Miles Greenberg takes the time to address the motivations and inspirations behind his newest performance, The Flaying of Marsyas, in his own words.
Last week, I had the opportunity to perform a new work in the Gallery of Honour at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam titled The Flaying of Marsyas. It was a seven hour durational performance in which I was painted head to toe in deep indigo makeup, and tied in Shibari by my wrists and ankles to a tall wooden post atop a rotating boulder, as I was slowly dripped head-to-toe in sugar syrup falling from the ceiling.
Marsyas was a satyr in Greek mythology who challenged Apollo to a music contest, lost, and was flayed alive as punishment. Rather than an abject reenactment of violence, my piece was intended as an interrogation of how Black bodies are read through the lens of European mythologies, and how those myths shift when embodied by us. Meanwhile, without sufficient context, the performance circulated widely through a thirteen second reel, and a tidal wave of criticism on public forums swiftly followed.
The Flaying of Marsyas is a retelling of a Greek cautionary tale that has been reprised broadly for centuries through painting and sculpture in the Western art historical canon. Most famously, the scene was depicted in a 16th century painting by Titian, but my inspiration lies in a particular sculpture in the Louvre, located about 20 feet to the left of the Venus de Milo. The tale is one of a mortal being struck down for defying a god. My reflection in reprising this figure was around the notion of hubris — who defines it, and the metrics thereof. I was thinking a lot about the threshold of the perception of arrogance, and how differently Black people relate to that perceived threshold as its historical function is to keep us from our aspirations and actualization.
I found Shibari to be an interesting counterpoint to Marsyas’ story, as it is a practice fundamentally rooted in sensuality; it’s a love language grounded in extracting pleasure from power dynamics, while deeply rooted in care. No aspect of this artwork functions within the framework of subjugation. Introducing that grammar of consent and introspection as an antidote to the punitive corporal violence inherent to the original myth was a crucial narrative detail.
As part of the study of embodying these archetypes, I’m fascinated by the ways in which a ‘Black retelling’ differs from the so-perceived ‘neutral’ white renditions of yesteryear, so I choose to engage with stories that can speak to the quiet complexities of Black life to Black audiences, while hopefully delivering a modicum of that complexity to white audiences in turn. To me, these complexities only feel articulable through nuance, cultivated over the course of a seven-hour development.
My aim here was to portray one of millions of pieces of Western art history through a Black, queer body, and inherent to that exercise is revealing what difference my identity makes to the output. Imagine the Louvre inhabited exclusively by Black folk –– what would Mona Lisa’s smile mean ? How did Venus de Milo lose her arms ? Does Medusa have dreadlocks and is she allowed to wear them to work ?
On the topic of violence, I feel fortunate to belong to a generation that has an innately sharp understanding of when and how violence manifests in the world. Beyond that, we are highly capable of discussing violence without adding to the net violence in the world. We know better than to reproduce something we seek to abolish. I consider myself so capable, too.
Ultimately, I refuse the idea that pain should be the focus of my work, or that suffering should be platformed for its own sake. In viewing a charged image for the length of a TikTok, yes, an argument can be made for the trauma porn of it all. But when we look a little longer, try a little harder, and stay with something together, we may begin to recognize something more important than abject pain — more sophisticated than a two-dimensionalized shock-value reference to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.
That being said, I do understand that my, our, bod(ies) do not exist in a historical vacuum. Being conscientious and considerate in the methods by which I explore, test, and permeate the boundaries of Blackness and selfhood in my work is vital to its longevity. The context certainly could have been made clearer. Sometimes it hits, sometimes it misses, sometimes it strikes a nerve or punctures a vein — But ultimately, we share common interests; the poetry we dedicate ourselves to is our only means to grasp in the dark. To quote Arthur Jafa, “We have an ethical mandate to mine the catastrophe of who we are and how we came into being. A lot of Black artists do uplift; I don’t do uplift, I’m an undertaker. […] Nevertheless, Black people are not unequivocally emblems of despair. We are emblems of despair and abjection, but we are also emblems of the ability to transcend it.” Taking care of sensitive subject matter can take many forms, and it is incumbent on the artists, the institutions, and the audiences to be jointly capacious enough to withstand contradictions, a lot of nuance, and the inextricable mess that we are.
I spare a thought, here, for (self-)censorship by Black people and non-Black people alike of Black art. I often wonder what the limitations are on what we allow ourselves and each other to discuss in view of non-Black audiences. When and why are we constrained by respectability politics ? Does self-imposed narrative control and internal policing come at the expense of our right to process our own lived and inherited burdens ? I believe in an allowance for us to self-examine.
People assume I’m blind during my shows because of the contact lenses I wear. I hesitate to reveal this, but that’s only true about half of the time. I choose to wear contacts with partial or full translucency for the pieces in which I’m balancing on something small to avoid falling, which was the case for this one. In the first hour of the show, I watched an elderly Black gentleman, probably in his late seventies, enter with a cane. He sat down in front of me and didn’t leave for what I was later informed was the better part of five hours. I rarely focus on audience members, but the entire time he was there, I was performing for him. He looked just like photos I’ve seen of my grandfather. According to my studio manager, he had heard about the show on the radio the day before, and was intrigued. Apparently he said something to the effect that there were topics I was dealing with in this work that didn’t really fit into language, but was poignant to him nevertheless. That’s an honour, because I think what he describes is a hallmark of the way Black people make art. We have a legacy of abstraction from jazz to masks to Gilliam that dances just beyond the reach of form and straight into feeling. It’s how Miles Davis plays So What and how Julius Eastman’s made up his own notation. It’s how Fred Moten weaves language and how Torkwase Dyson composes space. It’s how Kerry James Marshall invokes our skin like the night sky –– He says, “one of the ways you can bring the Black figure from the margin to the centre in relation to art history is to use those classical models as a frame, and place the Black figure in a picture that operates on the same terms as those [white European] pictures do.” All this to say, if that one elderly man picked up what I was putting down, I know the piece worked.
At the end of the day, my audience is Black people, and my audience is me, because, like you, I want to see us represented in museums. Museums help people understand who they are. Europeans know everything they are and everything they can be because they’ve built palaces to house their art, which defines a lexicon, a manual, on a breadth of human experience far broader than any other continent has been allowed by Europe to possess. My work attempts a forgery of Europe’s best acts of self-reflection, a stolen mirror by which I wish us to radically see and empower ourselves by our own hand.
Written by Miles Greenberg.
