Edging on Formlessness

Abstract In 2013, the artist now known as American Artist changed their legal name to a generic singular, making themselves impermeable to authorial identification. Manifesting both their official entry in the art world and a withdrawal from it, this name change literally hacked Artist into the white American art canon, as their work now appears alongside Jackson Pollock's or Edward Hopper's in an internet search. This performative act was only the first in a series investigating issues of recognizable form and practices of identification. In 2021 Mother of All Demos II, a computer encased in dirt, the main piece in Artist's installation Black Gooey Universe, fringed on material formlessness as black goo oozed out of the keyboard, spilled over the desk and into the white box of the gallery space, its viscous drops suspended midair, rewriting the racial history of computer technology. This article traces these refusals of form in American Artist's Black Gooey Universe. Drawing on Zakiyyah Jackson's analysis of Western ontology, the article theorizes the edges in Artist's sculptures as sites of undoing, suspension, and speculation. Undoing the form of the GUI to find the “gooey,” Artist's installation ties an archaeological reframing of technology to a reimagining of anticolonial cosmology.