Katie Cercone interviews Artist Jacolby Satterwhite

Sequined Serpent of Ratchet

Author | Katie Cercone

I was a bit hesitant to attempt to write about Jacolby Satterwhite’s work. Not only due to the fact that Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, Art 21, The New Yorker and The Huffington Post have all featured his work this past year at least once if not more (Satterwhite’s name appeared in four separate New York Times articles in 2013 alone), but because I’m not so sure his work needs language so much as language needs his work. To invoke Susan Sontag, whatever “words and mechanical gestures one is stuffed with, like a doll,” (1) language fails us. Call it an Afrofuturistic longing, a cosmic crunk post-human matrix, or just like he does… a “Matriachal Rhapsody,” Jacolby’s work is a place I’d like to remember, not explain.

In his recent body of work, formally titled “The Matriarch’s Rhapsody,” Satterwhite musicates a body of drawings his mother produced while battling schizophrenia. What the artist terms “songs of desire,” the schematic drawings and vocal recordings his mother made reflect real, imaginary and invented consumer products influenced by network shopping, late-night television commercials promising millions of dollars for inventions, medicine, fashion, surrealism, math, sex, astrology and philosophy.

Adopting his mother’s set of drawings as a type of codex, Satterwhite manipulates his sources with 3D imaging software to fashion Hieronymous Bosch ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ inspired landscapes. Real and fantasy consumable goods like vaginal care products, flying machines, wallet-umbrellas, balloon bouquets, towering cakes and speaker-breasts (all drawn by Patricia Satterwhite) intersect swiveling windfalls of neon light, genderless bodies and frame after frame of green screened footage of the artist dancing with himself. In Country Ball Satterwhite inflates his mother’s cake renderings to the scale of heroic and towering skyscrapers resembling the Tower of Babel. Complete with bondage contraptions installed up top, that’s also where you’ll find Jacolby himself, vogueing away.

Culminating drawing, performative dance and technology as a device to translate and document a personal mythology – Satterwhite articulates a queer, Afrofuturistic space in which the politics of the body are neutral. “Living in a liminal space is important to me,” said Satterwhite. “That’s the only way I’m going to break boundaries and do different things, not just become a commodity” (2). Call it a Polly Pocket World or a Las Vegas-esque litany, his work is at once otherworldy and familiar. You might call his videos Dancer in the Dark type fantasies, and you’d be right. This past October Satterwhite was a host of the IFC’s Queer/Art/Film event in which he screened Lars von Trier’s Palme d’Or winning musical melodrama Dancer in the Dark followed by a discussion about how his work intersects with the film.

In Dancer, pop megastar Bjork is at work in a drab factory when through some powerful wishful thinking its workforce becomes animated with song and dance. Christened by the integrative powers of music, even if only in Bjork’s imaginary world, the dark confines of industrial servitude glow with the good cheer of community and the sound current. By African American standards, the combination of music with work is tied to a long historical trajectory and an African aesthetics and culture in which European distinctions of the spiritual and secular do not hold. Since the days of slavery, when ironically the slaves with the strongest singing voices kept the work force efficient and sold for the largest sum, the expressive space of song and dance have served to challenge the commodification of the black body. As in Dancer, music and movement always serve to disturb the boundaries of “work” and “leisure” by which our modern lives have become falsely governed.

Poet Muriel Rukeyser has said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms, and Physicist Werner Heisenberg that the universe is made of music, not of matter (3). In a world stricken by the high stakes consciousness wars of corporate monopoly, are we content to let 4 companies tell our stories? According to John Miller Chernoff, a scholar of African aesthetics of social action, culture itself is “overtly musical,” in nature, it is a “dynamic style or organization through ‘various mediators.’” In a country where the most popular music (and Art) is either black or imitative, always dealing in racial spectacle and the question of cultural appropriation, Satterwhite’s polyrhythmic landscapes of objects and diva avatars confront the lingering questions we all barely know how to ask, let alone answer. Certainly not when we’re in our right minds.

In our interview Satterwhite talked a bit about the multiple languages available to artists today, not necessarily post-black but possibly post-human idioms interest him. He’s beyond having to hold tight to any particular history or preconceived Art structure. With mama’s drawings and family home videos occupying the bulk of his performative archive, other references that creep in are incidental. Ideas and subject matter ebb and flow, they are “fleeting” … like the way of “Google” or “someone’s Tumblr page… where it doesn’t mean shit.” At the end of the day, Satterwhite would rather rock out to Trina, sexualize his official press comments and perform his mother in “Alien Drag,” than make anything recognizable as “Art” (4).

Satterwhite’s happy he doesn’t have to be so post-modern about his work. His explanation of the recent history of contemporary art goes something like “conceptualism leads to identity art and they kind of had sex with each other.” The problem, says Satterwhite, is that “a lot of artists [had] to find an entry point through a historical frame.” Who needs a laundry list of –isms when you have throbbing power ballads like Cockiness, Hustling, Pussy Ate and Throb to fuel the creative fire? Who needs Rembrandt when you have Final Fantasy? For Satterwhite, self-proclaimed “video installation performance diva,” music is fuel. According to Art 21, who recently published his playlist, the real juice behind his very much maximal palate is hits by Trina, Lil Kim, Madonna, Rihanna, Janet Jackson, Kalup Linzy and Mykki Blanco (5). Satterwhite’s frame is continually X-rated, feminine and potent.

Concerning his remake of Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas, he says, “I just wanted to queer the fuck out of that painting.” Whether flipping a religious motif on its backside or turning the composition of a great white master into a gay cum battle, Satterwhite picks up aesthetic references like he would flavored bons bons, and he might just take half a bite and put the rest back in the box. On screen, his reference to iconic works of art hold no more weight than his mother’s drawings of turbo hairdryers. Satterwhite’s description of his Doubting Thomas composition goes something like, “poke poke poke, insemination, emmaculate conception… cellular agents, cum battle!!” All science fiction-y and gay, and at the same time, rejecting labels outright the work takes on a curious life of its own, bleeding high and low registers into one as it queers every expectation of what is.

Although Satterwhite speaks of his work as a “neutral body politic,” amidst the chaos of sex, glitz and the unyoking of white male patriarchal authority rests threads of a queer and even a feminist entry point. Reifying Desire 5, which details the fate of five cybernated women who experience several divinations before sprouting male genitalia, invokes Picasso’s infamous Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) simultaneously with his mother’s drawing “Pussy Power.” When researching source material for the piece, He explained that his google search of “female care” led to “bathing” which lead to Picasso. The transparency of the internet age makes clear how Art, specifically, the Western white male canon, overlaps with an ideological framework aimed to name, control and regulate the body of the Other (women, gays, people of color).

For Satterwhite’s mom, equally under the influence of consumerist ideologies and the colorful gesticulations of her mental deterioration, female care products designed to control women’s bodily functions amount to “Pussy Power.” Depicting a number of lotions, gels, lipsticks and flavored elixirs designed to eliminate feminine odor, Patricia Satterwhite instructs, “For pussy power, pour bubble into the hot water and soak for awhile to turn the smell of pussy off.” Signifying on his mother’s utopic fantasies and Picasso’s troubling appropriation of “primitive” African masks to decorate the faces of bath house whores, Satterwhite blurs the necessity of desire and the expectation of authorship. He says of the work, “I can’t tell if I’m the misogynist or she is” (6).

Satterwhite expressed that it was to help his mother that he first learned how to draw. “I wanted to help her so I learned how to draw. She had crazy glitter crayons – every brand. It was a strange laboratory.” His virtual panoramas are based in a “Utopia she wanted” (7). Ultimately, it was through drawing that he learned to master the language of dance. Through observing his older brothers, who for many years worked as back-up dancers for B-list R&B singers, he gleaned his first moves. When he was officially cut from the Jay-Z video, his brother called to say, “I’m going to call us the clear brothers because they always cut us out of these videos.” Satterwhite maintains today it is through his drawings that he understands angles and lines and how the body relates to space, “I learn how to dance through drawing.”

And apparently he’s getting quite good. In fact, IDIOM Mag calls Satterwhite’s live presence “incendiary.” Meanwhile New York Time’s critic Ken Johnson writes that Satterwhite has an “uncommonly elastic imagination” (8). Although today he’s garnering major attention for his work both live and in the 3-D virtual, it wasn’t always the case. Satterwhite spoke to me about the necessity of using animation to touch on heavy content like race, sexuality, disease and genitals. Older works without animation, like the mock lynching Satterwhite had fellow artists perform on his nude body at the Skowhegan Residency in Maine, were not received well.

Due to the consistent emphasis on Mom’s story in his work, I was curious where Dad fit in. Satterwhite explained that not only did his Dad finance and film the home family footage incorporated into works like Country Ball, says Jacolby, “My father is a major influence on my work. He was always there for me, took me to art school and college. I love my dad.”

I also asked Satterwhite exactly what he meant when he told Mousse Magazine “Contemporary society pollutes objects’ meanings with history, politics and social anxiety” (9). In an interesting article called “Techno-Animism,” writer Lauren Cornell was probing Satterwhite about any impulses of Animism in his work. Animism is a philosophy that suggests everything, including rocks and animals, have a spirit which is evolving in concert with mankind. Satterwhite explained to Mousse that his work does appeal to an Animist frame in that he’s consciously queering the political (social, commercial, sexual) potentiality of objects. His work confronts a “certain kind of normativity” governing our consumerist lives in which “objects are assigned.”

Interested in the performative nature of things, Satterwhite remarks “I always say objects are accessories to a performance score. What you see around someone gives all the details and information of where they come from, who they are.” Facing what Cornell writes is a world in which “Commerce has become a huge ecological and geological force, and today the Internet is where it is culturally liquefied in images, in social and financial transactions,” Jacolby’s work is beyond the realm of semiotics and deconstructionism, and as I want to add, beyond language.

Call him a sequined, orgiastical serpent of ratchet, a more based Mr. Gadget, or a reality-TV age cosmonaut sage. He might be the proper bedfellow of Julia Kristeva’s thoughts about abjection – where bodily fluids comprise a power and danger against the symbolic (paternal) law of words. Kristeva, a Bulgarian-French psychoanalytic feminist, problematically linked the behaviors and attitudes of “primitive cultures” to the behavior of children, psychotics and artists. In Jacolby’s work we do see the emergence of a type of primitive-futurism, even a tribe vibe. Music and dance always signals us in that direction, at the same time, his videos cast askance racist semantics that haunt the meanings of terms like “primitive” and “psychotic,” confirming simply: everything is everything.

In his latest work, yet to be released, Satterwhite has filmed himself crawling and dancing on scaffolding in Chinatown, Wall St. and within the subway system. He showed me some raw footage in which the oversize breasts of a monstrous female avatar will be mined for consumerists gadgets and eventually, her breast milk will provide the fuel for the cars of Satterwhite’s burgeoning virtual metropolis.

Is his work as spiritual as it is therapeutic? Maybe. His mother’s visions and certainly, Satterwhite’s work itself serves to diffuse the “spiritual integrity of the creative impulse” verses “destracting materiality of everyday life” (10) binary we still use to determine what is and isn’t Art. He says he’s loosely committed to some form of “Spirit…ual…ity,” mainly in that, “There’s a spirituality in my meditation and commitment to the process. It’s so labor-intensive and tactile. I have a system and a temple – the Matriarch’s Rhapsody codex. I think this is spiritual because I spend so much time trying to make this transformative situation, there is something that vibrates at the end.” But don’t worry, he’s “not trying to start a cult.”

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1) Susan Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence, Styles of Radical Will, New York: Picador USA, 1966, 24
2) Jacolby Satterwhite quoted in “Studio Visits: Jacolby Satterwhite,” Studio Museum Harlem Blog, July 2, 2013
3) Quoted in Rob Brezny, FreeWillAstrology.com
4) Jacolby Satterwhite quoted in Studio Museum Harlem Blog, ibid
5) Now Playing: Jacolby Satterwhite, Art21 Blog, October 8, 2013
6) Jacolby Satterwhite quoted in A.E. Zimmer, “Jacolby Satterwhite’s ‘The Matriach’s Rhapsody,’” IDIOM Magazine, February 11, 2013
7) Jacolby Satterwhite quoted in “A Family Portrait: Haniya Rae interviews Jacolby Satterwhite,” GUERNICA Magazine, January 15, 2013
8) Ken Johnson, “Jacolby Satterwhite: ‘The Matriarch’s Rhapsody,’” New York Times, January 24, 2013
9) Lauren Cornell, “Techno-Animism,” Mousse Magazine Issue #37
10) Susan Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence, ibid, 5