![]() ![]() It’s about arrival and survival through declaration of one’s hard-earned position in society. It is about establishing a new order in which black bodies seize and command cultural and physical spaces from which they have traditionally been excluded and are typically marginalized. ![]() To be sure, ‘Apeshit’ is all about bodies – an orchestrated contrast of energetically writhing and animated black physiques set against frozen white forms of the past. The video is an unapologetic visual and sonic manifesto about spaces, power, and control. ‘Apeshit’ is an arresting, and I would even go so far as to say brilliant video for what it does and does not do for what it reveals and conceals for the ways in which it meaningfully appropriates, exploits, and reinterprets Western paintings and sculptures as a way to chart and celebrate the Carters’s public and commercial success, and black bodies in an artistic canon inextricably linked to histories of colonialism. The video begins with fragments and close-ups of European paintings from the Louvre, a hallowed cultural space where masterpieces of European culture and civilization are housed, where imperial and colonial might through conquest and acquisition are put on grand display. For Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z, the measured exploitation of these things through high art and popular culture is best witnessed in ‘Apeshit,’ a track and accompanying 6-minute video from their first joint album called Everything is Love. ![]() Spanning the terrain from high art to popular culture and everything in-between, the complexity of race, gender, and culture continues to dog us. ![]()
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