The African Desperate (Movie)

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    ‘The African Desperate’ Expands the Movies’ Narrow View of the Art World

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    Most films set adjacent to studios and galleries lampoon unfathomable pretension, but Martine Syms takes a more nuanced approached in her look at art schools.Martine Syms’s “The African Desperate” begins on the last day of art school for a Master of Fine Arts student named Palace. She’s facing the final critique from a committee of four instructors who sit in her studio, lobbing comments about her work — some earnest, some passive-aggressive, altogether a bit bewildering.“It’s been interesting having you in the sculpture department.” “Where are you going to go with this?” “You’re afraid of your own appetite. It’s all a bit polite, isn’t it?” “Where’d you grow up? West Side Chicago?”Palace — played by the artist Diamond Stingily, with bright orange hair and a deadly deadpan — holds her own. She calls out problematic questions, quoting Saidiya Hartman and others. Then, at a seemingly arbitrary moment, it’s all over: She passed.“That’s it?” Palace asks quietly. “You’re free,” one examiner says, meaning well. But the comment also implies that art school wasn’t always liberating.“The African Desperate” stakes out new terrain in the rarefied niche of movies featuring art schools. Unlike many films set adjacent to the art world, it focuses on a Black protagonist and avoids the cliché of “making it big” amid unfathomable pretension — a satirical staple of movies like “Velvet Buzzsaw,” “Pecker” and “The Square.”Stingily, right, opposite Erin Leland in “The African Desperate,” which draws on the director’s time as a Bard College student.Dominica, Inc.Syms, a thriving artist who currently has multiple shows on, drew upon her time as an M.F.A. student at Bard College and years of teaching in universities and other settings. Syms remembers both feeling invisible and sticking out in white-dominated professional spaces at the upstate institution.“It’s not even impostor syndrome, because you’re doing the stuff and you’re there,” she said in an interview. “But even now I get people I went to school with who were like, ‘You weren’t even making art when we were in school.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I was literally in film class with you!’ So I wanted to capture this feeling of not being seen sometimes,” Syms said last month, in advance of the film’s streaming release Friday on Mubi.Her portrayal of art school pulses with the energy and humor of Palace and her friends, but it’s also a story of emotional survival.“It’s a brilliant lampooning of art schools, but it also felt like a catharsis in a way,” David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, told me. “Some of the greatest art is someone who’s working through something they experienced that they have contradictory feelings about it.”Syms, who co-wrote “The African Desperate” with Rocket Caleshu, created the part with Stingily in mind. The two connected at a Chicago bookstore and arts space Syms was running called Golden Age, and the director has cast the performer in other works. Syms, Stingily and Caleshu all drew on their experiences navigating professional spaces, and Palace, like Stingily at the time, also has the family responsibility of an ailing mother.Syms and Stingily would talk and laugh about how they would respond to situations.“She was like, ‘Man, I don’t know what I would have done in that program!’ Because some of the things that I experienced were really out of pocket,” Syms said.Instead of a traditional dramatic arc, “The African Desperate” exists in the moment with Palace. She’s ready to leave, but people keep coaxing her into hanging out. Her closest friend drives her to a lake to decompress; another friend buzzes with anticipation for the big graduation party; and there are last-chance flirtations with a guy who hasn’t made a move all summer.The film’s style zigs and zags with Palace’s conversations. It captures her very funny shorthand with friends and colleagues, using pop-up memes and head-on shots for phone dialogues. Syms said she had wanted to show “how talkie talkie talkie everything is” in art school. Max Minghella in “Art School Confidential” (2006), which leans into satire.Suzanne Hanover/United Artists and Sony Pictures ClassicsIt’s a sharp contrast with the style of “Art School Confidential,” the 2006 feature directed by Terry Zwigoff and written by Daniel Clowes (“Ghost World”). Clowes adapted the story of a starry-eyed art student, Jerome (Max Minghella), from a 1991 comic, loosely based on experiences at the Pratt Institute. The film is set on a cruddy, crime-ridden urban campus where a killer is on the loose.Zwigoff and Clowes’s acerbic satire leans into caricature: a horn-dog roommate, a pretentious instructor (John Malkovich) who draws only triangles (“I was one of the first”), an overbearing wannabe director with a “Film Threat” T-shirt. There’s a simmering skepticism about idolizing anyone, from a once-great alcoholic recluse (Jim Broadbent) to an arrogant art-star (Adam Scott).“Art School Confidential” was partly shot at Pasadena City College, which Syms attended. She liked the comic — and remembers getting caught in middle school reading Clowes’s books — but the movie “is not my favorite.”“I think it’s in the canon,” Syms said. “But it’s also about a white guy, which almost every art movie is about.” In her own time at art school, Syms said she saw precious little work by Black artists and filmmakers, like Edward Owens. “I remember really leaving school feeling — and not in any dejected way, just as a fact — I just don’t think I’m an artist,” Syms said.“The African Desperate” centers on Palace’s experience and subjectivity. The title comes from a verbal slip in conversation with Syms when Stingily meant to say “the African diaspora.” Syms remembered the accidental phrase and found it “evocative of the mood and what it feels like sometimes to be part of the diaspora in those spaces.”Palace does go to the party everyone’s talking about. It’s a happily spacey affair in a cavernous half-empty studio space. It might not look like much, but that’s also part of Syms’s realism. (“That was one scene I really didn’t want to be movie-fied, because it’s not a cool party! You’re upstate and there’s maybe 10 people you hang out with.”) Palace’s studio in the opening scene, for example, is a collage of life and art in progress, populated with books and Tarot cards and art materials (including long locks of hair she works with).Perhaps because it’s Diamond’s last day on campus, we see fewer artists at work than in another film featuring an art school: Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” which recently screened at the New York Film Festival.Michelle Williams as a ceramist who works at an arts college in “Showing Up.”A24Michelle Williams plays a Portland ceramist, Lizzy, who is finishing a collection for her imminent show at a gallery in town. The camera traces her gaze as she considers the pieces in her home studio. We also see the hive of student activity at the arts college, where she works as an administrator.“I was watching next to a friend of mine I went to RISD with, and we talked about how authentic the scenes felt to us,” Cynthia Lahti, the Portland artist who made Lizzy’s works, said, referring to the Rhode Island School of Design. “The way studio work flowed into the hallway. The painting class, the person throwing on the wheel, the fabric people wringing out cloth and hanging it up.”Syms’s film shares this embrace of the many creative energies in flux at an art school. The “African Desperate” cast includes a number of practicing artists, and the effect is effervescent without feeling gratuitously eccentric.“It’s not portraying this already joke-fied version of the art world,” Velasco said. “‘The African Desperate’ is portraying art school, but it’s doing it as an artwork itself.”Syms’s film doesn’t pretend that Palace emerges unscathed from her experience. “I mean, people out here really want me to get mad,” the character says early on, evoking a whole history of aggravation before the film’s 24 hours. “And it’s like, I don’t want to fight you.”But if the movie doesn’t offer a blandly happy ending, it affirms that a story has begun that only Palace can truly tell. More

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      ‘The African Desperate’ Review: Double Speak

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      Martine Syms’s whip-smart satire brings the invisible, everyday negotiations of a Black artist to startlingly visual life.Martine Syms’s debut feature derives its title from a Freudian slip. In the opening scene, as Palace (Diamond Stingily), a sculptor at an upstate New York art school, describes her thesis project to an all-white faculty panel, she mispronounces “African diaspora” as “African desperate.” It sounds nonsensical, but no one bats an eye, and the professors continue with their jargon-riddled commentary. This is the art world, a place as open to absurdity as it is closed to diversity. Here, people say made-up terms with grave conviction yet are incredulous that a Black woman like Palace has made it to the Venice Biennale.Drawn from Syms’s own experiences as a visual artist, “The African Desperate” is less an art-school parody as it is a portrait of existential incongruity, where contempt mingles with deep affection. After being anointed a Master of Fine Arts, a frustrated Palace is ready to pack up and leave, but she stays on for 24 final hours of debauchery, coaxed by friends, drugs and potential lovers.As Palace stumbles through a series of neon-hued encounters, ranging in tone from slapstick to dark comedy, Syms brings the invisible, everyday negotiations of a Black artist to startlingly visual life with layers of images and sounds. When a white classmate says she’s never heard of the Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter, Palace doesn’t react, but a meme flashes briefly on-screen with the caption: “What if I told you there were Black theorists?”There’s an echo of Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel” in “The African Desperate,” though Palace’s stuckness in her off-putting milieu is less surreal than tragically banal. As alienating as art school might be, it’s also a refuge for our eccentric, orange-haired heroine.The African DesperateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Many Lives of Martine Syms

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      LOS ANGELES — As self-portraits go, the video “DED” by Martine Syms is a bit masochistic. The artist’s digital avatar strolls across a flat, featureless limbo, enduring several gruesome deaths. Seppuku with a chef’s knife. Crippling, fatal allergies. Diarrhea so explosive she rockets into the sky like a rag doll, then dies from the fall. Then, somehow, she gets up and keeps walking.Syms remembers sending an early clip of the 15-minute piece to a friend. “I still think it’s kind of funny,” she said recently, at a booth at Little Dom’s, a red-sauce, dark wood Italian restaurant in this city’s Los Feliz neighborhood. “But let me be clear that I understand how people do not. They were like, ‘What the [expletive] is this? It’s really violent. I don’t like seeing you dying.’”But that’s the thing, she told me. “There’s always a level of seriousness read into a lot of things that I’m doing that I don’t necessarily connect with.”Especially when race is involved. “I’m using a signifier, Blackness, which for some people can connote serious pain,” she acknowledged. “But I see it as a real space of joy and freedom.”Syms, 34, is the sort of “new media” artist who antiquates the term. Since her days as a film programmer at clubs like the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, she has turned the various lenses of media around to interrogate what society expects of Black women, and Black artists in particular. An early video, “My Only Idol Is Reality,” from 2007, consists of a degraded VHS copy of a heated, unedited dialogue on race between two contestants on “The Real World.” Syms studied cinema at the Art Institute of Chicago, co-founded a book store called Golden Age and started an artist-book imprint called Dominica. She racked up tags: artist, writer, musician, publisher, teacher, filmmaker; D.J., influencer, brand. Throughout her art, her moving images feature avatars of herself that she endows with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.“DED” (2021), a digital video on view in “Martine Syms: Grio College” at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art. Syms endows avatars of herself, including Teeny, seen above, with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.Olympia Shannon/CCS BardIn the summer of 2017, Syms graduated with an M.F.A. from Bard College; that fall, she began a year as faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. In the interim, she produced a solo show at MoMA — a purple-tinged installation including photographs, furniture and a feature-length video.This fall brings her a triad of institutional coups, and a movie in theaters. Each stars dramatized, extrapolated versions of Syms. A new, open-ended video play fed by machine-learning algorithms anchors “Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And a gonzo sitcom called “She Mad,” 2015-2021, in which Syms often stars, appears at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until February 2023. The most recent episode routes the artist’s real-life ups and downs through a cover of the “Life Story” TikToks posted by the rapper Lil Nas X.“DED” is the showpiece of “Grio College,” Syms’s retrospective at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, in upstate New York. Bard, the artist’s alma mater, also inspired her first foray into independent films: “The African Desperate,” which she directed and co-wrote with Rocket Caleshu, enters worldwide distribution with screenings in New York starting Sept. 16. (The artist Diamond Stingily, an old friend, plays the lead, a Black femme named Palace with a newly minted M.F.A.; Bridget Donahue, Syms’s New York dealer, and A.L. Steiner, her former teacher, have small roles as Palace’s professors.)Installation view of “Martine Syms: She Mad Season One,” a wry take on contemporary life as a Black woman, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, through Feb. 12, 2023.Nathan Keay/MCA ChicagoSyms’s many avatars are a record of survival in a cloying media atmosphere. They’re sometimes self-indulgent — necessarily so, in the manner of psychoanalysis or self-care. The notion of “Grio College,” a place that teaches the trick of honing personal experience into modern stories, developed through the artist’s experience on the M.F.A. track. Syms writes in the press notes to “The African Desperate” that the overlapping dystopias of an advanced art college in the bucolic Hudson Valley came laced with racism. One of the last sequences of the film layers found audio of a man telling off his bigoted co-workers with shots of postcard-perfect fields and shops in Troy, N.Y.“The curriculum that she presents is larger than what a college typically covers,” said Lauren Cornell, the chief curator at the Hessel. “It encompasses one’s whole life, friends, thinkers, culture.” Her professors and gallerists become collaborators; the places she lives become sets and settings.Sitting in the booth at Little Dom’s, on the edge of Hollywood, dayglo-orange braids fell across Syms’s lilac tank top and accented a tattoo on her shoulder: the word “EVIL.” (Seen from a certain angle, it almost reads “LIVE.”) Waitstaff in the hall zapped small flies with loud pops of an electric racquet.Syms grew up in Altadena, a quiet town abutting the mountains east of Los Angeles known as a retreat for roughneck millionaires and an enclave for the Black middle class. Her mother worked as a registered nurse at the Kaiser Permanente hospital on Sunset Boulevard, and Syms would take the bus into Los Angeles to spend afternoons browsing Goodwill and Skylight Books or watching films at the vintage theaters. The kinetic harshness of the city comes through in her work. Her characters take the bus; they walk in Los Angeles.Diamond Stingily, in the role of Palace, stars in “The African Desperate,” which Syms co-wrote and directed, and which opens in theaters this fall.Dominica, Inc.But virtual registers are just as important for Syms and her versions. In some of her videos, characters’ texts pop up on the screen in bubbles; her 2018 piece “Mythiccbeing” is an interactive chatbot. Throughout our conversation, she mustered text messages, voice memos and notes from her phone, piecing together how ideas coalesced into art. Her style of hyperlinking in real time matches the hybrid way she works, reifying, refining and recollecting the thoughts that make a person up.Syms traces “DED” to a dream she had in early 2020, while she was sick with Covid; it is stored in an audio file that she doesn’t remember recording. The title of the 2021 show in which that work debuted, “Loot Sweets,” derives from another reverie. She pulls up her notes app: “post ap life in a weird mall. bard people and others. lauren and i are trying to escape. people are looting so we stop by pleats please on the way out. everything is gone. all the good stuff at least. lauren drops from the second floor into the ocean while i crawl down to meet her. she swims w me bc she’s stronger against the current. we finally get out and i’m immediately shot dead.”It’s heavy stuff, a nightmare fed by civil unrest incited by police killing unarmed Black Americans, against the background simmer of a global pandemic. Syms explained the chain of associations behind the phrase “Loot Sweets”: medieval lute music, Bobby McFerrin’s cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” reparations. While artists and activists have called for ending the exploitation of images of Black death, Syms turned to gallows humor.Syms with her electric guitar in her studio in Los Angeles.Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesBut Syms is mining the vein of absurdity, hidden in plain sight, running through freewheeling experiments in Black culture like Amiri Baraka’s poetry or Sun Ra’s jazz. In 2013, she wrote “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” which deflates Afrofuturist esoterica and other escapism. Instead, she proposes: “The chastening but hopefully enlivening effect of imagining a world without fantasy bolt-holes: no portals to the Egyptian kingdoms, no deep dives to Drexciya, no flying Africans to whisk us off to the Promised Land.”The curator Meg Onli, who included Syms in the 2019 exhibition “Colored People Time” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, told me that the text underpinned the show’s take on “the confluence of temporalities, Blackness and the mundane.”“I love her ability to pivot from conversations around Black futurity that center on the fantastic and spectacular,” Onli added, “and remind us that our future may not look drastically different from our present.”Syms pointed out that Teeny, her avatar in “DED,” doesn’t really die. The back of Teeny’s white sweatshirt reads TO HELL WITH MY SUFFERING in all caps. Call it a koan to contain the ambivalence of enjoying an often-awful world.Installation view of “Martine Syms: Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a script and performances constantly revised in real time.Joseph Hu/Philadelphia Museum of ArtAt the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the glowing green installation of “Neural Swamp” mounts two women’s faces on monitors, arranged around vinyl poufs. A third screen flashes with footage from rounds of vintage video game golf. The score and performances are constantly revised in real time: Digitized actors recite a script that Syms wrote but an algorithm updates constantly into an amalgamation of sitcom clichés and tongues.Formally, “Neural Swamp” resembles the Chicago install, and both recall another Syms production: her design for a Prada-sponsored supper club in Hollywood during this year’s Frieze Los Angeles art fair. Her vision for what she called “Prada Mode,” branded “HelLA World,” included “every last detail, from the lecture series to the matchbooks,” Donahue said. Her name on the restaurant’s marquee, DMs from guests crawling around long screens in the dining room, closed-circuit videos of the crowd on monitors hung from the bare studs between the restaurant, the outside bar — “It was a Martine Syms waking dream scene.”Maybe it’s a metaphor, too: There are stanchions, there are walls, but sometimes you can walk through them. Maybe it’s simply that, in a world prone to displays of despair, Syms’s fluorescent way of coping draws a crowd.I asked Syms why, given her dynamic range, she still works as a gallery artist. “I feel a great deal of freedom, you know?” Only in the art world, she said, are your most unqualified hunches met with such serious support. She told me about an event at the Zentrum Paul Klee residency in Bern, Switzerland, where, in lieu of showing slides of old work, she asked the organizers to serve a purple cocktail at the bar. Not only did they agree, a mixologist spent hours beforehand helping her perfect the drink’s taste and color.“If I told somebody I want to run Little Dom’s for a month as an art project,” said Syms, “I probably could.” More