Immolation and/or Reparations in Blood: Your Museum
It remains to be decided whether your museum, this museum, merits enough undeserved grace to be allowed to reform itself. Your museum is not the artists’ museum, it is not the surviving and always insurgent communities’ museum, and it is certainly not the museum of those who are committed to cultivating the demise of its Board and benefactors.
Perhaps the protocols of reparation will require immolation alongside complete redistribution. There is beauty in this fire. Imagine how the brick-and-mortar arrogance of the founders’ and funders’ presumed immunity to danger burns relentlessly, evaporating their blue tears in a perverse tragedy of the unrecoverable. Once it's gone, it's gone. Many of us share a suspicion that these fuckers have no idea what it means to exhibit creative genius because their institution, your museum, is a misery machine, a body snatcher, a trophy of the conquest they will claim is the precondition of beauty, aesthetics, Civilization.
At the risk of giving away part of the plan, i will confide that some participate in these ceremonies of restoration, liberal honesty, and truth-telling (including the one you are reading) under protest. Be forewarned that what some truly desire is to taste the suffering of your museum’s founders, benefactors, patrons and philanthropists—to celebrate their exposure to the terror of unexpected loss. We want them to cough and choke on the smoke of their own aestheticized ascendancy. Your museum is both kindling and ember, a combustible artifact of genocidal mockery that solicits destruction wrapped in the glee of the savage, incorrigible artists who come from otherworlds and antiworlds.
“For us who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act, and every attack aborted or drowned in blood.”
-Frantz Fanon
Your museum is a perverse kind of sanctuary. It attempts to privatize feeling by isolating it from the generally uncontrolled, pervasive and promiscuous conditions of invasion and endangerment that empower the brutal act of curation. It is a refuge without refugees; it is a refuge that kills refugees. Recently, it aspires to become a sanctuary of respectable diversity, which is to say, a sanctuary of and for white feeling that flexes a solicitation. It spills into a series of formulaic gestures, ranging from creepy to suspicious, couched in the increasingly familiar languages of liberal philanthropic extraction: inclusion, justice, culture change, institutional change, transformation, accessibility, equity. Solicitation convenes your museum’s administrators, board members, curatorial staff, and benefactors in ceremonies of whitesupremacy that constantly vacillate between poles of antiblackness (negrophilia and violent deracination) while commemorating their solidarity under the aesthetics of Civilization’s human.
A few of our talented friends—artists, curators and directors—are getting paid and famous through this momentary inclusion in the uptight crackers’ pretentious cocktail parties, but they already know the BBQ is elsewhere and they are expected to bring some of the good liquor using that dirty museum money. (Among my many affinities, i am a Pinoy/Filipino who grew up in Northern Virginia, regularly visited the Philippines as a kid, and still speaks Tagalog; i know what a good BBQ is.)
Breaking the back of your museum—including but not limited to immolation—is to “ready” the very idea of it for counter-occupation, including creative violence against the Civilizational aspirations carried by this peculiar art establishment. (Shoutout to Strike MoMA.) Reparation is necessary but insufficient; the liberals and reactionaries running your museum quietly refer to themselves as hostages of a dark mob, although they agree that the white lining of fulfilling this audacious demand is the relief of (Black) pacification. They consider whether offering a generous lump sum, affirmative action exhibition space, term-limited “community engagement,” and grease dripping public apology will finally defang the shouting horde’s historical tales of the museum’s transatlantic chattel angel investors.
Your museum’s leaders are making an atrocious miscalculation. There will be no peace on the other side, only modest satisfaction in forcing a momentary concession accompanied by performances of guilty surrender. How will your museum react to the overdue, fantastic, and dead serious excess that calls for—requires—reparations in blood? Don’t worry, we’re just talking aesthetics here.
An extended syndicate of righteously pissed infiltrators, co-conspirators, researchers, and disgruntled (ex-)employees is already engaged in a guerilla war against your museum. They are survivors and descendants of the ancestral DNA scattered all over the stolen colonial plunder your staff has stowed away in archival boxes that smell like must and desiccation. You try to “nuance” their understanding of your museum, your board, your philanthropists, your foundations. You try to convince them that your administrators, leaders, principles, and institutions are not all the same. You do not realize that demanding “nuance” from this crowd is no different than calling them stupid and daring them to come for you.
The insurgents listen politely to your absurdly earnest (self-)defense of benevolent plutocracy and differentiation between institutional forms while thinking, “no shit, we know the difference between Southern California Library and the Getty.” They are not fooled by your false equivalences and liberal equivocations: they recognize your museum as a front of undeclared war, perpetual war, aesthetic and cultural war, Civilizational war. The Getty is both bunker and trophy room, while Southern California Library (SCL) cultivates study, survival, and mobilization. They know—we know—what Yusef and Michele have been curating at SCL in South Central LA over the last twenty years: academics are greeted with side-eye and skepticism because they have consistently burned the library with their genteel extractivism (stealing and exploiting SCL’s credibility, contacts, and labor, among other things); on the other side, scholars, artists, and intellectuals of-and-for insurgency—actual and possible insurgency in all its joyful rageful forms—are always welcomed without qualification or reservation.
SCL activates and catalyzes a real deal sanctuary, a zone of fugitivity where the LAPD’s presence is actively repulsed and people (e.g. generalized targets/suspects of LAPD) address internecine violence, displacement, hunger, vulnerability, and generational suffering with relative autonomy from the sloppy, invasive tentacles of the state and philanthropy alike. This is a site of aesthetic experimentation and poetic exhibition that resists commodification because it is often inhabited by those who precede and exceed the shifting temporalities of chattel and colonial commodity.
In the meantime, the Getty exemplifies the full meaning of the recently popular phrase “virtue signaling” with shit like this:
“The Getty Board of Trustees gratefully acknowledges receipt of the open letter from many Getty employees, former employees, and others, expressing concern over the racial and ethnic constitution of Getty’s senior staff, its role in the perpetuation of overt and systemic racism, and the ways this inhibits Getty from fulfilling its mission….
We acknowledge the historic gravity of the moment following the brutal killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, among other Black Americans….
Racism has stained all of our institutions, including museums and Getty, and must be confronted and eliminated. Getty Board of Trustees and senior leadership stand united behind the declaration: Black Lives Matter.”
All the riff-raff—including the artists and visitors who induce Getty Board Members to involuntarily pucker and recoil—read this patronizing public relations trash as a “fuck off” echoing from high atop the hills between Brentwood and Bel Air. (Some vital context: the previously cited word salad was a response to “An Open Letter to Getty Board of Trustees,” written by Getty staff in July 2020 and crystallized by two words in the third sentence: “racism abounds.”)
Your museum is, at most, two degrees and a few years separated from the casualties that have inevitably—inevitably—brought the fight to your hallways and conference rooms. I can confess familiarity with the scene and feeling of such hostility; it is barely distinguishable from precious moments in the university setting when administrators and their professor-loyalists realize there are people in the room (both students and fellow employees) who do not give a shit about their bodily integrity or fake-ass safe spaces. A longtime colleague and dear friend, whose outwardly chill demeanor is constantly mistaken for placidity, once affirmed that these multicultural academic overseers constantly do abusive and toxic shit because they assume a magical immunity from getting punched in the mouth and jacked in the parking lot. I responded—and he agreed with a howl—that white assumptions can get you fucked up.
I will continue this reflection by disclosing that i use the term “insurgents” carefully and seriously. My usage derives from a working understanding of counterinsurgency as a planetary condition that constantly enlivens the historical logics of conquest, pacification, and Civilization. Counterinsurgency is not merely a military strategy premised on occupations, assassinations, and asymmetrical warfare. It is, in fact, a cultural and aesthetic approach to domesticating wild autonomous queer liberated being. Put another way, counterinsurgency restates as it weaponizes your museum’s founding mission statement:
“3-50. The most important cultural form for counterinsurgents to understand is the narrative. A cultural narrative… explains an event in a group’s history and expresses the values, character, or self-identity of the group…. By listening to narratives, counterinsurgents can identify a society’s core values. Commanders should pay particular attention to cultural narratives of the Host Nation population pertaining to outlaws, revolutionary heroes, and historical resistance figures. Insurgents may use these narratives to mobilize the population.” [emphasis added]
-U.S. Army and Marine Corps, Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency
Your museum as The Museum is a perpetual act of world-destruction. What, after all, are the purposes and consequences of such a thing? As a vestibule of Civilization, it platforms a domination of being, a compartmentalization of wildness, and a domestication of insurgencies against space, aesthetic, infrastructure, archive, and settlement. It is at once aggressively violating and self-abstracting, reproducing an institutional characteristic shared by an ensemble of metastasizing humanist projects: the university, the philanthropic foundation, “social justice” entrepreneurship, the DEI (diversity/equity/inclusion) establishment, etc.
Your museum as The Museum is a creepy solicitation disguised as generous invitation. It installs a compulsory imaginary of “the public” that convenes around a center of colonial, conquistador gravity, shifting the force and intensity of its pull while never surrendering the gifts it bequeaths to inheritors whose identities are entirely available and evident to the wandering, displaced, eviscerated illegitimate presence that reveals the condition of any such public as one more protracted campaign of asymmetrical terror.
There are tracks, footprints, tire marks around the inherited place, the public, The Museum that signify desperate fleeing alongside invited arrivals. These marks remind some that Indigenous decolonization, Black liberation, and abolitionist futurity are experimental performances enacting defiant gestures of escape from Civilization’s geographies, contributing to a totality of insurgency against its compulsory temporality—as permanent emergency, the insurgencies may implode the violent integrity of “time” as a Civilizational continuum and calibration.
The imperative is to find, disrupt, and destroy the machinery of the perpetual, asymmetrical conquest of land, imagination, body, way of being, and multiform horizon. There is no choice but to target The Museum for externally induced, inconvenient obsolescence. At best, this guerilla maneuver might provide furtive paths of access to attack and potentially obliterate the institutional, political-economic and ontological precursors that allow the terms of patronage, sponsorship, philanthropy, exhibition, recognition, “accountability,” and “equity” to prepare The Museum for its next misery making adaptation.
There are friends of mine, artists who are constantly trying to convince me that i too am an artist in the form of a dysfunctional intellectual rage machine. They are beautiful people of Palestine, Philadelphia, Cebu, Salvador, and Brooklyn. Their notion of inclusivity entails an invitation to imagine, celebrate, and actively prepare for what your world calls “violence.” We know that many more artists and curators are waiting to eat and drink with us, they dream of arson several times a week. The cousins and elders who work the place, clean the bathrooms, and pretend to give a shit about museum security will probably help us out, because they know exactly what extraction is; your museum taught them about that intimate theft the second they got the gig. Also, fuck this gig, you didn't do them any goddam favors, just cut the check and be happy no one tore it up and shoved it down your throat with a fist full of Sanitizer. Consider this a warning, a threat, a poem. I take no responsibility for what happens next, the museum made me do it.
