Dissonant Assemblages: Martine Syms' The African Desperate

In a bare, institutional room in a brutalist mid-century academic building, Palace Bryant assembles the culmination of three years of rather intense theoretical, artistic, and emotional work. The space does not fit the gravity of the event, nor does it do her art any favors. In this depressed, informal space, the pieces of her assemblage sculpture feel as haphazard as the half-full grocery store containers of cubed cheese and fruit she sets out with discount wine. But none of what Palace has done is haphazard. Even quick glimpses of the objects which comprise the piece connote meticulous intention and point of view. She sets up four chairs and on each places an artist’s statement. 

Her interlocutors arrive with drab unceremoniousness in clothes befitting a CVS run. They gesticulate odd, awkward hellos and take their seats. These four, accomplished in their field, respected by the institution, are the final gatekeepers to Palace’s future. But despite the lack of any pomp and circumstance, this gathering is a formality. The panel of professors do not read the statement, they do not so much as glance at Palace’s work. One can assume they’re already quite familiar. This is a thesis defense, and they each open with their own assessment of the work and of Palace as an artist before she will be given a chance to retort. The first of this degree granting authority pulls a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, unfolds it, and reads:

“In Palace’s work, the impossible trajectory of hope becomes the ground where irony and advice dance together in frightening hallways alive with languor and vitality. Screenland is the underground and overlay for consciousness in Palace’s work with consciousness understood as being made of multiple entry and exit points filled with voices and their shapes, exerting and relieving pressure on that question of how to live in all kinds of amazing and fucked up ways. Palace’s materials are whatever she needs them to be, ultimately being themselves and part of the whole at the same time and fluidly.”

If that feels dense and confounding, yes, it means nothing. The remaining three continue, creating a chorus of angel, devil, good cop, bad cop. One calls her work “polite” and admonishes her for “always having to prove [she’s] done the homework.” She is implored to give herself permission to accept the unknown in herself through invocations of Edward Glissant, a Black theorist who spoke about the concept of the colonized subject choosing opacity and inscrutability in the face of the colonizer’s demand for transparency. They make several unironic allusions to Fred Moten, a Black professor and cultural critic who writes harshly about white academic institutions. She is patronized by one as the hardest working person he’s ever met. 

The whole exercise feels absurd. And it is. All of them sitting in this dreary little room with such grandiose import, granting theoretical approval to artistic efforts. The entire conceit of an MFA program in general is pretty absurd. One arrives at the advanced degree stage after having already acquired the requisite skills, in order to situate oneself in a theoretical context and to further refine a personal artistic vision. But you can really do anything and, with the thinnest of theoretical justifications, call it art. This is a good thing, this is essential for discourse. But the degree granting institution must decide which justifications are earned, and which art is insightful, or exciting, or “good.” The institution is the discursive referee.

Discourse occupies an ethereal space, but institutions like the one depicted in Martine Syms’ The African Desperate are brick and mortar, and only so many people can fit inside. These are spaces in which the theoretical work of the outsider receives the utmost reverence. In which quotes from the work of post-colonial theorists (though some of them would take issue with that term) function like an intellectual currency. The foundational ethos at work may be the critical dismantling of the racial, economic, and intellectual power structures inherent in the Western canon, but in practice, very few outsiders are let in. In practice, these often prohibitively expensive programs tend to be populated by wealthy white people. They favor the already connected. 

This is how we find ourselves in a very awkward room indeed. Four white academics facing a Black woman, with no sense of irony about the authority with which they wield quotes from Black theorists in critiquing her work and placing it in a Black context. They seem unaware of their positions as white representatives of a white institution, imbuing themselves with the license to determine whether a work of art is Black enough or too Black or adding something new or significant to Black art scholarship. Their respective analyses, apart from the confusing opener, are laden with racial microaggressions, and the last is overtly racist. They take turns infantilizing and fetishizing her with effusive, but empty praise, and asking such galling questions as how she’s going to differentiate herself from other artists who are “like her'' and if she hails from “Westside, Chicago.” It’s hard to watch without writhing in your seat. 

Palace meets all of this with reserve and aplomb, but she does defend herself, and the film derives its title from her defense. It’s a Freudian slip, actually. She offers a reference to Saidiya Hartman, that in her work she is “responding to the African desperate.” No one knows to correct her and that she actually meant to say “African diaspora”. 

Martine Syms took this slip from a real instance in a conversation with Diamond Stingily, the actress who plays Palace Bryant. Much of the film is very closely based on Syms' own life and experience in an MFA program at Bard, and she depicts the environment and the people who populate it with incisive accuracy. Palace’s small cohort is a cast of archetypes, but they’re such real depictions of the types of people you meet in these programs. Well meaning but sheltered kids who are able to quote Marxist theory with precision 10 drinks in but have never worked a day in their lives. Quirky kids who amble about the woods without urgency, taking mushrooms and sleeping in, secure in the knowledge that a family friend has a gallery hookup. The relationships portrayed are earnest, but one senses that the past three years have required a lot of reserve and a lot of aplomb on Palace’s part.

So what follows is the catharsis. Palace’s last 24 hours upstate before leaving forever and returning home to Chicago. She intends to use the time to decompress alone, but is coaxed out for a night that turns into an epic bender at an appropriately underwhelming rave, the only party in town. It’s a meandering, dizzying night, and the portrayals of drug use and the conversations people have while high are so accurate and so natural, it feels like you’re sitting on the floor with them, drunk, desperately trying to focus and follow the conversation. The performances, especially by Ruby McCollister as Palace’s insufferable classmate, are effervescent and hilarious, and there is some truly great “crit speak” laden dialogue. Sometimes archetypes are realism. 

Syms is a multi-hyphenate, but she comes from a background as a visual artist, and it heavily informs her cinematic style in a way that is very refreshing. Memes flash on the screen in moments when someone says something particularly egregious to Palace. Phone conversations are depicted as the caller’s face overlaid on the recipient’s body. A final montage pairs clips of idyllic, pastoral upstate locales with an audio recording of a Black man quitting his job and telling off his racist coworkers. In many regards, the film is an autofiction, both for Syms and Stingily. The two were friends before the project, and Diamond Stingily is an artist who very much resembles the character she’s playing. Palace Bryant’s thesis draws from the same piece of literature that inspired Stingily’s real work, and there are many nods to her stylistic elements. Syms also cast her own professor and gallerist in the opening critique scene.   

The African Desperate is indisputably a comedy, but the visceral feelings it elicits span the spectrum. There is an uneasy undercurrent to the whole film that unmoors all of its relationships and hints at all types of violence. As it turns out, Palace does not need to grant herself the permission to be unknowable, as those who comprise her artistic cohort have constructed an impenetrable veneer. Palace herself is an art object to them. She notes that everyone seems to want her to get mad, and even her closest friend needs to be reminded that there is nothing exotic or different about her hardships. Anyone can have a sick mother and frustrating familial duties. And the bucolic, sun-dappled woods, the picturesque and precious upstate towns, these sleepy, beautiful places are not so welcoming when you’re cognizant of the fortresses which circumscribe them and the dark forces which enforce those boundaries. But as she assures us, Palace is fine. There is dissonance in everything, and dissonance is often the fuel for the greatest art.