Jefferson Pinder has produced highly praised performance-based and multidisciplinary work for over a decade. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows including exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, The High Museum in Atlanta, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and Tate Modern in London, UK. In 2017, Pinder received a Guggenheim Fellowship; he also won a 2016 USA Joyce Fellowship Award in the field of performance, and in 2017 the Moving Image Acquisition Award. Most recently, he was named a 2021 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow.
We spoke with him on the occasion of the opening of his recent exhibition “Weapons and White Music” at the Wayne State University Gallery.
You’re an artist who works in many different media, trained in theatre as well as in mixed media, and currently teaching sculpture. I’m curious what drew you to all of these different forms of art making?
Different mediums allow me to get to different conversations, depending on what I’m speaking to and the direction I want to go, what my fascination is in the moment. I think lot of my work is connected to not only history but also to the contemporary. So I feel like where theatre may have particular limitations, performance may not, or video may not. Creating an object that looks like it could be in an anthropological museum is something I want to be able to infiltrate—to get into different orders, or different systems. For example I’m working on a piece right now in Bentonville, Arkansas with gospel singers and bluegrass singers and I have to figure out more about the genre, I’m not an expert. I understand that if you put these people together in a room there’s gonna be commonality and dissonance. I think these histories speak to tradition, and I think that being as well-versed in as many different styles and mediums helps, but I think then that it’s almost like allowing the idea to take hold, and I feel like that’s what present at the work in Detroit is that you see a variety of different mediums, because they’re different ways of getting at the conversation. Perhaps a drawing or a print of everything in the room is not the work, I need to have an object, I need to have video, something with a particular type of dimension that adds to an exchange. Because ultimately I think the thing that doesn’t change is that I want to have a dialogue with this spectator that comes in the space on some level. It could be, “I like the way that guy’s lip-syncing,” ok well I’ll take it, but if you dig a little deeper you’ll realize that there’s more to it. I feel like it allows me to get closer to the conversation by shifting the mediums.
I’m curious with what you were talking about right there when you mentioned, “infiltrating anthropological museums.” So much of contemporary practice seems parallel to that field in terms of working found objects and tracing histories, when did you first working with found objects and what led you to that form of work?
I think in residencies. Initially I started with collage and mixed media, and it’s kind of a defined area of exploration in the 90s and 2000s. If you take a look at how inspired people were by Romare Bearden and Wangechi Mutu, and then you think, ‘well what about this is interesting?’ I think it’s the whole idea of making something from scraps, or from the remnants of a history, and then reassembling it so it has almost a universality. I think that the skull that I’m working with in Weapons and White Music is a great example of something where there needs to be an interaction. There’s no business in me having a human skull. What does it mean? Where do I start bringing in a more nuanced conversation about making? I think sometimes the objects speak to me just as you encounter them, and then others you don’t necessarily know until later. It’s about finding something that has a value or a feeling to it, and then figuring out to harness it and almost redirect it to have the kind of exchange you want.
For this current exhibition “Weapons and White Music” at Wayne State University’s Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, is there a specific framework or connective thread between the works chosen?
I think it begins to explore how there is a weaponization of culture. Here I’m talking about “weapons and white music” and then I think you boil it down and it starts coming together, you’re seeing this room full of disconnected Black figures that are lip-syncing to your favorite music, or maybe the favorite music of the last generation. What happens is, just like in an advertisement or a good piece of graffiti, it’s going to get inside of you, and next time you’re listening to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” you’re going to be thinking of my work. And if there’s any song about young Black people or young people dying on the streets there’s a Blackness to it. If you’re going to be talking about “Helter Skelter” you need to know that that song is about a race riot, and one happening in the present. I mean this is all about struggle and a fight, if I’m learning about the blues through Led Zeppelin what does that say about my Black experience? Or David Byrne for that matter. So part of it is there’s a particular kind of weaponization in culture in general, so there’s the literal weapons, but then there’s the things that you don’t associate with weaponry that happens in the hearts and minds of people that’s a lot more sophisticated.
Like culture as form of ideology transference?
That’s right. And the sweeter it is, the more it makes you chuckle and smile, the more incendiary it is. I contextualize this idea of weapons and white music as being something that might be different, but in the end you find out there’s nuances that make that molotov cocktail as potent as that Indigo Girls song. It’s getting to a place that’s a little more private. There’s also where my work has come from in the last ten, fifteen years where the kind of conversations I can have about these things maybe could have been a little more nuanced than what it is now. Now there’s almost a black and whiteness, a real directness, because everybody is somewhat informed, where ten years ago you’d be lucky if half the audience was informed about some of the things you’re working with. Now it’s like people understand the relevance of some of these things. But now I’m dealing with the history of the last ten years, it’s like “no I don’t want you to think of Breonna Taylor for this one, but I can understand why you would.” I can understand why you’re going to want to bring the contemporary into the work that way but I also feel like it has a particular universality that I’m trying to achieve a balance with. There are certain things that are very literal, but I feel like if you dig deeper some of that goes away and the complexity leaves you in a place where you’re not quite sure where you’re at.
We’re talking about a shift happening in terms of your audience’s awareness in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement and state violence against Black people, what do you think has caused this shift? Because its not like this is some new thing, so what do you think has caused this change in the last ten years?
I think it’s the media’s representation, what the media wants us to focus on, almost the barrage of information that people have to deal with. It’s not like this isn’t good but when its controlled in these ways I feel like the message can be worn out in different ways that aren’t truthful or honest. I feel like we’re entering a new space where not only is this stuff relevant in multiple ways—I think we’re fighting against information fatigue. People come into these spaces that want to learn, and it’s requiring a lot. It’s requiring a residual of violence, it’s requiring an acknowledgement of complicity. With my work I take people right to the edge of what could be a very political conversation, but then I let people deal with it. It’s not prescriptive, where like “this piece Revival is really about the segregation of music in American culture.” That would make the piece really flat. There’s like fifteen things going on at any individual moment. Is it always ready for the taking? That’s like where my work as an artist begins, it’s like I can put this on the table, and have these performers and this music, and what I want to say, but can I communicate it? Sometimes yes and sometimes no, but I think that’s the challenge is understanding that my audience is dynamic and constantly shifting and changing.
One of the primary concerns of this specific publication, Detroit Cultural, is the question of what the social role of art can be—what purpose does art play in our contemporary society. Do you see your artistic practice as having a specific social role?
Yeah. It’s a bit of a ball and chain, I’m not going to lie to you. I wish I could paint pretty pictures sometimes, but instead it comes out this way. I feel like sometimes it is the role of me as an artist to venture into these conversations, and I think people are fascinated with my curiosity. I think I’ve tumbled into these through many different outlets, it’s almost like the perfect storm. I think we all do this to some degree, I don’t feel like I’m unique, I feel like artists and people in the world combine their different experiences to move forward. But somehow I think my experiences have led me to a dark place. I can have as much fun with it as I can, but then I’m like the Greatest Hits work is a barrage of the N word, and I’m working on it with my son, and it’s just like, ‘what is this costing us?’ I guess I don’t realize it until I put the work out in the world and realize that it has a violence to it. I’m dealing with twenty and thirty year olds who can’t even sit through this piece. And the people who can are the people who have the most experience with that word. A 65 year old white man just sat himself down and watched the whole thing, and I was shocked.
A lot of your artistic practice seems to also operate as a form of historical work, highlighting and raising attention to certain historical moments that maybe aren’t known well enough by the average American—I’m thinking specifically of the work you did with historical reenactment dealing with the Red Summer of 1919. How did this medium of historical reenactment become of interest to you and your artistic practice?
It tickles a certain curiosity, and it also motivates me to think about lost histories and how they influence not only the present but the future. Float was a piece about the 1919 Red Summer road trip. It was in Chicago and it happened in the lake where a hundred years ago a young man floated from the Black section of the water to the white section of the water and someone took a brick and threw it at him and hit him in the head and he drowned. So a hundred years later we just wanted to get people out in the lake. One of the things that happened was that as we were approaching the water the police said you can’t go in the water with a flotation device claiming it was dangerous. Somebody came in with a permit and told the police officer we had the right to do it. But then we got in the water and it started floating. We were dealt with reality that you wouldn’t know unless you were in the water with a floatation device, you drift quick, there’s an undercurrent that will take you from one place to another. That was the thing we didn’t expect, we knew that was the core of the story, but we thought we were gonna sit there and float. The piece should have been called “drift” because you’re going to drift. We ended up in damn near Indiana and it took five lifeguards to keep us in place because everything about that lake wants you to move. These are the kinds of things you discover when you’re in that space and you have that knowledge.
There is a certain poetry in that reenactment because then you find out the truth of the moment, similar to the way in a court case they might have a reenactment play out. It’s not going to be the way you necessarily envision it. It’s almost impossible for us to recreate it exactly the way it was, but somehow in that process of getting people in that lake at that time I was able to offer a revelation. I would say that’s almost a fractal of my whole practice. I can think about it as much as I want, but I need people who can participate and almost like put themselves in the line of fire in the way of how this story is being told to us now. There’s so much strength in that because it’s never how you exactly think it’s going to be.
