Black Face White Mask Martini

Writing and poetry are central to Raque Ford’s artistic practice. Like earworms, the phrases that wind through her compositions elicit a sense of déjà vu in the viewer—familiar and catchy, as if one has heard the lines before but is unable to recognize their source. The subject of Ford’s billboard project, A little space for you right under my shoe, is drawn from her poem “Black Face White Mask Martini.” On the occasion of this project, I invited Ford to present this poem in a new interpretative form for the Whitney’s website. Inspired by the metatextuality of websites like Genius.com and her love of tabbed browsing, Ford has added her own footnoted annotations to provide insight into the inspirations and intentions behind each line. The resulting piece is a distinct, poetic project—true to Ford’s practice of remixing cultural references, revisiting her work, and thinking in elusive and associative ways.

—Roxanne Smith, Jennifer Rubio Assistant Curator of the Collection

Black Face White Mask Martini

What’s the new level of cute you are reaching for? This comes from a text message exchange between a new friend and me. I think we were talking about leveling up our looks. One of us asked: “What’s the level of cute you are reaching for?” And it stuck with me because it made me think of desire, the desire to “become cute” or wanting “more cute.” And I like the absurdity of measuring cute into levels. I’m a level ten cute, and then, in a year, I’d like to be a fifteen. It also makes you think about hotness and how dumb and unachievable it is when people measure attractiveness in numbers. I start the poem like this to put the reader in a dizzy and confusing place of questioning: “What is self and identity?” and “How am I perceived or how do I want to be perceived?”

I don’t know, but she holds her face like someone that doesn’t know her face I think I spend too much time on the internet, but there’s this trend on TikTok where people talk about how in order to see yourself the way that other people really see you, you have to film yourself with the other side of your phone and take a reverse photo. 

You know when you are standing

and your sole is on the floor. This is more pronounced if you are wearing a platform shoe with a heel, which is what I was wearing when I thought of this line while standing in the back during a film screening.

and your heel is digging into the ground

and that little space between them
Right there 

that’s where I make a little space for you To me, the arch of the foot can be a precious small space you make for someone while also dominating them. I like to imagine that there is a giant woman who has made space for a human, but it’s in this awkward space between her shoe tread and the pavement. And to make sure they are okay, she has to bend down sometimes to check on them. This made me think about getting on your knees as if to pray, and then I thought about the famous scene in Romeo and Juliet where there is the use of religious imagery to describe the intimate moment of touching hands and kissing.

Right under my shoe The idea of the giant woman and her shoe also comes from remembering old Skechers or Candie’s shoe ads I saw on the subway when I was younger. I’m not sure if I’m misremembering, but they had a figure in this forced perspective and a larger-than-life, chunky shoe. When I made the artwork for the billboard at the Whitney, it was very important to me that it referenced advertisements. I wanted it to be accessible to the average person walking the High Line. I chose pink and green to match the Sex Pistols album cover, for that pop-punk appeal.

Sometimes I will get down on my knees to see if you are still there
as if I’m praying
Praying for you to give me my sin again

Then I wake up to the realization that, Fuck! I don’t want to be a pretty girl. And I know I’m preaching to the choir, but I choose you for a reason. 

Because YOU would listen 

I’m sitting at a bar
black face, white mask, and a martini. I write notes in my Notes app, but they become illegible at times as I forget things or make typos. I wrote a note to remind myself to read the Martinican writer Franz Fanon’s book, but it got cut off and sounded like a cocktail. It reminded me of being at Bemelmans Bar for the first time, ordering a thirty-dollar martini when I had no business spending that amount of money, but it came with free snacks. Also, I think I was underdressed and felt out of place. The note in my phone also included this quote from an article about Jeremy O’ Harris: “In Black Face, White Mask, the Martinique-born philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote that Black people don't feel inferior to others because to feel inferior is to feel you exist. Instead, we obsessively search for recognition, like the recognition of another's gaze, in order to formulate an existence, to become self-aware.”

Pouncy and petulant. 
I used to think a lot about performing,
performing my identity,
but now I’m so tired I can’t. 
I haven’t thought about it in a while. 
Does that make me myself? This is hard to explain. It’s a lot of feelings in one. It’s the conflicting feeling of both wanting to perform and needing or having to perform. I was thinking about—as a younger person—how can I perceive myself from outside myself, but I realized that obsession ends up making you even less self-aware. This goes back to the first line. Being perceived and not wanting to be perceived and wanting to know what is being perceived and how it is being seen starts to get maddening and folds in on itself. What if you stopped? Are you just left with your actual self? And doesn’t that seem just a tad boring at times? 

Do you think when you voice something you want that it will happen, or that saying it out loud will jinx it and it will never happen? 
That you’ve ruined it by letting it out into the atmosphere. 
Or worse, you will get exactly what you want, but you don't want it really or it arrives slightly wrong.
Like they didn’t hear you right because you said it so softly. I’ve always believed in jinxing something into not happening. And when I was younger, nothing hurt more to me than hoping for something that ended up not happening. Who would be listening to this hope or desire that would hear it and decide to take it away? I’m soft-spoken, so people often can’t hear me. It can be frustrating sometimes and was really embarrassing when I was an extremely shy teenager. I like imagining I was wishing for something, but God or angels or whoever might be listening to me just didn’t hear me so well, so they messed up when they were trying to grant my wish or answer my prayers. So instead, I got some messed-up version of my wish that I really didn’t want.