ECHO — LOCATION: On Properties, Bass, Bounty, Sunshine State, and Exodus

Consider what it is to be concerned with the florescence and efflorescence of this generation’s self-defensive care, its prefatory counterpleasures, which reveal the public intramural resources of our undercommon senses, where flavorful touch is all bound up with falling into the general antagonistic embrace of inhabited decoration, autonomous choreography, amplified music, of which what happens in the yard, or at the club, or on the record are only instances, unless the yard is everybody’s and the club is everywhere, and everything is a recording.

—Fred Moten1

In Alex Wheatle, the fourth film in Steve McQueen’s five-part cycle of films entitled Small Axe (2020), the eponymous character enters the diegetic scene of his life’s narration by walking through a poured concrete volume shaped by antiseptic floors, bordered by institutional walls, regulated by a tempo that rings to the slick echoes of imprisoned bodies laboring at a fraught precipice between self-preservation and “self-actualization.”2 Their resonant sounds in the background of that scene’s unfolding constitute a faint but palpable echo within the great basement hall in Beacon, New York, where McQueen’s infratones pulse urgently directly beneath Cameron Rowland’s Underproduction (2024),3 a work whose artful occlusion and inversion mark a threshold between perceptibility and the position of the unthought.4

Rowland’s “sculpture”5 indexes ongoing emanations of Black futurity in an object whose historical emplacement protected the inchoate soundings of study, unfolding in Black interiors. Their cantankerous pan literally overturns audibility as a praxis of the enslaved, by way of an object echoing a series of acts aimed at nurturing undercommon narrations that secreted the end of slavery back into its fetid presents. In McQueen’s film, Wheatle’s silence—his stolid, wordless withdrawal from the scripture of his forced narration—tracks his horizontal movement through the scene’s opening frames, so that the camera figures Wheatle’s embodiment as an interstitial silence, an intermission coursing along diegesis’s teleological line, continuously syncopating the prison’s Taylorist rhythms.6 Wheatle survives a terrible tempo. His biography is narrated atop his worldlessness as an erasure entered in the logic of institutional inscription. Like much of Black history, Wheatle’s life attains legibility through its iteration in the ledger.7 His life recursively begins in the film as a writing out—a literal de-scription—and it is only in song, in his discovery of reggae and dub, that Wheatle finds his own choral echoing articulation. I hope to listen for such echoes in what follows.

A litany of texts converge at this small postindustrial corner of western New York, at a juncture in Dia Beacon’s galleries that resonates with the neighboring awfully harmonic geometries of Melvin Edwards’s haunted chords, his cascading wire riffs resonating their correlated displacements and expansive reiterations as Rowlands’s anti-propertizing art now enters the precincts of Dia.

Something complicated is afoot here. In Bass’s (2024)8 sonic emanations, we are given the cyclical iterative rhythms of an insistent tone pulsing under a gridded cascade of oscillating depthless lights—lights that in their near total diffusion and dispersal of the body’s shadow shift the historicity of this postindustrial space. Upstairs, above ground, within the theater of Rowland’s installation, the restrictive rhythms of covenant now resound in Dia’s galleries, and thanks to McQueen, so too does Bass’s dissonant, syncopated enunciation—its musics of muffled speech, and their digressive departure from a point without origin.9 Bass emits a somnolence from its basement space that sprawls with expansive plasticity beneath the wooden floors that bear one third of Rowland’s exhibition “Properties” (2024). Between Senga Nengudi’s pendant vessels, Edwards’s barbed strings, and Rowland’s and McQueen’s installations, Dia’s Beacon galleries are now collectively marked by these distending transformations of the regularizing, racializing frequencies of American industry.

In McQueen’s Bass, the bass itself instrumentalizes its audience as medium, as vector of its own fluvial movements. To enter into Bass’s aural field is to earth and disperse its itinerant vibration. Wherever we hear it, we bear and share its enunciations bodily. Moreover, Bass’s capacity to incorporate its audience as vectors of communicability enlists it in an ongoing act of (re)production, of labor without contract. Within this dematerializing structure, Bass rehearses a blackened condition of sudden availability to conscription into involuntary labor under conditions of (light) prescription, and it does this without imposing upon its audience the corollary and hereditary unfreedoms that echo in the work’s solicitation and imaging of the hold.10 In this, it is a non-sequitur.11

Bass is a resonance one might more easily pass than parse, share than plot, feel than name. It is what Tina Campt describes as “infrasound”—a fugitive, resistant murmuration “often only felt in the form of vibrations through contact with parts of the body.”12 In its irresistible communicability, Bass enacts affectability as a discourse of blackened sociality; it produces a machinic and mellifluous instantiation of miscegenation as a mode of fashioning, of weaving meanings that exceed the strictures of proper naming. Bass performs what Anthony Huberman calls “banging on a can,” in a Motinian echo of a mode of creative response that thinks the material and symbolic dimensions of life musically—a mode of intellection that reads worldliness in and as song.

That very act of banging on a can summons the friendly ghost of David Hammons squarely into the scene of Dia’s ongoing expansion and reiteration of its artistic program, effected here through these newly orchestrated installations of Edwards, Rowland, and McQueen. If the 2017 Met Breuer exhibition “The Body Politic” showed an affinity between the artistic practices of Hammons, McQueen, Arthur Jafa, and Mika Rottenberg, it was that rattling digressive can in Hammons’s Phat Phree (1995–99) that articulated a rhythm of improvisatory wandering, an invisible architecture of spontaneous combustion, which threads through Bass, just as Bass’s blue tones echo both Hammon’s Concerto in Black and Blue (2002) and McQueen’s earlier Blues Before Sunrise (2012).13

Bass emerges in a season in which Dia has welcomed, in linear sequence, the dual interventions of McQueen (at both its Beacon and Chelsea locations), the subtly inimical interpretive engagements with Bruce Nauman offered by Paul Pfeiffer in its ongoing Artists on Artists series,14 and now the inauguration of an installation by Cameron Rowland. In other words, Bass murmurs its rhythms in a season in which non-white speech has again assumed a position of prominent articulation at the core of Dia’s platform.15 Notably, where both Hammons and Nauman enact their repetitively aggressive bangs in such works, the modality of articulation common to Pfeiffer, McQueen, Rowland, and Nengudi could more aptly be described as a sinuous infiltration. Perhaps we might think this broader symbolic and racial moment in Dia’s art history with an eye squarely focused on the inattention so artfully and potently situated in Moten’s trenchant text “The Case of Blackness,”16 and perhaps we might consider the distinctive inflections of this set of practices—figuring them together with the weaves of Edwards and the vessels of Nengudi—within the undulating parameter of Renee Gladman’s iterative, recursively entangled, and infinitely wending lines:

I began the day wanting to bring into convergence three activities of being—what I’d seen, what I’d read, and what I’d drawn—and to say about these acts how they made lines in the world that ran alongside other lines, and how all these lines together made environments of the earth, where I could put my body and you could put yours, and these would be lines always entwined because there was little if anything you could say or make without calling forth other lines, and this was how you knew you were where you were and the ground was worth cultivating and that there was life beneath the ground.17

Easement boundary line of Cameron Rowland, Plot, 2024, photographed November 2, 2024, Dia Beacon, NY. (See caption in footnote 18.)

Rowland’s entire practice is testament to this last irreducible line: “there was/is/has been/will forever be life beneath the ground”: this is their Plot (2024),18 their tripartite intervention within the precincts of the Dia Art Foundation, and within its Beacon grounds.19 If we can approach Rowland’s work actively grappling with our ongoing imbrication in the irremissible debts of native dispossession, if we can arrive at such work freighted with a sense of the weight of racial slavery’s indispensable role in the formation of modernity, if we can reckon with what Kathryn Yusoff incisively describes as “this conversion of earth through the grammars of geology” into profit, into property, through a confluence of material and epistemic violences that “enacted a world-building and world-shattering” project whose ravages have been of an alarmingly consistent extremity, yielding to white supremacy an immense megastructure of racial capital continuous within our present afterlife of slavery,20 then we might grasp the terrible beauty of Rowland’s plot.21 Here, again, Gladman’s fractal lines course umbilically through McQueen’s fluvial sound, Edwards’s stringed instruments, Nengudi’s flavorful bodies, and Rowland’s upturned pan:

… where all at once the lines in the world head for the periphery, and each departure is violent and each exploding site is a center with a micro-architecture inside that pulses like all centers pulse, responding “to the megastructures of the previous layers,” each center being a book burning at the core of the earth.22

In Rowland’s recourse to the contract,23 to the rubric and stricture of the ledger, there is also an awful, beautifully inverted line drawing together, in utter involution, the categorical distinctions between earth, edifice, institution, and the afterlife of slavery.24 Through these documentary interventions, Rowland fathoms a set of “languages having to break in order for [enslaved] words to appear, to flow like they’re searching for something, illuminated from within,” to borrow from Gladman. In consonance with Marina Vishmidt, we might think this as infrastructural, and not institutional, critique, attending to the ways in which Rowlands’s mode of operation moves from “a standpoint which takes the institution as its horizon, to one which takes the institution as a historical and contingent nexus of material conditions amenable to re-arrangement through struggle.”25 We might consider the implications of this practice’s braiding together—through both contract and extant matter, through abstraction and concretion—the instance of the institution with the longue durée of slavery’s worldmaking aftermaths, a move that enables Rowland’s work to “transversally connect with and through [Black Radical] movements elsewhere, and to materialize those movements within the space of art as a concrete rather than gestural politics.”26

To borrow still further down that line from Ciarán Finlayson, it is a function of Rowland’s insistence on the docket, the jurisprudential precisions of the written contract, that links post-Emancipatory racial logics to their roots in pre–Civil War orders of slavery, as was materialized in Rowland’s pathbreaking debut exhibition “91020000” at Artist’s Space in 2016. Thus, in Dia’s instance, Rowland’s Increase (2024)27 sounds the awful consonance of Black infant mortality’s comparable rate of death in the present to that obtaining under chattel slavery:

Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants—11.3 per 1,000 black babies, compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies, according to the most recent government data—a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery, when most black women were considered chattel.28

Finlayson observes of this consonance that Rowland’s works “bear witness to abolition as the emancipation of capital and testify to the purported freedom on the far side of Jubilee as the dominion of what DuBois would call ‘dictatorship of property.’”29 So just as McQueen’s operative mechanism in Bass conscripts, so Rowland’s contractually architected relationship between extant object (or, more colloquially, ready-made) and art institution collapses aesthetic autonomy (and its values) into a structure and scene of contracted labor wherein personhood, propriety, and property are indivisible from white supremacy’s submarine architectures of enclosure and expropriation, wherein that which has been “purchased,” rented, or otherwise obtained and redeployed as art is committed to a program of derelict use, to a mutually agreed upon contractual promise of depreciation, degradation, deprecation of value, “raising the question as to what it might mean for these objects, completely unadorned, to be works of contemporary art only insofar as they are straightforwardly useful objects or historical artifacts.”30 To follow Finlayson, we might say: these “works” work. This simple fact enacts a kind of contagion consonant with McQueen’s bass-driven drift, since it extends to every object existent under the edifice of racial slavery’s ongoing aftermath … This is the nature of our (un)common (under)common entanglement, and it describes a space with no wholly separable straight lines.

***

“Properties” begins multiply. It begins with Estate—sited at the museum’s ticket desk—listing an inventory of literal properties, enumerating Schlumberger’s foundational contribution of oil wealth’s returns to the erection of an institution with canonical influence over common conceptions of the anti-normative possibilities of conceptual art. It equally begins with Rowland’s plot, which we might venture to say brings “exhibition” online: wherein Rowland’s work triggers the institution’s need to show what cannot be held, what cannot be owned, such need thus engendering commitment to the successive depreciation of its value(s). “Properties” does this in an institution whose single unit of measure—the day—is relentlessly interminably assailed by the ecological and neo-imperial depredations of an industry that bequeaths to the Dia Foundation its ground, its common forms of access, its public face. Here, there is echo of Gladman (2018) in Moten (2013):

There is an ethics of the cut, of contestation, that I have tried to honor and illuminate because it instantiates and articulates another way of living in the world, a black way of living together in the other world we are constantly making in and out of this world, in the alternative planetarity that the intramural, internally differentiated presence—the (sur)real presence—of blackness serially brings online as persistent aeration, the incessant turning over of the ground beneath our feet that is the indispensable preparation for the radical overturning of the ground that we are under.31

Can we perhaps now hear Rowland’s underproduction and McQueen’s infratones in a certain synchrony?

The first sight line in “Properties” is of/toward this Plot—a distant contract, but simultaneously a verb, a noun, an activity, a structure, a plan, the inner logic of a (melo)drama, the hydraulic32 mechanism that enables whiteness to metabolize its violence and regulate itself. To reach this plot one must first pass through a voided white vestibular space in which Rowland’s short publication stands in stacks as an open invitation to study. In pondering this invitation to reckon with one’s imbrication in this scene, this str(ict/u)ture, this plot, I am moved to ask: Can an upturned pan speak history’s scouring back into an emptied space? Can the sequence of five scythes that constitute Commissary (2024)33 sing in an interminable round loudly enough that we might sense their volatility? Can these rusted scimitar blades speak to the silence that surrounds them—can they cut industry and its initiating iniquities together in a necrotic embrace, one that sounds the threshed textures of this harvest that counterposes Increase and Commissary as two poles within Rowland’s magnetic field, in a gallery where their four works are arrayed at points north, south, east, and west—marking the totality of its and our social field?

Cameron Rowland, “Properties,” 2024, Dia Beacon. Installation view.

Can we reckon with the integration of these objects—objects which issued from the regularizing and repressive architectures of slavery and its aftermath—as precedent to the industrial modernity that gave us ceramic fountains and specific objects as matter for thought of the notion of transcendence? Can we attend to the manner in which their exhumation orients us toward a horizon beyond art (and its many precincts),34 and toward the structures of a world that invents leisure35 to manage the necropolitical eviscerations that its malignant lifeworlds depend upon?

It would be my contention that these questions concern us so much more than they do these objects on display. Given that for those myriad subaltern communities marked as structurally disposable, as incapable of (democratic) rights and the (responsible) exercise of freedom, “the fascism which liberal modernity and civil society have always required has never abided by this order’s mendacious separation of the political from the aesthetic,”36 how could one expect an art keyed to the operation of these structures, or grounded in the historical praxis of these communities, to conform to the artifice of such notionally separable strictures as those that divide aesthetics from politics, form from content, present from past, living from dead?37

If we even provisionally understand, as so many of those engaged in Black studies do, that “genocide, now as before, is an aesthetic project,” and that therefore the luster, integrity, probity, and solicitousness of culture serves precisely to veil and abet its perpetual practice of genocide as economic rationale, as engine of state formation, as regeneration of “growth,” then which aesthetic act can be materially uncoupled from the political arrangements of subjection that underwrite artistic “freedom”? Or, better still, in the words of Rizvana Bradley, “how do we survive the aesthetic regime that carves and encloses the very shape of our question?”38 Renee Gladman again:

I was looking into the moss growing between the bricks laid out in front of the door, looking into the moss as its own space, its doing beyond making a border, and the green coming back after such a long winter, bright but also mourning—the sun bearing down on it, the clouds blocking the sun, the human eyes glaring—and found, within, spaces that bordered some infinite writing about process and thought, some unending burrowing, some endless death and reach, some constant holding in place, Kristin Prevallet’s “the poem is a state both of mind and landscape,” and our books burrowing inside our drawings, the lines holding the brick unyielding.39

Steve McQueen, Bass (detail), 2024. © Steve McQueen. Photo: Don Stahl.

Faced with the impulse to break out of this bind, perhaps we might return to McQueen’s Exodus (1992–97), freshly on display at Dia Chelsea, a looped Super 8 film transferred to digital video and sited at the center of the first of his two galleries. It is a film in which, following the line of Tavia Nyong’o, “the blackness interpolated between cinema’s vaunted ‘twenty-four frames a second’” can be read between the weaving motion of these two Black men, echoing back Bass’s errant and digressive iterations as another order of blackened motion that brings dissonant difference into simultaneous articulation.40

If I might follow their lead, and depart momentarily from the order of propriety, it seems to me that in McQueen’s Sunshine State (2022), the twinned and inverted two-channel structure of simultaneous erasures of Al Jolson’s skin enacted in the film, whether into shadow under the glistening gleam of boot black, or into the irradiating halations of white “in the negative,” hail back not merely to the hydraulics of anti-Blackness, and to its generative negrophiliac dimensions, but forward to Cindy Sherman’s untitled and aborted “self-portrait” in blackface, and to Bruce Nauman’s “self-erasure” in his own self-assigned experiment with racial abnegation in Flesh to White to Black to Flesh (1968), an action resurfaced obliquely in Pfeiffer’s Artists on Artists talk in October of last year.

In the involuted echo of these “experimental” iterations of artistic freedom, McQueen’s Sunshine State unearths an antinomy of drastic disequilibrium in which opposition (of black to white, front to back) and equality (in the simultaneous identity of twin frames) are discomposed by the desirous depths of a whiteness that cannot separate the violence of consumption from the practice of affiliation that always incorporates, destroys, disfigures the difference it ostensibly seeks to celebrate.41 Sunshine State shows that within this twinned figure lurks the law of the singular, and its perpetual order of exception. Whiteness must first confront the reality of this need, this profound desire for possessive mastery before learning to desire, to move, to want otherwise. It must want Exodus as leave-taking beyond every register of possession. McQueen’s incantations of the work’s title in Sunshine State seem to articulate this training in the recursive structure of a chant that stages repetition as a programmatic transformation of the self’s relationship to meaning, through the iterations of memory.

In the neighboring gallery, Exodus’s concentric loop of surveilled entry and Black motion sits at the core of a panoply of photographic prints displaying luminous buds, flowers, stalks, fronds, leaves, stems, meshed webs, and tendrilled networks of rhizomatic Grenadian plant life that animates McQueen’s concentric array in a pallid gallery. The prints’ alternating assembly of longitudinal and vertical frames already figures seriality’s constitutive and repressed dependence on the irregular as an eruption that calls for the brutal impositions of order. We might recall here a short line from Moten’s 2015 lecture “Blackness and Nonperformance”: “Forms are reclaimed by the informality that precedes them.”42

McQueen’s prints describe a chromatic fullness of rusted reds and ebullient pinks, ringing the mute tones of the gallery with magenta-tinged depths, submarine greens, and deep black shades, which together fashion a filmic strip of hues that wend a musical structure across the patinaed walls and against the starched parchment of the gallery’s grey floor. The bricked enclosures of Dia’s arches mirror the flat plane of its grey floors and walls, making of the photographs a sinuous weave of Grenadian plant life that articulates a protuberant efflorescence, measured and restrained only by the white enclosures of the picture’s frames. Perhaps this is the (ef)florescence with which Moten was concerned in our epigrammatic opening?

In Exodus, McQueen’s twin Black men march the antenna-shaped fronds of their two potted plants through the bustling Brownian motion of London streets at a rhythm of two-by-two-by-two-by-two, their upright and elegant peregrinations beneath the nodding brims of porkpie hats and macintoshed coats rhyming, and bending white patrician codes to insistently queer Caribbean rhythms. They weave, they thread, they warp and bend—they miscegenate:

And I had found in reading a way to draw lines from the earth and make an outline around my sitting at this table or walking the streets of any place, any large or small city, any countryside, any emptied forgotten place, any place transitioning, taking on multiple identities, blaring them at once, and this was all architecture, all the reading I had done. Lyn Hejinian’s “the open mouths of people,” her “weather and air drawn to us,” to say, “landscape is a moment in time.” I’d found in my walking the expanse of several places through which I stopped repeatedly, I stopped in time and without time, I stood at the thresholds of doors, at the throats of caves; I pulled windows from collapsed walls, and grabbed a book to hold up the city, the barn, the balcony, and this was reading … Reading aggregated layers, with luminous lines running between, and each line was a moment in someone, where the body stood up and walked into a book, a drawing, a squat structure of doors, a tower perched on a hill, into the water, and each line was the writing back of language, its response, its figurations, and all this queering at the corners, putting corners everywhere, even on top of one another. And I found in my narrative these other narratives that opened under water, that glowed in deepest night, that you could read without alarm, that were blown-out geometries, maps, that were textiles hanging from the ceiling, calendula underground, always having something to do with bodies, moving through other bodies.43

Steve McQueen, Bass, on view at Dia Beacon until May 26, 2025. Cameron Rowland, “Properties,” on view at Dia Beacon until October 20, 2025. Steve McQueen, “Steve McQueen,” on view at Dia Chelsea until July 19, 2025.