Cauleen Smith’s Instagrammable, Anti-Capitalist Treatise
Pictured on the right, artist Cauleen Smith. On the left, a piece from COVID Manifesto.
By Jad Dahshan, third-year student studying Art History and Chemistry
"Yes. The vaccine is incomplete. I share these books in the hopes that through study and conversation exchange occurs. Germs are swapped. Maybe we need more than one vaccine. Maybe I need your vaccine and you need mine. The thing is resistance. Resistance is the thing.”
-Human_3.0 Reading List Manifesto, Cauleen Smith
In 2015, interdisciplinary filmmaker and former CRSPC Artist in Residence Cauleen Smith began Human_3.0 Reading List, a series of 57 graphite and watercolor drawings depicting the covers of books which have influenced her. The covers range from the theoretical and the diasporic to the lyrical and the science fictional. As part of the project, the artist also penned the Human_3.0 Reading List Manifesto which is quoted above: a self-described “low-grade inoculation” against neoliberalism and the systems of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy it contains.
Unsurprisingly, this language of contagion, disease, and immunity has seeped into Smith’s recent COVID Manifesto, which is part of the Gray Center’s online conceptual exhibition, Another Idea. “CAPITALISM is the VIRUS,” reads the 7th tenet.
Over the course of April, May, and June, Smith posted the 23 tenets, or principles, of her COVID Manifesto on Instagram, which in recent months hasbecome a locus for sharing protest information, bail fund databases, and educational materials like playlists and reading lists of Black feminist texts akin to the artist’s own illustrated syllabus. Like the Human_3.0 Reading List, the COVID Manifesto is manually inscribed with graphite on notepad paper. Handwriting these notes compels one to take pause from scrolling through their social feed to parse through them. This is similar to how Smith’s drawing of the book covers on the Reading List slowed people down and invited renewed interest,” as Smith explains in an interview with Art in America.
The Manifesto acts as a call to action rather than an instructional manual to dismantling capitalism. Responding to national and global events in real-time, it began with more playful tenets such as watching movies online and gradually grew into calls for the abolition of prisons, police, and “capitalist racial illogics.” Some tenets were also love poems to the planet suffering due our relentlessly extractive economy, and others were odes to the Black women, who are leading the struggle for collective liberation.
Smith’s COVID Manifesto is unique in form as a project confined to social media. However, it also shares it’s origins with the rest of her oeuvre as it is built on years of study of Afrofuturist, Feminist, and Black Radical traditions. Smith started her career as a traditional filmmaker, eventually expanding her collaborative and experimental practice to engage with public space. Her work focused on bringing people together in experiences of collective consciousness, mutuality, and cooperation. Besides the installation-based and highly tactile staging of her films in exhibitions like the Whitney’s Mutualities, the artist has also organized processions such as one in conjunction with a Smart Museum exhibition in 2017 and another for MASS MoCA in 2019. The COVID Manifesto, however, is not mediated through space or object. Rather, the Internet is used as a tool “to disrupt our dependency on social media and the ways in which it soothes us.” Through this lens, social media is a natural form for COVID Manifesto to take shape.
“Smith’s politics are serious,” writes Siddhartha Mitter for ARTFORUM, “but even more fundamental to her outlook is an ethic of care.” A care for life, a care for others, a care for the earth, and therefore a care to study, to envision, and to act. Smith creates open space for us to imagine different realities and to understand the urgency of this imaginative act. Even in a manifesto, Smith does not take on a didactic position to the viewer. Instead, encounters with her work swell with the possibilities of alternate futures, “a cornucopia of future histories.”
Hello! I'm Jad and I am a rising fourth-year studying Art History and Chemistry at the College. I write for artmejo.com about global and Arab contemporary art and occasionally do some arts reporting for the Chicago Maroon. At school, you'd usually find me dangling off a rope in Le Vorris & Vox Circus's practice room at the Logan Center or filming an Instagram story at the Smart Museum. Since being quarantined though, I haven't really strayed beyond the edges of my laptop or sketchbook. Each week of “Another Idea,” I will explore and reflect one piece in the exhibition. Experience and explore the exhibition yourself at The Gray Center.