a strategy of radical self-making and placekeeping” (Jones, 2019, para. e). The white viewer of the black interior bares a relationship to the work in their inverse; in their projection. This viewer bares relationship to the disconnection, malice, and discord. The black interior of Davis’ work is a genesis of creation or “self-historicization” (Jones, 2019, para. k-m), as seen in Pueblo Del Rio Concerto. In these visual spaces I account for the dearth from an exterior and inherited place. Yet, I choose to change this landscape from there on out, to examine the malice and pursue transcendence through accountability and change. I am glad I teach my child like that.

 What Davis’ work offered was an unrequited entry point to the abstract and interior. Yet, it was up to me to not just engage with the surface. In this space the power of eros and anger are reclaimed as Audre Lorde intended. The sensuality of eros and the catharsis of anger are not inert from the pressure pit of neo-colonialism. Where these emotional contents exist there is a marker, a familiar, a recognition, and where they do not exist there is a question, an opening, a glimmer and a glimpse. Sensual eros and visceral anger distance hardship in their presence and absence (Lorde, 1984, pp. 124-133). This is the trail I followed through the interior of Davis’ work.

I credit my ability to be present in this dimensionality to the clarity of consciousness that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten wrote in The Undercommons. Thanks to a friend’s recommendation I was reading The Undercommons around the time of viewing the exhibition at David Zwirner. Harney and Moten clarified for me how to both benefit from institution and steal from it, to use scholarship to steal away knowledge and bring it back to fortify the sanctuary: the community (Harney & Moten, 2013, pp. 22-37). Noah Davis’ work built this into his sanctuary of painting and community and helped me see where there are still some things an institution cannot own and why writing about my experience was important.

I pay my respects to his painting and the undercommons as a sites of resistance. I pay my respects to Noah Davis. I offer my candor to these liberatory forces,d irreducible to the context of economic space (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 38). I met the work by Davis, through the words of  hooks, Lorde, Moten, and Harney, as calls to action. I checked both my inherited and chosen ideologies at the door. I emerged with emotional richness and an unassailable perspective where I gained more than money can buy or supremacy can exploit. I also acknowledged the fortune to have grown up poor but to move laterally through the privilege of education to a class ascension. I use my training to identify where we hide supremacy in art and where we deviate. For Davis, it was pure psychic vapor.  

I threw myself into the deep end as far as possible. No life raft needed.