“A Few Acknowledgments, Mahalia Jackson and the Spirit” 

“A Few Acknowledgments, Mahalia Jackson and the Spirit” 

subtext:

Mahalia Jackson is a physical manifestation of the cultural tradition of black ingenuity, religious Spirit, and active resistance. Since the moment I heard her voice, I felt a shuttering authenticity and autonomy that commanded my attention. I could not drown out, overlook, or misunderstand this heroine black woman and her enveloping voice. The meditations and movements of black thinkers, makers, and people are heard: James Baldwin, MOVE Protestor, Sonia Sanchez, Ella Fitzgerald, James Weldon Johnson, Lucky Daye, Mr. Herman Shell (Tuskcogee Syphilis Experiment Survivor), The Aunt of Daunte Wright, Black Southerners, among others. It is both the specificity and ambiguity of these black individuals that evokes the realization that no transference or mobility between classes, fame, or status distances one from the violent history and presence of white supremacy. The audio is composed to be a conversation with the emotional performance of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” dedicated to jazz great, Louis Armstrong, which is a turbulent imploration of guidance, strength, and power from a believer to Jesus. While a colonizing tool, the Christian religion has been an open playground for the mixing and creation of new spiritual tradition and resistance ontologies that have created a sovereign black socio-political religious praxis. Christian religion is both the site of adherence to the subaltern status of slave, the justification for the primordial condition of blackness to inferiority, the culturcide of traditional religion and custom, and the site of resistance in song, political organizing, community building, custom creation, amongst other methodologies of resistance. 

art description: the live performance of Ms. Mahalia Jackson at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1970 opens and carries almost two thirds of the video, until it is switched to a live performance of Ms. Mahalia in Europe on tour in the late 1960s. Her performance is both literal and figurative. When the audio of her singing is heard, it is purposeful to hear both the lyricism and vocalization that Ms. Jackson is perfectly composing. When the audio is not heard, the visual presentation serves as a symbolic embodiment of the movement of Spirit-- that indescribable essence of the self that is in its highest moment to the supernatural entity comprising its cosmology-- through the embattled black woman’s body. Her voice and the movement of her body convey an authentic insight into her elapsing relationship to the performance, the song, its lyrics, and the meaning of the performance of each note, sound, and word. At times, Ms. Jackson is blurred out and flanked by a series of two images of herself, repeated. These arise at those visual moments where Spirit is most prominent within Ms. Jackson’s performance. The audio is collected from James Baldwin, MOVE Protestor, Sonia Sanchez, Ella Fitzgerald, James Weldon Johnson, Lucky Daye, Mr. Herman Shell (Tuskcogee Syphilis Experiment Survivor), The Aunt of Daunte Wright, and a black man giving testimony in a 1950s court. It is composed purposefully, with moments of repetition to emphasize key concepts, and arranged to be a conversation with the Ms. Jackson’s performance about the permanent sense of impermanence within the quotidian black life, by virtue of the threat of a legitimately violent state with the indistinguishable power to be violent with complete personal and structural discretion. The audio is a few acknowledgments of the unendding resistance of blackness to cease, surrender, or exile from this systematic attempt to commit violence on black flesh.