EXCESS AND FORMLESSNESS: THE ABANG-GUARD AND THE ATMOSPHERIC

Amber Jamilla Musser’s essay foregrounds multiple modes of formlessness in Abang-guard’s emphasis on making the unrecognized labor of museum guarding tangible. Nestled within their hope that greater recognition might help change the political landscape is an invitation to think complexly about how questions of representation are related to those of form. This is because their work shows how the ability to perceive form often relies on submerging something else—a condition of possibility that we might describe, in turn, as “formless.” However, the essay also argues for thinking beyond an equivalence between invisibility and formlessness by examining how Abang-guard produces a formlessness that is atmospheric and engulfing, thereby shifting the affective and political registers through which formlessness is understood. Instead of focusing only on invisibilization, Abang-guard stays with the excess of formlessness, amplifying our ability to perceive the uncapturable by labor or even representation.

After Image - Sensing Brownness

Amber Jamilla Musser writes about my Dark Matter photography series for her essay Sensing Brownness: On Racialization, Perception, and Method. She states that “visibility comes down to a question of valuation. In this way, Catbagan reminds us that our experience of art, museums, and even knowledge production more broadly is framed by work, people, and spaces that are often marginalized.” Her article is featured in the March 2022 issue of After Image.

Brooklyn Rail - Art Books Review

Amber Jamilla Musser reviews all three shows at the Center for Book Arts Spring 2021 exhibition including my show Lights, Tunnels, Passages, and Shadows. She connects them as manifesting “theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis and use the forms of the book to enlarge what constitutes knowledge and being together.” The review is featured in the June issue of the Brooklyn Rail.

The Brooklyn Rail - Art Seen

“Catbagan’s insurgent method of making time and meaning amid the durative is instructive for many of us now, as we each seek to work through the morass of upheaval and destruction…We work through much time and many thoughts with Catbagan, but how (like life) is up to us—we can move through them quickly or pause for more contemplation.” Amber Musser Jamilla writes about my recent painting/drawing series Notations, which are journalistic and diagrammatic interpolations of my daily thoughts and experiences that I have posted via Instagram @moofro.  

Instagram essay of Notations Series by Amber Jamilla Musser

“The place where these images and words meet can always only be specific to every person’s history and memory; an elusiveness that illuminates the instability that all representation is built on. Words and images are always fictional attempts to produce communication.” Amber Jamilla Musser is is an Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University, who writes about race, aesthetics, and sexuality and is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU, 2014) and Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU, 2018). Her brief essay about my Notations series is on her Instagram @ a_jamilla.