Edgar Arceneaux’s Watts Blocks
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
Screening: 6/21/08
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Celebrated artist Edgar Arceneaux’s latest semiotic endeavor is an exercise in cultural analysis, a technique of conflicting concurrence that he has explored and honed over the past decade. In Watts Blocks (2008), a one-night only project commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he collaborates with close friend and DJ/producer Nattu Coleman, using video as the medium of choice to visualize the emerging urgency of the contemporary moment in black America. Arceneaux’s broader conceptual practice of spotlighting surprising similarities and alien adjacencies between seemingly disparate objects is brought to bear in this choreographed mapping of black American psychogeography.

At first glance, the CinéMOCA commission is a celebration of history, community, comedy, and music. But under the surface, the project captures the urban specificity and depressed conditions of Watts, Los Angeles, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn as well as inciting a consciousness around histories of black migration, black cultural production, and ongoing crises in the quality of life within inner city neighborhoods. Watts Blocks , a mash-up of Wattstax (Mel Stuart, 1973) and Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (Michel Gondry, 2005), conjures and troubles the iconicity and impact of symbols like raised fists and ‘fros that are associated with the black struggle for liberation and solidarity in America. Iconicity is the conceived analogy between a form of a sign – linguistic or otherwise – and its meaning. Watts Blocks invokes this definition and confronts the historic politicization of black subjects.

If you Google search the term ‘politicization’, the last entry on the first page of search results is, ironically, a link to the Official Website of Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign. Arceneaux says the Obama candidacy was at the forefront of his engagement with Watts Blocks . He comments, “The black person is the central metaphor for America, and its question of true democracy. Richard Wright said that over 50 years ago, but our country has changed since then. An image of a black man, woman or child as iconic of suffering and oppression is now nostalgic,” suggesting a separation from the texture of the issues expressed in each film and a shift towards the politics of change that Obama inspires. With Watts Blocks , Arceneaux deploys his own query, asking “Where are we now, in the Civil Rights Movement, in the liberation of the oppressed in our culture?” With this charge as its backdrop, Watts Blocks dislodges the isomorphic relationships between Wattstax and Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and simultaneously excavates the spatial and temporal constitutions of contemporary culture.

The artists, Edgar Arceneaux and Nattu Coleman, both live and work in Los Angeles, CA.

Watts Blocks screens on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 7pm at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in downtown Los Angeles.

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http://www.moca.org/cinemoca/

via Tiffany Barber, 12 June 2008 1:18am | 1 |