Inhuman Nature

Jenson Leonard's disembodied King of Pop channels Black dystopia.
conversation

Installation view, Workflow, Jenson Leonard, Pioneer Works, 2023.

Courtesy of the artist.

Poet, meme czar, artist, critic, Afro-pessimist, post-ironic ironist, and newly minted University of Buffalo media study professor Jenson Leonard is a ghostbuster for the zeitgeist. His wicked collages of prefab images and words have gained him a substantial following as @coryintheabyss on Instagram, where he thumbs his nose at the intersections of late-stage capitalism, anti-Blackness, and high-tech hypocrisy in the universal language of bad taste.

With his new piece, Workflow (2022)ā€”the subject of Leonardā€™s first institutional solo show at Pioneer Worksā€”he crosses the DMZ into the art world like a crazed NFT. We fly over computer-generated landscapes celebrating the excesses of modern industry: a port jammed with colorful shipping crates waiting to be assembled on a giant barge, sun-blasted oil refineries, and a gargantuan Le Corbusier-ish apartment block rendered in sickeningly vivid oversaturation. A Muzak-y karaoke version of Michael Jacksonā€™s ā€œHuman Natureā€ floats with us for a minute, and then MJ himself appearsā€”well, a decapitated, AI marionette computer-generated cartoon version of MJ, exaggerating the King of Popā€™s creepiest late-period incarnation with an artificially chiseled bone structure, hair plugs, and bright red lipstick. Frequently blinking, its eyeballs are pupil-free. A simulacrum of a distortion that we already knew to be a distortion of his actual human nature. Disturbed yet?

Hold tight, because Workflow isnā€™t done with you. Instead of the mellifluous tones weā€™re used to, this Michael Jackson effigy growls in a deep, cyber-demon voice, seeming at first to parody the songā€™s original lyricsā€”ā€œLooking out across the macro / Panoptic eyes are everywhereā€ā€”but soon spinning off into a monologue that stitches together clichĆ©d expressions from the business and the self-help industries with tech jargon and literary references. Haunting declarations call upon the dystopic Black past to illuminate the dystopic Black presentā€”ā€œchitlinā€™ circuitry courses through you,ā€ ā€œupload speeds faster than Drapetomaniaā€ā€”and point ominously to a dystopic Black future. Or as the disturbing Jackson head declares while levitating above a horizonless cotton field, ā€œGoing, goingā€”ZONG!ā€ Its authoritarian voice seems to suggest that we are doomed; the cycle is vicious and intractableā€”ā€œautomatic, systematic,ā€ as the Jackson 5 sangā€”in its inhuman nature.

Workflow is a prime example of Leonardā€™s seductive but merciless aesthetic, which rips the hockey mask off modernity to show us that the same old circuitry of racism, discrimination, and brutality will always remain at work behind the glitz of technology.

Wanting to know more, I asked Leonard some probing questions about Workflow and his work at large.

James Hannaham

Whew! What possessed you to make Workflow?

Jenson Leonard

I wanted to get to the core of why work sucks, which meant delving into the interconnected history of labor, Blackness, and capitalismā€”all the good stuff. When I say ā€œwork,ā€ I don't mean the labor that goes into making all of this art; I mean the things I do to try to finance that.Ā Iā€™ve had too many workplace experiences where, once it's found out that Iā€™m an intelligent Black man who doesn't tolerate degradation, I am harassed, intimidated, and either strategically removed or outright fired.Ā This also points to the kind of employment opportunities that are available to me, which are usually physically demanding warehouse jobs where I am not using my MFA.Ā Typically, I apply to clerical and academic jobs, hear radio static, and then have to resort to finding quick work. The Biggie Smalls line, ā€œDonā€™t be mad, UPS is hiring,ā€ has always hit close to home.

Workflow is a prime example of Leonardā€™s seductive but merciless aesthetic, which rips the hockey mask off modernity to show us that the same old circuitry of racism, discrimination, and brutality will always remain at work behind the glitz of technology.

JH

So what do you do to circumvent this limited (and limiting) employment situation?

JL

I aspire to find a workplace that doesn't feel like that, or at least one where Iā€™m not bothered by those violences because Iā€™m compensated well enough to dismiss them. It's painful to realize that thereā€™s no arithmetic for freedom, just harm mitigation, just our contemporaneity. When I was 16 my dad got fired from his lucrative HR job and spent six years atrophying before he was able to find work. It was a tectonic shift for our family, and moved us from upper to lower middle class in the midst of the 2008 recession. I saw my dad have to remake himself and his identity as ā€œproviderā€ when the bottom was pulled out from under him. The system loves to affix the blame of structural issues to the individual, so instead of pathologizing and blaming myself I said fuck it, fuck this workplace-induced PTSD that follows me everywhere. I will sublimate all of my feelings around this into an undeniable work of art.

JH

The ā€œWorkflowā€ exhibition press release references Aria Deanā€™s essay ā€œNotes on Blaccelerationā€ as formative. Can you speak about that and any other references that were important to you?

JL

The Aria Dean essay was in many ways the scholastic jumping-off point to think through certain conceits about futurity and techno-civilizational advancement and collapse. She thought, wait a minuteā€¦thereā€™s precedent for a lot of this already within the structure of Blackness. Black people have already been robotized, tested on, and speculated upon en route to these ideas. Thereā€™s also the Afro-pessimist theory of Frank Wilderson, which has had incredible, explanatory power since it was published in 2020. He writes about the chattel slavery transition from human being to flesh to commodity; the slave as the ground upon which the waged laborer formulates itself; and the limits of Freudian and Marxist thought to account for the Black subject. All have remained remarkably consistent over time. It was important to ground this theory in material history as well. Thereā€™s a rather dry but incisive text from Caitlin Rosenthal called Accounting for Slavery.Ā It looks at slave accounting books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their methods of quantification as the proto-systems of scientific management, business management, and latter-day workforce organization. And thereā€™s an essay by Chris Lee, who works at Prattā€™s Design School, called ā€œThe Banality of Excel: Orthography, Grids, Colonization.ā€ It looks at the role that ā€œthe gridā€ has played in statecraft. Youā€™ll note Workflow is riddled with the repetition of squares and grids. This is all bleak stuff, but itā€™s not a source of nihilism for me; it's a scholarship for the soul. My art is bound up in all of this.

JH

Do you still think ofĀ this work as connected to memes, or do you define it differently?Ā 

JL

Memes matter; government propaganda ministries and reactionary teenagers alike understand this. Thereā€™s a democratizing element to memes where the barrier of entry is low, and thus they have a democracy-undermining element where anyone, anywhere, can say any old thing. That thing can gain momentum, and burst its way out of the filter bubble and into Nancy Pelosiā€™s office. Memes are a truth-approximating social currency. They play out our present crisis of algorithmically fed truth, reinforcing what one wants the truth to be. Partisan news sources, disinformation, conspiracy theoriesā€¦ all are symptoms of a growing distrust of institutions, corporations, and governments that lead to information warfareā€™s dizzying, democracy-destabilizing effects. Memes are impossible to disentangle from this larger context and our larger visual culture. Meme culture is digital culture is visual culture is culture.

JH

But Workflow doesnā€™t utilize any memesā€¦

JL

This work arose out of my exhaustion with working in the meme space, which is ultimately the domain of Big Tech and their phenomenally opaque methods of surveillance and extraction. It was important for me to make something that remains conceptualā€”heavy on puns and feintsā€”but that lives outside of social mediaā€™s attention-economy roulette. In some ways this work is an extrusion pushed out of the cacophony of networked life. Which is to say, thereā€™s still some meme-lord stank on it.

JH

Transgression and shock value are importantĀ elements of what you do; tell us a little bit about the joys and sorrows of transgressiveness andĀ Blackness as you see them.

In some ways this work is an extrusion pushed out of the cacophony of networked life. Which is to say, thereā€™s still some memelord stank on it.
JL

Blackness and transgression are contiguous.Ā Iā€™m not saying that by virtue of one's Black identity, walking outside amounts to some display of radicality, like when during the 1968 Summer Olympic Black American athletes raised their fists in a sign of solidarity with the Black Freedom Movement. But transgression doesnā€™t take much, knowing what we know about the way Black existence has been structured historicallyā€”the way Blackness has been crafted since the Enlightenment to serve as the horizon line for where the primacy of whiteness ends and the animal, Black ā€œotherā€ begins. W.E.B. Dubois called the Black subjectā€™s awareness of their own foreignness double consciousness; Fred Moten calls Blackness jurisgenerative, reflecting on how it has been legally elaborated as criminal; and Christina Sharpe calls Blackness anagrammatical to convey how it disorders the structures of language, thought, and society. All these theoretical coordinates of Black rebellion and difference exist on the shared map of Blackness as the edge, the fulcrum, the Je ne se Quando Rondo of humanity. Have you heard the joke, ā€œEverybody got that one crackhead cousinā€? I mean, do they? I donā€™t know about all that, but I understand the veracity of the claim; the joke is less about one crackhead being apportioned to every Black family and more about the idea that the crack epidemic was so vast in its destruction that it has forever transmogrified the whole of Black sociality such that there is no Black family its violence hasnā€™t touched. Out of the absurdity of this gratuitous violence comes the tragicomical register of my work. ā™¦

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