What is it to speak of this outpouring, to speak of the thing, the vessel, in terms of what it gives, particularly when we take into account the horror of its being made to hold, the horror of its making that it holds or bears?
—Fred Moten
To consider a motor or a basket, on the terms that Kevin Beasley calls forth, is to consider objects that cast implications far beyond their objecthood, invoking the gravest horrors of North American history. To speak of these vessels is to recall the agony that has poured from them. It is to consider both the beginning and the end of things as they were known.
In 2012, Beasley went to Maplesville, Alabama, to pick up a General Electric induction cotton gin motor that had been in operation from 1940 through 1973. This acquisition set off several bodies of work spanning various media, through which he investigates the entwined histories of enslavement, labor, land ownership, and cultivation in the United States. Motors propel: they produce power to do what must be done. At times they may obviate the need for human bodies, drastically altering the conditions of labor. They might fuel industry and inequity alike.
The Beginning of the End is a large-scale, wall-mounted “slab” utilizing Virginia cotton and a dozen cotton T-shirts to map an image of a basket. In architecture, “slab” refers to a flat-sided monolith typically used as the foundation of a structure. In Beasley’s practice, the term recalls the founding of a nation on the power of enslaved labor, but also the industry and stewardship of the Black families who have continually cultivated the land from which Beasley sourced the cotton that frames this piece.
The basket depicted was hand woven by a family in Maplesville and used for picking cotton. It is a symbol of both artisanal craft and field labor, recalling the attendant pains of each in the forms of factory-made clothing and the raw cotton of which it is made. The basket is a vessel, a prosthetic to the toiling body, gathering the plant that will be fed to the gin and carrying also the weight of ancestry.
Note
1. Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 185.
What is it to speak of this outpouring, to speak of the thing, the vessel, in terms of what it gives, particularly when we take into account the horror of its being made to hold, the horror of its making that it holds or bears?
—Fred Moten
To consider a motor or a basket, on the terms that Kevin Beasley calls forth, is to consider objects that cast implications far beyond their objecthood, invoking the gravest horrors of North American history. To speak of these vessels is to recall the agony that has poured from them. It is to consider both the beginning and the end of things as they were known.
In 2012, Beasley went to Maplesville, Alabama, to pick up a General Electric induction cotton gin motor that had been in operation from 1940 through 1973. This acquisition set off several bodies of work spanning various media, through which he investigates the entwined histories of enslavement, labor, land ownership, and cultivation in the United States. Motors propel: they produce power to do what must be done. At times they may obviate the need for human bodies, drastically altering the conditions of labor. They might fuel industry and inequity alike.
The Beginning of the End is a large-scale, wall-mounted “slab” utilizing Virginia cotton and a dozen cotton T-shirts to map an image of a basket. In architecture, “slab” refers to a flat-sided monolith typically used as the foundation of a structure. In Beasley’s practice, the term recalls the founding of a nation on the power of enslaved labor, but also the industry and stewardship of the Black families who have continually cultivated the land from which Beasley sourced the cotton that frames this piece.
The basket depicted was hand woven by a family in Maplesville and used for picking cotton. It is a symbol of both artisanal craft and field labor, recalling the attendant pains of each in the forms of factory-made clothing and the raw cotton of which it is made. The basket is a vessel, a prosthetic to the toiling body, gathering the plant that will be fed to the gin and carrying also the weight of ancestry.
Note
1. Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 185.