maggie's blog

Earlier this year, Robyn performed the title track off her new album, “Sexistential” on Colbert in bright red leather pants, a beaded vest, and one singular above-the-elbow bejeweled glove. She starts the performance on her back, legs hoisted above her head at an angle. Shards of lyrics flash in a Venn diagram behind her: “Well Adam Driver always did kind of give me a boner.” She begins to writhe on the ground, crawling and grabbing. She reaches up behind her head and pulls on her bleached blond hair. The performance is done with a completely straight face: it’s not entirely clear to the lay viewer that Robyn has always been in on the joke.

The online reaction to the Colbert performance was predictable: many cringed. Robyn was "pushing 50 and trying to mimic the style and performance of artists who are young enough to be her adult children,” per one Reddit comment.

It would be easy to battle against these accusations by pointing out that much of the perceived cringiness seems to derive from the public’s perceptions of what should or should not be done by women of Robyn’s age and gender. One could then reaffirm the right of a 40-something-year-old woman to speak of sexual acts and writhe onstage, as the writer Genna Rivieccio does: “she’s clearly using Sexistential as an opportunity to push back… on the continuing narrative that a woman can’t do, well, much of anything after her forties.” Pitchfork, too, marveled at the performance’s gumption: “It was the perfect intro to the album, which celebrates the 46-year-old Swedish singer’s current mindset: horny, maternal, sentimental, a little crazy, and very, very free.”

The narrative of Robyn pushing back against a societal taboo by owning her sexuality is convincing. It’s certainly part of what makes the performance (and the album as a whole) so compelling. This narrative is part of a larger mode of analysis that I want to examine in this blog post: a mode that understands anti-normative artwork as taking a stand, speaking out, speaking against, defying, challenging, or delivering a message.

Clearly, this mode of analysis has its benefits. Artwork does often take a stand, and analyzing it as doing so allows one to make a clear argument about a work’s utility to a sociopolitical cause. However, it is a mode that I have found myself itching to get out of. What lies behind the stance of defiance? At what other levels is subversive artwork working? How can we untangle the messy and far-reaching impact of artwork, especially artwork that has political stakes and contains a political argument, without defaulting to standard cultural modes of evaluation?

For example – is there more to "Sexistential" than its function as a proof-of-concept of a right to sexuality?

In April, I went to the launch of the Art & Ideas Archive at e-flux. The event featured the curator and scholar KJ Abudu, who talked about two of his recent exhibitions, Traces of Ecstasy and Living with Ghosts. Among other thinkers, Abudu referenced Derrida and his concept of “hauntology.” He talked about the ability of artworks to haunt those who encounter them, to “impregnate them with the weight of the unfinished revolutionary project” (I am paraphrasing his talk from my notes). I love that: an impregnation.

To bring it to the most concrete level, I believe that the way the world is organized is profoundly unjust and violent, and there are better ways to organize ourselves. I think that artwork of all kinds, just like parties and revolts, can offer us an impregnation, an opening, an illumination, a slanting, a kindling, a binding, a splitting up of reality. I worry that an analysis of art that offers a declarative correction (actually, women can talk about IVF and sex), even if we usually agree with what’s being declared, can end up limiting what we seek and obscuring the impregnating-opening-illumination-slanting-kindling-binding that may actually lie behind the headline.

After reading Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure in January, I began collecting material and snippets of thought about the problem of analysis. The Queer Art of Failure set off a Rube Goldberg machine of intellectual change for me, giving me a set of reading assignments in whose footnotes I found more reading assignments: Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Sofia Samatar’s Opacities, Foucault’s A History of Sexuality, Vol 1, the pamphlet “Against the Structural Weight of Catastrophe: A Poetics of Negation” by Laura al-Tibi and Amr Amer, Wendy Brown’s “The 'folds of our own discourse': The Pleasures and Freedoms of Silence,” and Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant.

This strange and stitched-together collection of works have each shot straight through me in their own way — repeated and propulsive. They are each about so much more than just the analysis of art and offer more to the world than just how-to examples. I want to single out two modes of analysis from this collection that transcend the issues of the declarative mode: refusal and negativity.

The Queer Art of Failure, as you might guess, has to do with failure. Queers “are all used to having our dreams crushed, our hopes smashed, our illusions shattered” (1). But what if the real problem lies in what we are told is success? Halberstam references the movie Little Miss Sunshine (2006), which “relinquishes the Darwinian motto of winners, ‘May the best girl win,’ and cleaves to a neo-anarchistic credo of ecstatic losers: ‘No one gets left behind!’” (5). Could failing — “losing, forgetting unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing” — bring “more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world”? (1).

“Which of course takes us to other L words. ‘Lesbian’ is irrevocably tied to failure in all kinds of ways” (The Queer Art of Failure, p. 94)

In the chapter titled “Shadow Feminisms,” Halberstam discusses Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, a performance piece from 1964.

In her nine- minute- long performance she sits on stage while members of the audience come up and cut off pieces of her clothing. The act of cutting is thus assigned to the audience rather than to the artist, and the artist’s body becomes the canvas while the authorial gesture is dispersed across the nameless, sadistic gestures that disrobe her and leave her open to and unprotected from the touch of the other. As the performance unfolds, more and more men than women come to the stage, and they become more and more aggressive about cutting her clothing until she is left, seminude, hands over her breasts, her supposed castration, emotional discomfort, vulnerability, and passivity fully on display. (138)

Cut Piece was famously written about by scholar Julia Bryan Wilson in Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, who argued against the previous analyses of the piece that focus on Ono’s passivity, her “mute and still body within a closed system of female submission and male aggression” (Bryan Wilson). Instead, Bryan Wilson emphasized the piece’s connections to the images that emerged from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she situated Cut Piece within a larger project of commemoration and the souvenir in Ono’s work.

Halberstam sees Bryan Wilson’s reading as definitive, but shifts the focus slightly to the work’s connection to antisocial feminism. They begin the chapter, “Shadow Feminisms” with scholar Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and analyze theorist Gayatri Spivak’s “Can The Subaltern Speak?” and Jamaica Kincaid’s novels, before moving to visual art with their discussion of Kara Walker’s collages and Cut Piece. In all of these works, Halberstam sees “a radical form of masochistic passivity that not only offers up a critique of the organizing logic of agency and subjectivity itself, but that also opts out of certain systems built around a dialectic between colonizer and colonized” (131).

Halberstam finds subjects “who cannot speak, who refuse to speak; subjects who unravel, who refuse to cohere; subjects who refuse ‘being’ where being has already been defined in terms of a self-activating, self-knowing, liberal subject” (126). These subjects, whose politics emerge in their most “potent” form in anticolonial and antiracist texts, refuse to respond in a recognizable form (126). They refuse to play the game of the active subject that reproduces the world’s order. They refuse to be or become “woman as she has been defined within Western philosophy” (124).

Ono’s dismantling performance presses us to ask about the kind of self that comes undone for an audience in nine minutes. Is such an act, and such a model of self, feminist? Can we think about this refusal of self as an antiliberal act, a revolutionary statement of pure opposition that does not rely upon the liberal gesture of defiance but accesses another lexicon of power and speaks another language of refusal?

Ono’s performance of Cut Piece, racially inflected in 1965 by her status as an Asian woman within the imperial imagination, asks in terms that Hartman might recognize whether freedom can be imagined separately from the terms upon which it is offered. If freedom, as Hartman shows, was offered to the slave as a kind of contract with capital, then moving about, being restless, refusing to acquire property or wealth flirts with forms of liberty that are unimaginable to those who offer freedom as the freedom to become a master. Here Ono sits still, waits patiently and passively, and refuses to resist in the terms mandated by the structure that interpellates her. To be cut, to be bared, to be violated publicly is a particular kind of resistant performance, and in it Ono inhabits a form of unacting, unbeing, unbecoming.” (145)

Ono avoids the “liberal gesture of defiance” (the artwork speaking up, speaking out, claiming, taking a stand) and instead “refuses to resist in the terms mandated by the structure that interpellates her.” It is a distinction with weight and with important political implications, which the truly incredible book that Halberstam references, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, by Saidiya Hartman, can help elucidate. The book traces the history of transatlantic slavery through her own journey traveling to key historical sites in Ghana. There are so many sections that I want to quote at length here, but read this for now:

The legacy that I chose to claim was articulated in the ongoing struggle to escape, stand down, and defeat slavery in all of its myriad forms. It was the fugitive’s legacy. It didn’t require me to wait on bended knee for a great emancipator. It wasn’t the dream of a White House, even if it was in Harlem, but of a free territory. It was a dream of autonomy rather than nationhood. It was the dream of an elsewhere, with all its promises and dangers, where the stateless might, at last, thrive. (234)

This version of freedom that “flirts with forms of liberty that are unimaginable to those who offer freedom as the freedom to become a master,” in which the stateless do more than just survive: the political implications and urgings of this legacy are manifest in Cut Piece (and in the analysis of Cut Piece that Halberstam offers). Sometimes, what may look like passivity is a refusal. We are still “looking for an exit from the prison,” as Hartman writes (133). “From the holding cell, [is] it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again?" (100).

Another possibility, in addition to impregnation: art that refuses. Art that imagines living and breathing again.

The currents of refusal that surge through Cut Piece and Lose Your Mother are alive in the work of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, two contemporary artists who have been working on video and sound installations together since 2009. I recently saw a work of theirs, a striking installation entitled “Until we became fire and fire us,” at the 2026 Whitney Biennial. The work consists of three channels of videos, layered atop each other and interrupted visually by metal columns, with fragments of poetry that appear in both English and Arabic.

The start of “Until we became fire and fire us” features videos of a beach, the image turned literally negative: we see the strange hump of a sand bar and the blue-green bark of a palm tree. Words appear: “The land will testify / there was a village / where there is now a beach.” This beach is now known as Dor Beach in Israel, and it lies near the site of the Tantura Massacre which was committed by the Alexandroni Brigade (later incorporated into the IOF) during the 1948 Nakba. After occupying the small fishing village of Tantura, the Brigade massacred as many as 200 people. The martyrs were buried in mass graves.

Although the survivors have given testimony since 1948 (see the oral history and documentation project, Palestine Remembered), the history of the massacre has been actively suppressed in an Israeli and global context. A study done by Forensic Architecture in 2023, commissioned by the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights, uncovered evidence that several mass graves lie below the present-day beach resort. One, which contains the bodies of seventy to a hundred and forty martyrs, lies, horrifically, beneath a parking lot. The footage shown in “Until we became fire and fire us” mirrors the forensic, X-ray visual language of the report: “the land will testify… Where there is violence/ there is always a trace.”

How can one talk about art in the context of an ongoing genocide in Palestine? When tragedy and destruction hang so heavily? When more than seventy thousand people have been murdered? How to acknowledge the importance of every act of resistance, and also acknowledge the limits of “awareness” and cultural impact?

The incredible “a-disciplinary platform” bilna’es published a set of four bilingual books that “examine the politics of refusal in Palestine.” I bought a book by art history scholar Laura Al-Tibi and artist and musician Amr Amer titled “Against the Structural Weight of Catastrophe: A Poetics of Negation” at the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances. Also in the series is “Being the negative,” a work by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. In the blurb for “Being in the negative,” the work of the artists is described like this:

In their multidisciplinary practice the space of the negative continues to occupy a principal dimension, asking what it means to resist impossible conditions, to refuse the terrain as given: What does it mean to breathe where one should not breathe? To emerge from the site of exclusion and extraction unbound?

To “refuse the terrain as given”: this sounds like “refus[ing] to resist in the terms mandated by the structure that interpellates.” "The Poetics of Negation,” the other book in the publishing project, builds on this thread of a refusal in a deeply impactful analysis of their work embedded within a political and poetic tract.

In “The Poetics of Negation” Al-Tibi and Amer emerge in opposition to what they term the “structural weight” of settler colonialism: the overwhelming, imposed sense of its own permanence. The Nakba, they write, is not a singular event, but “a series of negations, the aggregate of which is an absence corded on hewn land. It is the discursive and physical emptying of Palestine, the disavowal of our bond with the land, the razing of our harvest, the ruination of our homes, and the suspension of our traditions and rituals, so deeply attuned to the cadence of the land.”

To see the Nakba as a series of negations is to accurately diagnose the character and “political grammar” of the devastation but, also, to see beyond it. The Nakba is structurally ongoing, but “the Catastrophic state it spawns is neither permanent nor absolute.” They write: “The transition from life to death, from land to prison, from people to populations, and from resistance to martyrdom highlights the pervasive and tenuous nature of colonial negation. Yet, the colony is also precariously perched on the edge. Just as land can be reduced to territory, it can be restored. As Palestinian resistance has repeatedly demonstrated, the colonial limit is not impenetrable.” The negation is a screen which hides the Zionist state’s fear: “the imperative and inevitability of return.”

“History doesn’t unfold with one era bound to and determining the next in an unbroken chain of causality … the point isn’t the impossibility of escaping the stranglehold of the past, or that history is a succession of uninterrupted defeats, or that the virulence and tenacity of racism is inexorable. But rather that the perilous conditions of the present establish the link between our age and a previous one in which freedom too was yet to be realized." (133) Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman

Throughout this work, Al-Tibi and Amer discuss Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s work, both in direct analysis and by referencing the images that reoccur throughout their installations. It first appears in this paragraph, which discusses a different piece of theirs, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, which wrestles with many of the same themes as “Until we became fire” and uses much of the same footage.

In their ongoing work, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme theorize the negative in affective terms, introducing it as an aesthetic and political category that emerges from the land -- not just as the site of dispossession, but as a generative body sprouting indigenous life in the face of repeated destruction. Their practice immerses us in the land through an embodied filmmaking -- sinking into the soil, moving with the vegetation, and breaking through 'the pores of this sea and land they called dead.' Beneath the layers of colonial rot lies an animacy ringing through millennia as it binds the ancestral dead to the living. This process of becoming allows space to unfurl, releasing caged breath and, with it, room for an otherwise. The duo's theorization of the negative in the Palestinian context offers a framework from which to read Catastrophe not just as an ongoing structure, but as something that unfixes, unearths, tunnels and mutates, coming apart and together again. (6)

I want to bold every sentence fragment in this paragraph. They pierce straight to the heart of it, and show the stakes of the installation and what it enables: an experience of the land that both acknowledges negation and exists outside of it, the “animacy” and inevitability of a piercing poppy in the midst of “colonial rot” and destruction. An enactment of binding “the ancestral dead to the living,” a reaching towards the people of the past and present, singers and musicians and dancers and friends and chanters and protestors, archival footage and choreography blending: “Bodies falling in and out of each other, bodies holding each other” (“Until we became fire”). A creation of “space to unfurl”: “room for an otherwise.”

At the end of the looped installation, we see a sole figure dancing, in a keffiyeh. The image is turned negative and has been processed with a time-delayed exposure, so as she dances, we see, in white streaks, where she has been before. The horizon shifts, too, as the camera is unsteady, and the dark purple of the land shifts and sways. This is not the negative of witnessing the “protracted violence of repression of erasure,” nor the time delay of seeing “our own death image slowly processing before us.” This is the negative and the time delay of “absented presence coming into focus, the soil reddening from purple to brown, anticipating the return.”

The failure of the colonial project – its inability to actualize the fantasy of an unpeopled land – leaves it open and unbound, creating space, however minimal, for an otherwise. Despite its hollowing, the land continues to resist and sprout native life against invasive ecosystems, spawning beyond cartographic lines and marking the ruins of razed villages, as if to commemorate countless unknowable martyrs. Our portrait in the native is still processing, the absented presence coming into focus, the soil reddening from purple to brown, anticipating the return of our workers from their enslavers and our captured from their jailers, once the five geographies are sutured, the sixth destroyed, and the self and kin are restored.

To invest in resistance is to believe in the inevitability of an otherwise, where the line between life and afterlife, breath and martyrdom is not so thin. It is an investment that generates multiple returns: a return to the land, to the self and the collective, a return of innumerable social and cultural worth, and a return of the repressed.

As destruction hangs heavy, “The Poetics of Negation” articulates what art can do in impossible conditions, creating a piercing critique of the Zionist state. They quote from Palestinian intellectual and martyr Basil al-Araj: “Every price you pay in resistance, if not reaped in your lifetime, will be reaped in due course.” What can art do? It can invest in resistance. It can “impregnate with the weight of the unfinished revolutionary project.” It can bring room for an otherwise. It can bring into focus the return, and the restoration to come.

Now we return back to Robyn, though she is obviously operating at much lower stakes than either “Cut Piece” or “Until we became fire.” Can her new album be analyzed as more than a declaration? “Sexistential,” the newest from the master of the anthemic sprint-across-the-Brooklyn-bridge-during-the-sunset pop chorus, is not a radical break from her previous work or from the pop landscape in general. It treads in familiar sonic ground as her 2010’s landmark album “Body Talk”(ex. zig-zagging synths, robot-vocoded vocals). And her primary subject, romantic love and the troubles that surround it, has been well explored in contemporary pop music at large. But I think the album – with its lyrics, its peaked musical terrain, its visual language – inhabits a relational posture that I find utterly compelling. Robyn brings a complete willingness to be broken, again and again. Though on her last album, she vowed she was “never going to be broken hearted, ever again,” here she sings, buoyantly, bouncily, brilliantly: “I’m a sucker for love.”

To be a “sucker,” in all senses of the word, is key to the relational posture of “Sexistential.” She does not inhabit the atomatization of singular personhood, nor the blur of communion (whose arm is that? Where do I end and you begin?), but a third option: of swallowing, pulling, suckling, flaying, chuckling, sucking, crushing, being crushed. “Something here’s opening deep inside of me,” she sings, then on the next song: “I’m coming fast so guide me in.”

Sucking turns more literal than ever on “Blow My Mind,” where she sings: “Baby, ravish me, tear into my flesh / Button down my shirt, go on, make a mess / Make it quick, I'm about to burst, we're all skin on skin (come here)/Ain't you the cutest little thing?” It becomes quickly clear that the subject who blows Robyn's mind may not be a romantic interest, but instead her child. The blurred line between the two reminds me so much of Maggie Nelson’s writing on breastfeeding in The Argonauts: “It is romantic, erotic, and consuming—but without tentacles. I have my baby, and my baby has me. It is a buoyant eros, an eros without teleology.”

In the video for the “Blow My Mind” version featuring the Argentinian duo Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, we see Robyn in the middle of the two boys. Her cheeks are pushed around by Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso: they knead her face as she mouths the lyrics. Mirroring a baby’s fascination with faces and complete disregard for bodily autonomy, the scene also reminded me of Cut Piece. “Crushing me every single day,” she sings: there is something so key to this flayed state, this devotion to destruction. If Robyn is proclaiming anything, it is her dedication to pain, to loss, to ruin, in the face of human connection.

It is the same dedication that acknowledges, “I could be bulletproof/but still I’d lose”: we keep losing, and sucking, again and again, but still, we choose to let connection in. When reminiscing about a past connection, she has a voice-note-like spoken word intro: “and also can I just say something? I don’t really go there anymore but sometimes I think about how you used to make me crack up so hard I didn’t keep it together.” All she wanted, she sings later, “was for you to be silly with me, baby.” I appreciate her articulating her relation to humor, which has always been obvious in her ridiculous one-liners (and one of my favorite Robyn songs of all time, “U Should Know Better,” with Snoop Dogg).

“It was a way of continuing to speak even when one felt completely flayed. Too raw to withstand a glance.” (17) From Opacities by Sofia Samatar

There is something more than an argument that lies within this album. It shines with something special, a certain way of holding the shoulders, of letting your face be melded, of sucking hard. It’s a way of holding oneself and relating to others that I think is in short supply. To be sure, many will only pay attention to the album in the pre-determined cultural slot of “pop song,” enjoying the short escape it offers, which is just as worthwhile and awesome. But on closer listen, or maybe in subconscious seeping, there is more than escape on offer. “We’re splitting up reality,” she sings, and “I slip out through the crack in between it.” I believe that is what is at play here: not an argument, but a split of reality and a slip out from between it.

I present to you, then, a collection of ways to analyze, of ways to deeply understand the potential in something, how it works and what it can do:

Like parties and protests, artwork can offer a glimpse, a practice, and an impregnation of another world. A world that is better organized. A world “where the stateless might, at last, thrive” (Hartman). A world that is inevitable.