INTOLERABLE WHITENESS
My piece in the exhibition, On Whiteness, at The Kitchen, is a sleek, stainless steel, water cooler dispenser that has a video monitor mounted on top, where traditionally a 5-liter bottle of water would be. Here however, the water cooler dispenses milk to unsuspecting viewers of a video that plays on a continuous loop. The video documents public performances of investigative journalism, art as social practice, and popular infotainment as I seek to discover whether, milk is racist in light of the fact, the alt-right has adopted milk as their symbol of racial purity, since 75% of African Americans and Latinx, 90% of Asians are lactose intolerant, this white substance has come to represent white power. Because of the loop, there is no true beginning or end to the video's narrative, collapsing cause and effect, refusing temporal and narrative closure, the sculpture then, becomes a proxy for my body as a performing artist and creates a "white line" threshold where some bodies can fully access the piece--those who can drink milk--and others--mostly non-white bodies--who cannot.
The video that plays in the sculpture is here:
