Written by: Justin Williams-owner of Taino Studios
Every day, history is quietly rehearsed in the rhythms we inherit, the objects we preserve, and the bodies that carry memories beyond written archives. Indeed, those activities that people engage in regularly, such as work or leisure activities with their families, form our identities. Although James Baldwin, Nikos Papastergiadis, and Henri Lefebvre offer distinct ideas about the role of everyday life in the formation of identity, culture, and politics, they share an idea about the need for artistic representations of reality, which would reveal the hidden truths of life. I find it quite reasonable since art should reflect the essence of everyday life in which culture and politics happen. I would like to focus on the ways in which art reveals the capacity of everyday activities to act as archives through which history is stored in unofficial sources. Music, dance, and family histories can contain the information about certain events that happened to individuals and thus serve as an archive of their lives.
James Baldwin’s conception suggest, artists have an important mission in society. They need to reveal what other people refuse to see. Artists have to "shine a light on the dark things" that we usually keep to ourselves. In other words, art helps us discover aspects of life that we do not see usually. Baldwin positions that art should not be a means of escaping from reality; his stands that, through stoicism and mastering the art of being alone, creation is a vessel for understanding it.
This becomes all the more true in light of the contemporary crisis of lonely men in America. Social isolation continues to be seen as a major public health issue while men are observed to suffer from higher suicide deaths. However, such situations become even more complicated when viewed in the context of the history of Black males in America, who for centuries have been dealing with issues related to slavery, segregation, discriminatory housing laws, mass imprisonment, economic disenfranchisement, and inequality in education. All of these have led to the breaking up of family bonds, lack of access to institutions, and the immense pressure of showing masculinity and keeping vulnerabilities hidden.
In past times, the Black body has frequently been regarded as an object as opposed to a full subject of humanity. In the time of slavery, Black men were seen merely as bodies of work whose worth could only be gauged economically and never emotionally or intellectually. After liberation, institutions like convict leasing, Jim Crow segregation, redlining, and eventually mass incarceration further constrained the mobility, labor, and domesticity of the Black race. It is not just that these mechanisms impacted economics alone. They had an impact on the sense of belonging and self-respect that African Americans felt as a community and over many generations.
These past facts have shaped the current depictions of black masculinity. There is usually more room allocated in popular media for strong images of brute force, athleticism, or criminality than there is for expressions of emotions such as grief, vulnerability, or introspection. This may lead to limited views of black masculinity and affect how black men see themselves as well as how others view them. For this reason, Baldwin's demand that artists bring out secrets is an ethical responsibility. Art provides room for emotions that dominate discourse.
For good reason, he is convinced that all our experiences such as family, place of residence, music, and emotions have some special meaning that we can realize only when an artist reveals it to us. I find his ideas very fascinating as he sees art both as a means of creation & also an act of human responsibility.
Art must become an integral part of people's daily routine, rather than being separated from it. According to Nikos Papastergiadis, when art and life interact closely, it may result in the emergence of a unique and powerful combination. In other words, it provides artists with an opportunity to find innovative ways to reflect on art which will not be based on the conventional academic perspective.
As stated by Nikos Papastergiadis, the encounter of art and life not only gives rise to innovations, but it also provides a space for artists to explore the interplay of memory and invention. When art meets life, artists are freed from all the academic rules and conventions and can find meaning in the ordinary. He quotes, "there is both rejection and lineage and claim of assimilation," thus implying that everything that we create denies our traditions and at the same time depends on them. Nothing new comes out of nowhere, but is always a product of conversation with past. His statement that "neither the pleasures nor the vices...are embedded within social history or political solidarity or aesthetic investigation" suggests that artists have to go beyond their own individuality and create something based on the experience of others.
The mundane not as that which lies between important things but as the place where importance slowly accrues. There is no separation in my life between art and life; instead, my studio space extends itself from conversations had following a bachata social, runs made before sunrise, the stillness following the choice of self-respect over relationships that couldn't be what I needed them to be, and the memories that come when I sketch my father's hat. In their individuality, these actions may seem like nothing much at all, but taken together, they construct the emotional architecture of my artistic practice. It seems that identity does not emerge solely through great happenings; rather, identity is formed through repetition of acts of love, discipline, sorrow, happiness, and coming home. My drawings are thus not an attempt to escape everyday life but to engage with it enough so that it can teach me something in which I did not previously see for the sake of others.
With repetition, the dance rhythm is eventually internalized, transforming the familiar into heritage. In that way, my boxers, my musicians, my dancers, and my family's legacy are but more layers added to the heritage I am constantly reinterpreting without necessarily rejecting or preserving unchanged. Every day is not just the setting of my artworks, its the medium by which memory becomes alive, by which love continues its inscription, far past absence, and by which I continue to grow into the man and artist my father, my community, and my own lived experience has been preparing me to be.
It is this understanding of the ordinary as transformative that intrigues me about the works of Henri Lefebvre. For Lefebvre, if everyday life is where memories accumulate, then it is also the starting point for imagining possibilities. He writes that while people may see the daily as repetitive and confined, in the same daily activities lie the seeds of possibility for transformations. Instead of allowing the daily to remain as something fixed and given, he seems to advocate for the artist to dream of other possible realities beyond what he has inherited, and in so doing imagines the reality of futures to come.
"The Possible" by Lefebvre is particularly close to my artistic experience and Buddhist practice. "The possible opposes itself to the real, and is an integral part of the real." As Lefebvre explains, the imagination is not an escapism from the reality, instead it can be used as one of the tools to change it. Indeed, the idea of transformation through imagination is similar to the Nichiren Buddhism notion of Kosen-rufu, which claims that the most significant social changes can happen if individuals change themselves first of all. In other words, the changes do not have to wait for ideal conditions because, according to Kosen-rufu, peace, justice, and human dignity can be attained only through compassionate actions, creative labor and revealing oneself to the world. For this reason, my drawings are not trying to recreate the history as it was but explore its potential and unrealized opportunities. Thus, the rhythm of bachata, discipline of boxing, musicians' movements and items of my father are means to explore how memory transforms into new being.
On the other hand, Lefebvre’s reading raised my consciousness about the intellectual traditions underlying his ideas. His approach reflects the Marxist tradition of critique regarding alienation and social structures in tandem with psychoanalytical considerations concerning desire, absence, and subjectivity. It would be impossible not to agree with the importance of these theories in the development of contemporary criticism and theory of art; however, they can never be considered the foundations of artistic knowledge on which any artist must base him- or herself. As a Black artist and educator, as well as a future curriculum designer, I see myself designing curricula of art education in Historically Black Colleges and Universities, in which these theories would find themselves in dialogue with similarly rigorous intellectual traditions that originated in Africa, in the African diaspora, in indigenous societies, and in the Caribbean. For example, the philosophies of W. E. B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Frantz Fanon, and the humanistic philosophy of Nichiren Buddhism can offer us alternative approaches toward seeing art as something that derives from liberation, community, human dignity, and revolution, not alienation or psychological absence.
In this sense, the studio becomes more than a place of production; it becomes a place of cultural restoration, where art participates not only in the transformation of objects but also in the transformation of consciousness, communities, and the future they imagine together.
Despite the fact that Baldwin, Papastergiadis, and Lefebvre all have unique approaches to analyzing their understanding of everyday life, in the end, they come to the same conclusion. Everyday life is not simple and straightforward; rather, it has its own secrets that can be revealed only by the artist, according to Baldwin. According to Papastergiadis, the everyday life is a site where memories, cultures, and creative activity constantly negotiate with each other, whereas Lefebvre emphasizes that the everyday activities of people give rise to unfulfilled opportunities. In sum, these authors believe that there is no need to distance oneself from reality; instead, the artist needs to go deeper into it.Though their philosophical assumptions differ, both recognize the fact that life is never passive but is the very site for identity formation, imagination, and social change. This has made me reflect upon my work process as being much less about producing images than about cultivating the capacity to see the world differently from how others may.
In the end, Baldwin, Papastergiadis, and Lefebvre have challenged me to see everyday life as the arena of history, memory and possibility being made. Their writings have helped me see the artist as someone whose job is not only representation but revelation of those relationships which exist unseen. As I move forward in creating my Sonic Archive studies, I now understand that archives do not just exist in museums and libraries; that they also live inside the bodies of people who remember dance forms forgotten, in the thick calloused hands of a musician, in the controlled movements of a boxer, in the brim of my father's hat, and in the daily activities which create who we are. Thus, the role of an artist goes beyond making objects and becomes one of holding on to memory, bringing back the history lost and offering up new possibilities for human dignity. If it is true that history is built up in the course of our lives, then art is the activity of listening to that history closely enough to keep its rhythm alive and make its humanity known to generations yet to come.
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