BASEL.- First there is blackness. It is already an image. Interrupting it, just a few seconds into _Human, Luke Willis Thompsons new single-screen 35 mm silent film projection, is a strange and luminous apparitionsome sort of peak perhaps?that appears for just a few fleeting frames. Then blackness again, before a slow pan, a close-up of a nervous crisscrossing of lines and marks on what appears to be a brittle, dry surface. The lines dont quite form a grid, nothing so rational as that. This could be an arid landscape pictured by a satellite or a piece of charred tracing paper. That it is a close-up of skinwith its estuaries of wrinkles, melanin deposits, and potholes of poresdoes not immediately suggest itself. Then, in a blue flash, a similarly ethereal and skinly combination of form and texture. No sooner has this image-burst passed, than another close-up appears, as if the camera were peering voyeuristically into an opening, exposing a crossing of thin metal bars. An X. The bars are, in fact, dressmakers pins, usually holding pieces of fabric temporarily in place, but here they become monumental, structural even. The pins gleam in the light despite being flecked with dust of unknown provenance (have not scientists determined that most household dust consists of shed particles of skin?). And moving into and out of an inky blackness by way of the lights slow pulse is the central subject, before the camera circles beneath its minute architectonics, filmed so that it appears towering, larger than life. At no moment is it possible, beyond any reasonable doubt, to determine what it is you are looking at. The object is at once an abstraction and a piece of material evidence seen at such close proximity as to be unrecognizable, unnamable.
As with much of Thompsons work, _Human is a distillation. It is the product of a dense enlacement of histories, at once personal and universal, and is by turns a sumptuous document, devoted homage, art historical resurrection, portrait, self-portrait, and biting manifesto. To speak of this work one first needs to speak of the British artist Donald Rodney, born in Birmingham in 1961, the youngest of twelve children born to Jamaican parents of the so-called Windrush generation. Rodney died in March 1998, aged 36, of complications caused by sickle-cell anemia, a hereditary blood disorder that overwhelmingly afflicts those of African descent (the genes originary function being a defense against malaria). The late artist deployed his body as both evidence and metaphor, a palimpsest of the racism, police violence, and trauma historically and literally writ upon it. Rodney was part of a generation of artists who contributed to an emergent black British consciousness that irrevocably changed the land scape of British art. His perhaps most iconic work, In the House of My Father (1997), is a pho tograph he made while hospitalized, one episode among many following the numerous surgeries he under- went to alleviate pain and to postpone the death sentence of his ge netic coding. In the image, one sees a close-up of Rodneys hand cradling a tiny sculpture of a house made just prior and bearing its own title, My Mother, My Father, My Sister, My Brother (1997). Measuring not much more than a few centimeters in each direction, it is built from the artists own skin and held together by pins and cellophane tape. This object, charged, thick with anguish, and so extraordinarily fragile as to be accessible almost exclusively by way of its photographic reproduction, is the basis for Thompsons filmat once a gesture of interpretation and appropriation, and an attempt to reactivate the stakes of Rodneys message, still so urgent today.
_Human features the house Rodney made of his epidermis, his black skin, twenty years on. Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and anti-colonial intellectual, insisted that the history of racism is inseparable from what he termed an epidermal schema. The artist Adrian Piper called it a visual pathology. The very idea of white supremacy, they both understood, is constructed by the gaze and at the level of skin. Rodney knew well (the whole of his oeuvre declares as much) that the trap of reading the human in terms of black or white begins at precisely that corporeal border between self and world whose material he was fashioning into a house. Thus by turning his own skin from the surface upon which racist ideology is projected into a metaphor for loss, memory, love, and home, Rodney demanded a thinking that both indicts and transcends the epidermal.
Just over three minutes into _Human, the films seeming abstraction gives way to a strange shift in perspective. Now shot from above, capturing what finally reveals itself more clearly to be the delicate structure of a house, the viewpoint bears the characteristic movements of autom- atized surveillance. The camera zooms in and out mechanically, circling the rudimentary archi- tecture surrounded by fragments of leftover skin (diligently kept and cared for by the executors of Rodneys estate for the purpose of a possible future repair). To watch this sequence, and others, is to detect a logic that seems not quite governed by aesthetics or formal concerns. Instead, it is driven by a form of conceptualism that deploys cuts and shifts of perspective to entangle Rodneys biography with Thompsons own, and Rodneys critical commentary on his time with Thompsons on ours.
During different moments in the film, Rodneys house serves as an anticipatory symbol for the locations of contemporary violent events, such as Londons Grenfell Tower, a low-income housing project consumed in a blaze of official neglect, or the house of Stephon Clarks grandmother in Sacramento, California, on whose porch Clark was shot down by police. Images of both of these sites were captured by helicopters, from above, and show the architec tural structures involved as we are shown Rodneys skin house. The automation of some of Thompsons cameras movements was conceived to replicate the surveillance images (having gone viral) of these recent scenes of violence, down to their precise angles of vision and zooms.
Thompsons careful reckoning of present injustice has yielded a film syncopated with trauma, not just collective but also deeply personal. To edit the imagery, he used data concerning Huntingtons disease carried in the cells of his siblings. Although Huntingtons is a disorder obviously different from Rodneys, it is simi - larly hereditary, and the fact that Thompsons siblings manifest the deterioration from it suggests that likely so, too, does the artist, who, as he watches his family succumbing to the disease, in essence already livesor, more aptly, dieswith it anyway.
In many ways Huntingtons disease and sickle- cell anemia are polar opposites. If sickle-cell anemia is, to quote sociologist Stuart Hall, an emblematically black disease, Huntingtons is a white one, affecting primarily subjects of European descent (Thompsons own affliction would thus be traceable to the genetics of his white/pākehā New Zealand mother, rather than his Fijian father). The investment in Huntingtons research far surpasses that in sickle-cell re - search, a preferential interest indelibly tied to the logic of racism and, by extension, to the social distribution of death.
In the context of Huntingtons disease, repeti- tion is meaningful, because any repeat count over thirty-six of the DNA bases known as CAG within that specific gene (called HTT_HUMAN) virtually maps out ones (foreshortened) life expectancy. Thompson uses forty-two, the number of times his siblings CAGs repeat, and other medical details as a kind of coding or score to structure the film, most palpably detectable in its construction from forty-two strips of film of varying length. Thompsons film consciously sets two illnesses into relation, mingling two life experiences that have little in common other than their prematurely fatal conclusion. Yet, this is also an act of subversion, shared by both artists oeuvres: Rodneys displays a specific conceptual act also observable in Thompsons an identification with the pain of others that transvalues ones own. In that light, one might look to Rodneys multiple self-portraits as police victim as conceptual precedents for Thompsons auto-portraiture.
If systemic racism has been a thread running through Thompsons performances, sculptures, and films, so too has a preoccupation with inheritance. This is the case in the performance he organized in which visitors could gain access to his familys multigenerational home (inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam, 2012/14), or with his extended performative action focusing on the tombstones of anonymous immigrants and laborers buried in a segregated cemetery in Fiji, in which the artist became the legal custodian of these markers, and cleaned and cared for them when government officials did not (Sucu Mate / Born Dead, 2016). There is also the set of films featuring the children and grand children of women who died at the hands of police brutality (Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, 2016). Inheritance is all the more present in _Human, not only genetic or artistic, but also in the sense of the contemporary Western colonial inheritance that continues to shape our present.
_Human is the name of both a film and this first exhibition it appears in. As with all of Thompsons sober, meticulous presentations, this one reveals minute details as critical to the production of meaning. As per the artists instructions, in Kunsthalle Basels stairwell, the monumental fresco is covered and the windows are boarded up; Thompson likens the gesture to the space holding its breath. This thinking of a space as if it were a person brings some of Donald Rodneys last wordsI cant breatheto inform details of Thompsons exhibition. I cant breathe were also the final words of Eric Garnerunarmed, black, and held in a chokehold by police on the pavement of Staten Island, New York, in 2014uttered eleven times before he died. That the phrase, which has become vital as a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter and a metaphor for oppression, is on Thompsons mind should be no surprise. At the heart of his project is the attempt to make work of, and about, his time while looking back and also already indexing his own end. According to Thompson, the legacy that Rodneys My Mother, My Father, My Sister, My Brother left him is to try to imagine something that doesnt live in the unequal present, but anticipates an existence after that present has ended.
Luke Willis Thompson was born in 1988 in Auckland, New Zealand; he lives and works in Auckland and London.