Arsenic and no Lace
Greg de Cuir Jr.
2021
Greg de Cuir Jr. is an independent curator, film scholar, author, and longtime companion of Everson. For the exhibition Recover, de Cuir Jr. has written a text titled Arsenic and no Lace, which describes his first encounter with Kevin Jerome Everson and provides insight into Everson’s masterpiece Sugarcoated Arsenic (2014).
Greg de Cuir Jr. (*Los Angeles, lives in Belgrad) is an independent curator, writer and translator. He has been organizing the screening series Avant-Noir, which presents contemporary film and video work by artists concerned with visual representations of black culture in its various complex forms. His programs were shown in institutions and various festivals such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; ICA, London; National Museum of African American History and Culture Washington DC; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Los Angeles Filmforum; Locarno Film Festival; Flaherty Film Seminar, New York; Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad; Alternative Film Video, Belgrade and others. His writing has been published in Cineaste, Millennium Film Journal, Jump Cut, among others.
Arsenic and no Lace
Greg de Cuir Jr.
I remember meeting Kevin Jerome Everson for the first time. The occasion was Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 2014, when his masterpiece Sugarcoated Arsenic (2014, co-directed with Claudrena Harold) was shown in the international competition program. Everson’s reputation had been buzzing a few years leading up to that as someone making powerful contributions to contemporary North American film art. I often encountered lavish praise of his work in various reviews of film festivals and exhibitions, and I committed his name to memory as one of the rare artists who was prioritising Black peoples and cultures through avant-garde film.
Sugarcoated Arsenic is an entry in the ongoing film series Black Fire, co-created by Everson and Harold, which consists of evocations of African-American life over the decades at the University of Virginia, where both artists work as professors, Everson in the Department of Art and Harold in the Department of History. The film is a gambit of sorts, one which illustrates a great deal about Everson’s creative method and his approach to form. The aim of the co-directors was to illuminate the legacy of Professor Vivian Gordon, who taught at the University in the 1970s and was known as a fierce and persistent critic of white supremacy. Harold had found some audio recordings of Gordon’s talks and lectures in the university archive, and then she became fascinated with the idea of bringing her story to life. Everson imagined that there must also have been 16mm film material of Gordon in the archive, but no moving image documents were to be found. To compensate for this archival lack Everson decided to shoot 16mm film in a period fashion, with close attention to details of costuming and décor, as if their film was an assemblage of “found footage”. It was the proverbial lie that revealed the truth. It was also part of Everson’s consistent refusal of the label “documentary” and all of the ethical and aesthetic trappings that the term implies. And it was one of the most elaborate examples of Everson’s approach to the craft of filmmaking, in which he often fabricates props and other scenographic objects to insert into the body of his films as not just a documentary refusal, not only a way to merge his sculptural and plastic arts practice into the field of cinema, but also something of a seamless self-reflexive mark of the auteur.
But I did not know any of this as I sat and watched Sugarcoated Arsenic in the festival cinema, puzzled as to the true nature of its formal qualities. Was this an archival piece I was seeing? A whole readymade gesture reclaiming a lost work of nonfiction? The effect of the film was immaculate as it moved between segments of Gordon lecturing and views of everyday life among Black students at the university – but a seamless aesthetic was not the point, nor the aim. This was a very “unheimlich” film in its stylistic seduction, but also in its presentation of historiographical values. I was left in an unstable position in my seat as a spectator, and that disruption can be seen as central to the film’s political strategy. Even though I could not wholly place or categorise what I was seeing, I felt convinced that this was a significant work. As the saying goes, Everson long had my curiosity – but now he had my attention.
I attended the post-screening discussion hoping to hear more about the artist’s process. I even asked a few throwaway questions, just in an attempt to keep him talking. Everson can be a cagey discussant. He does not always tell you what you want to hear, such as when he professes to be hostile to his audiences and totally unconcerned with making them feel safe or served. Rather than the spectators, his fidelity is to the figures in his films, to the concepts that he explores in partnership with them. He is even fond of going so far to say that his films do not need an audience. The public discussion confirmed my suspicion: this was an artist worth paying attention to, someone forging their own path and who had something urgent to say about the state of the art form and its place in the world. Everson might not be the type of artist to give you what you want, but he is certainly the type of artist to give you what you need. Which is to say: none of his films are sugarcoated.
After the post-screening discussion I wandered back into the cinema foyer, where many hang out in between screenings at the festival. I saw Everson standing in the corner with another artist and a few colleagues. He gave me a head nod – a coded signifier shared between Black males that serves as an ice breaker and also an invitation to converse. I felt safe to come over and speak with him. The first thing he said, with a smile, was: “Now what are you doing here, and where are you from?” I knew what he meant, since we were most likely the only two Black people in that entire cinema, if not the entire festival. Plus it was my first visit to Oberhausen, so I was probably looking like someone adjusting. We then launched into a discussion about everything except film, everything exceptart. And that discussion has continued to the present day while blossoming into real camaraderie.
Kevin Jerome Everson is the single most important Black film artist working anywhere in the world. Check in near the end of his career, considering his prodigious output, and he might just hold claim to being the greatest film artist of them all, with no qualifications whatsoever. The body of work speaks for itself in its breadth, its nuance, its bold experimentation, its indifference to regimes of good taste, its dedication to working class concerns, its respect for the contours and politics of labor, its disarming ordinariness, its proficient multidisciplinarity, its reverence for the medium of film and the photographic arts, its deep love for Black peoples everywhere. Vivian Gordon posited the notion that Sugarcoated Arsenic was the promise of equality and integration that was fed to Black people, to make the inherent anti-Black foundations of US society more digestible. I think the films of Everson are an inverse proposition: they can often be hard to swallow, but they always nurture the soul.