No materials are off-limits for the conceptual sound artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. Whether using iron pots to transmit Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s mystic chord frequencies or incorporating the circulation of water from the James River in a sound-based installation, Toussaint-Baptiste pushes us to pay attention to “low-end” frequencies and their diasporic implications.
Below, Toussaint-Baptiste discusses the usefulness of anger, the errant nature of sound, and the imperative of being a glitch in the system. After our conversation, I was reminded of a passage from Go Ahead in the Rain by the writer Hanif Abdurraqib:
“I imagine the low end to be anything you could touch once but is now just a fading dream. I imagine the low end to be a bassline that rattles your teeth, too. But, I also consider the low end to be the smell of someone you once loved coming back to you.”
Explore Toussaint-Baptiste’s work as the artist plays with new materials in an effort to break from what they call "fixity." Through the break, you’ll find out what comes back—even if comes back as just a hum.
-Kortney Morrow
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste x Kortney Morrow
Kortney Morrow (KM): I’m curious if you could talk a bit about the usefulness of anger, of the break, and how that ties into breaking free.
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (JTB): I grew up listening to a lot of Rage Against the Machine. At the end of their self-titled album, on “Freedom,” Zack de la Rocha says, “anger is a gift.” I really do think that is true when used responsibly. It’s a true gift to be able to really sit in that raw state of emotion when faced with a crisis or a question that begs answering. I’m not interested in discussing art as something that can uproot oppression on its own, but I am interested in really wonderful aesthetic practices that thrive in ruptures and breaks. Even though they can be uncomfortable at the time, those exciting moments often open up new avenues, inroads, or little tributaries. The things that we can effectively affect as cultural practitioners are tradition, aesthetic practice, social practice, and the imaginary. There are things that we can positively break.
There’s the legend of Charles Mingus as one of the first figures to smash a bass on stage angrily. Either the crowd wasn't listening enough, or he deemed the crowd to not be paying the right kind of attention, so he broke the bass. How does that act of breaking take on a sort of larger-than-life effect?
Thinking extra-poetically about it, I’m asking what it might be to give tradition a break? Thinking specifically about a place like South Louisiana, where I’m from—sometimes those traditions feel really warm and sometimes that hand feels really tight smothering; I often desire a break from it all and a break for it all. I mean, we invoke “the ancestors” so much that even in death our ancestors can't get a break. In a place where, historically and contemporaneously, tourism is so intertwined with a very specific Black art form like jazz, that is as much about preserving it as it is about keeping it like shuffling to the point where it feels like a zombie.
Can the people who are playing it take a break? Can the people who are being invoked, in death and absentia, also be given a break?
KM: It’s almost like sounds can get stuck in a cycle where people feel nostalgic, but the nostalgia can also be repressive at a certain point.
JTB: There is something to getting stuck. This choreographer that I’ve worked closely with, Will Rawls, works a lot with language. The first project we collaborated on, “What Remains,” was with Claudia Rankine. He specifically has this practice called “repetition transformation,” where through a sort of emphasized repeating of a gesture or of a word, over time, it becomes something else. I’m thinking about how to apply that practice and that generosity to my work.
And to be clear: I also love jazz. I love these forms. They've gotten me to where I am. But they didn't become what they were out of sole repetition. They became what they were out of mutation. What kind of glitch in a system is necessary to force a mutation? Maybe the person is the glitch. Maybe the one who is just like no more. The one who refuses, like the Bartleby character in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street." Maybe it’s the figure who says I won’t, or I would prefer not to continue along the cycle or continue one-to-one replicating and insists on a type of mutation.
KM: I’m reminded of this idea that Blackness itself is this sort of orientation towards fugitivity, toward flight. I think sounds can also have an orientation towards fugitivity as well—they can disrupt and refuse. When you think about your practice, what do you feel like you are refusing?
JTB: Hmm. I don’t know if I am. I’m thinking about modes of refusal. If anything, I’m refusing a type of universal fixedness or fixity. Nothing ever has to be what it is since the pipe wasn’t the pipe (from Rene Magritte’s infamous painting, The Treachery of Images). I’m playing with that tension. But also, again, there's a crude ontological realness to everything, including people.
Also, fugitivity doesn’t always mean constantly searching for a new thing. I like that you mentioned sounds as fugitive because sometimes the fugitive or errant nature of sound means that it comes back to you. That it does something wavy. I find Édouard Glissant’s drawings really helpful to think about when considering the errant nature of sound. It definitely moves around, but maybe sometimes it comes back. Maybe when it comes back, it's weaker or stronger, or just a hum. In that way, it feels much closer to Black American and some diasporic cultural practices where there are vestiges of shit from multiple generations ago, numerous generations ago, that we can't even give a name to. Yet, it’s there, and it’s gone, and it’s wiggled around, and it’s come back and maybe it’s wildly different, and maybe it’s just a hum. That feels more in the spirit of the way that I’m thinking about Black cultural and social production and sound. It’s moving through time and space and history but maybe also coming back from something.
KM: Do you ever think about erasure and if sounds can be at risk of erasure?
JTB: It feels like that happens through the imposition of social and cultural values or even change in technology. High-fidelity and digital recordings, to me, feel like a mode of erasure via hyperclarity. They're cleaning up the moment and taking the noise out of things. I love cassette; I love physical forms of listening to sound because you have to negotiate the medium itself, which becomes similar to listening to somebody playing an instrument.
And then I think about what happens when people move to areas and bring with them certain social and cultural assumptions about how a neighborhood should sound? They begin to erase not just the presents and sounds, but also the practices and the histories. Sounds are not a-historic. The more you stack them, the more histories stack with them. I think in cities like New Orleans, there are folks who have had plenty to say about the sort of quieting of the city that's attempted to happen as certain neighborhoods have shifted due to development. But I also think that the wonderful thing about that errantry and Glissant’s drawing, is that it reminds us of the gift of time. Sometimes, it takes a long time for a ripple of water to make its way to the edge and back.
I think we’ve seen a few times, for good and not-so-good, that erasure doesn't prove to be as permanent as it presumes itself to be. Sometimes when things go quiet, ears are still listening. If things go quiet, they’re gonna find something. Our ears are also really hungry. Our entire listening vessel wants to hear.
KM: Can you talk a little bit about some of your exercises in reclaiming, reimagining, or retrofitting tools of state violence?
JTB: So there’s a consistent strain through my practice, recently, where I’m working with tools of state. For my recent piece “…and Drive (Far Away),” I took a decommissioned cop car and fit it with two 18-inch subwoofers in the back and a dash cam facing the front and the back. The really complicated thing about that car is that it still had the cage, and the back doors couldn't open from the inside. The car was, to a degree, still in capture mode. This was the fourth life of the car as a project car. Three other artists had had it before me, and none of them decided to change that aspect of it. For my purposes, that felt like an exciting space where no one would be allowed in. No one could get in the back. If anyone got into the back while the performance was happening, the performance ended.
The other thing that felt really wonderful and gave me permission is that the Crown Vic is also ubiquitous with a kind of car that goes to auction. People buy it for cheap and do things with it like put some 18-inch subwoofers in the back and some tint and turn it into something completely different. So, there was already precedent to take this visible signifier of the State and do something else with it.
KM: I know you’re interested in incorporating tinted glass into your art practice right now. How do your materials come to you?
JTB: My curiosities revolve around the same set of things—things that reflect, things that you look through, and things that make low frequencies. I’m thinking about the tinted car window as something that allows you to look out but not necessarily look in. When I see a shiny or even a matte black surface, I see a portal. Sometimes, portals are for stepping through, but sometimes, you have to break them to get through the portal. It’s important to break with our own notion of what a portal is to get to that break or get into the space of rupture and then growth. Since I had already been working with the car, the car window just felt important. It’s a type of glass that is tempered not to be easily breakable. What is the act of force required to break a piece of tempered and tinted windshield glass?
KM: What’s the last moment you had in your studio that put you in a state of unknowing, that disrupted your own ideas, where you surprised yourself and you felt on the threshold of something completely new?
JTB: Recently I was sort of confronted with the reality that my work is in the service of something else. In performances, I talk about how this is a front for something that feels much more complicated, something much bigger, that it isn’t just art. This felt like a surprise, because I really doubled down on the idea of art being without function—like really, really without function—even when it feels good or is fun or even unpleasant.
The other moment was realizing the necessity for this show, Break Stuff, a gesture that is both direct and conceptual in its execution but also in its reasoning for both. Can I potentially create an abstract painting by smashing an upright bass onto a canvas while also evoking this attempt to break with tradition and give history a break? You can’t play a broken bass. That’s a very crude truth. Ultimately, who cares? This is going to happen, and then, one way or another, the form is going to continue, so it becomes a matter of where one positions themselves in relation to that momentum.
More explicitly, this is me going on record and saying, even if it does continue as it is going to, I would prefer not to. There are plenty of parallels between musicians, dancers, and the military. My tools are instruments and things that make sound, and these are the things that I'm choosing to break in refusal of a type of history marching forward. I wonder what sort of imaginative thing might burgeon when folks are reminded that they can break their own tools and say no.
"The Slave Trade came through the cramped doorway of the slave ship, leaving a wake like that of crawling desert caravans. It might be drawn like this: African countries to the East; the lands of America to the West. This creature is in the image of a fibril.
African languages became deterritorialized, thus contributing to creolization in the West. This is the most completely known confrontation between the powers of the written word and the impulses of orality.”
—Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 1990
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste's work, spanning roles as artist, composer, and performer, considers errant relations that push toward the limits of subjectivity. Toussaint-Baptiste has exhibited and performed at museums and institutions including The Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU); 1708 Gallery; Berlin Atonal; MoMA PS1; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The artist has also received awards, fellowships and residencies from the Camargo Foundation Core Program Fellowship (2022); Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Sound Artist-In-Residence (2021), and Rauschenberg Residency 381 (2019), among others. Toussaint-Baptiste holds an MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts from Brooklyn College and is currently Assistant Professor of Sculpture & Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Kortney Morrow is a poet creating from her studio in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has received support from 68to05, The Academy of American Poets, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and Transition Magazine. When she’s not writing, she’s co-running Studio Reciprocity—a consulting collective that helps organizations and artists heal and transform.
A printed version of this interview was published in conjunction with Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste: Break Stuff, Other Plans, 2024. Design by Collection of Collections and printed by constance. To receive a copy of this publication, contact us at info@otherplans.gallery.