Michael Paul Britto

"He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is the convulsive possession."

-Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia (1935)

Momenta Art is pleased to present Michael Paul Britto’s solo exhibition, Shock & Awe, consisting of his new series of works in combination with videos, a fabricated object, and collage works.

The exhibition’s title is derived from the military doctrine of the same name, which advocates rapid dominance in order to deprive enemies of their will to resist. Yet, obviously, these authors didn’t speculate upon the possibility that the intimidated may become as fearless as the violence imposed on them. Outsmarting these military doctrinaires, Britto’s new body of works pose a series of philosophical and anthropological questions concerning mimesis and transformation, filtering and bridging historical and contemporary experiences of the African American male.

LYNCHTalk, the centerpiece of the exhibition, transforms an infamous public speech, the Willie Lynch Letter, that was supposedly delivered in Virginia by a white slave owner in the 18th century, into a TED talk performed by a black actor. The speech exhibits an alarming resemblance to the Shock & Awe doctrine in advocating strategies to “break the will of the Black slaves to resist.” Performed by a black male actor and applauded by an unseen audience, Britto’s piece induces deep confusion among its unsuspecting viewers. What is he talking about? Whom is he addressing as “we”?

Accompanied by LYNCHTalk is a series of collage works titled Shock & Awe Collages that delineate a series of psychological phrases of black men under the systematic oppression imposed by slavery. Each psychological stage is characterized through a silhouette of a black man in a variety of postures derived from the Willie Lynch Letter and other archival sources. These silhouettes are, with a great dexterity, stenciled from images culled from a variety of magazines.

A two-channel video work, Are We Even Yet? appropriates a memorable scene from a detective movie and TV series in the 1960s, In the Heat of the Night. In search of a murderer, a black police detective encounters a wealthy white plantation owner. Infuriated by his treatment as a suspect, the white plantation owner slaps the detective in the face, and in return, as if a reflexive reaction, the detective immediately returns the gesture. It is this violent, yet fascinating moment, which Britto appropriates in this work, transforming two consequential insults into a singular moment of eternity. The scene repeats itself seamlessly for 44 times, indicating the pedigree of Obama’s presidency.

Britto’s body of works poses interesting questions concerning mimesis. Comprised of abundant “quotations,” which is itself a form of literary imitation, Britto consistently tackles the theme of a black man’s imitation of the external world filled with violence; the detective in In the Heat of the Night slaps the white plantation owner as if it is an automatic somatic response in principle reminiscent of the Code of Hammurabi (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth); a black man in Shock & Awe Collage, threatened by fear-inducing strategies of slave owners, absorbs and fills himself with mediated images.

Through mimetic excess one achieves heightened self-consciousness. LYNCHTalk provides a potential ground for reconciliation. Witnessing this bizarre spectacle of a black man mimicking a white slave owner, he finds the other in himself in the moment that a white man finds himself in the other. In their mutual recognition, they may finally acknowledge how far they have traveled to become not similar to, but just similar, and decide to leave the suffering of the past and present.

(Text written by Kikuko Tanaka)

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Michael Paul Britto graduated with a BA from the City College of New York. Michael’s works range from videos to digital photography, sculpture, collage, and performance. Britto has had residencies at the New Museum in New York as well as Smack Mellon, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation and LMCC. Michael has been featured in shows at El Museo del Barrio, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Kitchen in New York, The Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in England. Britto’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America and the Brooklyn Rail.