“You only burn for all eternity once.”

—Manèstèri The Tration


All heat is validation, and art has a lot of it. Suppose you’re in a rich mega-collector’s home—no matter the pretense. The abode is “lit” and has “lit” shit in it. If they owned one, the ignition point would arguably be nearest their David Hammons. Quality interactions with the work aside—it’s a Hammons. The same-difference can happen when attending a blockbuster exhibition opening at a major institution. Just imagine the museum as a communal version of the aforementioned mega-collector’s home; only the museum is hopefully owned by canon. Now, objects are objectified, right? Yet, the paintings/sculptures that are Hood Niggas Camping focus on flipping the switch that would allow the art to objectify us. As for openings, most people are focused on themselves being seen more as art than the art there to be seen. This reveals art’s standing in the broader social hierarchy, even within the confines of its presentation. It’s rare that art isn’t a jaded practice on all sides. Based on its public associability, I’d venture that it functions as lowbrow at this stage. It used to be the light that went forward into unknown darknesses, ensuring there was footing for Gods. Now, it’s the easiest space to transmute class signaling for dirt cheap—or free.

Hood Niggas Camping is different. It self-advocates for the bottom-up approach to validation, as opposed to the top-down flow. It doesn’t subscribe to the generalized, exhibitional pecking order of art during its showing. Instead of using the works as social currency (a flex-worthy IG backdrop), sophistication theater (a cheap date at the museum), investment vehicle (a speculative buy at auction), or exhibition filler (another name on the checklist)—Hood Niggas Camping uses you. In a sense, it’s art that you’re art for. It’s better than us in the same way we’re better than it. Take aspects of our relationship with fire, for example. There’s a smug-flavored delusion we synchronously and psychically imbibe along with whatever alcoholic beverage we elect to drink as we stand close enough to a contained flame of our making. There’s a self-righteous tingle of omnipotence born from the posturing intrinsic to man’s mechanical fortuity and defiance of the physical that intoxicates our thoughts while admiring our unlikely ability to harness something so cursed with avarice it’s doomed with the need to eat the oxygen we simply breathe. A dominion so false we can’t touch our rule over it. Fire. What else can’t you touch, especially if it’s in a gallery or museum?

Hood Niggas Camping communicates across intersections of functionality, luxury, and need more effectively than we typically do when repositioning our own symbolic switches. You know, it's not like we invented fire. Fire was already here. We just learned how to manipulate it. And no other animal can do that, so we’re unique and important. Yes, realistically, we’re exponentially more important than a piece of art hanging in a gallery or museum that we could destroy with fire. So, what’s the next poetic step with inversion in mind? Does Hood Niggas Camping consume you as heat? They're staring down at you the same way you would a campfire. You’re the center of their attention. When you think about it, we—humans—are “lit.” We emit heat. Our bodies effectively cook us as we fuel and age. I remember hearing somewhere that if you’re caught in a crazy blizzard with someone overnight without shelter, you two should get naked and cuddle up because your bodies will generate more heat that way. We’re clothes-wearing “stars”—made out of the same shit the ones in space are, supposedly.

Hood Niggas Camping is designed to be installed in a massive circle of larger-than-life, Stonehenge-esque “pedestals” that act as three-dimensional, freestanding chunks of a white cube wall. All 21 original, monochromatic, black assemblages would be installed on the inward-facing fronts of these giant, encampment-forming supports. Even though it would be a spatial impossibility—no matter a local’s capacity—ideally, their circle would be center-oriented—or tight—enough to where if one were standing in its void (where an imaginary campfire should be), whatever Hood Niggas Camping directly in front of you would be visibly full and clear as day. Meanwhile, the others—to the left and right—round out the curvature of your viewpoint, igniting your peripherals’ simulation of refraction. In effect, channeling that shimmering way heat absorbs the air while simultaneously baking it. The mirage effect. Have you ever looked at a fellow camper from across a campfire’s blaze? The fire almost tricks you into believing that the best way to see the person clearly in front of you is from its point of view. From its vantage point, you are the flame. You’re not on fire. You are fire. A fire to keep some hood niggas who decided to go camping warm.

Technically, Hood Niggas Camping is one of the practice’s inverted-performance installations—not a painting/sculpture series. They’ve made a campfire out of you. A Class A fire needs more natural fuel like wood or paper to get hotter; Hood Niggas Camping’s fire needs more you—the more of you that’s added, the more it burns. Therefore, every energetic outflow while standing in as their bonfire is a gradation of flame, from flicker to roar. You’re still smoldering—even if you stand there silent, eyes shut, lips zipped. Any verbalized praise or condemnation, neck-crane, body-pivot, or widened eye against their scale is an emission of your heat and enactment of you as fire for their use. Onsite participation alone doesn’t designate the amount of heat being contrived for this group of camping “hood niggas.” You can leave the show and inadvertently remember the experience of standing there. You are still burning and warming them up. You can share it with someone via text, email, call, or in person; their attention, reading, hearing, and thoughts all become kindling. It all energetically contributes to the fated inferno from pre-show anticipation to post-show buzz. Leave it to art to use your ego for its practical use. In this context, does art use us better than we’d typically use it?

Man—yet they wield it.

Hood

Hood prays for autogenic self-redemption within the art of being itself. One might argue that any upstanding attributes that Hood has are not Hood's, as if Hood can't be both Hood and claim them. This sentiment revolves around separation, and we often confuse the ability to separate physically with the unrealistic "suspended intellectualization" of being able to separate via definition. You can physically avoid certain elements, or attempt to, by not going around them or where they presumably can't. Imagine that you're having dinner at a Michelin 3-star restaurant. Now, imagine a hood-ass dude—face tatts, scars, gold slugs, and that fucked up, out-of-place energy, who’s outdressing the dress-code and sitting at a better table. All that physical separation is obviously out the window. All you have left is definitional separation.

He's not as classy as you. Or, his money isn't as legit as yours—and per my description of who he mostly is, you would be right. However, definitional separation excels when it’s your definition doing the separating.

Consequently, in the preceding scenario, physical separation gets bypassed by what Hood-Ass Dude actually earned. Can any hood dude sell enough dope, hit enough licks, or whatever “unsophisticated” and likely criminal activity a certain mindset only allows them to afford embodying a better version of your patronage at the same Michelin 3-star spot? It’s doubtful, but a rare one can. There are admirable ways to do even wrong things. If he sold dope, did he cut it ethically? If he hit licks, did he not dome the person he robbed after they complied? Is his ill-gotten “credit” legitimized by braving a Michelin 3-star restaurant instead of peaking at Ruth’s Chris? Does mastering the dress code garner him a degree or two more legitimation? Does transcending the dress code edge him further in that direction? Granted, going to a restaurant—Michelin 3-star or not—is going to a restaurant. There are levels. What about going to a museum? Of course, Hood-Ass-Dude could pull up to an opening dressed to the nines in art chic. But what if once you got there, you realize he’s the art you came to see at another place you expected him not to be? That would invert the whole premise of definitional separation of association—physically and intellectually—in a space where the thing usually separated from is the thing you're separating for.

Is dining at a Michelin 3-star restaurant a positive activity? I’d wager most would say yes. Even if the experience disappoints, its intent was unquestionably clear. Dining there is not “hood,” that’s for sure. But how much of Hood’s negative charge gets scrubbed by cultivating its positive side? Everything has degrees. For example, there are only degrees of equality. Hell, anything identical is merely a degree of what it can’t equally be alone (LOL). We gaslight, in degrees, our grasp of difficult ideas by narrating them like they’re always outside us. So instead, we assign a face. Hood Niggas Camping anthropomorphizes Hood—absurdly and with calculation. It names it like a person and codes it like a system. Not to relate to it, but to humanize it just enough to multiply it—past sense, past sympathy, into something projective. We interact with objects like humans all the time—why not concepts? Abstraction’s real job is to frame understanding in the direction of “beyond.” Whether “beyond” is legit or just marketing, it implies progress. And when you stack the deck toward progress, the odds eventually break your way. If there’s more of a problem, then there must be—abstractly—more of a fix. That’s not just abstractly complicated; that’s concretely complicated.

Even if Hood only wanted to be hood, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t randomly create something of itself that’s elevated or profound enough to reach the heights of fine dining or fine art. If that were the case, Primitive Art would never have existed since the practitioners weren't formally taught. That was the point. If you don’t want to be around it, you’re not dumb. It’s tough to navigate. Still, Hood in Hood Niggas Camping is more than its conceivable stigmatic definition. What’s that mean for its place in a museum? Well, when was the last time you were shown in a museum? Despite that, steps assert themselves in space. If you’re inside a structure, you can’t unqualify the steps taken for you to experience standing inside it more than its existence qualifies the steps taken for it to have space to be inside of in the first place. Now, how you got in there is how you got in there. You’re in there. And somehow—whether the backdoor, side window, rappelling down from the ceiling, or by hook or crook—you’re standing inside the analogous structure, meaning, class, import, accomplishment, etc., you find yourself standing in. Depending on the degree of whatever context, it might not count for much, but if it takes 578 from 579 to get to one—it counts for something.

I only scratched the surface with the above definitional musings of "suspended intellectualization.” In that sense, I guess Hood is a fantasy. All of my purest dreams were hoodborne anyway. Hood is what fostered my desire to add one more slot to the urban “Big Three”—rapper, baller, or kingpin. Why not annex a nontraditional aspiration? We love to talk all that “giving back” shit with an authoritative tone that contradicts itself—i.e., MLK and Malcolm X. Or, to “Big-Three-ize” it a bit—Nipsey Hustle and Young Dolph. I’m good on that. I’ll keep my embodiment of the vision breathing and show little hood boys and girls that they can start dreaming about going live with fine art while keeping it “real.” The only giving back I trust—doing it. Hood needs to see what these Lambo hallucinations, playful absolutions, and hook-ass tattoos underlaid by cutthroat development strategy and “toxic” competitiveness can bring about. Fuck it. Imagine how lit it would be if the culture ascended to fighting and shooting out in galleries or museums because two “real” blue-chip artists got beef. And the artists’ grading scale would ultimately be based on how active they are—like real gangsta rap (admittedly, it does feel better listening to music about shooting somebody by somebody who shoots or gets shot by somebody.) I’m joking. I don’t want the white cube space to turn into an arena for the contemporary art version of Quando Rondo vs. King Von, bringing a different kind of “canon” to canonical while I’m getting mine. But, as far as fine art goes? If it’s real enough, it should be able to be as hood as it wants.

Art—yet we wield it.

Nigga

I had a sit-down at Starbucks with a Dallas-based collector a few years back. We were amidst butting heads about the merits of the practice’s inverted-performance installation titled FOGA: Real-Nigga Edition when he proffers what he believed to be a virtuous counter by asking me: “What if somebody made a video game where you can hang niggers instead of doing it in real life?” Despite whatever ‘inspiration’ he thought it carried, it was really just a lazy reversal of FOGA’s therapeutic absurdities, anchored in a false equivalency—likely fueled by his opportunistic soft spot for the boys in blue à la his affiliations with local government. Another incident found me grabbing a slice with a different Dallas-based collector who I was comfortable enough with to sprinkle in a nigga-this and an nigga-that here and there—speaking how I really speak—like Kevin Hart does. He was appalled and called himself condemning me—all the while “saying” it, of course. He also took it upon himself to hope I wouldn’t teach my son “that” word. Then he went on and on about how a lot of people around him said it growing up, but not him because it was a horrible word, and his being a part of a certain marginalized and persecuted group himself only magnified his emphatic sensibilities—all the while still “saying” it. Cool.

Yet, the funniest thing was that he kept “saying” it wrong.

Maybe he was confused—

I said nigga-this and nigga-that. He kept saying nigger-this and

nigger-that.

Why say nigger instead of nigga? They're two completely different words. They have two completely different connotations. Who goes around dry-ass putting ERs on words that end with an A? It’s like we don’t give Nigga credit for what it did anymore. Suppose an African dude sits you down and tells a compelling story involving a hyena. Will you project your morality, guilt, irreverence, proper English, etc., onto the validity of a fable centering around an animal as lowly as a “hyener?” Would a “llamer” or a “pumer” better suffice as stand-ins of whatever allegorical lesson is conveyed? Imagine the amount of disrespect and “traumer” caused by correcting how the African shares his own story. Funnily enough, in Hood Niggas Camping, the overtly dissociative literalness prevalent in how certain folks might regard the word nigga works against itself in that truthful way only comedy can. Because if we’re just making shit whatever we want it to be, these niggas can be more than “niggas.” Since abstracted Lamborghini hood shapes constitute each Hood Niggas Camping, does that technically makes them Italian? Maybe they’re blacks born in Italy—which likely makes them twice removed because they’re actually African niggas—or, maybe they’re some white Italians acting black—“Wiggerrones.”

Yes, there’s an illicit dare to say nigga, too—if a black person says it around you—but it’s a dare to say the right word. How do you smudge all that courage and glory by blurting out the wrong one? What if I had a gun to your head and told you that if you didn’t say nigga I was going to push your wig back? Would you seriously—all sweaty, panting, and swallowing loud—utter nigger instead? Even if 'Hood Niggas Camping' were titled 'Hood Niggers Camping' and you said it like the former, I’d still wonder why you said it incorrectly. There are a million ways to imaginatively contextualize both n-words’ distinctions, but the simplest seems the hardest. Does the context of the art world make either n-word more unspeakable these days (not if you ask Glen Ligon and 52 Walker)? What about in a Texan art text? Let's do a "textperiment"—an in-text installation of text—on how different Nigga is from Nigger. Below, you will find a modest selection of n-worded sayings, dialogues, and quips drawn from pop culture, historical intellect, personal imaginings, etc. One will be its nigger version, and the other will be its nigga version. You'll see the difference.

ER—Niggers can’t leave the calling of niggers: Nigger, solely to other races.

A—Niggas can’t leave the calling of niggas: Nigga, solely to other races.

ER—Why does Nigger stay at the OK Corral?

A—Why does Nigga stay at the OK Corral?

ER—If Niggered Nigger nigged a nigg of niggered niggers. Then how many niggered niggers did Niggered Nigger nigg?

A—If Niggaed Nigga nigged a nigg of niggaed niggas. Then how many niggaed niggas did Niggaed Nigga nigg?

ER—Do you believe that what’s wrong with the Nigger is that there’s always going to be something nigger about the Nigger?

A—Do you believe that what’s wrong with the Nigga is that there’s always going to be something nigga about the Nigga?

ER—Niggers are things.

A—Niggas are things.

“Yikes,” huh?

Now, I'm not saying Nigga made them better, funnier, or make more sense—but it definitely didn't make them worse. What it did do, unequivocally, is make them different. Because it's not the same word. If you're claiming they're just as bad, you’re bullcorning. That disrespects everything the word nigga has accomplished. Since cash is king, let’s cherry-pick an example: Sure Nigger made hella bank back when—but that was a different time. Nigga revolutionized the market. Whether or not Nigga’s capital generation has eclipsed Nigger’s is debatable—I lean yes—but Nigga is hands down the more accepted today. More “market-friendly.” It turned the n-word into an industry of itself. And while we’re at it, Nigga made each one of the above “textperimental” versus’ cooler—by a landslide.

X: David-Jeremiah, Nigga isn’t okay just because it’s “cooler” than Nigger. How can it be cool, considering what it really means?

Y: So you’re going to cancel Nigga because it used to be a nigger?

X: (Gasps; spluttering.) I-Uh-W-uh-I-You-Y-Uh…

Is that it? Is it because Nigger spawned Nigga that you won’t say the correct word? Is this the

n-word version of the “real” hip-hop vs. rap argument?  Zealots—I swear.

Regardless of your misgivings about it, the word nigga is better than the word it isn’t anymore. It already “did the work.” The continued attempt to deplore Nigga doesn’t make it less than what it is now. We live in a world where, based on how you feel, kidnapping the intent of something and holding it ransom in exchange for the perceived negativity and offense of it that you want without “earning” it is okay. Of course, the Nigga in Hood Niggas Camping will continue to make less sense the more you misinterpret it against its context. But it’s already more significant than the misconception that your presumptions were fireproof. Now or later, they’ll be burned to warm up or reheat validation that’s already there, just like you will. Similar to how this text itself has reinterpreted misinterpretation already misplaced. Yes, that’s how Hood Niggas Camping works. Even though it has you “burning” for it, it still does more for you. After all, it is inanimate art hanging on an extensive and fancy wall. But the fact remains that through the transmutation Nigga afforded Nigger, Nigga fell victim to our definitional separationism’s suspended intellectualism. That’s our bad.

Despite it taking something real to make something fake, juxtaposed Nigger, a purist might still argue that Nigga isn’t “real.” I’m kinda joking. So, we’re clear, the exact mechanics of “earned” contextualization and “inverted” validation, as examined and proposed in the prior segment of this text regarding Hood, apply just as precisely to Nigga. Do the projected negative connotations of this series’ middle name supersede its achievements? Hood Niggas Camping is the honoree of a hopefully culture-shifting exhibition in a world-class museum. Did you have to change your middle name to walk in and see the show? No? Then why would the art have to? Nigga is larger than the discomfort we both feel or front when hearing it. There’s a positivity in its past, and past what you’ve been taught to associate with that past—this time, at least. Will we ever see what happens when Nigga completely loses the acceptable version of itself? Who knows? In the meantime, it’s undeniable how Nigga did a lot of great shit for Nigger. That deserves respect. My niggas are in museums. Where’s yurs? For how many hundred years have mouths put together the letters, breath, and sound to say your name like they have Nigga’s? Based on that alone, Nigga deserves to be in a museum/the canon more than you deserve to judge whether it does or not. What’s the point of affirming something already stamped? Maybe it’s Nigga affirming itself? They’ll live longer than any memory of the flame they conjured through you. They’ll go forth, consuming the heat of your grandchildren's grandchildren’s, etc.—while making them burn as well. At least these niggas are non-stereotypical enough to plan a camping trip.

Nigga—yet I wield it.

Camping

Hood Niggas Camping explores depictions of—and plays on—camp and camping. Sontag’s definition of camp is entirely Sontag’s. The 2019 Met Gala is all hers. Hood Niggas Camping, on the other hand, focuses on the dynamic of the highbrow meeting the lowbrow.  Although “meeting” sounds polite, it’s not.  It’s rife with preliminaries. The highbrow hand-picks what it finds usable from the lowbrow, brings it up to its level, breeds with it, and begets something “new” that’s leveraged in a way mostly benefiting the highbrow. Think: Supreme—high-end fashion plus skateboard culture. That amounts to something more “lit.” Lit? Heat? Fire? Campfire? It’s turning into something hotter. But since hot air rises, Hood Niggas Camping inverts the flow. It converts the “hotness” or chain of validation from a top-down flow into a bottom-up flow. Limits of popularized technology aside, and despite it being foolishly dangerous, we don’t see campers suspending a campfire in midair to lie underneath for warmth. Still, through the pseudo-biblical physics of our floating fire analogy, no skater makes the kind of money from skateboarding that the person who made Supreme makes from Supreming. Camping, then, marks not only a style—but a dispossession: those forced to generate enough heat to be “lit” while relying on pre-existing socioeconomic and architectural structures to find shelter.

Hood Niggas Camping gathers around a “campfire” of “you.” As previously surmised, I doubt they'll ever be installed according to their conceptual ideal. So, technically, the idea of “camping” is largely restricted to the work traveling from show to show. Yet, camping also implies a campsite, which conceptually widens the business of subsets/individual Hood Niggas Camping—installation-wise, via activities native to this generally outdoor recreation. In effect, maybe the three ducked off in the corner of an installation/“campsite” are getting blazed. One of the two along the site’s parameters could be taking a leak from a position that betrays his fear of going deeper into the woods while his homie ensures “no one’s looking.” Or, it could be a huge campground, and a lone, soul-searching Hood “Nigga” Camping has a personal fire going on some Nigga, Pray, Love type-shit. Therefore, in Hood Niggas Camping the installation and concept can partially collapse into each other—making them, to a degree, interchangeable. The objective at large is to warm them up. Creating a fire is nearly effortless these days. You can build a fire damn near anywhere. If you can build a fire in your living room, they can make one in the same room out of you. It doesn’t take all of them to do it. With that in mind—and since each unitary figure of the work is a “nigga”—if a Hood Niggas Camping finds itself alone, excluded from the ideal encircled install or broader exhibitional “campground” (wether in an institution’s vault, or a group show of varying bodies of work, or in a collector’s home), then Hood Niggas Camping would merely turn into a Hood Nigga Camping.

Coda

My favorite aspect of Hood Niggas Camping is aesthetical. They have a simultaneous blending of figurative and portraiture. But this lies in the void between their “torso" and

“lower body.” The space between the assemblage’s bottom and middle units reads like mouths grafted straight to their stomachs for faster digestion. That would be ridiculous. But, designating Hood Niggas Camping’s consumption of heat/us as ingestive has caused me to fall into a pattern of imagining the different mechanics and sensations of mastication implied by their diversely shaped “mouths.” This haunting and assumptive profundity of liberation I’ve long imagined being eaten alive to be, doesn’t cancel out the practice’s exercisable intellectual theory. Depending on which Hood Niggas Camping you’re getting consumed by, that could feel like being sliced, mushed, shaved, chopped, gnarled, gummed—or just swallowed whole. Any of that might be better than burning.

Lastly, fire needs itself. This series initially adhered to the practice’s production norm of three sets of seven per body of work—1-Set-7, 2-Set-7, and S-7. However, it also qualified to be retrofitted with the newly developed fourth set of seven—EE (Emma Esse). The actional texture prominent in 1-Set-7 and 2-Set-7 unifies the initial onset of heat as its illuminative glow shimmers between each tri-part Lamborghini hood shape of each work. These sets also reveal the flame-induced “shying” or overlapping shrinkage that occurs when most consumable things get too close to fire. In S-7, the texture begins to fester and roil as they are on the verge of becoming one with flame. The swells and disfigurements at this stage are presented through the impasto application of the practice’s hallmark latex mixture. In EE, the seven works progressively erupt into flames and, in turn, burn off all of the surface predispositions, prejudices, and pre-expectations to reveal the polychromatic beings of blazing fire they truly are. Not in that easily disdained “We Wuz Kangz!” way so mercilessly mocked on social media free-for-alls like X, but in the way that reveals that the same human affects of being dominant, paramount, or cultivated to the degree afforded by their “earned” highbrow context of fine art don’t actually make them better than you, it makes them better at being you. Because, like us, they played with fire and got burnt to shit too.

Itself—yet it wields it.

Basic Summation

Hood Niggas Camping is about making something more than you the way you want it to be for longer than you’re able to.


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