In the slaughterhouse with Aria Dean

When I caught up with Aria Dean, at a Brooklyn café with an ampersand in its name, she had just quit her day job at Arthur Jafa’s film company. She’d also recently stepped back from writing—Sternberg published her collected essays in 2023—and hasn’t been curating much either. Instead, the multi-hyphenate artist-intellectual, known for her work with non-profit arts organisation Rhizome and her essays in e-flux and Real Life, has been focused on her art.

“I was trying to work through this idea of Black identity politics in objectified artworks,” she said, her hands working the air. “It feels so obvious now, but five years ago, I don’t think I saw it.” Her style of critical sculpture and video, she added, could—like a black square posted on social media—serve to paper over “the ongoing ills of the art world,” as if showing a sculpture about Blackness was enough progress.

Dean, 30, speaks swiftly, slaloming through references to people and ideas—theories of accelerationism, memes, Blackness, violence and minimalism; and artistic touchstones like Jafa, Robert Morris and Jordan Wolfson.

For years, her visual art has had a  somewhat subsidiary relationship to her writing. She would theorise on the page, in influential essays like Poor Meme, Rich Meme, and then experiment in the gallery with pieces like the 2018 video subtitled Crowd Index, composed of crowd shots pulled from rap videos. “I whipped up this, like, functional machine,” she said of her work and writing.

You can often see Dean’s ideas assembled in her sculptures. In Dead Zone, a cotton boll stands in a bell jar like the rose in Beauty and the Beast, stiffened with transparent resin. The wooden base conceals a device that stars like Beyonce are rumoured to use to jam nearby cellphones (the tech is illegal in the US) and thwart paparazzi—a comment, if you connect the dots (and Dean dares you to), on the commodification of images of Black celebrities.

Other pieces have a weird presence that exceeds their plan. Two Cotton Bales Bound Together at 250lbs Each, from 2018, is just what it sounds like: twin chunks of fluffy fibre, tightly joined with bright red ratchet straps. You can see the contours of Dean’s theories on postmodern art and global commerce, so clearly they’re almost performative: cotton, the signature commodity of slavery in the US; the readymade, as the signature form of conceptual art. The result, however, is brutally physical, bodily and spatial, in the minimalist idiom of a box with a striking surface. The piece even smells like cotton. “It’s about its materiality in the moment,” Dean offered, “as much as it is about its material past.”

In recent work, Dean has turned to virtual materiality—or to the question of whether that’s a thing. The sculpture Little Island / Gut Punch, which debuted at the 2022 Whitney Biennial, is a chroma key green vertical box that looks like it’s been dented by a tremendous force. In fact, the object is pristine, rendered and shaped using a digital model in a collision simulation. The damage was all virtual. Dean described her thinking around violence. To her, the work proposes a thin distinction between the superficial appearance of violence and actual, physical violation—which, she says, is complicated if you think of virtual space as real. Other work in a similar virtual-to-physical vein includes off-putting riffs on minimalism and monumentality, such as a horse crushed into a cube like a scrapped car.

Gut Punch is also roughly the size of Dean’s body, she says; and the simulated force is roughly what someone of her stature could apply to a projectile. Again, you sense the precursors of minimalism’s address to the body in space, and to commodities and objects—cotton, the slave trade, Blackness—and the fraught sympathy the artist has for minimalist forms. Dean calls the green sculpture “a gag about being an artist”: up on a little stage, performing your pain, wearing an armour of ideas. The punch lands, though, in meatspace.

Her newest video, 2023’s Abattoir, U.S.A.!, now on view at the ICA in London (Dean’s first show in the UK), is different. “There’s a lot of research, a lot of writing that I’ve done towards it, but none of that’s in it,” she said. “And it doesn’t really prove anything.” Instead of thunking down a boxy object for the viewer to negotiate, the piece is an experiment in disembodiment. All rendered in 3D, the virtual camera glides through a model of an industrial slaughterhouse, pockmarked and dented but (almost) bloodless—there are no workers, no livestock, and no meat, living or dead.

“The structure of the interior is super linear, it’s an assembly line,” said Dean. “So you can’t really spin around. You have to go through a narrative.” You are the cow, a walking, breathing commodity, shuffling down the rail to your doom. In the final scene, the camera floats to the ceiling, among the swaying hooks, as the abstract soundtrack coheres into an instrumental version of I Think We’re Alone Now with what sounds like a goofy synthesised “moo” carrying the tune.

It’s an unusually emotive throw for Dean, not to say expressive. She told me she’s tired of testing theories and wants to ask questions with no answers. “This general question of violence and subjugation in terms of sculpture and cinema is really interesting,” she said, comparing the mechanised abattoir to industrial imagery. “What kind of subject does the film constitute?” She offered two options, neither wholly satisfying: “I felt like I was the cow… or, you know, just part of a technical apparatus.”