Two Artists Confront Erasure Along the Louisiana Coastline

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 247, ‘Lay of the Land’

In Trace the shadow between this world and the other (2024) – a two-channel video installation included in her recent exhibition, ‘Gulf ’, at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture – Imani Jacqueline Brown overlays data on petrol infrastructure with an image of a 19th-century painting depicting a burial in a plantation grove. The competing aerial and frontal vantages compound and obscure the delivery of information. With a turn of orientation, Brown suggests another kind of knowledge embedded in histories of perspective. A vanishing point is also a point of convergence; perspective is a demonstration of relationship.

‘Studying the Gulf ’s geomorphology through arcane geology white papers, cryptic core samples and cosmological theories of earth,’ Brown explains in the exhibition literature, ‘I have come to believe in a correlation between Chicxulub [an asteroid that struck the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago] and the formation of the Gulf ’s subaqueous stores of oil and gas’ – and, by extension, the relationship between the fifth mass extinction and what may be the sixth. Reviewing the show for The New York Times, Siddhartha Mitter commented on the ‘lyricism’ in Brown’s art; it is a quality, I would suggest, imbued in the history of ‘data portraits’ that wrestle with the double duty: to find form and to inform.

Across Storefront’s galleries, Brown drew lines like connective tissue, converging at significant points. Brown’s home, which she calls by its Choctaw name, Bulbancha (land of many languages) is one of those points; it establishes the logic of the entire system. ‘From Louisiana to Angola and beyond,’ she explains, ‘colonialism and slavery dispossessed people from their land, terraformed the earth into capital, and imposed the logics of segregation that sanctioned the hierarchization and sacrifice of people and places.’ Brown’s Fractal catastrophes generate new solidarities (2024) charts the relationships unearthed in her ‘ongoing research into the global reverberations of Louisiana’s extractivism’. The lines connecting Louisiana to Portugal to Palestine mirror the ‘snarl of pipelines’ that cross the Gulf and head inland to the refineries and petrochemical plants built on former sugarcane plantations, mapping both collusion and solidarity.

Focusing on the Amistad Research Center’s archive of the Gulf Oil Corporation – an economic anchor in Louisiana for much of the 20th century – Brown’s lines of inquiry converge on the international boycott of Gulf Oil in response to its illegal corporate donations to sway foreign and domestic policy from the US to Angola. The vectors move in two directions, however, sustaining networks of colonial power and mobilizing ‘Christian leadership and socialists, students and elders, auto-industry workers and artists’ in collective resistance. Part of the profundity of Brown’s fractals is how they test the limits of visualization. How far can we see? Through how many layers? In its density of data, her practice poses questions about legibility that become concretized in the title of her exhibition, ‘Gulf ’. In her palimpsest, we see that lines are also powerful tools of erasure. That a gulf is a gap is a cut is a hole in the Earth.

In ‘The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure’ (2013), poet Solmaz Sharif articulates the politics of the page:

Erasure means obliteration.

The Latin root of obliteration

(ob- against and lit(t)era letter)

means the striking out of text.

Poetic erasure means the striking out of text.

Poetic erasure has yet to advance historically.

Historically, the striking out of text is the root of obliterating peoples.

Brown’s work is at once redaction and reclamation. In How Do You Open a Doorway to the Other World? (2024), she sutures together appro- priated footage of core-sample extractions from 600 metres below the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico’s Mississippi Canyon. The samples, or cuts, exhibit an irrefutable beauty, providing the geomorphological proof of the sediment’s instability, ‘for those who were allowed to read it,’ the exhibition text notes. But the ‘inconvenient knowledge’ was not heeded. In 2010, a blowout at British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon rig resulted in the deaths of 11 workers and the delivery of nearly five million barrels of oil into the Mississippi Canyon – the largest marine oil spill in history from what had been the deepest well. The black stain of crude oil floats at the surface of Brown’s work as a mark of obliteration.

The ‘lyricism’ of Brown’s practice seeps from the fine line between ‘collision’ and ‘collusion’. Her work figures in a history of poetic erasure that recognizes the page as a field of conquest, marked by visible vectors of power, in which effacement is not only a sign but also an activity. It is a struggle between articulation and its subordination, between the time of signification and its perversion. It demonstrates convergence as both violent encounter and nexus of knowledge.

In August 2020, Artforum published an exchange with Baton Rouge-born artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. Their performance for Abron Arts Center, Get Low (Black Square) (2020) – a work about abstraction and visibility by way of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) – had been indefinitely postponed.

In the conversation, Toussaint- Baptiste turns to another black square, a false flag of solidarity in the months of Black Lives Matter pro- tests: ‘The black square moment on social media got really weird because it became a performance of self- silencing. It’s an interesting form of disengagement because it’s an active “opting out” that stymied the flow of necessary information.’ What had circulated initially as a sign of collective resistance had side-stepped into an act of censorship. Its legibility further deteriorated in the context of an endless algorithmic digital feed. As the artist has explained about Malevich’s ‘zero form’ square, ambivalence (to the point of insignificance) can also be the result of over-abundance. ‘From a purely colouristic standpoint’, Toussaint-Baptiste argued, ‘black is full of other pigments and other hues. So, the zero is not empty. The zero is not necessarily a void; it’s not a nothing [...] There’s an argument to be made that a zero form is not a wiping away of everything, but an including of everything to the point where it becomes flat.’ My own ellipses redact the focal point of Toussaint-Baptiste’s comments: the critical 2015 discovery that Malevich’s Black Square, previously understood as a tabula rasa made for futurity, was itself a sign of erasure, blacking out the handwritten text beneath that read: ‘Battle of negroes in a dark cave.’ Toussaint-Baptiste met this revelation of Malevich’s square as a palimpsest of racist humour with relative indifference, reflective of a deeper knowledge about inscription and visibility.

Historically, erasure has been received as a mark of violence after the fact. More recently, we have become accustomed to witnessing obliteration in real time. Earlier this year at Other Plans, New Orleans, Toussaint-Baptiste welcomed the community to witness them destroy a saxophone. A week later, the artist exhibited works comprised of pieces of the broken instrument, engulfed in a shimmering square of black silicone.

In 2023, at Wesleyan University, for the lecture-performance Y’all Don’t Wanna Hear Me (You Just Wanna Dance) (2021–ongoing), Toussaint-Baptiste wielded a long-range acoustic device, a popular law-enforcement tool for ‘crowd dispersal’, explaining, ‘It’s designed to hurt people – to be weaponized.’ But the artist enacted a kind of negation through détournement. Recognizing the tool’s power to directionally mobilize and their own obsession with Malevich’s Black Square, Toussaint-Baptiste embroiled the audience in a rousing turn of ‘Black square dancing’. Just before the action, they interrupted themself to explain: ‘I’m telling you, everything you’re witnessing is a front. I’m not here for this and neither are you [...] Behind this thing is another thing. And behind that thing is another thing.’ Erasure is a form of obliteration, but it can also be used to ‘distinguish’, as Toussaint-Baptiste has argued in unpublished writing, ‘between art and action, while considering the former as a cover or front for the latter.’

In recent years, it has fallen on artists to render visible the scale of loss in southeast Louisiana. They have furnished us with a steady stream of photography of our disappearing coast and portraiture of the communities we’ve forsaken. Redaction in the work of Brown and Toussaint-Baptiste is, to borrow from Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box (1934), ‘a way of succeeding in no longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture’. It is an activity, a collision, a convergence, a kind of vanishing.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 247 with the headline ‘Vanishing Points’

Imani Jacqueline Brown is included in ‘Displacement’ on view at The MassArt Art Museum (MAAM), Boston from 27 June – 8 December

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste’s ‘What Do You Think It’s Worth?’ is on view at Yes We Cannibal, Baton Rouge, Los Angeles, from 14 December – 1 February 2025

^{Main image: Imani Jacqueline Brown, Trace the shadow between this world and the other (detail), 2024, video still. Courtesy: the artist}