…in returning, one uncovers the promise of studying together.
Sandra Ruiz, Left Turns in Brown Study, 4
You know what a review is: it offers a critical perspective on a book, performance, film, exhibition. The writing rehearses a familiar geography: the object is over there—and the critic is over here. I am trying to find another writing alongside critics like Tina Campt, Sarah Cervenak, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. I want to fully honor theorist and performance studies scholar Sandra Ruiz and her collaborators, which recently included abstract painter Daniel Hughes Noriega Vernola, curator and performance artist Dusty Childers, movement artist Estado Flotante, and electronic composer Erica Gressman. I follow their collaborations here through a creative entanglement.
Ruiz’s Left Turns in Brown Study (Duke University Press, 2024) is a collection of theory-poems, visual scores, and citation-dedications. After decades of re-reading and returning, Ruiz finds:
somber,
quietly riotous,
at times dreamingly
depressing in abysmal
displeasure & indignant
rumination for greater
presence & futures,
where mourning meets
difference in the folds of
their entwined
orchestrations (15)
Enjambment ensnares mood with object, and in so doing reminds how close this work happens in our chests. To a project of “brown study”— “a gloomy, / reclusive, abstracted / meditation of thought,” made into “verse, rhyme, / word, syllable / punctuation, citation, emotional tendencies, / affective voids & the / play/playfulness between / forming content & deforming / organization” (14–15)—I bring my own turn of form in a version of Ruiz and Vernola’s proto riffs; that is their term for the collaborative process that exists between Vernola’s monoprints and Ruiz’s text.
In a tradition of performative critical writing, I pivot into and out from Left Turns and their proto riffs, hoping to learn from the texture of Ruiz and Vernola’s collaboration. My writing deploys antiphony, distillation, re-mixing, collaging, and looping to perform what I call critical generation, harkening to a meaning of poesis in Greek of creating or making. I have Ruiz to thank for marking how I was responding in a performative mode to their work. With critical generation, I aim to animate a form of writing as making-engagement with the works—rather than to use writing to enact or simulate observation, description, or analysis divorced from the embodied experience of a space in which the witnessing happens. Critical generation performs being-with, thinking-with, and making-with the works that unfolded together at once. But not in pursuit of virtuosity. In this branch of my work, I’m aiming toward something quieter: poetic recalibrations to sidestep hierarchies of value that so easily bake into the grammar of criticism. Ruiz offers one iteration of this. Critical generation offers another.
And this is also how I accept the invitation to be “viscerally touched and turned over by [the] words” of Left Turns and the exhibition and performances of “Sensory Riffs & Visceral Turns: From Syllable to Sound to Print,” which I visited at the Ortega y Gasset Projects space in Gowanus, Brooklyn on an icy December night.
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I emerge in from winter rain, slow: met then surrounded by what’s been moving. We’re turned inward by Vernola’s ecstatic monoprints, then turned back to “Preturn,” the book’s opening (11), to “Watching Dreams Con Lord Lydia” (91), to “Miscarried” (49). Vernola’s paintings take their titles from the pages of Left Turns and become a series of numbers to pivot back and forth between paint and word. The reason the paintings’ titles correspond to the poem’s pagination that urged the paint to turn is to circumvent the property regime that holds Ruiz’s words. These titles could seem to mirror the paintings’ abstracting, except they are – like the paintings – material marks of a choreography: where and how to turn.
“Preturn” works on you like an incantation, summoning Ruiz’s father alongside José Esteban Muñoz and a litany of queer performance and queer Latinidad scholars: Joseph Whitehead (Making Love With the Land), Amber Jamila Musser (“Sensing Brownness”), Uri MacMillan (Embodied Avatars), Joshua Javier Guzman (“Brown”), Sara Ahmed (Complaint!), Stephen Harney and Fred Moten (The Undercommons), Raquel Gutiérrez (Brown Neon), fahima ife (Maroon Choreography). Many admired others are cited with capacious care and specificity. (Care is only care when it is also specific, material choreography.) Each citation embraced as its own portal, its own spell. I take these and “Preturn” with me and turn the corner.
The turns are turns in pages, in paint, black boots later scuff the grey cement floors, an electric fan gives breezes here then there then back, turn stamped onto a tunic, a carnation offered between the squares one family line (Dusty’s) would quilt and another would find dignity cleaning. When else has soap been used to make a shrine? That is the wrong question: the ordinary—“an event and a sensation,” “both animated and inhabitable” (Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 4)—is teeming with homes and their smells-sounds-threads-heartbeats. The sensory does not only lead to a memory, it compounds, expands, intensifies, dimensionalizes a memory, transgresses particularity (without erasing it) for a moment of mutual recognition.
On a small table near the nodding fan is a bowl of Ivory soap wrappers refashioned into calling card mementos. They ask, in writing, if we have questions. The scent—mass-produced clean—is remade here into intimacy’s lining. Bars of soap line the wall in neat and not neat stacks of white on exposed brick painted over white. The wrapper should ask if we have anything other than questions.
Left Turns in Brown Study opens:
I’ve been returning with the dead since I can remember listening. Readings & writings that moved past any alphabetic entry into the sonic refrain—what kinds of sounds muster life across a chorus of energies, desires for returning? I’ve been returning since I sensed my father couldn’t use paper & pen to weaponize against oppression, not because he wasn’t ‘educated,’ but unschooled…. Left Turns in Brown Study was written aloud, for & with them, for & with listening. … / Just because ghosts & spirits refuse print does not mean they refuse syllables. (3)
These are some echoes through which the book reaches from the classroom beyond the page—thought first many times, maybe remembered, rehearsed with students, with countless other pages, then landing gently for us to mark how echoes resound if we can stretch to make a page, a mark into repositories of other mediums. The voice you hear can be a familiar outstretched from their new place. This is how one fellow traveler is already hundreds.
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You spent a lifetime studying, you spent a lifetime performing, you spent a lifetime teaching, you spent a lifetime coaxing paint to coax you, you spent a lifetime running for your life. Someone will ask how it all makes sense together, and someone will answer that here there is another sense of sense, one that is not hemmed to what critic Tiana Reid describes in an encounter with Athena Papadopoulos’s work as “the sense-making system that has gotten us here, destroyed” (Tiana Reid, “Between Language and Cure”). With Ruiz, Vernola, Childers, Estado Flotante, and Gressman, the sense of sense is brown and it bleeds and if it’s working then when it bleeds it stays, turning, brown.
We have to make it. In this Minor Aesthetics Lab production, which Ruiz directs, is also where the limits for thriving meet to expand through what each collaborator brings. Here is an altar summoning a register—you have to quiet habits of thought, the ones disciplines taught you, to hear— where I can find you and you can find me, and we can wonder about how we found one another and have discomfort like a snack. If we lose a thread forever, or find an end, let’s make another, and wrap ourselves in it.
What small portion can we give one another when we study, besides exhaustion, to keep going making? Witnessing is responsibility, no matter how often the call is ignored. That’s a different thing. If all I have is this, I have this. After all, what happens to a book when it is finally a book? What does a book make happen? What’s happening now to the lives poured into them? The lives they pour into, still? Why does anyone stop caring about the join? (To make empire possible. To draw a box around the possibilities to flourish and the sentence of over-dying.)
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The space—bricks and plumbing white, floors poured gray cement—softens with chiffon curtains fluttering against their gentle stitches, remnants fashioned into hugging threads leading back to friendships whose shapes fill out the loves one could be born into or forge or hope for. You taught in the classrooms next to one another—Ruiz and Vernola, the students called you. Dusty, you teach too, and sometimes a student’s parents will attend one of your performances and the student will tell you in the morning. This white, grey, softened room fills with teachers pulling us close to how closeness in thinking does not mind distance—of years, of quiet, of rhythm, of language. What teachers know is that students and experience lead, and teachers—in the best case—mind timing. Someone asks, how would you teach this book, these paintings together? And all answer almost together: tear the pages out, destroy the painting and try to put it back together. Dissection but not for mastery. Toward making more forms from pieces.
Maybe this is more than a page. One choreographer meets another and the gentle dance between them could become a world, a moment, a lesson, another place to leave a mark to remember the pivot. I was here and you were, too. And we made something despite. We made it, and then more could be more. We expanded to find the measure.
Each monoprint twirls from one of Left Turns’ fifty-one poems. Fifty-one because Puerto Rico is held un-sovereign. The prints here are mounted onto cardboard: the classroom bulletin board and the time for crafting before lunch are here too, just like the remnants of watercolor on plexiglass pressing paper, onto one print then the other, leaving “leftover” marks from the previous on those that follow. It was never only our classroom. These marks can make connections—across prints, across space—real. And it is not the only way.
They answer: take any page and cut up the words. The order is disorder it to find what you need. That can be making a line to break and smear it, turn it into dots. Anyone can enter the poem. These are small insistences. Find me so we can feel the inflection differently together from one moment to the next.
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You have to make the thing to teach the thing. You have to teach the thing by inviting students to make the thing. You have to break the thing to make the thing to study the thing. The point is nothing ends but something can begin. The point is not to make it new, but to be new and leave a trail for the curious to follow.
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Before Estado Flotante reads to close his and Erica’s performance-collaboration, they join us in the space with her sonic score, anchored by a thumping drum machine. (Ruiz writes with Gressman’s work in her forthcoming Tears for Tears: Aesthetics in Grief Minor.) Estado Flotante’s lunges and curvings, feet now pointed then square, grab at the pivots, enlivening the paintings, not as echo, not as answer, but more a steady, studied disarticulation of the distances we think into a place, as they bend into and away from the seams of the tunic marked by Childers with a stamp that reads turn. They become stuck, doubled over, then hop, one low smile interrupts, and what’s left is an entreaty of breathing heightened by having worked new room from this room.
If we accept it, the measure of work is study. The measure of study is work. To strain for something else is to be recognizable by the same habits and languages that would say fighting for your rightful death is the only law of nature. But feeling exceeds the human. Between one and the other – work and study – is a hopeful possibility that has to be nurtured and protected. Citation alone is insufficient to the task if not accompanied with the practice of finding more righteous tenderness, tenderness that refuses to be swallowed by the other needed fire: rage. There are not more words in books than have been spoken.
It has to be true: if you make a world really yours, it’s already artful. Otherwise, art names the instances when made beauty recognized as such shoulder shrugs at extinguishing other emergent practices for making beauty. Ask your co-workers if they know the difference.
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I will hold this here now, in motion because I should practice how to be slower. Ruiz and her collaborators show how to be studying and making at once. How to study to unlearn what keeps one too small to hold and offer and fight for what you need when you – any – need it even without words on a page. (But there have been.) You know what I know: this is more strenuous than empathy, enough study and work to dignify lives.
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Monica Huerta