KEEPING THEM DAMN ALIVE — guilt and failure @ arebyte Gallery
I’d like to begin by stepping back four years and making a comparison. Both aesthetically, in regard to the digital textures, and conceptually, in relation to the history of violence against black and brown bodies, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE at arebyte Gallery owes a debt to or is at least reminiscent of Sondra Perry’s 2018 Typhoon coming on at the Serpentine Gallery. However, I’d like to tentatively propose that the prior achieves something that the latter did not, via the careful negotiation of spectatorship it draws us towards a closer understanding of our culpability.
Central to Perry’s exhibition had been the manifestation of J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), a painting from 1840 that depicted the fate of one hundred and thirty lives cast into the freezing Atlantic from the slave ship Zong. Mutated into a hallucinogenic video backdrop Perry’s ocean wrapped the entire circumference of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, shifting from Turner’s signature colour palette to a queasy purple, cocooning the visitor within the devastating scene. And then, situated in one of the building’s two armoury channels were a rowing machine and an exercise bike, each connected to and through their use activating a triptych of video monitors. The intention being to map, as much as is possible, the physical experience of the visitor against that of the slaves fighting for their lives. Viewing the work necessitated physical exhaustion.
Outside the control of Perry, I have always reserved a suspicion that the tragedy seemingly evoked was undercut by an unforeseen circumstance. In the weeks preceding my visit I had become increasingly aware of the show through multiple Instagram posts, which inevitably featured an individual posing on the rowing machine, the more photogenic of the two apparatuses. Angled correctly the large brick opening formed a framework making the purple seascape a backdrop to pose against. The necessity of self reportage sat at odds with the artist’s intention, an attempt to figuratively place visitors in relation to the historical episode, and by association other contemporary murders, was occasionally being diverted into the gamified reality of social media.
Our selfie society of the spectacle had interrupted the potential of introspection. Worse still, the self reportage may be categorised as the false allyship known as virtue signalling. A subject Brathwaite-Shirley stabs and whose stomach she twists the knife in.
Pita and I attended SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE with two friends, Catinca Malaimare and Bob Bicknell-Knight, and our dog. We arrived around 4:40pm on a Saturday and had to wait for Rebecca Edwards, the gallery’s curator, to return from her very late lunch to let us in. Why account for these details, because the context is important to the experience and how you approach Brathwaite-Shirley’s work will drastically alter your experience.
At its technical core the exhibition is a light-gun shooter in the style of the 1990s arcade game Time Crisis but without the need to duck incoming fire or reload, though aesthetically it correlates more closely to Quake with brighter embellishments. Across three levels the player is tasked with eliminating threats to the trans and black communities whilst avoiding becoming a threat themselves through inflicting collateral damage. Plus and minus points awarded accordingly. Theoretically easy the task is anything but, unlike Time Crisis the hostage situations are not isolated, nor are they actually hostages, treats and community members mingle, dance and flex amongst one another in difficult to decipher crowds. Which is where the Quake comparison has added relevance. Much like the fiends, knights, orges, spawns, shamblers and scrags of hell, Brathwaite-Shirley’s compendium of goodies and baddies can be cryptically difficult to distinguish, their polygon textures sometimes frustratingly similar in palette. Adding to the challenge, the minus points are often much higher than the plus points, meaning a score can rapidly plummet in a matter of seconds.
Entering the game guided by the logic of first-person shooters and the confidence accrued through years of gaming, the immediate reaction to seeing your score drop below zero, and then further down and down, is a mixture of frustration and competitive anguish which as the level closes is confronted by Brathwaite-Shirley’s voiceover passing judgement on you. Not only have you FAILED in light of your fragile male ego (Bob and I played first) but you have been denounced as being an enemy to progressive causes, hitting a second vulnerability, our belief in being beyond bias. The next few rounds you play more cautiously, trying to be more pinpoint accurate and resisting the urge to pull the trigger without thinking (Pita and Catinca go second). At the close your score is hovering just above zero and you have hope for some small positive recognition, but yet again the ending casts you in a negative light, through your reserved avoidance of the difficult conversation you’ve not helped, your actions are insignificant to the issues being addressed. You may as well have posed on Perry’s rowing machine to signal that you understand the legacy of slavery.
In this sense, the inversion of core game logics is maybe more proximate to Joseph DeLappe’s dead-in-iraq, a five year long online performance in which the artist manually entered the names of 4,484 US Army soldiers killed in conflict into America’s Army, a team based first-person shooter used by the military as a recruiting tool. A space with fixed expectations is turned on itself to effect an commentary upon systemic conditions of oppression and to trigger introspective reflection. DeLappe’s method can at best be called scattershot, by his own admission it is hard to know whether he changed any minds, though an anecdotal account confirms that at least one young man was dissuaded from joining the army thanks to the intervention. Whereas, according to our collective experience, the circumstances created by Brathwaite-Shirley are extremely triggering.
Around the third or fourth attempt, we begin to coordinate our efforts, anyone not playing adopts the role of a spotter. With the exhibition catalogue to hand we flick back and forth helping to identify who is and who isn’t a target. We double check the text to confirm, we monitor their dance moves to ensure our judgements are correct. And our score creeps up towards the high-teens.
What the game is asking us to do is to have a constant conversation. Through the gradual movement towards a successful ending we shift out of engrained gaming mentailities, through cautious approaches and towards a player / non-player hybridised mode of communication. Eventually with Bob shooting we manage a score of twenty-nine and were relieved to have finally achieved a positive outcome. Yet whatever success we feel is immediately disquieted by what it represents, the game is only a metaphor for our relation to these issues and accordingly any jubilation remains within the game, simultaneously the game has exposed us to our failings in addressing systemic racism and transphobia and we have still done nothing to address that. Our engagement and conversations are kept inside the confines of the microcosm, the work closely on a sense of bathos, the sublime shifting to the ridiculous. Achievements crumbling away.
Finally, there is one final tactic used by Brathwaite-Shirley to complicate the relationship between self representation and the subject of trans and black and brown lives. Unlike Perry’s Typhoon coming on in which the visitor was able to frame their relation to the work, a condition of entering SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE is that you agree to be live-streamed over a dedicated Twitch channel. Four cameras positioned for a comprehensive view are relayed into a security monitor display format, turning our group into a team of shoplifters. We cannot know whether we’re being watched or not but we are aware of the possibility. If we were to make an attempt to virtue signal by posting on Instagram (which we did in our Stories), we must equally be aware that there is an objective and publicly accessible record to counter that narrative. It is a final masterstroke of bringing accountability into the gallery and if you’d like to see, we asked arebyte for a downloaded of the hour we were there which we’ve included below:
Authored by Elliott Burns. Supported by Pita Arreola-Burns. With thanks to arebyte Gallery, Bob Bicknell-Knight and Catinca Malaimare.
