Brooks and Lorange Gossip and its Minor Discourses Discipline

Title: Gossip and its Minor Discourses Authors: Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange Citation: Brooks A and Lorange A (2017) Gossip and its minor discourses. Discipline 4(5): 37–52. ‘It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.’ —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963, quoted in Vernon Ah Kee, authorsofdevastation, 2016 ‘We plan. We plan to stay, to stick, to move. We plan to be communist about communism, to be unreconstructed about reconstruction, to be absolute about abolition, here, in that other, undercommon place, as that other, undercommon thing, that we preserve by inhabiting.’ —Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons, 2013 Part One In this paper we want to think through the concept of gossip, considering it not only as a way of speaking but also as a way of composing and reading texts—broadly speaking, gossip as a textual modality. We will begin by introducing gossip in these terms and finish by reading works by Clare Milledge, Vincent Namatjira and Vernon Ah Kee as gossip. We’re going to consider gossip’s potential as a critical and interruptive speech act, that is, as a noisy and disorderly discourse that brings things into relation while upholding their difference. Informal but not formless, its resistance to univocality poses a challenge to the legitimacy of authorised and authoritative speech. Gossip is always on the move, and as such, remains outside official discourse, occurring in the cut or the break, as Fred Moten might say. It involves the circulation of information, vacillating between the public and the private, truth and speculation. In this first section of the paper, we will think through the concept of gossip in relation to what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call ‘the undercommons,’ arguing that gossip can constitute an important mode of speech for what they call a ‘fugitive public’ that refuses to acknowledge the authority of the state and its accompanying systems and structures. Much maligned as a mode of feminised speech that trades in the inconsequential, malicious or unsubstantiated, gossip has been, and continues to be, dismissed. Its dismissal as trivial, as talk that trades in personal matters, pure speculation or untruths—or as Heidegger would say, as an inauthentic form of discourse that concerns ‘neither true “intelligibility” nor true “Being-in-theworld”’—belies the concern that gossip might reveal truths that would otherwise remain concealed.i Our intention is not to re-value gossip on moral terms (as others have before us)ii, arguing that gossip is good by default, or for a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of gossip (gossip as healing talk versus gossip as malicious rumour-mongering, for example). Rather, we want to consider how it interrupts the disciplining of knowledge by admitting the subjective into the structure of discourse, allowing discourse to mutate as it circulates. As Irit Rogoff notes, gossip ‘turns the tables on conventions of both “history” and “truth” by externalising and making overt its relationship to subjectivity, voyeuristic pleasure and the communicative circularity of storytelling.’iii Its dismissal as inauthentic, unfixed and unsubstantiated is at the heart of its importance to marginalised subjects. That is, in relation to histories (past and continuing) that deny the ontology of black, Indigenous and queer subjects—as well as women, the original gossipers—the inauthenticity of gossip is something to reclaim. For the undercommons, gossip serves as a productive model, one that makes possible the construction of non-dominant knowledges and alternative epistemologies that place difference at the centre of their ontology. Gossip might, as Irit Rogoff says, ‘serve us well in the reading and rewriting’ of history.iv The undercommons is, as Moten writes, ‘a gathering in the break of all those already broken voices,’v organised by the desire to ‘tear this shit down completely and build something new.’vi The undercommons acknowledges that the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us are broken beyond repair. We’re interested in gossip as a critical function of the undercommons, as part of this breaking and building. And while this paper focuses on the work of Clare Milledge, Vincent Namatjira and Vernon Ah Kee, it forms part of a larger research project that considers gossip in relation to race and gender—both at their intersection and in the ways that blackness troubles gender ‘in the afterlife of slavery and colonialism,’ as Che Gossett says.vii The undercommons doesn’t simply refer to subjects marginalised and excluded by dominant systems and structures of power, rather, it describes a coalition based on the acknowledgement of what Jack Halberstam refers to as ‘the brokenness of being.’viii And, gossip is not limited to the ‘fugitive publics’ of the undercommons. Our intention is not to read gossip broadly speaking as subversive, a claim that would try to elevate gossip from its status as inauthentic speech. Gossip is an ambivalent activity, a mode of speech that toggles between the trivial and the significant, information and disinformation, love and malice, care and fear, survival and aggression. Occurring across and within almost all social networks, it is mobilised to contradictory ends, and yet, as a multi-vocal and multi-authored mode of speech, it contains an interruptive potential within which we can find a model for radical forms of knowledge and care. We’re interested in this interruptive potential—which, we will argue, can be understood in terms of the undercommons and by reading key texts ‘as’ gossip. In this context, gossip is concerned with the disruption of, and flight from, the systems and structures that produce the seemingly infinite sense of crisis that defines our contemporary moment. It functions as a mode of care, as when we talk about and worry over our loved ones; as a mode of study, around, for example, a dinner table; as an expression of planning that evades policy; and as a mode of selfdefence. As radical knowledge, gossip is situated in the break, cutting across or slipping between dominant forms of speech in order to circulate information among a social body. Gossip both points to things—subjects, objects, events, affects—and foregrounds points of view. This dual pointing is a gesture that is simultaneously internal and external, an index of the subject and their relation to other subjects, objects and events in the world. Gossip involves both the acquisition and distribution of knowledge, listening and speaking. As Maryann Ayim has observed, gossip can be thought of as a mode of inquiry or investigation, not simply the passive reception of information but an active combination of listening and speaking in order to solicit or acquire sensitive information.ix At this point, we want to make a distinction between oral and textual forms of gossip and the different publics they produce. As an oral form, gossip is an example of what Peggy Phelan calls ‘unmarked’ performance, that which passes through a social network in unrecorded exchanges of stories and information that evade capture by official archives.x Its resistance to capture presents a challenge to centralised economies of knowledge production and reproduction.xi For subjects stricken from, or marginalised by, official histories, gossip’s refusal to produce a singular message or demand is a mark of its potentiality. Exceeding the control of any one individual, gossip-asspeech moves through and across social bodies, and yet is always bound by relations of intimacy, trust and positionality. As Michael Warner notes, ‘gossip is never a relation among strangers,’ and as such, it is representative of a social body that is neither public nor private, but something other— something like a sociality of the undercommons. In contrast, texts, such as the works we are discussing and the paper that we are giving, produce publics that are self-organising and discursive, social spaces that bring strangers into relation.xii In this sense, gossip as a textual form refers to the emergence of an alternative public archive. In reading (and producing) texts and artworks as gossip, we might ask: what type of public do these texts seek to enact? And, for whom is the archive built? Reading texts as gossip is an explicit attempt to disrupt established epistemologies and their archives, not in order to gain recognition from a broken system (even though such a thing may occur), but in order to facilitate knowledge of and for the undercommons. Reading things as gossip is to consider the ways that unfixed and unmarked speech acts might find a form as a performative declaration, visible to a fugitive public. This is the coming-together of gossip as speech and gossip as text. In this mixed mode, gossip moves between the unmarked and the marked, the invisible and the visible. For people of colour, the experience of being at once invisible and hypervisible is a constant reality that requires a continuous labour of endurance. Gossip offers spaces for withdrawal from moments of hypervisibility and spaces of irruption from moments of erasure. What Rey Chow defines as ‘the ascendancy of whiteness’ is power built on the coupling of structural discrimination and everyday micro-aggressions directed at people of colour.xiii The accumulation of these moments, passed off as misunderstandings, effects of an immovable structure, or commonplace thoughts, constitutes a scene of extraordinary, daily violence. This is the reality that the poet Claudia Rankine describes: ‘you are not the guy and still you fit the description of the guy because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.’xiv This circular logic both inscribes and erases—erasing individual subjectivity while projecting a generic and racialised conception of identity onto non-white bodies. The scenes of ‘ordinary’ violence that Chow locates in the ascendancy of whiteness are made all the more perverse by the demand for people of colour to ignore, accept, and normalise the racialisation of the social. This amounts to a demand that people of colour invest in the promise of belonging, even as they are excluded time and time again. Gossip is a way of speaking against or across these structures of power, a modality in which things can be done differently and that foregrounds difference—by refusing to make the multiple singular, and by following not the call to order but ‘the call for and from disorder.’xv As Moten and Harney write: We [the undercommons] are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of self-governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home. We are disruption and consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval. Sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosure whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area, we got politics surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented.xvi At the heart of the undercommmons is this call for and from disorder. The undercommons implores us to dwell in, and listen to, the noise of many voices and their non-unified demands. It is a site of fugitivity; an accrual of debt that cannot, and will not, ever be repaid; a refusal of the choices and the terms on which they are offered. Part Two What doe we with our hands? Doe we not sue and entreat, promise and performe, call men unto us and discharge them, bid them farewell and be gone, threaten, pray, beseech, deny, refuse, demand, admire, number, confess, repent, feare, bee ashamed, doubt, instruct, command, incite, encourage, sweare, witnesse, accuse, condemne, absolve, injurie, despise, defie, despight, flatter, applaud, rejoyce, complaine, waile, sorrow, discomfort, dispair, cry out, forbid, declare silence and astonishment: and what not? with so great variation and amplifying as if they would contend with the tongue. — Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1580xvii In this part of the paper, we will talk about hands, fingers, and faces, arguing that bodies and gestures can be understood according to this reading of gossip as a critical, interruptive speech act. Our sense is that faces and hands (and especially, fingers) point to, in a rather literal sense, moments of unrest, anxiety, or uncertainty in received notions of the real. If we understand the ‘real’ as that which is enacted via ritual, habit, ceremony and practised reason, then these moments of interruption can occur by simply pointing out these enactments of ritual, habit, ceremony and reason. In a text like a painting, this pointing can be figurative or literal, a kind of emphasis or an actual scene in which hands and fingers index the givenness of reality. We read this kind of image both ‘as’ gossip, that is, as texts that move meaning in obtuse gestures, and as texts that facilitate a reading style akin to gossiping—a reading practice tuned to the sociality of standing in front of a painting, engaging with the publicness of a text and its manifold histories. This next section is indebted to Ann Laura Stoler’s work in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), in which she considers the instability of the colonial archive and its capacity to be read and reread in the spirit of critical ethnography and towards a politics of what might be called an uncommon sense of history.xviii ‘Critique,’ she writes in her introduction, ‘emerges in the interstices of what goes without saying and what should not be said.’xix We are thinking of pointing to, pointing out and signifying pointedly as ways that critique can happen in the painting, and that reading paintings as critique in this sense links gossip to this critical ethnographic rereading of the received, the given, and the reasonable. This interest in hand gestures in part comes from earlier research into the concept of the index. Beyond the book index and its implications for reading and writing, indexicality, broadly speaking, refers to material relationships between subjects, objects and events. The index acknowledges correspondences between things—smoke and fire, a print and its foot, history and its innumerable archives. Fingers are indexes, because they gesture out from the body and towards the objects they name, or implicate, or bring into play. One finger in particular bears the name ‘index,’ but all fingers, or digits, are equally indexical. The word digit (and so also digital) comes to us via the Latin for finger, denoting numbers able to be counted on the hand. And the Latin term for hand, manus, is found in words like manipulate, manuscript, and, importantly for us, manicule—that typographic mark featuring a gloved and cuffed hand, pointing. So: fingers are indexes that name, count, and gather; reading, writing and counting/accounting are activities inextricable from each other and from the bodies that act. In his essay ‘Toward a History of the Manicule’ (2005), William H. Sherman looks at the history and function of the gloved-and-pointing mark.xx The first manicules turn up in thirteenth-century manuscripts, among other hand-drawn and intricate reading marks (like flowers and astrological symbols). Sherman considers these marks as the critical traces of a reading culture with an ‘acute awareness of the symbolic and instrumental power of the hand,’ that part of the body that not only comes into direct, physical contact with the manuscript (and marking implements), but that also engages in the act of reading itself, as fingers follow the line and guide the eye, or stop at a choice passage. Idiomatic language bears witness to this emphasis on the hand as symbol and instrument of reading: we get a handle on a text, we grapple and grasp with concepts, we confront the issues at hand, we consult manuals or handbooks, we draft manuscripts, we manipulate information, and so on. In the historical period that Sherman is examining, hand-drawn marks like the manicule were a part of this material practice of reading, indexing the body’s registration of a text. Passages were marked for a variety of reasons, with different symbols that corresponded. Manicules marked passages that were particularly noteworthy—a precedent to nota bene, note well, now most often written as n.b. A few centuries later, as Sherman tracks, the manicule noted passages ripe for use in ‘commonplaces,’ anthologies of contemporary writing, assembled in one text and for the purpose of representing common wisdom. For this practice of anthology-making, the manicule signalled the connection between reading as individual act, and reading as social participation. Sherman’s study of the manicule considers hand gestures as an important part of the history of thinking, reading, writing, and speaking. The hand, by many different philosophical and theological accounts, was often thought to have a more direct and secure connection to the mind—as opposed to speech, which often bungled or misrepresented thought. Sherman follows scholars interested in gestural systems both connected to language (as in sign language) and extra-linguistic (as when gestures are made to convey a secret message). He cites a text from the English Civil War that refers to fingers, rather evocatively, as ‘privy cyphers’ for sensitive or covert information. It’s in this rather mashed-up history of the hand as reading instrument and symbol and as an expressive agent in its own right that we will now turn to gestures in contemporary painting and the efficacy of reading them as critical and interruptive. Clare Milledge, the Sydney-based painter, has recently exhibited various works from the ongoing Self-Reflexive Critique series in which she transcribes men’s bios (hand-picked and alphabetised) from Tinder onto large plates of glass, gallery windows, and, most recently, backwards onto a wall. Milledge’s serial paintings demonstrate how in certain social spaces (the hetero erotic market, the gallery), the act of pointing to what already exists can be a critical intervention. The critique is selfreflexive, of course, because the language is unaltered; the Tinder users themselves compose ‘unintentional but super functional critiques of masculinity, entitlement, ego, and desire.’xxi Pointing, in this sense, becomes a kind of gossip—a social text that cuts across or sneaks under dominant speech in order to move information quickly and covertly. That Tinder is, by and large, a finger-operated ‘digital’ app that correlates pointing with expressing the self and desire, and that Milledge’s painting practice includes a great deal of handwritten text and transcription, makes the gestural overlay of the Self-Reflexive Critique series all the more interesting. Milledge’s paintings are, above all, works of pointing and pointedness, examining vernaculars of straight romance and expressions of male solidarity and supremacy via the simple gestures of collecting, cataloguing, and bringing into the space of the public gallery. Such gestures perform the labour of critique by facilitating critical readings of the vast textual archives of the social. If, as we are arguing, gossip is a way of transmitting both ideas and ways of thinking, this work is gossipy insofar as it can be read as an invocation for reading eroticism differently, critically, historically. We will now look at Vincent Namatjira’s work, and the hands, fingers and faces central to his paintings, which are at once subtle and explicit, funny and devastating, hopeful and despairing, camp and glib, flat and wrinkled, parodic and super-serious, impossible and utterly true. Namatjira’s Prime Minister paintings (part of the TarraWarra Biennial 2016) demonstrate a slight departure, in that he paints portraits notably missing the hand and finger play so present in his other work. The portraits show the last seven Prime Ministers of Australia, including the current one. Leader portraits are a genre, one that (conventionally, at least) celebrates leadership itself—or perhaps more exactly celebrates governance symbolically via the body of the leader. That body occupying the portrait will differ—he may be Catholic, he may once be a woman, he may be from Queensland, he may be a successful businessman or lawyer—but the figure remains, both symbolically and functionally, identical. Namatjira’s reimagining of the genre emphasises the tendency to metonymically link the state with the leader via their body, most often their face and hands. The hand is extended in acts of diplomacy, aid or discipline—in all cases, hands are imagined as belonging to a collective, national body. The face, on the other hand, indexes the singular figure of the leader: a face which is at once singular (this one over others is the chosen face) and general (this face stands in for all other faces that it governs). The portrait of the face that governs is a literal representation of representational governance; even more so, as in these portraits, when the hands are not in frame. The convention of the political portrait—head and bust only, the subject static and front-on—reifies the face in order to legitimise its singularity. This legitimacy, as Namatjira well knows, is performative: the face becomes the single face of governance when it announces itself thusly in a row of former governmental faces. Contemporary political portraiture has a particular aesthetic—unintentionally abject in its effort to appeal to tradition while at the same time unfailingly betraying the visual conventions of corporate production (the vernacular of screen-based media, hotel lobby art, advertising, and so on). Namatjira’s are obviously different: painted in his idiosyncratic modality in which threedimensionality is rendered in a complex surface-play of proportion and relation, and in which colour is used in a way that registers light in its projective drama of vector, shadow and haunting, he reveals the odd co-mixture of affect and ideology that animates (and is suppressed in) the face of the politician. The success of a portrait is not in its reproduction of a face but in the evocation of a subject’s mode of being, their vocabulary of affective expressions. The portrait of a politician is different—it must convey a sense of restraint, the projection and concealment of affect a signifier of the capacity to lead. In Namatjira’s paintings, what we see in the politicians’ faces are varieties of retention: the grimace, the vacant smile, the furrow.xxii We read these paintings as gossip because by both conforming to and deforming the genre of the political portrait, Namatjira points to what is at once obvious and constantly obfuscated: the codes and codedness of governance, the perverse deployment of the face as the index of human goodness and exceptionalism in representational democracy, the unbroken whiteness of leadership, and the anxious rituals of colonial ‘common sense,’ to use Stoler’s phrase. He doesn’t need to tell us this stuff, and yet he does, because literally every single day requires a renewed commitment to reading history differently: such is the tiring work of freighting gossip across the break. Considering this body of work against Namatjira’s other ‘political’ paintings, we can read the lack of hands and legs, gestures and bodily agency, as a silent evocation of the fraught trade of bodies that constitutes a nation state like Australia: the many bodies that preceded, the bodies of empire, the bodies of prisoners, the occupied, the settlers, the missionaries, the migrants; the body politics; the bodies that comprise systems of governance, the bodies of military enemies, the bodies of us here, and the bodies that populate the archives and records, or the bodies forgotten and excised. Governing bodies depends on the governing body to look like it’s merely a collection of bodies like all others; that’s why we see portraits of Turnbull, or Gillard, or Rudd, rather than maps or flowcharts of governance in its unwieldy and compromised operations. We forget this when we see a singular body being thoroughly bodily—when we see it eat an onion or fall on steps, when we eroticise it or champion it for necking a beer. The image, Namatjira reminds us, of the body that governs, must never be read as a body as such; not a body of this or that person, nor the body of a public servant at the top of her game. They must be read, instead, as images in excess of their subject (as images surely always are), and as a part of a discourse of management to which our bodies are always subject. If rumour and hearsay are central to politics and its propensity for rhetoric and face-saving, then gossip—though such a thing might on first glance seem synonymous with rumour—provides a critical counterpoint. Rumour traffics in speculation or fantasy; gossip (as we understand it) points out what is actually going on. Also in the TarraWarra Biennial is Cook’s Dinner Party (2015). Here, we see arms, hands and fingers in a complex interplay of relation and signification. One of Cook’s arms is around Namatjira, the other lifts a prawn in a gesture of conviviality. Namatjira holds up a knife and fork; he’s paused as if posing for a photograph. Together, their three visible hands are in a neat row, with the fourth hidden in implied intimacy—we see the cuff of Cook’s jacket become the body of Namatjira, a literal coming together. These aren’t the only hands we can see: we see two drumsticks of a fowl, one vertically arranged and oddly balanced at the edge of the table setting, and the other among the rest of the food, discarded or ready to eat; we see the curled tentacles of an octopus and the mobile leglets of a lobster. The bodies in the painting are brought together around a meal: there’s Cook, Namatjira, and the bodies that are also food. The body of Cook, as we know, is long gone. But Namatjira’s body inhabits a world (as well as a painting) in which Cook’s body is present in the rule of law. This dinner party, which we know from the painting’s title is hosted by Cook, shows the kind of reconciliation that counts for settler-colonial father-types: the kind where the host remains unchanged and unmoved and in which the guest receives hospitality as one receives a debt, threat, or bribe. Cook’s spread includes his own brand-name wine and the type of food associated with trophy-style still life paintings in which an economy of treats, luxuries and choice cuts was part of a ruling-class aesthetic. He’s the ur-dad, putting on a spread but offering his own commodity line. Of course, Namatjira’s body is important here, too. He’s sitting cosy, ready for the meal, smiling and looking slightly off-camera (so to speak). He knows what he’s doing at the party, and he knows that one way to defy the rule of the father is to refuse to acknowledge the father’s rules. This can be as simple as, for example, enjoying a meal that one is expected to feel grateful for or humbled by. His face, framed by a Chicago Bulls beanie (as iconic as Cook’s captain’s hat) and raised, ready hands, makes for a kind of devastating, ecstatic self-portrait: a vision of the self in which a speculative meeting takes place between the artist and history’s spectacular failures, rendered in the form of the diplomatic gesture that is so often performed in lieu of reparation: the official event, the cocktail reception, the dinner, the breakfast, the handshake, the photo op. This work sits in a series of paintings that bring together figures from the 200-and-something years of settler-colonial occupation in Australia. A number of these paintings wrinkle history into impossible moments: Cook with the current Queen, for example. Hands are emphasised— handshakes, gestures of recognition or intimacy, performances and rituals. Look, for example, at these scenes, in which hands are: Linking together racialised histories of cultural production and participation; indexing distance and intimacy in the intergenerational practices of Namatjira and his great grandfather; cataloguing gestures of military allegiance; and the declaration of colonial rule; and transactions of legal and extralegal relations between subject, state and empire; and rituals of discipline through recognition and exceptionalism; and scenes of non-sovereignty; and gestures of officiation. In these works, hands index the variety of gestures that constitute the experience of living in and resisting Australian settler-colonialism. Namatjira’s work shows us how idioms of resistance can be expressed in the barest gesture of pointing to gestures—showing how statehood and citizenship are conferred and conform according to rituals of the hand and, as such, how a critical reading of hands interrupts the assumed naturalness of statehood or citizenship. The fantastic historical mash-ups in which Namatjira stages impossible meetings or reimagines iconic scenes of state-and-subject encounters show us that this short history of occupation contains within it an endless history of governance over bodies, and that while governance is not concerned with any one body, bodies are nonetheless singularly impressed by the logics and operations of governance. The co-presence of Cook and the Queen, or Cook and the painter himself, is not merely thinkable in the context of a shared history and present but profoundly true in its understanding of governance. Words like ‘here,’ ‘there,’ ‘this,’ and ‘that’ are indexical, because they refer like a pointed finger to specific things; taken in a sentence or with a hand gesture, they make a link between a word and its object. This seat, that person. Sometimes, a single indexical word is all that is needed in order to freight urgent meaning. Him. Gossip often functions in the service of care, as when we speak of those we love, or when we issue a call or warning in a quiet voice or local code. Social registers come with their own vocabularies, often able to be shortened to the most deictic forms: this. Namatjira’s paintings can be read as emphatic pointing fingers, aimed at this, here. This world, this country, this history, this present. And, if you keep reading, this future. Part Three ‘The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence.’ — Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994 We want to conclude this paper by the thinking (briefly) about the relationship that we have been developing between gossip—as a mode of speaking and reading—and the concept of the riot. An insurgent act of self-defence against the violence of the state and capital, the riot emerges not as a response to exclusion but rather, as Moten says, as a ‘performative declaration of what we are and what we have and what we give.’xxiii It a generative and active disruption that reveals the limits of the status quo. Put another way, the act of rioting is an expression of a riot that is already, and always, occurring in the space of the undercommons in the form of a call for and from disorder. In the undercommons, what animates physical acts such as rioting is also that which animates modes of speaking, reading and living. We have been considering this in relation to Vernon Ah Kee’s Tall Man, a remarkable four-channel video work from 2010, that takes as its subject the 2004 Palm Island riot that occurred in the wake of Mulrunji (Cameron) Doomadgee’s death in custody. The video is composed of footage captured by Palm Island police, members of a police ‘tactical response group’ flown in to the Island, members of the local community and other unnamed sources, posted anonymously to Ah Kee after he travelled to Palm Island to make a portrait of Lex Wotton, a former Councillor who was tried and convicted of inciting the riot. The footage, much of it shaky and frantic, comes from hand-held video cameras, CCTV feeds and early video phones. The work, distributed across four screens, juxtaposes the perspectives of police and Islanders, moving between a number of different locations and vantage points. A coloured test pattern with the text ‘nsville’ (Townsville, the city that presides over Palm Island, and the place that Wotton’s trial took place) interrupts the footage at various points, organising it into six discrete sections. At various points in the work we see and/or hear: the Palm Island community gathered and awaiting news of Doomadgee’s cause of death; Wotton addressing the crowd, asking repeatedly ‘will we accept this?;’ the police in lockdown, preparing for, and anticipating, the impending riot; the police station alight and burning; the panicked utterances of police, ‘Fuck … you gotta take your Glock. They just smashed in all the windows … Fuck. Fuck.;’ scenes of rioting; long shots of the island, smoke rising as the police station burns in the distance; the arrival of the riot squad; a police briefing, ‘I’d be very careful with the firearm. It may be the case that you will have to discharge a few fuckin’ rounds in the air, to scare the shit out of these cunts;’ police and police dogs standing in formation; police retreating into the barracks; and finally, scenes of protest outside the Townsville Courthouse in the wake of the riot. Tall Man is a powerful portrait of a community’s response to the tragedy and injustice of the all too familiar occurrence of an Indigenous death in custody. It’s also a portrait of a state that denies the sovereignty of Indigenous people through forms of hyper-governance, suppression and erasure. What we can find in Ah Kee’s work is an expression of the undercommons—that call for and from disorder that seeks to live in the space of the break. When we watch Tall Man we see a scene of crisis and yet we do not see a community in crisis. Rather what we see is a community asserting what they are and what they have and what they give. Reading Tall Man as gossip is to understand this work as of, and for, the body of the undercommons. It captures the sense that the act of rioting is moved by the same desire as that which motivates speaking, reading, writing, pointing to, calling out—a reaching out to find a connection in the space of dispossession. Tall Man makes explicit the relationship between gossip as a mode of speaking and gossip as a mode of reading: there is the circulation of information as gossip, as in the anonymous and covert delivery to Ah Kee of the footage that Tall Man is composed of (the same footage that was used to convict Wotton); there is capture of gossip in the content of the work, the recording of the many voices of a marginalised community speaking back at the univocal authority of the sovereign state; and the transformation of gossip into a work of art and a work of protest, to be read by fugitive publics as gossip. The work points to the illegitimacy of the sovereign state as it produces and circulates a point of view of the undercommons to the undercommons. As Ah Kee says of his work, ‘It’s made with the idea that my family reads my work, that they understand what it’s about, and that they see themselves in it. That’s the context that I make my art in.’xxiv In this, we might find a radical model for knowledge and a radical model of being. i Patricia Meyer Spacks, ‘In Praise of Gossip,’ The Hudson Review, 35, no. 1, (1982): 19-38, quote 23. See, for example Max Gluckman, ‘Gossip and Scandal’, Current Anthropology, 4, no. 3 (1963); James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Good Gossip, ed. R.F. Goodman and A. Ben-Ze’ev (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1994). iii Irit Rogoff, ‘Gossip as testimony: a postmodern signature,’ Generations & Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 58. iv Ibid., 59. v Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 132. vi Ibid., 152. vii Che Gossett, ‘Žižek’s Trans/gender Trouble,’ LA Review of Books (September 2016), https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/zizeks-transgender-trouble/#!, accessed 20 November 2016. viii Jack Halbertsam, ‘The Wild Beyond,’ in The Undercommons, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 6. ix Maryann Ayim, ‘Knowledge Through the Grapevine: Gossip as Enquiry,’ in Good Gossip, ed. R. F. Goodman and A. Ben-Ze’ev (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1994). x Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). xi Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 18. xii Michael Warner, ‘Publics and Counterpublics,’ Public Culture, 14, No. 1, (2002), 59. xiii Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of the Capitalism, (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2002). xiv Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric, (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014), 105. xv Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 133. xvi Ibid., 20. xvii Cited in William H. Sherman, ‘Toward a History of the Manicule,’ 2005, Lives and Letters, http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk, accessed 20 November 2016. xviii Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). xix Ibid., 28 xx Sherman, ‘Toward a History of the Manicule.’ xxi Astrid Lorange, ‘Reading Paintings and Poetry,’ Blackbox Manifold, Issue 16, 2016, http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue16/AstridLorangeBM16.html, accessed 20 November 2016. xxii On this, we’d like to mention Jill Bennett’s reading of the gestures and expressions George W. Bush and Tony Blair, two politicians who employed and struggled with affect in very different ways but in the common service of attempting to appear adequately sincere, in control, concerned and the right amount of ‘moved’. See: Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11 (London: IB Taurus, 2012), 114–115; 127–128. xxiii Fred Moten, ‘necessity, immensity, and crisis (many edges/seeing things),’ October 2011), Floor, http://floorjournal.com/2011/10/30/necessity-immensity-and-crisis-many-edgesseeing-things/, accessed 20 November 2016. xxiv Vernon Ah Kee and Elizabeth Mead, ‘Interview with Vernon Ah Kee,’ August 2012, MONA Blog, https://monablog.net/2012/08/08/interview-with-vernon-ah-kee/, accessed 20 November 2016. ii