Sarah Jane Cervenak

Black gathering: “The weight of being” in Leonardo Drew’s sculpture

The collector, according to Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire, is the figure who treads the edge of day, roaming the margins of Enlightened society in search of its tossed-aside forms. Into this wasteland of rejected and disavowed life, the collector ambles as if in a dream. In her dream, disavowed living moves into a “better” world, one that lingers safely past the suffocating ether of tired taxonomies. Sculptor Leonardo Drew is a collector that creates and remakes in this spirit. Leonardo Drew purposely weathers objects – wood planks, fabric, cotton, animal carcasses, feathers, and other items – and makes abstract sculpture. By wearing down the object in the process of making something new, Drew intervenes into histories of racial and sexual subjection; histories that have made people into useable objects. Through his reassemblage of the rejectable, Drew imagines another world on the side of this one – a domain of living disaggregated from use and retethered to justice.

Untitled and Outdoors: Thinking with Saidiya Hartman

In some ways, critical conversations on black performance studies focus the first part of Scenes in its particular engagement with black fungibility. Arguably, the first half is black performance studies’ founding text. Even still, the authors argue that black performance studies is never not a question of ecological possibility, of being black outside in the wake of self-possession’s overdetermined white particularity. Such questions foreground Scenes’ second half. Just as Hartman elucidates how the “nonevent of emancipation insinuated by the perpetuation of the plantation system” bespeaks the state’s anti-black insistence on keeping blackness outside and in the field, the authors argue for the field’s persistence and just as well as for the question of what’s out from the field. It is in that spirit that the authors argue for the centrality of Scenes’ second half for black performance studies.