Workflow, the first institutional solo exhibition of artist Jenson Leonard, centers on a titular film that explores the velocity and momentum of Blackness as it relates to the philosophical concept of acceleration—the notion that the only way out of capitalism is through its intensification.
The Exhibition is set at the Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York between July 7 and September 10, 2023.
In Workflow, a spectral Michael Jackson Halloween mask recites a surrealistic quarterly earnings reports. Building on a 2017 essay by artist Aria Dean titled “Notes on Blacceleration,” the short film centers on the ways in which the Black subject grapples with its commodified status within the labor market despite—or, resultant of—its own history as a commodity, stemming back to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Completed during Leonard’s residency at Pioneer Works in 2021, the video utilizes uncanny humor as a mechanism to expose the shared grammars inherent in Afro-pessimism and speculative finance.
The artist is justifying using Michael Jackson as a support artistic vector:
“It’s a Michael Jackson mask. In the corpus of media, there’s such a gulf between who Michael Jackson, as a notoriously private person, was and his public, outward persona, and the media that created ‘Jacko.’ And then, I also wanted to relate that to some of these Afro-pessimist and Black studies ideas about the ontology of Blackness—Blackness as a structure, and some of the precepts of dispossession, and being a tool for others. MJ is arguably the most famous and messianic figure, [and] a lot of the things that counterweigh that are tied to his Blackness—the assumptive guilt.
In reducing Michael Jackson to a head, [I’m] disembodying someone who is so known for their movement and grace, and trying to brush up ideas about the split between mind and body—which are still heavily played out, the deeply embedded eugenics of our society. Like, Shut Up and Dribble, for instance, where athletes are just athletes and there’s no purchase for them to have interiority or ideas. There’s a long history that goes back to Enlightenment thought, of the primacy of thinking over the body.
There’s an awesome Greg Tate article in The Village Voice. He [says]—I’m paraphrasing—that some may see MJ’s surgery as evidence of a deep self-hatred and mutilation, and he’s just a perpetually tragic Dorian Gray figure. There’s a more generous reading that sees him as a liberal subject who is pursuing happiness, is self-making by any means. And then, there’s a more cynical read of a pop star who is trying to algorithmically maximize their appeal by altering their appearance.
And then, in terms of accelerationist thought, there’s this book called Xenofeminism by Helen Hester. And it’s about reconfiguring and rupturing gender through interfacing with the surgical and pharmaceutical to create a new kind of being that is out of existing paradigms, but—[this is a] super generous, speculative reading—maybe MJ was already doing that. But again, Afro-pessimist logics say he’s structurally in a place of dispossession, so his terms and conditions are always tenuous. He doesn’t quite get to define them. In a weird way, I’m looking out into the macro at MJ, and MJ is looking back at me. And I’m like, Same.”
When asked why he did not use a more realistic version of Michael using AI, he answered:
“There’s a really good term for that: hyperstition. I’m going to poorly explain it: At one point, space travel was just an idea in science fiction, and then it became a part of this feedback loop of technology and industry and nation-states competing to prove their progress. It’s almost like the idea became real, and then more than real. And now it’s a part of some hegemonic idea of progress. There’s MJ as a real person, but I think there was an element of hyperstition that made the fictive idea more real than whoever the fuck Michael Jackson was. And hyperstition is a process that comes out of acceleration. It’s something that is technologically brought into reality.”
While some of us might be offended by the Michael Jackson representation, the artist’s explanations make sense and it has a purpose and provides a clear message in our current world.
Pioneer Works
159 Pioneer Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
Free Admission
Wednesday–Sunday
12–6 PM
