Category: **SEPT-OCT 2023

How do we tell our stories? Martine Syms is rewriting the terms. In addition to sculptures, installations and text-based projects, the polymath Angeleno artist has made a string of ambitious films. Her work in FAV extends as far back as her solo show at MoMA in 2017, where the then 29-year-old artist debuted her first feature-length film, Incense Sweaters & Ice, as part of the exhibition “Projects 106.” The show was arranged so that the viewer navigated multimedia collages around the centrally placed three-channel film. Describing the experience of walking around “Projects 106,” New Yorker critic Doreen St. Félix observed, “I had the sensation that the artist had planted coded messages for me, and for other black female viewers—messages that others might walk right by.”

This granular specificity is a key feature of Syms’ practice—there is nothing general in her work, despite her penchant for ironized hyperbole (see The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, published by Rhizome in 2013) and her abiding fascination with the broad, slapstick humor of Old Hollywood animation studios (which infuses everything she’s done). To write about Syms’ sprawling oeuvre entails a considerable amount of back-catalog research into her bibliography, and the works themselves are inundated with references to pop and literature. The effect is that of a challenge for the viewer to either bone up or miss it. In an early interview for the Baltimore zine Video On Paper in 2012, she explained, “I’m interested in storytelling, but I’m obsessed with how we share our stories” (emphasis mine). In a moment when every writer and content creator seems to be hastily revising their job descriptor as “storyteller,” her insistence on turning the camera back on the messenger resonates 12 years on from that first assertion.

Incense Sweaters & Ice follows 20-something Girl as she navigates a fits-and-starts romance with WB (White Boy) as well as the LA to Mississippi trajectory required of her in her job as a nurse, itself an inverted reference to the Great Migration made by Black Americans during the 20th century. Like all of Syms’ work, the film gives inanimate messengers equal billing with its cast. Much of the dialogue occurs in text threads between Girl and White Boy, which are superimposed on the film in real time. Also, like all of Syms’ work, it borrows from experience, here drawing on interviews with her mother, who worked in nursing.

Saddling an artist with the “autobiographic” descriptor is necessarily fraught, in that it presumes both a right and an ability to “know,” and that this knowledge is relevant to the work. When I asked her during our phone interview about how she thinks about autobiography, Syms responded, “I think self-reflexiveness is a bit more interesting to me. There are obviously things taken from my life, but it’s usually pretty constructed.” She qualified, “I like the idea of fucking with autobiography. In a recent piece I did, called My Life Story, I’m using stuff from Lil Nas X’s TikTok but I’m presenting it as my autobiography.” The protagonist of Incense Sweaters & Ice at one point tells White Boy, who is recording her, “I don’t really like posing, like this is so strange … Okay, I’ll pose I guess … If you’d stop that’d be great. Thanks.” It reads as a nod to the incessant surveillance and patrolling of Black women, often by white men, as well as the performativity expected of them.

Syms’ The African Desperate, released in theaters in 2022, is a study in affect and performance, lofty artistic ideals and the mundane tasks that fill studio days, even in the rarefied air of a pastoral summer MFA program. In it, Diamond Stingily, Syms’ longtime friend and collaborator, plays a masters candidate on the cusp of graduation. Stingily is a seasoned and virtuosic performer of Black female subjectivity, adept at subtly amplifying the visual cues that signal contemporary Black womanhood. Syms had already showcased Stingily in her 2015 video Notes on Gesture, in which the artist performs a looping string of finger wags and waves, palming the air in gestures copied from recordings of famous Black women. In The African Desperate, Stingily is seen simmering under the scrutiny of the almost entirely white program as she wrestles with the question of what she will and won’t do, whether she’ll play their game or refuse it.

Syms’ most recent video work, i am wise enough to die things go (2023), pays homage to the crucially personal reference of 20th-century animator Chuck Jones. From 1933 to 1962, Jones created now-canonical animated shorts for Warner Brothers, where he developed the iconic personae of, among others, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. Like Jones, Syms is a covert minimalist intent on conveying her characters’ interior worlds with as little extraneous detail as possible, adhering to predetermined rules (motivations) that drive them. The video is the centerpiece of her recent exhibition, “Loser Back Home” at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, and responds to a 1953 Jones animation, Duck Amuck, which is a notably meta (for the time) twist on the usual trials and tribulations of Daffy. The premise is that the cantankerous duck is plagued not by another toon but by the brush of the anonymous off-screen animator intent on messing with him—constantly switching out his backdrops and costumes, erasing all but his beak.

I am wise enough to die things go copies Daffy’s travails gag for gag, with the notable difference that her actor, Leslie Bamou, is performing in live action. Bamou, who Syms met at an acting class, captures both the blustering Daffy and the affectations of a pretentious Hollywood star: “I always wanted to do a sea epic,” Daffy exclaims as the animator paints him in a (short-lived) sailor’s costume. Meanwhile Bamou enthuses, “I am a water creature. I think it’s because my north node is in Pisces.” It’s tempting to see the self-righteous outrage of Daffy Duck and that of the star of i am wise as at odds, to project onto the latter a commentary about the external constraints placed on Black female bodies. But the more relevant constraint here is that of translating an animated work to film. Rather than funny, the jarring quality suggests a displacement or fracturing of self. And yet the original is unsettling in its own right—one sympathizes with the duck’s frustration.

People want a lot from this work, and at a certain point Syms says no. Responding to my follow-up query to check her statement on My Life Story, she responded, “I think the question of autobiography is generally extremely boring, and I said as much during our interview.”