The Party & the After Party

The language of decolonial and anti-ethnographic critique, developed by Black, Indigenous, and women of color scholars under specific intellectual and political pressure, has been absorbed by an insulated curatorial class.¹ Social media exacerbated this in recent years, permitting any artist to signal credibility without experiencing the conditions originally necessitating the critique. The experiences by which artists and scholars like Trinh T. Minh-ha and Saidiya Hartman built their work have blurred into gesture-language available to anyone who learns their terminology in an undergraduate seminar.² Institutions rewarded gesture-language in pursuit of a proverbial party, prior to COVID. Rising illiteracy, global instability, and other pressures now require artists to work with legible rigor more than ever. In the second half of this decade, as the post-COVID world normalizes, the afterparty has arrived.

I am a Black American woman who grew up in Inglewood, California. For the second half of my adolescence I attended a predominantly white school district in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The subject of this study is an artist my age who I knew at that time. I have purposefully omitted any identifying information about this person because this project is not an indictment of an individual. This inquiry began when I was randomly drawn to reading their artist statement and it did not sound right in my head. That aversion was my starting point and this artifact operates within the autotheoretical register of my practice-as-research.³ After I gathered these materials in a single afternoon, the artist has since unpublished their website. Abandoned by their maker, recoverable only by someone who looked in time, their writing exists in a fugitive condition that makes anonymous analysis possible.⁴

Intuitively, I felt dissonance while scanning what they have written and said about their practice on-line. Although the artist describes their work through inherited identity, they use language like Indigenous Asian, which is a clear contradiction in terms. Considering they are Japanese and Hawaiian only through ancestry and grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, this operation is exactly what Hartman and Trinh refuse. The artist never cites the lineage of decolonial and anti-ethnographic thought directly, but the vocabulary they reach for, and the authority they ask it to confer, belongs to that lineage. That lineage, however, does not argue what their framing assumes. Trinh, Hartman, and others working in this tradition actually build their critique against this particular operation: the idea that ancestry itself, claimed and stated, transmits content or authority to a body of work.² Their arguments are about method, positionality-in-practice, and accountability to specific historical conditions, all of which refuse inheritance asserted as a credential. The artist's language points toward this tradition without being structured by it. By gesturing at a critique the practice does not enact, the artist repeats the move the tradition works to refuse.

This project is an attempt to create a text that may prove useful for the future study of contemporary art. I used an artificial intelligence model as the primary tool for tracing the contradiction I sensed because it holds a working memory of the field at a scale that I do not possess alone. I wrote the prompts and verified the citations in its responses. What the artifact documents is not that the model confirmed my intuition quickly, but that it could locate, in citable and legible terms, the specific theoretical mechanism by which the artist's self-description and their claimed lineage pull against each other. What matters is not that the model was right. It is that it was right on demand, in 2026, faster than it took me to type the question. The dissonance required no retrieval. I felt it somatically before I asked. What the model retrieved was the apparatus that makes my knowing legible to institutions. The named lineage, the citations, the theoretical mechanism, the paperwork once functioned as a credential and was developed under specific and costly conditions. It has now been absorbed into infrastructure anyone can query, which means it no longer functions as a gate.

This is a dated observation and years from now the findings may be unremarkable or gatekept by other means. The artist under discussion is incidental because this operation is repeatable through the study of any artist making similar rhetorical moves. What I am recording is the model’s reading: if the dissonance I sensed can be named and sourced by anyone asking, then it was never inaccessible specialist knowledge. It was ontological.

I want to be precise about what this argument is and is not. It is not an indictment of an individual. It is a claim that ancestry alone cannot excuse appropriating theory in an attempt to project access to the experiences necessitating them. While the artist's self-description treats ancestry as if it did, many artists today operate in a similar realm of ambiguity, insulated and dissociated from the work’s context. The legible gap is between what their artwork claims and what is practiced, not between their identity and their right to claim it.

What follows is an excerpt from the exchange.

me: is it wrong to find them kind of lacking like im not sure what this means and i watched the film its just a home movie of their relatives in the bathroom bathing each other and doing their feet but like they edited it for cohesion but other than that theyre not the one holding the camera they werent born when the film was made they said so im not sure what this description means or what their practice is acutally about its like found footage but they dont mention that it says theyre the director

model: There's a real tradition this belongs to — artists who edit family or found footage and take a directing credit for the framing and sequencing, where the argument is that editing is authorship. So the credit isn't a fraud by the conventions of diaristic and found-footage cinema. But the tradition has internal standards. The work has to do something with the material: structural, voiced, relational, or archival. Cohesively-edited home video with a heavy curatorial description carrying the conceptual weight is the version the tradition itself criticizes. A credit block listing the artist as director with only a cinematographer named separately reads the position more aggressively than the work supports.

me: yes i was wondering exactly how are they combating the western ethnographic gaze please explain further

model: The phrase refers to a long history of Western filmmakers shooting non-white people as specimens or spectacle. The canonical critiques are Fatimah Tobing Rony's The Third Eye and Trinh T. Minh-ha's films and writing. A film that genuinely works against that gaze refuses certain shots, breaks the documentary grammar, refuses to translate, leaves things illegible on purpose, gives the subjects authorship. The description claims the source of the footage — being shot by family — is itself enough to constitute a counter-gaze. That's the weak version; family-shot footage is necessary but not sufficient. And there's a contradiction inside it. Offering a glimpse into the womanhood of aging women of a named demographic is itself ethnographic framing — a window onto a culturally specific experience defined by category, which is the structural move of ethnographic film. It claims to refuse the gaze while inviting the viewer to consume the footage as a representation of a demographic.

me: what does indigenous asian mean in this context if htey are japanese and hawaiian and live in los angeles in the suburbs theyre no longer in japa are theystill indigenous ifeel likeshe misappropriated that term but idk

model: The phrase is specifically incoherent. Native Hawaiians are Indigenous to Hawaii and are Pacific Islander, not Asian. The census bracket mashes the two together, but the categories are distinct, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty movements are pointed about not being collapsed into "Asian." If the elders are Native Hawaiian, the accurate term is Native Hawaiian or Kanaka Maoli. If they're Japanese, "Indigenous" is wrong in a different way: the Indigenous peoples of Japan are the Ainu and the Ryukyuan/Okinawan peoples. The phrasing reaches for maximum identity legibility without committing to which lineage the work is about. Doing none of the specific work while claiming all the categories is a soft form of leveraging identity for curatorial weight.

me: i feel like theyre copying trinh which is rich. does it make more sense to know that they were born 19in the nineties and have lived in the suburbs their whole life so technically outside of ancestry arent they operating within the white gaze

model: It isn't appropriation in the racial sense — Trinh's framework is available to anyone; her ideas aren't cultural property. The issue is depth. The description picks up the vocabulary as theoretical garnish, and there's a specific irony: Trinh's whole point is that you don't earn non-ethnographic status by intention or demographic category; you do it formally, in the cuts. Announcing your non-ethnographic status is the move she spent a career critiquing. On position, the artist works across generational, linguistic, geographic, and cultural distance from the elder relatives — the position of a granddaughter looking across distance, not an internal documentarian. The honest versions of this film make the gap the structure of the work: Akosua Adoma Owusu, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, Rea Tajiri's History and Memory. The description tries to collapse the gap by claiming insider status through descent. Biological relation transmits intimacy plus distance, not a gaze.

me: can you judge this about section is it a ba or bfa this person im tryhing to guage are they a candidate for an mfa program

model: The bio leans on three things: the festival co-founding, a list of circuit screenings, and the degree. Look at what's load-bearing and what isn't. The filmmaking credits are substantially shared with a partner, and the link the bio points to for that partner is his site, not theirs — the practice keeps resolving back into a collaboration rather than standing alone. The degree is a legitimate BA from a serious program, but it's not the variable that decides anything. What the bio is doing is assembling proximity — to a festival, to a circuit, to a collaborator with his own standing — into the appearance of an independent practice. The independent footprint, separated from those, is thin.

me: its just a glorified circle jerk

model: The evidence points that way. There are genuinely good selections in the festival's recent program — two well-regarded experimental filmmakers with real standing — but selecting good films isn't a curatorial vision. Any well-read experimental-film person would know to program those names right now; it's a taste signal, not original thinking. The structure tells the rest: a co-founder's home institution appearing on the program is a favor economy made visible on a public schedule, and the short blocks are numbered and unnamed. It's a modest regional program run by a tight social circle that mostly validates and circulates work within its own network.

me: critique this old interview i found and their contributions its very pedantic and childish it seems they call peoples artist websites and statements stuff? idk if im being harsh or if this reads as an outsider like it seems

model: Across the whole interview the artist speaks twice, and both times the contribution is logistical rather than artistic. The two collaborators dominate — they articulate positions about time, format, medium, what a film is for. You can disagree with those positions but they're arguments. These aren't. Asked what programming taught them about their own filmmaking, the entire answer is that they've learned to make shorter films. Four words standing in for an artistic statement, next to paragraphs from the others. The interview reflects a hierarchy nobody states out loud: the collaborators carry the more prestigious training and the conceptual authority, and this role resolves into the supportive and the organizational. There's a difference between an enthusiast-organizer and a critical practitioner. A serious programmer discusses formal relationships between works, historical positioning, what a program argues as a unit. They discuss how the program feels.

me: what does that even mean do you think like if osmeone was an art world serious critique trying to udnerstand what they were doing are they even doing anyrthing at all it seems like somethingfor their friends not the serious greater discipline

model: Here's the quote. Their favorite part of the process, they say, is organizing blocks around an idea rather than by genre, and then “naming [it] something cute and fun! It makes the party so much better!" Read it against what a curatorial statement usually does. There's no formal logic, no account of why one film should follow another, no argument the program is making. There's the pleasure of the gathering and the naming. “It makes the party so much better" is the whole curatorial philosophy stated plainly: the program is an occasion, and the work of the artist is self-described as to make the occasion more enjoyable. That's genuinely valuable for an event host. It is not a practice. And any serious gatekeeper reading it would clock it immediately, faster than you did — because the contrast with the others is right there on the same page in the interview.

Notes

1. Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . . . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation (Beacon Press, 2019).

2. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Indiana University Press, 1989); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997); Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2019).

3. Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (MIT Press, 2021).

4. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).