It was the end of the summer of 2015, I was back home in Dallas, Texas, getting reacquainted with some old colleagues from college. I spent a lot of time with my homegirl Leaf, a gay girl from Dallas who joined the Navy after leaving the University of Texas for Prairie View A&M where she thrived in leading community organizations. I remember seeing her at a kick back once or twice but we were never close friends. We got really cool that summer though, she told me all about her romantic relationships with my other mutual friends; AfroLatina, and the scoop with her dating and cheating on Fayroh, and how my old homie Taywop was a slut bucket too… and how depressed she was feeling… I was trying to be a light for her… we became lights for each other though because I was also fighting states of depression and dealing with my schizophrenia best friend Curtae, who I also hung out with often… we were mad crazy reflections of each other. And completely mad with and without each other but we gave each other a sense of joy and hope in tomorrow… for the next backwood we would smoke and the next low life adventure we would go on as unemployed, weed-head, crib-ridden twenty-something year olds scum buckets.
At the time she was suffering emotionally, physically and mentally. Her foot was badly hurt from bunion surgery and she was on crutches, lowkey trying to get kicked out of the military or go AWOL… it was a lot to deal with, with the commanders and chiefs above her debunking her with racism, writing her off for a “bad attitude” on some stereotypical ‘mad black woman’ shit, on top of dealing with her wife’s consistent infidelity. She was a tough girl tough, super strong and creative, and on top of that her dad sold weed too! So she always had access to some good Dallas corn and even though she didn’t smoke, was real cool to be around. She was a part of this social clique of drinkers that i never really care for back in school though… Crysanthomum, SaraJParker, and DeadPoole were like the worst people ever to me, out of their little group…but Leaf never seemed so bad for some reason.
One night we all gathered at LaflareDoggs house.. LD was real cool and cute, always super stylish and could drink, dance and party his ass off at ANY given moment. He was like the blue flame at the beginning of the lighter that got the rest of the shit orange and yellow… all lit nshit.. He had some new homegirls around that i had never seen before, and one of them was best friends with this girl Crysanthomum, that basically spread rumors about me being a stripper to all the new UT students… and I kinda hated her for that, I ain’t gon lie. This underclassmen girl wanted me to be her mentor once told me that she just got on facebook and started pointing people out, giving them the scoop… but little mama had some of her own drama to deal with as far as getting faded with upperclassmen all the time and publically claiming to be a virgin went, but that’s neither here nor there for why she chose not to complete her college career at UT… the black community was so small… and so messy… it was inevitable that she might leave the school… she was pretty sexy too, if i might add, too bad I can’t remember her name right now…. Anyways… the friend was much nicer and friendlier than that girl Santhomum had ever been to me at UT so the vibes were cool all the way around…
One night, we all went out to the Aurora showcase in Downtown, Dallas… I thought the show was a pretty big deal because my cousin Sume had told me about this large festival of lights running all the way from the state fair to the ends of the downtown area, lighting the city up with all beautiful colors and art displays days before…
This one in particular display was located at entryway to an underground tunnel parking lot that was closed and gated off providing a space for a table in the middle of the entryway walls…
A video played on each side… on left side was a video of two women, each holding a big clear creamer jug, one full of milk and the other empty, in which they would hold up to their mouths, take a sip, lean over to kiss the other woman, transferring the milk from her mouth into the others and then the other woman would spit the milk inside of her empty jar until it was full, and they would repeat this over again until the other’s jar was full…then reverse it…
It was a sick vision: https://www.dallasaurora.com/artists/caitlin-berrigan/
Across from this screening was another… Carolyn Sorters piece:
Now at first glance, I immediately thought about surveillance and Big Brother on some dark vadar shit, without reading the artist description or title of the work. But after staring at the work for about 10 minutes straight and reading the description, in contrast to the Caitlyn Berrigan piece being displayed directly across from it… I couldn’t help but to think about consumerism and the food industry problems at large. I saw cannibalism in a new way after seeing that milk being transferred by mouth to fill the cup of a “neighbor” or “Life Partner”, or whoever is sitting at your table, sharing your meal in a sense… but there was no meal, only milk… a naturally produced nutritious bodily fluid that is also the substance and taste of life. To watch it shared by the idea of taking a sip out of my own cup to pour into you so you can pour into yours, but simultaneously emptying MINE, made me think about how sharing is caring up until the point that it becomes self harm, in that you aren’t caring for yourself because you’ve shared everything you have with the other, who is now full off you… your substance… your freedom… your milk and honey… your breath of life… and the reversal of that, to impose a sort of endless cycle of recycled substance giving and sharing of life…It was beautiful and sickening in the same sense. Like birth… or the surveillance of such a thing, which is the idea I got looking a Carolyn Sorters piece as she seemed to analyse all those Youtube videos in the background… pulling two-three colors out of the image setting… and actors…. But its YOUTUBE! HOME FUCKING VIDEOS! Not just Television actors… YouTube productions… like…n dude…iiiI USED TO MAKE YOUTUBE videos. I USED TO LOVE YOUTUBE. I USED TO BE ADDICTED TO YOUTUBE, LOWKEY. And I still have connections to old videos I made… remembering what I was experiencing and feeling at that time in my life when i decided to share myself via the viral world… the free world… for free… Unlike professionally paid reality star actors, I was making reality shows on Youtube before major companies bought them out, changed their privacy policy, copyright agreements and intellectual property rights, and started paying people with ad-sense for their popularity in views, shares, likes and comments… So i felt that on a spiritual level, to imagine some dark vadar NSA/FBI/CIA Agent watching me and my channel like that… even though I hadn’t made any Youtube videos in SO LONG, (because my mom used to always tell me I would never get a job because of my silly youtube videos… years later she wakes up from a bad dream telling me to pursue my dream of radio, television and film and do my thing with the media even though it was a bit too late), I thought about all the conspiracy theories i’d read about Big Brother before and also having taken this one class by Dr. Simone Browne at the University of Texas for my senior seminar, which included bits from her initial class subject to teach on the history of surveillance of black bodies, which is some preeetyyy CREEPY SHIT, if I must say, considering the old stench of anti-black racism lingering in the universities atmosphere. Luckily, she made that class more so surrounding topics of our personal interest… There were only 5 girls in my class and we were all black… Anyways, it made me feel uncomfortable as fuck to presume that the colors could be read as the analytics of energy and space in people’s videos being used for some larger science experiment in space around people’s performance and consumption… on some Hunger Games shit… cuz, I mean, the bitch look like a damn space cadet with them head phones, the hair cut, and that cup of milk…THAT GOT DAMN CUP OF MILK!
LIKE WHYYY WAS SHE DRINKING MILK ANALYZING THIS CONTENT…
My life.. The precious jewels i shared, or that anybody who’s ever dedicated time to making precious art for YouTube.
For a second I thought about her getting life from the videos… free entertainment… and inspiration from another walk of life…. Something to consume on some alien shit… alien to another’s ways of life and perspective. Alien to their land and cultural practice… but then you have people who make videos to relate to others… about popular culture, or which creates popular culture… Is that when she takes a sip of the milk? Once she’s felt connected? Or comfort in her need to feed on what’s before her? Like a meal? Does the milk just top it off like a nice cold soda? (i don’t even drink soda, did she not drink soda like me? I mean that wasn’ no vegan shit though, so what’s the health concern here?). Anyways, reading the titles and art descriptions two years later makes me feel like a goofy for two reasons:
1- for taking so long to write this analytic and
2- for actually holding in these thoughts long enough to see the manifestation of a confirmation. Because when I first wanted to write about my experience In 2015-16 the aurora website wasn’t updated or complete… yet here and now today, I can see all the artist and their work on the website and even get info on the upcoming show next year!
I actually got to talk to Ms. Sorter though, in that time i was stuck in that display room for almost 45 minutes, lost on my own, unconcerned as fuck about where my friends were. I was complete struck and captured by this art. Like WHAT THE FUCK DID THIS shit really MEAN? Sorter spoke to another woman for a long time, who eventually picked up that I also had a little something to discuss with the artist about her work and she eventually gave the floor up to me.I told Carolyn that I loved her work and felt connected to it. I thought it was interesting that she was a “watcher” or “consumer”, watching the women across from her displayed in this sort of non verbalized struggle for the production and consumption of fresh produce… Sitting in one place with only a cup, and only an other to share with… never self-indulgent… or swallowing, but passing along… life…and wasn’t sure what that meant… like they never digested the milk, they just kept giving and giving to each other… as if only just to see the others cup full… super thought provoking concept. I mentioned the issue of consumption to Carolyn, speaking about food deserts in impoverished areas, the surveillance of black bodies, my professor Simone Browne’s class material and the struggle for black & other women of color that these pieces didn’t directly target or include, but indirectly spoke to. She confirmed that her display was about surveillance for sure and the issue of privacy, we talked about Cable TV vs Youtube and other sources of entertainment and she admitted that she pirated her cable, so she doesn’t even pay for cable TV… and that made me feel some type of way seeing that my mom works for a major cable company, but shit, if she didn’t, I’m sure we’d probably be pirating that shit too… i know it’s not an uncommon practice, it was just interesting that she was a pirate of Cable TV, so did that mean she was diminishing YouTube values as well? She paused and said “Does it make you think “what if if was really Big SISTER, instead of big brother” and biiitch I must have looked her upside her head crazy and got teary eye’d… cuz that shit changed my life.
I cried at that idea of living in a world that was actually ran by women who used men and the unintelligent as pawns… like what if it really WAS women this whole time, and the deception of government power-heads went deeper than I imagined? Wow. This was a whole new in depth look into the processing and sharing of intelligence and information.
Click here to watch the video: https://vimeo.com/85665330
The fact that her lips were blue made me think whenever she opened her mouth she spoke with authority… because blue is a color of higher authority… also, her glasses seemed to have been screening her from reality…shutting the windows of her soul out of a real bare/naked experience… as her headphones seemed to transmit and transmute the sounds of all those videos at the same time… what was she hearing? What was she watching? What was she really looking for or analyzing if she was looking for anything at all…. Then the title transmembrane made me think what if she wasn’t even real, but made up of everything she’d seen on Youtube… like a hologram… but that got damn glass of milk made her real… like even if she WAS on some creepy surveillance shit, she was still a human being at the end of the day needing nourishment and nutrients…. Needing the milk and honey of life… and she looked to be comfortably enjoying it… with a blank stare sort of vibe… as if it were a job, but not one she dreaded… one she was there for… present and aware… and sipping that got damned milk.
She told me she actually didn’t even know the artist displayed across from her and had no idea that her piece would be placed in that position, so that made it even more interesting… that it wasn’t supposed to seem like she was watching the video across from her… I thought that was an interestingly deep part of the display and asked who set that up, she told me the curators… I also asked her if she had twitter or social media, but she didn’t, she had a website though… and i did some more research on her and visited it: http://www.c-cyte.com/
Then i found this
when i googled her:
Which i found very interesting.. She’s like a whole ex-attorney out here bro. When you have that much knowledge on the law and choose to pursue art instead, it reminds me of the corruption of our justice system and unjust players in the arena of law and order. I respected her, and her work, and vision that much more. Meeting Carolyn Sorter opened my mind to the depths of what leads society, and open ended about who is really in control.
