Language Fails: In Dialogue with Austin Peete
How do we approach Black masculinity, individually and as a society? Shall we approach it academically or emotionally, in a historical context of 400+ years of oppression or within our own lived experience? How to balance generational trauma with our individual spirits? Do we approach with empathy for the oppressed or disdain the oppressor? Like much of life, layers of nuance exist between these poles, layers that speak to the individual lived experience of every repressed person on this planet.
“So often when we start to have these conversations around Blackness, the Black body in America, people shut off and I don’t want people to do that.”
These aren’t questions that Austin and I addressed directly as we sat on a small brown IKEA-style sofa in his two-bedroom Lindberg apartment. Echoing much of post-pandemic life, Austin was in transition: moving spots and preparing to visit family in his birthplace of Oklahoma. Soft jazz plays in the background as Austin and I’s conversation weaves through the state of the world, expectations about identity, and the American penchant for progress. People get left behind in this constant search for the new, they don’t get acknowledged or recognized. Capitalism so often doesn’t reward the entrepreneur or inventor, it puts all it’s praise on the person most able to work within the system, to play the game correctly.
“There’s such an emphasis on progress in this culture, that we’re constantly changing and not looking back. That’s really what I want to express within this show, when I go to Korea or Japan… these cultures are soaking up those moments, the cultural zeitgeist, the thing they love about it and then studying and iterating and polishing it so well, they become good as fuck at it. There’s the execution but there’s a different affect, it carries through the body differently.”
We talked about the genesis of his upcoming exhibition, DUAL.world, starting with his time studying abroad in Korea in 2016. “It showed me that I’m out here in the world, existing as a Black man, traveling internationally and it shifted my perception of Blackness so much,” Austin says. He elaborates that it had a lot to do with how America [the United States] curates culture and, in turn, how other societies, like Korea, adopts and integrates it’s interpretations of this pre-packaged cultural export. He hopes DUAL.world will be an entry point for others to explore these themes.
“When I talk about double-consciousness, it’s not specifically about Black masculinity, it’s about the oppressed and the oppressor because anyone oppressed within the system cannot fully exist as themselves because they have to conform to the system they need to survive in.”
Ocean, Austin’s brother, has lived in Japan since 2015 and makes music as DOT.KAI.
While much of the show is text-based, Austin recognizes that language is often insufficient in communicating the different perceptions and nuances of Blackness he has experienced as he travels between regions of the United States, from Oklahoma to Georgia to Rhode Island, and abroad in Eastern Asia. Austin draws parallels between the patriarchal cultures that dominate in both Japan and America, citing the comfort women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in the 1930s and 1940s and the forced sexual relationships between American slaves and their masters. Words begin to fail as we talk about individuals within these systems of power. Who are the children and descendants of these relationships and how do they identify in a world where their existence isn’t fully recognized? What voices are lost when collective consciousness is formed by the narratives set by those in positions of authority, narratives which we share, which integrate into the fabric of our lives, and are thus reflected within our communal sphere of influence?
“Photography is another language for me because that’s a way in which I can directly show people the world I’ve been in,” says Austin. He speaks about the evolution of the United States and the distinction of “Black History” within the American narrative. So much of what remains unsaid, or rather unsayable, is the overarching feel of a place, a culture, of how a society functions. An obvious undertone of modern cross cultural exchange is the internet and the technology that allows us to spread information instantaneously. He laughs as I ask about his Masters Program, Human-Computer Interaction, at Georgia Tech and about his relationship with technology.
“At this point, I’ve been taking a break from asking myself that question — For a long time, technology caused me a lot of dissonance in my body, like friction, it felt like it was shifting social interactions and our understandings of the world in a way where we didn’t understand it as it was rapidly changing and we’ve been changing with it and so, what that does is, we reach a point where we don’t even understand what we are exchanging anymore.”
What are the dangers within these tools, and the potential? We discuss context collapse, computational bias, algorithms, and how the internet has become a more prevalent and pervasive form of media. He believes that technology could be an equalizer but not if we forget about the human element inherently involved in our ever-present demand for technological progress. The potential voice provided by the internet is infinite but there is always an interplay of exposure, access, and time in regards to whose voice actually gets heard.
“The internet is like a microcosm of the real world because what technology has taught me is that when people create things it’s really just like an extension of ourselves and the internet feels like this really big extension of shared consciousness. I don’t want to be involved in it now because it’s so heavily skewed by markets and money and politics in ways where people aren’t actually addressing and seeing each other and that’s due to context collapse.”
As an artist, writer, and musician, Austin is concerned with how America curates a presentation [of identity, of culture, etc] and pushes that out in to the world. As a computer programmer and UX designer, he is concerned with the tools which are used to shape and deliver this curated packages of culture. He has worked through these two modes of operating to define his own definitions between art and design.
“With design, we’re understanding other people’s realities and how they perceive them and then curating tools to help them, in some sense, cope or engage or interact with that environment so that they can then communicate with that environment and other people. With art, the way I perceive art, is it’s me understanding my own reality, and speaking to it so fully, authentically that I then create space for other people to be in conversation to start to form their own tools for engaging their reality.”
In many ways, DUAL.world is a project 10 years in the making with its origins spanning back to Austin's youth in Stockbridge where he took piano lessons, worked in a photo studio, and taught himself to dance by watching music videos on BET and MTV. Details about his life emerged throughout our conversation. He talked about the heavy matriarchal energy in his family, his Cherokee heritage, and how “Oklahoma is a weird, floating, liminal space” that he returns to between his travels. He tells me how he learned to sew in high school by making bow ties inspired by his father. He weaves together the many threads that form to shape our lives, almost forgetting to tell me about his gastrectomy surgery which reshaped his life.
Austin reading poetry in his Lindberg apartment.
We are lucky to be invited into a space that Austin has create for us to contemplate our own identity in relation to others who have different lived experiences, to explore our own perceptions, and rethink our assumptions on reality. DUAL.world will be on view July 28-August 1 via donation-based tickets at www.thebakeryatlanta.com. The exhibition will take place at our South Downtown Gallery located at 92 Peachtree St SW. Gallery hours are 5pm-9pm July 28-30 and 12-6pm July 31-August 1.
