Poet, meme czar, artist, critic, Afro-pessimist, post-ironic ironist, and newly minted University of Buffalo media study professor Jenson Leonard is a ghostbuster for the zeitgeist. His wicked collages of prefab images and words have gained him a substantial following as @coryintheabyss on Instagram, where he thumbs his nose at the intersections of late-stage capitalism, anti-Blackness, and high-tech hypocrisy in the universal language of bad taste.

With his new piece, Workflow (2022)—the subject of Leonard’s first institutional solo show at Pioneer Works—he crosses the DMZ into the art world like a crazed NFT. We fly over computer-generated landscapes celebrating the excesses of modern industry: a port jammed with colorful shipping crates waiting to be assembled on a giant barge, sun-blasted oil refineries, and a gargantuan Le Corbusier-ish apartment block rendered in sickeningly vivid oversaturation. A Muzak-y karaoke version of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” floats with us for a minute, and then MJ himself appears—well, a decapitated, AI marionette computer-generated cartoon version of MJ, exaggerating the King of Pop’s creepiest late-period incarnation with an artificially chiseled bone structure, hair plugs, and bright red lipstick. Frequently blinking, its eyeballs are pupil-free. A simulacrum of a distortion that we already knew to be a distortion of his actual human nature. Disturbed yet?

Hold tight, because Workflow isn’t done with you. Instead of the mellifluous tones we’re used to, this Michael Jackson effigy growls in a deep, cyber-demon voice, seeming at first to parody the song’s original lyrics—“Looking out across the macro / Panoptic eyes are everywhere”—but soon spinning off into a monologue that stitches together clichéd expressions from the business and the self-help industries with tech jargon and literary references. Haunting declarations call upon the dystopic Black past to illuminate the dystopic Black present—“chitlin’ circuitry courses through you,” “upload speeds faster than Drapetomania”—and point ominously to a dystopic Black future. Or as the disturbing Jackson head declares while levitating above a horizonless cotton field, “Going, going—ZONG!” Its authoritarian voice seems to suggest that we are doomed; the cycle is vicious and intractable—“automatic, systematic,” as the Jackson 5 sang—in its inhuman nature.

Workflow is a prime example of Leonard’s seductive but merciless aesthetic, which rips the hockey mask off modernity to show us that the same old circuitry of racism, discrimination, and brutality will always remain at work behind the glitz of technology.

Wanting to know more, I asked Leonard some probing questions about Workflow and his work at large.

Whew! What possessed you to make Workflow?

I wanted to get to the core of why work sucks, which meant delving into the interconnected history of labor, Blackness, and capitalism—all the good stuff. When I say “work,” I don't mean the labor that goes into making all of this art; I mean the things I do to try to finance that. I’ve had too many workplace experiences where, once it's found out that I’m an intelligent Black man who doesn't tolerate degradation, I am harassed, intimidated, and either strategically removed or outright fired. This also points to the kind of employment opportunities that are available to me, which are usually physically demanding warehouse jobs where I am not using my MFA. Typically, I apply to clerical and academic jobs, hear radio static, and then have to resort to finding quick work. The Biggie Smalls line, “Don’t be mad, UPS is hiring,” has always hit close to home.

So what do you do to circumvent this limited (and limiting) employment situation?

I aspire to find a workplace that doesn't feel like that, or at least one where I’m not bothered by those violences because I’m compensated well enough to dismiss them. It's painful to realize that there’s no arithmetic for freedom, just harm mitigation, just our contemporaneity. When I was 16 my dad got fired from his lucrative HR job and spent six years atrophying before he was able to find work. It was a tectonic shift for our family, and moved us from upper to lower middle class in the midst of the 2008 recession. I saw my dad have to remake himself and his identity as “provider” when the bottom was pulled out from under him. The system loves to affix the blame of structural issues to the individual, so instead of pathologizing and blaming myself I said fuck it, fuck this workplace-induced PTSD that follows me everywhere. I will sublimate all of my feelings around this into an undeniable work of art.

The “Workflow” exhibition press release references Aria Dean’s essay “Notes on Blacceleration” as formative. Can you speak about that and any other references that were important to you?

The Aria Dean essay was in many ways the scholastic jumping-off point to think through certain conceits about futurity and techno-civilizational advancement and collapse. She thought, wait a minute…there’s precedent for a lot of this already within the structure of Blackness. Black people have already been robotized, tested on, and speculated upon en route to these ideas. There’s also the Afro-pessimist theory of Frank Wilderson, which has had incredible, explanatory power since it was published in 2020. He writes about the chattel slavery transition from human being to flesh to commodity; the slave as the ground upon which the waged laborer formulates itself; and the limits of Freudian and Marxist thought to account for the Black subject. All have remained remarkably consistent over time. It was important to ground this theory in material history as well. There’s a rather dry but incisive text from Caitlin Rosenthal called Accounting for Slavery. It looks at slave accounting books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their methods of quantification as the proto-systems of scientific management, business management, and latter-day workforce organization. And there’s an essay by Chris Lee, who works at Pratt’s Design School, called “The Banality of Excel: Orthography, Grids, Colonization.” It looks at the role that “the grid” has played in statecraft. You’ll note Workflow is riddled with the repetition of squares and grids. This is all bleak stuff, but it’s not a source of nihilism for me; it's a scholarship for the soul. My art is bound up in all of this.

Do you still think of this work as connected to memes, or do you define it differently? 

Memes matter; government propaganda ministries and reactionary teenagers alike understand this. There’s a democratizing element to memes where the barrier of entry is low, and thus they have a democracy-undermining element where anyone, anywhere, can say any old thing. That thing can gain momentum, and burst its way out of the filter bubble and into Nancy Pelosi’s office. Memes are a truth-approximating social currency. They play out our present crisis of algorithmically fed truth, reinforcing what one wants the truth to be. Partisan news sources, disinformation, conspiracy theories… all are symptoms of a growing distrust of institutions, corporations, and governments that lead to information warfare’s dizzying, democracy-destabilizing effects. Memes are impossible to disentangle from this larger context and our larger visual culture. Meme culture is digital culture is visual culture is culture.

But Workflow doesn’t utilize any memes…

This work arose out of my exhaustion with working in the meme space, which is ultimately the domain of Big Tech and their phenomenally opaque methods of surveillance and extraction. It was important for me to make something that remains conceptual—heavy on puns and feints—but that lives outside of social media’s attention-economy roulette. In some ways this work is an extrusion pushed out of the cacophony of networked life. Which is to say, there’s still some meme-lord stank on it.

Transgression and shock value are important elements of what you do; tell us a little bit about the joys and sorrows of transgressiveness and Blackness as you see them.

Blackness and transgression are contiguous. I’m not saying that by virtue of one's Black identity, walking outside amounts to some display of radicality, like when during the 1968 Summer Olympic Black American athletes raised their fists in a sign of solidarity with the Black Freedom Movement. But transgression doesn’t take much, knowing what we know about the way Black existence has been structured historically—the way Blackness has been crafted since the Enlightenment to serve as the horizon line for where the primacy of whiteness ends and the animal, Black “other” begins. W.E.B. Dubois called the Black subject’s awareness of their own foreignness double consciousness; Fred Moten calls Blackness jurisgenerative, reflecting on how it has been legally elaborated as criminal; and Christina Sharpe calls Blackness anagrammatical to convey how it disorders the structures of language, thought, and society. All these theoretical coordinates of Black rebellion and difference exist on the shared map of Blackness as the edge, the fulcrum, the Je ne se Quando Rondo of humanity. Have you heard the joke, “Everybody got that one crackhead cousin”? I mean, do they? I don’t know about all that, but I understand the veracity of the claim; the joke is less about one crackhead being apportioned to every Black family and more about the idea that the crack epidemic was so vast in its destruction that it has forever transmogrified the whole of Black sociality such that there is no Black family its violence hasn’t touched. Out of the absurdity of this gratuitous violence comes the tragicomical register of my work. ♦