Werner Herzog in his Master Class on filmmaking.

THIS YEAR I WENT TO SUMMER SCHOOL. For an hour or so each day I escaped the business of life to indulge in the gleeful asceticism of online education. I let waves of learned, prerecorded prose wash over me. I lurked; I listened. My professor was Werner Herzog and this was his Master Class on filmmaking, and I along with several hundred fellow students––his “soldiers of cinema”––followed twenty-six lessons that taught us that nothing is what it seems.

Herzog offered wisdom as if reading from a manifesto only half finished in his mind. His style was confessional and earnest. He was pragmatic (“Don’t accumulate like a squirrel.” “We are filmmakers not garbage collectors.”) and subdued (“Filmmaking is mostly banality.” “Make sure people turn off their cell phones on set.”). His lessons were a heavy pendulum that swung between tedium and mad inspiration.

Here are my crib notes:

Film school is the seat of nearly all cinematic mediocrity and brainlessness. There, no one reads. If we are wise, we should stop everything and pick up J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1962) for no other reason than its ability to morph author and world. Three-act structure is criminally predictable and trite. Also, stop being so longwinded. If you want to know how to narrate a film, listen to Unsolved Mysteries. Read some poetry to get pumped up. Stop brooding. Do you think handwringing will make your story interesting or cohesive? Write and think with urgency. Be frugal. Money people always slow things down. They are cowardly. Lawyers are pariahs. They are poison to creativity. You will surely fail. Let failure be your teacher. Make a decision. Dailies are misleading. Stop being mild-mannered.

Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2010, color HD video, 95 minutes. Foreground: Werner Herzog. Photo: Mark Valesella.

Nestled within the litany of platitudes were striking reflections on film. Herzog speaks of the physical attitude of the camera, using Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres fous (1955) as a prime example––the momentum and magic of the image so often murdered by stylization. A film should allow an audience to trust their eyes again (even in the case of the Hauka of Rouch’s film, violently possessed by their colonial masters). Herzog confesses that he does not know how “aesthetics seep in” to his films Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) and Encounters at the End of the World (2007) and he doesn’t care. There is a lot of near-death that surrounds his films, for example the dueling murder plots hatched by Herzog and his muse and nemesis (“the absolute pestilence”) Klaus Kinski. In Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), it was not the physical undertaking of moving a steamship over a mountain or the challenge of wrangling hundreds of local extras in the deep jungle that made the making of these films so fraught, but the slow erosion of will in the face of one’s own exposed nature. Herzog insists, however, that these were not exercises in proving oneself. Inner growth, pushing boundaries, testing limits––these are fundamentally “stupid” motivations and New Age malarkey. And yet, as Herzog describes it, filmmaking wakes something inside, a dormant brother brought forth by film, and along with the promise of kinship comes terror.

Cinema is not feral. There are rules about engaging with humans. There seems to be no line between his professional actors and the subjects of his documentary films. In both cases, people are made to feel safe but kept off balance. Nicolas Cage is told to rage with the “bliss of evil” in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009). Christian Bale is lovingly coaxed into consuming fetid meat in Rescue Dawn (2007). Herzog reveals the influences that guide his characters, for instance the mimetic quality of Marlon Brando’s heavy-lidded portrayal of Emiliano Zapata in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952) and the somnambulist performances in his Herz aus Glas (1976). Subjects who are already weird are made weirder by Herzog’s intervention, and as a result, we are drawn even closer to them: the death row inmate in Into the Abyss (2011), the coroner in Grizzly Man (2005)––these are figures offered as a rejection of “vanilla ice cream” emotionality. Herzog is a master conversationalist, lingering uncomfortably on silences long enough for his subjects to plumb their own interiority. Like Baker’s The Peregrine, Herzog wants to show the wholeness of the worlds in which his subjects inhabit and enfold.

Class reaches its end, but before we are dismissed, Professor Herzog leaves us with a quote from the late-medieval poet Thomas à Kempis, which he previously used in his short film Pilgrimage (2001):

It is only the pilgrims who in their earthly voyage do not lose their way, whether our planet be frozen or scorched: They are guided by the same prayers, in suffering, in fervor, and woe.

When he finishes reading the passage, Herzog eagerly tells us that it was not Kempis but he who wrote this text for his film. And finally we wonder whether this entire undertaking has been some kind of terrible, inspired fiction, one that paradoxically draws us closer to him.

— Todd Meyers

“Ecstatic Truths: Documentaries by Herzog,” a twenty-two-film program of nonfiction films, runs August 12 through 18 at the IFC Center in New York.

Carrie Mae Weems, Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, 2016. Performance view, College of Charleston Theater, South Carolina, June 4, 2016. Carrie Mae Weems. Photo: William Struhs.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS sat upright at a typewriter, her back to the audience. A footlight cast her long, crisp shadow against a blank white screen, like a sigil on a blank white page. To the sound of a five-piece jazz band, rising from the orchestra pit, Weems was soon joined on stage by spoken-word artist Aja Monet and playwright Carl Hancock Rux, poets and her guides of sorts, and eventually by three Graces—Eisa Davis, Alicia Hall Moran, and Imani Uzuri. The trio formed a Greek chorus, repeating in unison, “Always convicted, always charged, always stopped.”

In the wake of recent carnage across America, one might wonder where grace is hiding, or, more pointedly, what grace could possibly yield. Last month, at the 2016 Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, Weems took on this subject with Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, a work produced by the festival and dedicated to commemorating victims of the shootings at the Mother Emanuel African Episcopal Church in June of last year and the many black and brown people who have lost their lives to police brutality.

Grace Notes called for reflection on these tragedies and raised questions, whose timing could hardly have been more significant, about how we go on surviving them. Only days after the second and final performance at the College of Charleston Theater, Pulse Nightclub would be attacked by a lone gunman, principally targeting queer people of color—a massacre that resulted in forty-nine dead, not including the gunman himself. Only three weeks later, news would break of the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, cast across our sundry, constant media streams.

“There are only a handful of stories in the world: the difference often lies in the telling,” Weems writes in the director’s notes.

After working on Grace Notes for months it occurred to me I was telling the story of Antigone, wherein an innocent man dies by unjustified means and his sister fights for the right to bury him honorably. But the wider community refuses her; her right to justice, and to peace, is denied. Likewise, Grace Notes examines the wider social implications of tensions at work in communities across America. These tensions are marked by… the killings of young black men, and the tragic events of the Emanuel Nine.

Carrie Mae Weems, Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, 2016. Performance view, College of Charleston Theater, South Carolina, June 4, 2016. Aja Monet, Alicia Hall Moran, Eisa Davis, and Imani Uzuri. Photo: William Struhs.

The pathos of the contemporary African American experience was foregrounded in Grace Notes—a multimedia odyssey of stark tableaus, at once vivid, realistic, and dreamlike—through beautiful abstract imagery, music, and choreography. In an early scene, a black man appears on a treadmill, running. From whom? To where? It wasn’t clear, but something was gaining on him, it seemed, given the Graces’ urgent refrain. The man evoked countless images replayed on news and Facebook feeds everywhere, of black men fleeing, shot, like game, in the back, and at once the viewer was brought into the exhaustion of the man’s experience, treading water, running in place. In a later sequence, another black man floated in a transparent plastic bubble, rolling around the stage, kicking and tormented like a baby struggling to be born. As he drifted about, defenseless, one of the Graces joined him, rocking the ball to and fro like a fretful mother who knows what awaits her child, the slim odds, her guiding hand the only thing standing between him and rolling off of the edge of the stage. Throughout, the Graces stood witness to these symbolic struggles, repeating mournful laments and singing with apparent heartbreak at the men’s fates. And another refrain emerged, cast and recast: “How do you measure a life?”

Grace Notes seemed to end on a hopeful note: In the midst of an uplifting dance sequence, a balloon was released into the crowd and batted from one patron to another like a shared thought or idea to be paid forward. In the face of injustice, Weems was perhaps suggesting, the path forward is human connection.

But what can grace teach us about fostering those connections, and how is it embodied?

At a talk at the Charleston Library Society the afternoon before the second performance, Weems described grace as “holding on to your humanity and integrity, your core, in the face of all question and all forces.” If, as she suggests, grace is inherent to survivors of oppression and violence, the African American experience becomes a perfect metaphor for grace. Each new day a mercy for unprotected black and brown bodies.

Yet as I left the theater, though moved by the stunning visuals and the music—Moran delivered a barn-burning rendition of “Amazing Grace”—I felt a tug of dissatisfaction with the conclusion. More specifically, I felt like I knew this story, which seemed all too familiar in the telling. I, like many, had been weaned on images of imperiled black people (mostly men, of course) who, in the face of tragedy, joined together in song and struggle. Songs like “We Shall Overcome”—anthems of the civil rights movement—were a requisite of my education as a young black man. Conveniently, for white supremacist systems of power peddling violence, that popular education builds on a simplified narrative, one whose moral is that peaceful resistance is the most enlightened form, looming large as an emblem of grace. Weems’s show beautifully honors the dead and nods at this legacy of resilience, but, exhausted with mourning and amid a new struggle over the lives of black and brown people, I wondered: What now?

After the names of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, and so many others were recited during the performance, was the “embrace” of the “magnitude of a moment” (to quote from Rux’s enigmatic lines) the most we could do? Wasn’t now the time to upend the notion that black people ought to be patient and participatory—to continually exhibit restraint and above all graceful bearing in the fight for black lives?

I knew my discontent had little to do with the beauty and imagination of Weems’s work. Nor do I mean to diminish Weems’s larger exploration of the meaning of grace or the broad scope of her goals, one of which was to imagine a parting gift to President Obama, a man who has already delivered addresses on the occasion of at least fourteen mass shootings.

It had more to do with the needs of the moment, and the extent to which languor and beauty can lose track of the urgency of those needs. Instead of a song of mourning, I longed for a scream, like those conveyed by the phantasmagoric hellscapes of Kara Walker’s most grotesque visions of racism and slavery, which manage to contain all of the confusion, ugliness, and subterfuge involved in the work of smuggling one’s humanity out of a system of terror, mass-violence, and death. Meanwhile, Beyoncé and others continue to mine the legacy of black folks making lemonade from life’s lemons. (Even the controversial “Formation,” which ends her Lemonade, reminds us to “always stay gracious.”) As the murders continue, that’s hard to do, and as a response to tragedy, grace begins to feel anachronistic. Still more complicated: If the concept of divine grace that animates songs like “Amazing Grace” (written by a slaveholding white clergyman) stems from the doctrines of the colonizer’s church, to borrow from Frantz Fanon, then how do we repurpose it as a tool for decolonization?

Vigil in Charleston, South Carolina on June 13, 2016. Photo: Chase Quinn.

Bereft after Grace Notes and the news of Pulse, which ominously occurred on the heels of the Emanuel Nine anniversary, I attended a vigil in downtown Charleston. The Mayor spoke. So did the head of Charleston’s chapter of the NAACP. A well-known Imam from a local mosque. It was like many vigils: a respectful memorial—maybe the kind Antigone would have wanted. But then two young people of color approached the mic. Representatives of the LGBTQ organization Southerners on New Ground, they asked the crowd to part for the queer people of color in their midst. They told us to come forward, to join them at the foot of the stage.

Planned or not, this action was not at all a natural one, to hold space in a crowd of predominantly white people, to awkwardly proclaim my body and identity in front of an audience at such a time, at any time. It was decidedly not graceful—it felt awkward, and disruptive. It reminded me of Zora Neale Hurston’s words, “I feel most colored when I am thrown up against a sharp white background,” or more relevantly here, of the messy, jumbled, and jammed typeface of those words as they appear in a 1990 painting by Glenn Ligon.

As we made our way to the stage, the duo explained that they wanted us to know that they saw us, and that the targets of the Orlando shooting were not incidental. They wanted to recognize that the everyday lived experience of LGBTQ people of color was a radical act, not just a graceful one. This was deeply moving and, more significantly, totally unexpected. It shifted the focus of the room and the dialogue from the dead to the living, and no doubt made many squirm.

Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015, nylon, 84 x 52 1/2". Hanging outside Jack Shainman Gallery on West Twentieth Street in New York.

Perhaps what I was resisting in Grace Notes, and the concept of grace I gleaned, was this lack of surprise. The grace I longed for in the grip of loss was a call to action, and not a harmonious experience. It sprang on you, an undisputed fact, like the artist Dread Scott’s recent response to police killings: an 84 by 52 1/2” flag hung in the heart of Manhattan that read, A MAN WAS LYNCHED BY POLICE YESTERDAY. It was disorderly. Like the Black Lives Matter protesters who halted Toronto Pride. It exposed you.

All I know for sure is that if grace is to be an instrument of change, or even just an adequate lens through which to reflect on our times, it must have more to do with audacity—crucial in small moments too, like the fleeting interchange on board a plane stuck on the tarmac for two hours, when I meekly tried to get the attention of a passing stewardess and my request was only heard when the white passenger next to me commanded, “I think he needs your assistance!” Grace, if it is to have any utility at all, must be about knowing and proclaiming your value, even at the risk of being perceived by some as difficult or uncompromising. Unafraid to be called disgraceful—maybe this is a grace that can matter.

“I do not at all understand the mystery of Grace,” writes Anne Lamott. “Only that it meets us where we are, but does not leave us where it found us.” And as I hear word in the writing of this piece of the murder of trans activist Deeniqua Dodds, the fourteenth trans woman of color to be killed in 2016 alone, abutting news of policemen shot in Dallas and targeted in Baton-Rouge and the acquittal of those responsible for the death of Freddie Gray I continue to wonder: Where has our grace left us?

Chase Quinn is a writer based in Charleston, South Carolina.

Cover of Anohni’s Hopelessness (Secretly Canadian, 2016).

Feelings aren’t facts in Anohni’s debut solo album Hopelessness (2016)—but that doesn’t mean they’re useless. Her eleven new songs speak frankly from the heart and lay a rhythm for direct action. Creating friction with upbeat electronic tempos and chilling lyrics about downbeat issues, Hopelessness has been called a protest album. Artforum.com managing editor Lauren O’Neill-Butler asks the singer for her take.

Hopelessness seems to suggest that violence shouldn’t be understood or theorized as an abstraction but rather as something increasingly commonplace, a lived reality with an extensive history. How were you trying to frame violence in this work?

I collaborated with a group of women in New York City a couple of years ago and we developed this system of tenets that we called “Future Feminism” because we were all concerned about the future, basically. The first tenet was “The subjugation of women and the earth is one and the same.” The time-honored enslavement of the feminine now climaxes in the virulent decimation of the biosphere. Our propensity for warfare, violence, and hierarchy—born innocently enough out of some survival—now ushers us along the path to ecocide. Judeo-Christian religious texts have been rooting for an apocalypse for thousands of years. But these patriarchal death cults had to wait until the twentieth century to find the technology and capitalism that could finally make their dreams come true.

While acknowledging histories of violence, the album offers what might seem like love songs, flirting with the NSA or a drone bomb. Could you describe some of your processes for writing lyrics?

When I was a kid, one of my means of self-defense was to disarm perpetrators with a confounding display of vulnerability. I guess some of these songs come out of that impulse. They used to recommend that if you were being raped you should act like a wild animal and scream and gnash their teeth, hopefully jolting the aggressor out of his stupor and giving him a fresh moment of perspective, or at least giving him a moment’s pause in which you could escape.

The lyrics for this album were an attempt on my part to be more vigorous in the ways that I used my influence. Honestly, I was sick of writing pastoral songs. It felt too passive in the face of what is happening. I wanted to try to model another approach and see how far I could push it in terms of content. Once I dove into the idea of singing harder lyrics against euphoric dance tracks and got past the phase of self-censorship, the first draft of the work came pretty quickly. It was easy to write lyrics about these subjects, which have preoccupied me for such a long time. In that respect it is actually a very personal record.

Anohni with her “Future Feminism” collaborators (Kembra Pfahler, Johanna Constantine, Bianca Casady, Sierra Casady).

Did you feel like pop songs might speak more powerfully about drones, for instance, than news reports or even protests?

Music is a different way of communicating, using our voices expansively to communicate a depth of feeling, or an impassioned belief. It reaches a different part of the psyche, and so it can be useful.

Listening to the album I was reminded of Eugene Thacker’s writings about our increasing indifference to the planet (which he calls “the world for us”) and the planet’s increasing indifference to us (“the world in itself”), as well as the “world without us,” a horrific endgame. Do you think at this point the world would be better off without us?

I don’t imagine the earth as indifferent to us. She suffers inexorably for us. Only a mother who loves her children would offer them the fat from her body, the water from her eyes, the clothes off her back, at the cost now of her own life. So I do not think the earth would celebrate being rid of us, which would also necessarily require the eradication of biodiversity itself, of forest systems, of ocean systems, of so many complex and interdependent aspects of life on earth. We will be among the last to go, if it comes to that. Suggesting that the earth would be “better off without us” is not a useful fantasy. It denies the extent of the disfiguring damage to the earth’s life systems that we would need to inflict in order to make the planet uninhabitable.

Is there any hope in Hopelessness? Do you think the album urges a fundamental reorganization of society, perhaps from the ground up?

I experience hope and hopelessness both as feelings rather than facts. It’s important to be honest about how I feel. But it will be our immediate actions and not our feelings that determine the future of the life on earth. The case for the necessity for hope or the need to deny feelings of hopelessness sometimes feels like a red herring. Plenty of destructive people feel bountiful hope. And a lot of really effective organizers and activists feel at times a terrible sense of hopelessness. But that doesn’t stop them from continuing to take action.

The album gives us a dark image of our era; it also has mystical moments (lyrics about wanting to be born into the past, seemingly directed to a higher power, for example). Is there room for mysticism these days given our grave, real, and non-abstract problems?

I don’t think of spirituality as something abstract. I see it as inseparable from the world/universe in all its most tangible aspects. I think the separation of our ideas about spirituality from the practical face of nature and life is one of the ways we have been hoodwinked into behaving virulently, believing that true spiritual value lies elsewhere, on another far away plane, perhaps in heavens.

Our current issue is themed “Art + Identity.” Do you think identity politics is back (or if it ever left)? What might this term mean now?

I tend to feel that many of us have been manipulated in the US into thinking that identity politics is the endgame and that beyond it lies the utopia of social justice. In the ’80s, I remember watching as half of America voted for Reagan out of fear that gay men would otherwise be tainting the water supply with AIDS. But Reagan’s actual legacy was neoliberal capitalism and the dismantling of legislation that had long protected the working class. Now we have a vastly poorer general population, with significantly diminished access to education, advocacy, financial security, healthcare, or truth in media. Here comes Trump, a billionaire, still harnessing working-class people across the country who fantasize that he shares their often-bigoted points of view, when really he is just another mogul trying to pull the wool over their eyes. It will take stoicism to root out the carcinogenic individuals and institutions that manipulate us into compliance with easy-to-digest morsels of fear and pedestrian bigotry. My teacher Vito Russo used to say the three phases of a plague were denial, blame, and then finally, fear.

Page detail from Storm #11 (Marvel, 2015).

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. —Guy Debord

JOCKSTRAP NIGHT WAS CANCELED, so everyone at the bar was in clothes they hadn’t planned to wear. I spotted three men in Captain America T-shirts and made out with one of them. I tell this story to my workout partner, who sports Iron Man–themed compression garments from Under Armour. Next to him in the locker room, another jock is squeezing into red Lycra with a Superman insignia on the chest. Walking home, I check Instagram, noting that, in my feed of comic-book memes and action figures, Beyoncé has dressed up as Storm at a costume party. I dodge a little kid on a scooter dressed as Thor, padded muscles sewn into the sleeves. In my apartment, I click on Hulu, scanning blurbs for The Flash, Arrow, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. My domestic partner negotiates a détente: He puts on the news between two superhero shows. Distracted, I swipe through zentai fetish sites, searching for a Cyclops bodysuit, then reach into my bag and pull out the latest issue of X-Men.

Within mainstream gay-male culture, many situate themselves on the spectrum of jock to geek, two “communities” available on Scruff. These terms figure complementary fantasies of bulging bodies, technologized in skintight sheaths, hurtling in foreshortened intensity. In this moment of superhero saturation, I am reminded that it was not the ubiquity of these images that first attracted me to them, but the ways in which they signaled a rejection of the culture that marginalized me because I was different. Am I still different?

I was once a nerdy sixth grader finding companionship in comics shops and conventions, my primary point of contact the monthly issue of Uncanny X-Men. That was before the Fox films (credited with the advent of the “modern superhero movie”) and Capcom video games disseminated X-Men to a worldwide marketplace. Enabled by the Internet, contemporary fandom is a discourse around this mediation, a response to the corporate handling of intellectual properties. This discussion can take the form of sustained critique, as it does on themarysue.com, “an inclusive, feminist community,” or the podcast Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, hosted by a polyamorous couple, one cis and one trans, based in Portland, Oregon. Or it can happen in ad hoc comments on Instagram feeds such as stormfanforever and through Gay Geeks of New York’s Facebook rants. Fandom can even generate new queer theory, as in the forthcoming book The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics by Ramzi Fawaz, assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who argues that “fantasy [is] a dynamic aesthetic and social phenomenon, a mode of communication deployed as a tool of world making.” For an embodied expression of this “world making,” there are queer conventions like Flame Con, started in Brooklyn this past summer, which ended its day-long activities with a climactic display of superhero-themed drag performances.

Instagram featuring Logan De La Cruz, Chun Rosenkranz, Rustin Charles Low, and Paul McGill at the New York Comic Con, October 2015.

Born into an already alienated world, comics functioned for me, as they do for many, as a means to reimagine the construction of identity, often expressed by dressing up as another. Comics can be a way to find allies in a system that is violently hostile to crossing boundaries. In Debord’s Situationist critique of mediation, he cautions that the spectacle promises “all that appears is good.” Today’s image consumers know this to be untrue, even as they agitate for favorable representation: The interface of media culture allows for and even encourages dissent. Flawed as representation is, it is in response to critique—the utterance by intersecting voices that all is not good—that the companies that produce our contemporary mythologies create correctives to invisibility and stereotype. And then sell them to us.

This November, under the banner “All-New All-Different,” Marvel Comics recast many of its best-known brands in brown and/or female bodies. Captain America is black, while Captain Marvel, Thor, and Wolverine are now women. Ms. Marvel is a Pakistani teen from Jersey City. All-Different-ness promises multiplicity: While black Latino Miles Morales is Spider-Man, so is white male Peter Parker, in another series. Gwen Stacy, once Parker’s girlfriend, is now Spider-Gwen; Korean-American Cindy Moon is star of the spinoff Silk; and Spider-Woman Jessica Drew is pregnant. Another white male Spider-Man, Cletus Kasady, aka Carnage, is an antisocial mass murderer, while Web Warriors features Spider-verse characters from other species, such as Spider-Ham. “All-New All-Different” splinters superhero identities, once secret, into publicized identifications, distributed among demographics. Almost half of the people who read comics are women; many, of course, are people of color. The people who write and edit Marvel Comics are predominantly white men, though the pencillers, inkers, and colorists who make the artwork are culled from a more diverse pool. Marvel has recently hired Ta-Nehisi Coates to write Black Panther (Marvel’s premiere black superhero, introduced in 1966 in the pages of the Fantastic Four) as part of “All-New, All-Different,” adding his name to the shortlist of nonwhite guys that includes G. Willow Wilson (A-Force, Ms. Marvel), and Greg Pak (Storm). Marvel Comics, started in the early part of the last century for an audience of white boys, is producing heroes who reflect the specificity of consumers in a twenty-first-century marketplace. All that appears is all that appears.

Page detail from All-New Wolverine #2 (Marvel, 2015).

Marvel Comics’ lurch toward a new superhero body politic was not achieved without bloodshed. In May of this year, Marvel Comics commenced the “Secret Wars,” a massive, multititled maxi-series scheduled to destroy the Marvel Universe (and its parallel, the Ultimate Universe), setting the stage for “All-New All-Different.” “Secret Wars” played out over the summer and into the fall in almost fifty different miniseries, the flagship title selling around 200,000 issues a month. The event was advertised as an end to the interconnected continuity that has been the setting for Marvel’s superhero stories since 1961, beginning with the publication of Fantastic Four #1. The Fantastic Four, Marvel’s “first family,” has been canceled, its last issue coinciding with the beginning of “Secret Wars.” Marvel Comics also announced that monthly titles X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, All-New X-Men, Amazing X-Men, and spinoffs Spider-Man & the X-Men, Wolverines, Storm, Magneto, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, and X-Force were ending in the runup to “Secret Wars.” If you wanted to see your favorite X-characters, you would have to read the various “Secret Wars” titles, although in those series, they were alternate-reality versions of themselves. All dangling story arcs from the canceled monthlies, and central continuity, would be resolved in the final Uncanny X-Men, #600.

“Secret Wars” is an apt name for the event of these cancelations. A 1993 deal 20th Century Fox made with Marvel before the latter had its own film production company licensed off the X-Men film rights while keeping the merchandising at Marvel. Fan sites host heated debates on the vicissitudes of intellectual property, bifurcated by competing interests: In the case of X-Men, Fox can make movies (and television, as in the upcoming pilots for X-Men spinoffs Legion on FX, and Hellfire on Fox TV, coproduced with Marvel), but Marvel appears reluctant to continue to make merchandise that could benefit its former collaborator, now competitor. This impacts the content of the comic books: A 2002 court case ruled that Fox also controls the term “mutant.” So mutant characters can’t appear in the Marvel cinematic universe, which includes Guardians of the Galaxy and The Avengers. The Walt Disney Company’s 2009 acquisition of Marvel Entertainment (for $4 billion) is the object of much consternation on fan sites, fans knowing, as they do, that the bottom line determines their access to, and the fate of, these highly cathected-to avatars.

Page detail from All-New X-Men #40 (Marvel, 2015).

IN APRIL, prior to cancelation, All-New X-Men #40 came out, and in it, Iceman, one of the original X-Men, came out too, as gay. The scene, scripted by Brian Michael Bendis, with art by Mahmud Asrar, depicts the young mutant Bobby Drake being confronted by his telepathic teammate, Jean Grey, who calls him aside after he makes a sexual comment about one of their teachers, the demonic teleporter Magik. Jean knows, because she can read his mind, that Bobby is gay, and overcompensating. Iceman protests: “Maybe I’m bi.” Jean answers, “They say everybody is. But I think you’re more full gay.”

X-Men is about a community of mutants facing extinction: To avert genocide, they often resort to time travel. The Jean and Bobby of All-New X-Men are teenagers displaced from an earlier time, and they discuss the fact that people in the current era are more accepting of homosexuality. Paradoxically, Iceman is a teenager living in a time continuous with his older self, in a separate body. He ponders what this means about the older Bobby’s sexuality. He asks if Angel, a flame-winged mutant with blond hair, is gay too. Jean says, “No.” Two pages later Angel is flying in the air with his girlfriend, a transgender clone of Wolverine.

X-Men has long been a site for a speculative interrogation of the construction of sexuality, veering between essentialist rhetoric and the fluidities of queerness. With “Secret Wars” raging on, the question was: Would the time-traveling teenage Iceman confront his older counterpart about his “full” gayness before the end of the world? If Iceman admitted to his younger self that he was gay, would that mean he had been gay since his first appearance, in The X-Men #1, released in 1963? And was this revelation to be undone with the end of Marvel’s continuity?

In comic books, continuity describes the holism of a fictive reality created by multiple authors using the same consecutive narrative elements: character designs, biographies, geographies, and timelines. These elements of continuity become a canon. When a canon is changed by altering the fictitious history that established it, the term in comics is retroactive continuity, or a ret-con. The revelation that the X-Men character Phoenix was an alien clone of Jean Grey, who was alive in an energy pod, even though everyone thought she had committed suicide on the moon, is a ret-con. A narrative conceit that destabilizes the continuity it produces, a ret-con is a means of revising the shared production of an imaginary world, of redressing wrongs and creating new problems for others to undo. The X-Men’s corner of the Marvel Universe’s overall continuity is a baroque entanglement of paradoxes. That time-travel is a regular occurrence in X-Men comics make them particularly rife with ret-cons.

Cover detail from Secret Wars #4 (Marvel, 2015).

The premise of the nine-issue “Secret Wars” is that the villainous Doctor Doom has, through nefarious means, become “God-Emperor” of the Marvel Universe. Dislocated from a now-defunct continuity, the series places Marvel’s characters in a medieval-ish realm, answering to a cloaked and armored Doom who sits in his big chair surrounded by brainwashed minions, most of them blond women. The Invisible Woman, wife of Doom’s rival Mister Fantastic, is his consort, and the names of all these characters tell you everything you need to know about the gender politics of this book. “Secret Wars” depicts a melancholic patriarch’s dysfunctional omnipotence, as Doom consolidates control and staves off the inevitable coup. Each of the territories under Doom’s dominion is an alternate reality chronicled in a different series. The same characters appear as versions of themselves in different contexts, and comics, at the same time. Continuity is shattered into discontinuous products.

Doctor Doom is an omega male—marking the end of the line of male privilege, the death throes of patriarchy taking everyone else with it. If the Marvel Universe is to contain the multitude, its white male “God-Emperor” must both kill everyone and be killed by them. This is the promise and the threat of the omega male, troubling in the way that most dystopian extinction narratives are, centralizing the survival of humanity around a white gender-conforming body. The omega male is the villainous version of this fantasy, a negative identification, an antimatter cancelation.

The obvious antidote to the omega male’s tyrannical mismanagement of the (Marvel) universe is the community called the X-Men, their name promising a postmale, nonhuman collectivity. The sole X-Man to survive “Secret Wars” #1, Cyclops, leads a rebellion: His neck is snapped by Doom in issue #4. The violence meted out to the X-Men in this “crossover” indicates a disturbing trend in the comic-book company’s attitude toward violence in general and specifically against its fictional universe’s beleaguered minority group. In “Secret Wars,” the X-Men are sent to the periphery, their communitarian ethos dislocated to a range of institutional settings that place them outside Doctor Doom’s castle, from the utopian Mutant Museum of X-Men ’92 (a camp homage to the 1990s Fox Kids cartoon) to the concentration camps of Years of Future Past. These series are set in alternate timelines with many of the same characters reappearing as different versions of themselves. In “Secret Wars” miniseries Age of Apocalypse, Inferno, E is for Extinction, and X-Tinction Agenda, various incarnations of the X-Men fight for their lives in panels overcrowded with death; they are killed by biological warfare, demons, psychic trauma, apartheid, and one another. If the violence meted out at “Marvel’s merry mutants” (as Stan Lee once dubbed them) was traumatic for readers (as it was for me), one could take heart that it was not in the true continuity, and none of this “really” happened. What really happened to the X-Men, readers were reassured by Marvel’s editorial teams, was to be resolved in Uncanny X-Men #600. I want to review Uncanny X-Men #600. But to get there, I have to trace a history of representations of difference within X-Men comics, and the shifting signification of its primary sign, “the mutant.”

Page detail from The X-Men #1 (Marvel, 1963).

MARVEL’S MUTANTS were a childhood obsession that resulted from, and contributed to, my own alienation. Mutant teens bound by a shared genetic condition, they were described as both “children of the atom” and “the next step in human evolution,” eliding atomic-age anxieties with a speculative rewriting of Darwin. The original team, consisting of Cyclops, Beast, Angel, Iceman, and Marvel Girl (better known as Jean Grey), were trained in the use of their powers by Professor Charles Xavier, aka Professor X, a telepath bound to a wheelchair, at his School for Gifted Youngsters in Westchester, New York. Tasked with fighting bad mutants to prove that not all mutants were bad, these teens awkwardly mitigated their differences in order to conform: Angel hid his wings in his jacket and Cyclops wore “ruby-quartz” shades to contain the concussive blasts shooting uncontrollably from his eyes. Unlike Captain America or the Fantastic Four, the mutants were “The Uncanny” personified. That is, “Unheimlich,” or “un-home-like,” the familiar made unfamiliar, figured by Freud. It has been suggested that these X-Men were a way to discuss being Jewish (as both Lee and Kirby were) in an era when this was not talked about in comics, or presumably, mixed company.

I first encountered the X-Men under the stewardship of Chris Claremont, who from 1975 to 1991 was head writer on the series, which was drawn by a pantheon of celebrated cartoonists including John Byrne, Terry Austin, Paul Smith, Barry Windsor-Smith, Rick Leonardi, Arthur Adams, Bill Sienkiewicz, John Romita Jr., and Marc Silvestri. During this time, X-Men and its spinoffs—The New Mutants and X-Factor, written by Louise Simonson—used “mutants” as a conceit to explore the relationship between otherness and the construction of group identity. In issue after issue, the X-Men faced the discrimination of a world that “feared and hated” the difference that marked them and which, ironically, was also the source of their power to survive it. Their extraordinary abilities served as a shifting metaphor for difference, that state of non-belonging that resists, pressures, and at times destroys the structures that demand normalization.

The mutant metaphor has adapted with the sway of identitarian politics. Much has been made of the conflict between Professor X’s integrationist ethos and Magneto’s separatist ideology. This debate has continued into the most recent issues, the oppositional positions occupied by educator and community organizer Storm, and educator and revolutionary Cyclops, each of whom lead rival mutant schools. The politicized status of mutants in Marvel Comics was fertile territory for a variety of storylines that echoed 1960s discourses on race. And yet, the original X-Men’s all-whiteness made it impossible for the mutant metaphor to further the discussion of difference without calling into question the lack of its representation within its pages. The Xavier School had to be integrated.

Cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1 (Marvel, 1975).

In 1975, the flagging title was relaunched with Giant-Size X-Men #1 and the introduction to the team of white-haired African weather goddess, Storm; blue-furred Bavarian Catholic, Nightcrawler; Soviet metal man, Colossus; Japanese firebrand, Sunfire; Native American tracker, Thunderbird; and Canadian animal-man, Wolverine. Multiculturalism had shifted the mutant metaphor from one of discomfort with conformity to its utter impossibility: These “international X-Men” were ethnicized in a way that was no longer subtextual, and their physical appearances, more spectacular and seductive than their predecessors’ (thanks to Dave Cockrum’s ingenious character designs), made it impossible for them to blend in—and who wanted to blend in in the 1970s? The question asked by this team of X-Men was: What if your “difference” cannot, and should not, be hidden, because, strange as it may be to some, it’s also beautiful?

During Claremont’s run as head writer of the “X-Men,” it became one of Marvel’s best sellers, the comic’s popularity due in large part to his skill at interweaving a political milieu—in which difference was reviled by the dominant culture—with well-wrought characters, many of them women, such as Kitty Pryde, the first openly Jewish mutant, whose power was to become, and make other things, intangible. Storm replaced Cyclops as leader, making the X-Men the only superhero team in the Marvel Universe lead by a black woman. She also got a Mohawk, echoing the transition from hippie to punk as a generational marker of opposition. With the X-Men fighting to survive increasingly hostile prejudice, Claremont created situations that echoed twentieth-century realities of violence against minorities, from governmental surveillance to bashings on the street to televangelism. The pejorative “mutie” was introduced as the term of choice for antimutant bigots, hurled at the characters in graffiti and verbal attacks. Like many other pubescent readers of the 1980s, my anxieties about my own set of differences seemed to be reflected in the challenges faced by this diverse band of outsiders.

In the decades that spanned the Claremont era, the mutant metaphor was a way to talk about how fear of difference supports systemic injustice and state-sanctioned murder, with the characters themselves fretting over what they would be forced to do to survive, including killing their enemies. X-Men comics have always had a high body count, with characters such as Thunderbird and Jean Grey (who had transformed from Marvel Girl to Phoenix—echoing the empowerment of Women’s Liberation—to Dark Phoenix—echoing, perhaps, a sexist backlash) among the first to die in the struggle. One could argue that this exploration of the mechanics of prejudice set the stage for less nuanced and skilled writers to get the wrong message, making of this conflict a perfect mise-en-scène for the video-game-style carnage unfolding in the pages of “Secret Wars.” As a reader, I can attest to no desire for mutant genocide, and am much more interested in the ways that these characters have staved off annihilation for fifty-plus years.

Advertisement for Marvel crossover series “Fall of the Mutants,” 1987. Art by Jon Bogdanove.

IN THE ’90S, comics became big business: The relaunched X-Men #1 sold 8.1 million copies in 1991. Claremont was replaced by artist and writer Jim Lee as head of the “X-Men” line, which was metastasizing with spinoffs such as Rob Liefeld’s X-Force. The ’90s “X-Men” franchise, as it had become, was dominated by steroidal characters in shoulder pads and high-cut thongs, and they carried weapons. Cable, Bishop, and Domino, with their mutant-powered guns, Psylocke with her psychic knife, and Gambit, able to throw explosive playing cards, signaled a move to the weaponized body, capitalizing on the popularity of the seminal Wolverine, with his “Adamantium” claws. These antisocial X-Men were part action hero, à la Terminator, part school shooter: They often wore trench coats. On the flipside, other X-Men introduced in the ’90s exhibited outlandish physical deformities, their mutant powers manifesting at adolescence just as teenage body issues converge with the emergence into adult sexuality. If I am more than a little put off by gun-toting Cable, I have a certain love for grotesques like Chamber, whose powers blew off half his face, leaving him with fire coming out of a jawless maw, and Husk, who tears off her skin to reveal a crystalline body, and Marrow, bones growing on the outside. Like the impossibly sexy Rogue (introduced by Claremont in the ’80s), whose hamartia is that she cannot touch anyone skin to skin without absorbing their psyche, these characters flesh out the mutant metaphor, extending difference past the category of human.

Queerness was the subtlest dimension of the mutant metaphor during the Claremont era. Storm and Kitty shared a sapphic dynamic, as did the villains Mystique and Destiny, foster-mothers of Rogue; in teen melodrama New Mutants, the earth boy Doug Ramsey could physically and psychically merge with his “self-friend,” the mutant alien boy Warlock. These characters exhibited affective relationships with other same-sex characters, though queer sex itself remained elliptically off panel throughout the ’80s. In subsequent decades, as the closet opened wider in the larger culture, more explicitly queer characters emerged. The mutant and intermittent X-Man Northstar, a high-flying Québécois speedster, was the first superhero to come out, and the first to have a same-sex marriage, to his nonmutant, African American boyfriend, Kyle, during Marjorie Liu’s run as writer on Astonishing X-Men. Since then, the lineup of queer characters has grown to include the lizard boy, Anole; the rock-skinned daughter of hip-hop producers, Bling; and the shape-shifting “transmorph,” Benjamin Deeds. There is also the bisexual male couple Rictor, an earthquake-making Latino, and Shatterstar, a time traveler whose backstory includes the paradox that he is his father’s father. Longtime character Karma, a Vietnamese immigrant with the power to possess peoples’ minds, was revealed to be a lesbian at about the same time she lost a leg.

And now, an original 1963 X-Man, Iceman, just came out of the closet. The “coming out” of teen Iceman sparked a debate in fandom, and garnered media attention from outlets like the Advocate. Some critics argued that to change his sexuality was to betray his core. Others countered that these characters evolve over time, and anyway, Bobby had never had a successful heterosexual relationship before, so there was room for this development. (I note that his teammate and friend Northstar had crushed on Bobby.) My aforementioned workout partner had always loved Iceman and was elated. But the big question was, if teen Iceman is gay, what about his older self, existing paradoxically in the same timeline? The question suggested two potential models: Either sexuality is like mutant DNA, hardwired to emerge at adolescence, essential and immutable, or sexuality is like mutation, a shifting property that is created through interplay between genetics and environment. So which was it?

Page detail from Uncanny X-Men #600 (Marvel, 2015).

That question, and others, we were promised, would be answered in Uncanny X-Men #600. In a six-page sequence set in adult Iceman’s bedroom at the School, dressed in T-shirt and cargo shorts, he is confronted by his younger self, Jean Grey dragged along for support. “I’m gay,” says the teenager. “So that means you are too. Right?”

In effect, Iceman never “comes out.” In two consecutive events, he is outed: once by a friend, once by himself. The older Iceman can only confirm his homosexuality to these interlocutors, and the all-too-predictable affirmation merely serves to secure the comfortable borders of heterosexuality. I can imagine more nuanced and interesting responses, as in the older Bobby telling the younger that sexuality is ephemeral and shape-changing, like the ice they both manipulate. Or the two embracing the seeming paradox of their conflicting sexual identifications: one full straight, one full gay, but coinciding in the same character. Or, what if the two Icemans, reveling in a narcissistic fantasy, could transgress all laws of time and space by having a sexual relationship themselves? But Iceman’s explanation for having remained in the closet for five decades (though he is maybe in his thirties in the comic) is another question: “Can I just have one part of my life that I’m not being persecuted for?”

At this very queer impasse—indeed, at the end of the Marvel Universe as we know it—something obvious happens: “Queerness” is abolished and continuity is straightened, expressing the final step in the teleology of the ret-con device. In making Iceman’s sexuality immutable and continuous, his gayness, which is just a promise to be gay since he has never had a diegetic same-sex partner, is used to affirm the heterosexuality of the other characters: Six pages after this exchange, Jean Grey makes out with the teen Beast for five panels.

Page detail from Uncanny X-Men #1 (Marvel, 2013).

“MUTANT,” AS A METAPHOR, used to stand in for specific differences. But as the minority identities for which they once stood have made their appearance, “mutant” has become part of a larger structure of otherness. Mutants in the mythology of Marvel Comics are a device for exploring the way minority subjects are constituted, personally and politically, by alliances across difference with other marginalized groups. As such, the mutant is useful, and urgent, as a narrative structure for telling stories about how difference is imbricated with differences, but it no longer symbolizes specific differences. With the coming of the “All-New All-Different” era, the mutant has become a metonym of difference. “Mutant” means mutant, and these mutants are intersectional.

In a final call for solidarity, the mutant metonym is complicated by its relationship to activist politics. Uncanny X-Men #600 ends with all of the mutants in the Marvel Universe at a “million mutant march” lead by Cyclops. His speech to the gathered throngs:

Revolution! I know that’s a loaded word and that it means many things to many people! Some see it as heroic and some see it as terrifying. Some equate it to terrorism! And I admitted to myself that I did not know exactly what I meant when I called for it… only that something revolutionary had to happen. Well, this is it. This is the mutant revolution. Every mutant in the world on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. In the heart of everything democratic and good… And you hear that? Do you see that? Nothing. Nothing is happening. The humans’ worst nightmare about mutants is that we would unite and attack. Unite and conquer. Unite and come after them. Well, here we are, united. And… isn’t it beautiful?

According to Cyclops, this demonstration of protest and solidarity is “beautiful” because “nothing is happening.” The X-Men’s longest story arc, the clash between a persecuted minority and their oppressors, is resolved with an affirmation that all that is “democratic and good”—the government that in the comics has spent years trying to contain and kill the X-Men—is safe from this soft “revolution.” Magneto responds, shadily: “Charles Xavier would have loved this.” Storm says, “This doesn’t change anything,” and Nightcrawler disagrees: “Actually, it kind of does.” They are both right: The tactic, borrowed from the playbook of mass-media entertainment, is to suggest all possibilities are equal, and in the end, cancel each other out.

Page detail from Secret Wars #1 (Marvel, 2015).

Then the Marvel Universe blinks out of existence. It is no secret that “Secret Wars” is a means to inspire consumers to buy more comics. That Uncanny X-Men #600 was delayed from its original summer launch until November only made it more desirable, and necessary: We waited to see what befell our beloved mutants, while being pummeled with images of them dying in the pages of “Secret Wars.” By the time Uncanny X-Men #600 finally came out, Extraordinary X-Men #1 was on the shelves. The continuity of the Marvel Universe may have ended, but a new one would take its place: one in which the mutant no longer had the corner on the diversity market.

All-New All-Different Avengers, New Avengers, and the Ultimates, all launched this fall, feature teams whose rosters include a majority of minority superbeings. The Avengers are government contractors: They are state-sanctioned, and the inclusion of these nonwhite, nonmale, sometimes even nonstraight characters has the feel of a corporate mandate, a “diversity push.” In contrast, the X-Men—who, after all, most comfortably fit into an academic model, with their intrinsic conversation around identity politics (not to mention the school setting)—still offer a unique space for exploring the complexities of oppression: In the new title, Extraordinary X-Men, the mutant metonym is attached to a population of refugees unwanted because they are considered politically dangerous and contagiously diseased with something called M-Pox. If it is important that Ms. Marvel of the All-New All-Different Avengers be a Pakistani American teenager as a way to combat stereotypes and offer new role models, it is also important that X-Men remains a space where otherness is not confined to a body, a gender, a culture. Mystique, like so many of her children and relatives, is blue skinned, but she can also change shape. And she can be a villain and a hero at the same time.

Left: Page detail from Uncanny X-Men #188 (Marvel, 1984). Right: LexiMomo as Cyclops (DeviantArt).

In the summer and fall of 2015, the X-Men died, and died, and were alive again, not quite reborn, but recast as truly abject and transgressive bare lives within a newly progressive, if fractured, continuity. Uncanny X-Men #600 led them to the end of a political revolution founded on collective action, only to find them reemerging in Extraordinary X-Men #1, demoralized and diminished survivors of catastrophe. M-Pox, we learn, results from exposure to something called “Terrigen Mist,” a compound from outer space that turns normal people—if they happen to have alien ancestry—into “inhumans.” “Inhumans” are an intellectual property owned entirely by Marvel/Disney. “Mutants” are not. When mutants are exposed to Terrigen Mist, it turns out, they get sick, are sterilized, and sometimes die. So no new mutants will be created, the line will be trimmed down. If it makes little narrative sense, it’s because its logic is financial: As Chris Claremont said during a taping of the Nerdist podcast at the 2014 Phoenix Comic Con, “The X department is forbidden to create new characters … all because all new characters become the film property of Fox.” The X-Men, having survived genocide, may end up purged by capitalism.

And so: Like Cyclops, I call for revolution. The X-Men’s survival depends on their liberation from corporate-owned continuity. “The hero’s immortality no longer originates in the strength to survive all possible ordeals, but from its ability to be Xeroxed, recycled, and reincarnated,” writes Hito Steyerl in “A Thing Like You and Me.” Marvel Comics knows this and has set about remaking many of their icons to appeal to millennial readers, who feel entitled to be reflected in the corporate-owned mirror. We cannot be satisfied with that! The X-Men, emblems of our difference, scarred spectacles of our own oppression, promising as they do an empowerment born from the fragile community of outsiders, are as much ours as anyone else’s. We cannot sit by and watch them be mutilated by the greed of their parent companies: The comics sadistically torture them because they can’t reap the profits from the movies; the movies repress their political urgency to appeal to a mass audience. So let’s rewrite Uncanny X-Men #600 to make Cyclops call for violent overthrow. Let’s produce bootleg Storm T-shirts advertising ecofeminism and make CGI porn of Iceman fucking himself. Debord’s description of “ultra-détournement” includes “the wearing of costumes in public.”

Yes, the necessary means to combat the brutality of the capitalist spectacle is cosplay.

Alexandro Segade is an artist based in New York.

Still from Young Moose feat. Martina Lynch’s 2015 video No SunShine.

THE PAST SIX MONTHS IN BALTIMORE have been traumatic. Last April and May saw top-down violence from police and destruction by citizens amid simultaneously peaceful protest. Addressing the uprising that began after city police officers murdered Freddie Gray—an innocent twenty-five-year-old black man—Baltimore columnist D. Watkins wrote in the New York Times, “Some people might ask, ‘Why Baltimore?’ But the real question is, ‘Why did it take so long?’” Many, particularly those in East and West Baltimore, suffer from brutal policing, a school-to-prison pipeline, massive incarceration rates, crumbling housing stock, inadequate public transportation, and imbalanced urban redevelopment, to name a few. Although arts opportunities for people of color are gradually increasing here, change is slow. For instance, Baltimore has four public, Confederate monuments still standing guard. In late October, while a special city commission was beginning to review the history of the monuments and soliciting public opinion about their futures, Pablo Machioli and Owen Silverman Andrews led an artists’ action in front of the Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson monument across from the Baltimore Museum of Art. Machioli made a large sculpture of a pregnant black woman and placed it in front of the monument in protest. After the Parks Department removed it, the artist displayed the sculpture in a common space at The Copy Cat, a popular artists’ live-work community. A vandal found the sculpture and covered it in violent, racist language.

Violence in Baltimore is relentless, the effect of systemic problems that have been interminably reiterated throughout the course of American history. Local artist and musician Paul Rucker’s installation “Rewind” (shown at the Creative Alliance last winter and again at the Baltimore Museum of Art later in the fall) included finely cut sculptures resembling unfinished or isolated parts of instruments each titled with the date and location of a murder. The roughly chest-sized plywood boxes, July 17, 2014, New York, New York, refers to the NYPD’s murder of Eric Garner. These sculptures are graceful and dignified, but represent an absence too, like muscles without a skeleton, bereaved torsos perhaps, or sonorous cores uncoupled from sound or strings.

Baltimore rappers Young Moose and Martina Lynch’s song No SunShine, released last May, also points to violence passed down through American history, suggesting that the conflicts in Baltimore, although extreme, are not unique. In the music video for their song, Moose and Lynch rap at the site of Freddie Gray’s arrest. In front of a memorial to Gray painted by the artist Nether, Moose asks, “When we gonna wake up and realize it's real? They did the same thing to Rodney King and Emmett Till.”

Influential Baltimore activist and theater artist Sheila Gaskins likewise calls out that very repetition in American culture of black bodies murdered and abused. When I spoke with her for this piece, she—like Moose and Lynch—invoked Till. In 1955, Mississippi white supremacists lynched fourteen-year-old Till then dumped his body in a river because he allegedly whistled at a white woman. His mother, Mamie Till, insisted on an open casket at his funeral. Gaskins wrote to me in an email: “For centuries, we have seen black bodies exposed, mutilated, hanging from trees, in museums, fetishized, on display, whipped, etc. During slavery days it was used as an example for other slaves to stay in line. Emmett Till’s mom left the casket open so everyone can see the ugly face of racism. However, years and years of exposing Black bodies has made it the norm. We no longer feel or can relate when we see Black bodies in turmoil. We are all traumatized, numb, powerless.”

Wickerham & Lomax, NSECUR, 2015, HD video, color, sound, 4 minutes 53 seconds.

Still, Gaskins is resolute, and a rekindled spirit of self-determination is similarly manifest, among other places, in the work of Baltimore artists who would like to visually intervene in the continuing cycle of cruelty she describes. Some of these artists enact rituals as a possible antidote to mutilation and psychological and physical violence. Take the recent digitally animated video by the Baltimore duo Wickerham & Lomax, NSECUR, (part of “Take Karaoke: A Proposition for Performance Art,” at Brown University’s Cohen Gallery in Providence until December 16th). The video seems to start amid the Baltimore Uprising, with the sound of screams and the image of burning buildings. A decapitated, muscled security guard stands in front of an inferno, cradling first Malcolm Lomax’s severed head, then Daniel Wickerham’s. Flowers spray from a hole in the security guard’s neck while both heads recite the same pensive, tabloid-like drama. Their language hovers between sense and nonsense; the drama driving their story seems to be personhood as lived in the gap between institutional recognition and financial security on one side, and resilient, honest self-presentation on the other. Yet, however cut-up the mode of expression or the anatomy of the video’s digital bodies, these bodies function. They insist on their own terms, becoming whole by performing.

Take, too, the work of performance artist Bobby English, Jr., which similarly interrogates violence against black bodies in solidarity with the Baltimore Uprising and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Staged over the past six months, English’s recent works incorporate and respond to the fear he sees in reactions to his tall, athletic, young, black male body. He appears nude or draped in cloth or raffia, adorned in blue and gold body paint, performing to be secure and vulnerable both in public space and within and without the confines of the intricate metal cages he builds. A key figure in Labbodies—a Baltimore performance incubator founded in January 2014 by Hoesy Corona and Ada Pinkston—English cites the Baltimore Uprising as an awakening.

Bobby English, Jr., Immure, 2015. Performance view, Terrault Contemporary, Baltimore, 2015. Bobby English, Jr. Photo: Clyde Johnson.

A sense of possibility undergirds the practices of many, like English, in this city, including the numerous artists who work for afterschool art and poetry programs, in community development, and with youth-empowerment groups. Photographers like Devin Allen and Nate Larson are inspiring young people to document their own world. (During the Baltimore Uprising earlier this year, both separately brought unflinching photographs—of police, protestors, the National Guard, and members of the press—to Time Magazine, CNN, and the world.)

In addition to teaching, to calling out and resisting, Baltimore artists seek to transcend violence by envisioning alternate realities. Where the persecution of black bodies is sustained and normalized, other mechanisms of succor emerge. Zoë Charlton, who splits her time between Baltimore and Washington, DC, considers a powerful survivalism. I held one of her collages in my hands in her studio at American University in DC, where she teaches. The collage shows a cutout photograph of a Pende woman kneeling, headless and holding a reclining child. She is set against a blank white ground, disassociated from history and culture. Twinkling blue-green-pink bubbles emanate from her ornate neckwear, as if they could nourish the child. Like so much of the work in and around Baltimore, Charlton’s cutout figure feels traumatized, eerie and mournful. It might also be a vehicle for a different knowledge—not what’s assumed to exist, but perhaps what could be.

— Marcus Civin

Aranguren & Gallegos's preliminary rendering of the new Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in the Design District. Photo: Aranguren & Gallegos.

SOUTH FLORIDA has always been friendly to topless beachgoers. This past year, though, the city’s art museums gave new meaning to being topless in Miami. Four were without directors at some point: the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami); the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM); the Patricia & Phillip Frost Museum; and the Wolfsonian-Florida International University Museum. All of the positions have now been filled, but it will be several years before it’s clear how the newbies’ visions will shape programming. Meanwhile, the Bass Museum of Art closed for renovations in mid-May (although it did open a pop-up space at the Miami Beach Regional Library across the street) while the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in North Miami and the ICA Miami are just finding their footing after last year’s debacle that resulted in the exodus of the former’s board and the birth of the latter. All of the above put at a standstill—though not a screeching halt—the hopes of those here who are invested in maintaining a lively and intellectually rigorous discourse around art all year long.

Still, there were highlights: The ICA’s deep pockets often go toward inviting artist’s artists like Richard Tuttle to give lectures, while PAMM’s programming has been rock solid as its curatorial team begins to operate like a well-oiled machine, producing one great exhibition after another. MoCA’s stunning group show “Autonomous Zones” was theoretically rigorous while showing the depth of work being made by artists who happen to be primarily based in South Florida. A number of smaller organizations also stepped up to the plate. The downtown Cannonball stands out for its series of “Wavemaker” grants to local artists and cultural producers. (Although it just lost its director, too!) The institution also launched the alternative school r.a.d. (research.art.dialogue) that has been popular with artists. Indeed, hungry for intellectual debate, a group of intrepid artists fundraised and put together the ambitious program “Fall Semester,” a two-day event that brought together artists and thinkers.

But one wonders what happened to all the rancor regarding the naming of PAMM several years earlier. Let me help jog your memory: $100 million dollars of taxpayer dollars went toward construction of the new Herzog & de Meuron building of the institution formerly known as Miami Art Museum (MAM). However, when board member Jorge A. Pérez, a real-estate developer, pledged $20 million in cash (to be given over a ten year period) and part of his collection (valued at $20 million), the museum’s name was changed to the Jorge A. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County. This led to the resignations of four board members who felt that the museum should reflect the city’s name. Perhaps the larger issue is a cultural climate overwhelmingly shaped by a coterie of collectors. In fact, the construction of the new ICA Miami building, slated to open in 2016, is being underwritten completely by the collectors Norma and Irma Braman, although they have not stipulated their names be attached to the building (as reported in the New York Times). Underlying the PAMM naming controversy and the more recent surreal drama regarding the ICA and MoCA North Miami are deep divisions along class lines.

Art in the Age of Technological Resurrection seminar led by Anton Vidokle at r.a.d (research.art.dialogue), Miami, November 2015.

In the commercial art world, the big news is that most galleries have fled from Wynwood, which has now become thoroughly gentrified, and many have moved to the Little River/Haiti area. David Castillo Gallery, one of the first to set up shop in Wynwood, was one of the first to leave: He opted to move to Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. Sociologists coming to Miami to witness another cycle of gentrification, take note: There is a lack of a core gallery center in terms of density—and this is probably a good thing for residents already living in these areas. That is, while Brett Sokol’s recent New York Times article is correct about a decampment of galleries, The Screening Room and Dina Mitrani Gallery, focused on video art and photography respectively, as well as the Bakehouse Art Complex (to name a few), ensure that we still need to visit Wynwood.

The Times article also indicates that the board of the nonprofit ArtCenter South Florida, known for their studio residencies and international exchange program, is debating between moving forward with plans to develop a space in Wynwood or Little River/Haiti, where it recently opened a temporary exhibition space. However, as María del Valle, ArtCenter’s director, explained to me via email, this is not the case. The board is not split between Wynwood and Little River. This false binary is an oversimplification of the topography of the Miami art scene, just as the article in the Times last year regarding the exodus of artists to Los Angeles is overly dramatized.

Maybe I began with something of a red herring. The aforementioned ArtCenter South Florida sold one of its holdings for $88 million, resulting in an endowment that is larger than any of the major institutions in the region, and it has the potential to stabilize this area for artists who otherwise will likely be driven out. Perhaps more so than the ICA, PAMM, and MoCA—or any other institution with an acronym or one attached to a major collector or university—what the ArtCenter does and does not do will have major ramifications for the cultural landscape of Miami. While I do not want to imply that it can single-handedly remedy or counterbalance the influence of the market and sway of collectors, it can certainly provide a push in the right direction toward the creation of an art scene that is not only multipronged (it already is) but also one in which power is distributed, if not evenly, at least in a less one-sided fashion. Otherwise, the Miami art world is destined to be distilled to nothing more than the origin myth that everything leads back to Art Basel (and you thought I would forget to mention it!).

PS: I encourage everyone to visit the group exhibition “100+ Degrees in the Shade,” curated by Jane Hart. This roundup of artists based in South Florida has received tremendous buzz and promises to be one not to miss. Since the exhibition is scattered across various spaces in the city, it will also get you off the beach to get to know the larger Miami art scene.

— Alpesh Kantilal Patel