The first work I saw of Ashley Holmes' was in early 2014. In a group show in Manchester, two old CRTs sat on a floor in a corner. Bilious grime music seethed through speakers as bizarre architectures, prismatically extruded from images of black men in hoods, whizzed by on axes through abstract digital space. These were the works Air Max But They're TN's Though and Bait We Was Gonna Be Here 
.
Not a little later, I curated Screwface Means I'm Not Amused 
into a group show in NYC. In an abyssal zone of blackness, canonically-verified renaissance marbles are rendered shook by quick cuts and the erratic hypnoticisms of Wiley's The Morgue (2005 remix) 1. In the last months of 2015 I finally met Ashley in person. We went to Udon West, near to where I was working at the time, and ate and laughed and drank in a room with no clouds outside.
It is now 2017 and I write this in the waning days of February. Ren Hang has just died 2. Yemen is being bombed, again, by the British (again) 3. The refugee crisis continues unabated as the Syrian Civil War grinds on into its sixth year (birthday March 15) 4. Chosen as the ideal site for the American-style projection of Russian International power, it chooses to do so by bombing cities from the air 5. Centrists, liberals, neo-liberals, corporatists, and Blairites have successfully conspired to wreck the chances of Corbyn and Sanders 6. The culmination of a decade long project to radicalize legions of basement dwelling outcasts through video game and anime message boards culminates in a new politics of violent nihilist asininity 7. A stupid gallery in Dalston 8, London is chosen as the site at which the same strategies will be deployed IRL to radicalize a new demographic, the naive and moronic artworld: These same successful fascists dance unbound through the upper echelons of Western Governments. As a Scandinavian human rights lawyer flees China, it is described by a scholar as the 'perfect dictatorship' 9.
Dot Dot Dit Dit Dot Dot Dash opens in January 2017. It has since ended but before it did, I walked in with a friend: lets call him Mr. Artworld
10. He was holding a bag of grapes and eating them loudly. He, white
11, noted that it was a happy show. The music soothed him. He read the videos as platitudes. He did not register any of the footages which constituted the videos as archival because the black people in them were, to him, functionally identical to the black people he did not register out in the world 
. He chuckled at Donald Duck and in his chuckling, did not notice that the Duck was doubled. Because he had never imagined that patois might have a written form, he half-assumed it to be Dutch (or some nonsense language or no language at all). Thinking of it no further, he ignored its inclusion in the work and did not link Donald Duck to the patois or indeed to the rest of the show 
.
He had recently seen 'The Place is Here' 12 at Nottingham Contemporary (featuring people like Akomfrah, Boyce, Chambers, Himid, Piper, et al). "I am glad that this show is not sad like that one,” he said. He noted that these videos were jolly, he was not struck by a sense of grief or loss or et cetera. He had nothing to say about anything else. I tell my friend that he is wrong, I explain why. Out of my mouth, protests are aggressively re-interpreted into thought-terminating clichés: my friend cannot hear what I say. His face, once round and smooth—full of green grapes—crumples into a mask, a desiccated rattlesnake, as he spits raisins from a pursed hole in a machine gun stream. He catches himself and smiles again.
My friend's smiling blindness is the story of the earth: He shrugs. He laughs. He floats over and is buoyed up by a roiling mantle of horror. I think now of this exchange and if I kiss my teeth any harder they'll be sucked from my gums, into my throat, and I’ll choke to death and, because I'd be dead, I would have lost. A loss made bitter by the simple fact that my friend lacks the capacity to understand: it is a function of carelessness. Whether he has neutered or cauterised himself is irrelevant. I'm not here to rehash the successful arguments of others but lets imagine the sadness he cannot see as a tangible, bodily product of racism.
The sadnesses in the works of Boyce, Akomfrah et all, function muscularly. They are the response to a more obviously naked environment of racial injustice & hostility. These older artists are the children of the space of time between Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell. But those days were those days. And racisms, and the sadness they produce, have changed. During the pre-conscious childhood of anyone born after '89 came the deployment of a new politics of multiculturalism as a cover for historical amnesia and tokenism that has largely survived to this day 13.
And so, the sadness of Holmes et al is skeletal, or if not skeletal then genetic perhaps. As Sadness, it has seeped deep enough to have damaged DNA, which is to say: the sadness is structural. The sadness-producing-racism Holmes et al face is different. The racism he faces is understood not as personal and pointed but in all directions and at all times. It is omni-directional. It is the leftover radiation from the Big Bang birth of racism. It is the white noise of our lives 14.
So what, if this is the case, does the old footage, filtering in like radio signals from lost worlds, in Dot Dot Dit Dit Dot Dot Dash mean?
Mr. Artworld, when pressed, dismisses simply and quickly: the charge is nostalgia. But how so when Holmes was not really alive when much of this was broadcast? The mechanics of nostalgia, wizened and weaponised, form the central engine of the racist contemporary 'amnesia' regarding Empire, but how do 'we' talk about nostalgia when we know, for fact, that the past for us was in all ways more horrifying?
And, indeed, if Holmes were to play-hark to better times would these old footages, drawn from the 80s and 70s, not have to constitute a celebrated golden age? No. Holmes uses these old footages holographically, they overlap to reveal an absent Venn almond: Sources X and Y conflate to illustrate lack 15. In a manner postulated by Philip K Dick, Holmes is overlapping sources from the past to illustrate our false present and our present lack.
And what of this lack? Of all the works, the only one that’s visibly derived from contemporaneity is the work that’s projected onto a structure like a tipped gallows, angled jauntily: the only sculpture-ish thing in the space 
.
Three minutes and fifty-seven seconds long 16 and edited together from about twelve videos all conforming to the genre of the YouTube instructional, all the footage in this video is marked with the clear originating distinction of being produced via webcam. Each of the videos, how-tos in the correct wearing of a du rag, is essentially a portrait and a tutorial in a specific way of presenting oneself as a black man.
But a du-rag is a funny thing. And, growing up, I'm not sure if I've ever actually seen anyone, apart from one or two of the corniest motherfuckers, wearing one. When I had them, I would sleep with my locks wrapped in a pair of stockings. I also wore one when I worked in a kitchen. A stocking is similar, for sure, but it would occur to me that a du-rag is fundamentally not British. This is to say: a du-rag is a symbol and a product of Black America.
Holmes is showing us how the Deathstar of black America casts its shadow over all things. Via the vast structural apparatus of capitalist-inflected black exploitation: the CIA's eternal-project of cultural warfare continues. From AbEx to Hip Hop to the psychotic ouroboric cannibalistic inertia of the Hollywood Film Industry 17.
In the aftermath of decades of inadequate public programming as regards Black Britain, it has fallen to America to produce cultural points of reference. That the most prominent black British character in a TV show on the BBC for many years was Will Smith's Butler, Geoffrey 18, speaks volumes.
Similar only to a racist, the black cultures of America and Britain are obviously not the same. And yet despite these differences, due to the lack of adequate representation in British media, black Britain has had to make do and make do with what has been available. I have only anecdotes, for as far as I know no studies on the subject of black British linguistic development have occurred, but I am drawn to think of the explosion of the n-word within black British culture 19. That said some things have not stuck. The Du-rag (and the mode of masculinity it implies) being one of them.
This, obviously, causes friction. We are not the same. And this difference serves only to further highlight a lack, whilst only ostensibly filling it.
But still, there is connection and it feels relevant that I first met Holmes in America. In the same way that atomic annihilation might be understood as the subtext to manga and anime, so too might we consider our several-centuries-long holocaust as the subtext to all black artistic production. This is the connection: the black Atlantic 20.
We, the heirs, the pre-robots, the scions of the irrelevantised first note in a rhythmic, möebian, debased mechano-ritualism: the industrialization of horror and of pain. We, blacks of no nation, that constitute the collateral afterbirth of the psychic holocaustic apocalypse that was the birth of capitalism. And make no mistake: black people gave birth to capitalism, it gestated inside of black flesh inside of holds on the high seas. The birth was like rape in reverse, an eldritch and inverted baptism, for in giving said birth: our Africanness was forfeited and we immediately became black 21. And indeed Black people are STILL giving birth to capitalism, the apocalypse, the achronic, and it still peals all about. It is the noise and the echo. Time flips over and inverts: the negative space becomes the 'thing' and back again.
On the islands of the Caribbean and in Africa, where black is max demographic, the lack of representation must never have really manifested, despite whatever toxic remnitudes of white supremacy persist. But in America, where we know the lack remains sorely felt (and indeed the lack takes on negative mass), we can see the most successful remedial actions. And why? It is because 13.4% of 316.5 million equals 42.3 million people 22.
Like a moon, too small to retain an atmosphere, we in England might reasonably stare at the future with blank eyes. Holmes understands and explicates the essential hopelessness of the black British project and I am moved to think of a-chronicity.
As I understand it: achronicity is not helpfully understood as a type of 'timelessness' but rather 'un-timeness': The flickering strings of causality collapsed into a singular and dense smear—nothing really changes because things don't happen in the right order or at all. More specifically, I think of this un-timeness, this a-chronicity, and of blackness: a state of conceptual arbitrariness wherein the supposed 'laws' of the expected context can be said to have been revised into an anarchic 'not-really-ness'.
We, the black, for whom the laws don't really apply, live in this condition daily. Subject to destabilising socio-political technique and a world that can collapse us into a single multivalent psycho-spatial, bio-geologic supra-object: no humans involved 23.
Against it all we survive, and we may be empty, yes, but resplendent in the face of freshly unveiled nauseating infinitudes of time and violence.
Achronicity in the show is further underscored by Permissions soundtrack 24 mix tape thing. Playing on loop throughout. One would be watching a video and have its soundtrack change several times during ones viewing. That each Soundtrack 'fit' served only to underscore the discongruous atmosphere we were in, where but moments ago we'd known motion scored to a different tune. This is Achronicity. And all of this is linked to hopelessness, yes, but it is not inextricably linked. There is life beyond hope, the opposite of Kaspar David Friedrich's wanderer 
is not still on his feet, no, the black Britisher runs endlessly in a concrete ravine. Which is to say that this a-chronicity, the result of new sadnesses rendered genetic is now not weakness or strength but standard operating condition.
In a time more hopeful, black Britain turned reggae into blitzed out, electronic dub. That the black Britain that made Holmes 25 ate hip-hop, chewed it, digested it, and birthed out 200bpm murder techno 26 is important.
Sam Selvon allegedly wrote several sequels to The Lonely Londoners 27 but are any of them real? Are any of them true? Did any of them ever happen? I, for one, doubt it. And if they 'exist' at all then surely all these could-be, perhaps-ish sequels must pale in the cold blue sun of the last chapter of the original.
I say this (I ask) because that chapter, like the whole book, being about our grandfathers, is more than just an application to a metropolitan modernist canon...
It is, in absence of all else, a framework for black Britain. Despite all the change and progress, despite the recorded and anecdotal differences in treatment between black and other poc, we still remain the mostly poor and mostly sad and mostly a-chronic. Adroitly adrift. Perhaps Sam Selvon cast an inadvertent spell that did this to us. Yes, Perhaps Selvon cast this damn spell.
Or perhaps we live in a Philip K Dick-ian false reality (not NIGER FERRUM CARCER but NIGGER FERRUM CARCER) because despite the fact we 'know' that it ended we all already know, because it is increasingly self-evident, that 'the empire never ended'. Instead of 1st century Christians wandering around hallucinating our contemporary woes, perhaps we are all Galahad and Moses, dreaming.
Or perhaps Selvon's (or whoever’s) spell was stranger still.
Perhaps the Nazis that burned all those children alive in New Cross 28 were actually ritually sacrificing the future of black Britain, in a bleak, millennia-later inversion of the druidic ritual self-slaughter on the isle of Anglesey in 60-61AD that led to the downfall of the Roman Empire 29.
Or perhaps the spell was stranger still and when they threw David Oluwale 30 in the water he turned into a manatee, ate the future to save us the pain, and swam away home. And if the future did not become a manatee's supper then, goddamn, maybe we should have become manatees! And after wading into the Humber, we should've swum up the rivers Niger & Gambia to steal a home.
Because, as it is, where have we really gone? We’ve gone nowhere. Arguably backwards. Direct me, please, to a black British middle class 31. Once I thought the problem was one of demographics. That the small percentage of black people in Britain was what occluded our progression. That the difference between 2 million and 42.3 million was what it took to produce a Barack Obama. But the percentages are similar for Britain’s other not-white populations who have all done markedly better in that they have generated visible middle classes and we have not 32.
BUT lets go back for a moment: back to Sheffield, to late Jan. As I hung around Dot Dot Dit Dit Dot Dot Dash and patiently waited for Mr. Artworld to leave. Out of grapes and of things to say, he acquiesced to my silent desire. When gone and back to London, I wished that Mr. Artworld were made only of straw and not the meat and bone of a thousand worthless dickheads.
Now alone, I go to find Holmes to speak with him. I giddily relay my hushed arguments with Mr. Artworld and go on to tell him what I think are clever things.
I say:
"Inadvertently or otherwise, the social-machinery of the Artworld works to steadily squeeze out working class artists like pus from a zit. And woe betide you if you are not white, if you are working class and poor, if you are ugly.
And the black British artist is a metonym for black Britain: it is to fight for inclusion in a system that would prefer not to fight for you.
To be a black artist is to be expected to feel guilty about your achievements 'because of tokenism' but never ever angry about the opportunities you *know* you didn't get because of racism...
It is to have been taught that 'dogs born in stables can never be horses', it is to have learnt to perfectly understand the language of the dog-whistle. It is to be more familiar with racism than racists, to KNOW intrinsically when one is about to deflect you, demur you, obfuscate you, lie to you, or lie about you. It is to have classmates destroy your work. It is to have gallerists destroy your work. It is to know you will be wildly underrepresented if you are represented at all. Curses be to the cruel Wizard Selvon."
Ashley smiles at what I have to say but when all is said and done, at the end of the day: Permissions, who is Holmes, is a guest at his own show and the show was not programmed, Holmes had to apply 33.
So perhaps I am wrong but curses be to the cruel Wizard Selvon.
The culmination of Roots: the next generation makes me cry 34. James Earl Jones emoting and emoting and emoting as he discovers his ancestral village, and is welcomed, cuts deep because I think we all want it. And yet it is not a satisfying scene. It does not placate, it does not really soothe, it offers nothing in the way of catharsis save the whistling-ly bleak fantasy that comes with sniffing the clothes of the dead in the hopes that one might re-experience their smell. But the smell is gone because time has passed and you long since sucked it all out up your nose and you are triggering no memories, you are generating imaginations.
And so, James Earl Jones finds his home. He wails in a way that looks like the opposite of grief (but I know that sound). And he acts and acts and acts as if finding his home is the completion of him, standing upright, as if a missing lodestone in the architecture of his soul has been returned. And then he leaves, as soon as he came it seems.
Whilst the lack is real, the village is not. And one cannot truly live with the gaps in the ones soul as posited by Roots. Instead, we have adapted. The lack is abyssal. So blackness has adapted to the pressure of life at its depths. It ekes along as many things. And we with skins the breadth of pigmentary expression, live blackly because in the deep dark depths, everything is black.
Yes, James Earl Jones was acting when he clasped his long lost family but his howls of grief at realizing he had come home, were documentary. That the village elder was made up in such bizarre makeup is further proof of the madness and the hollowness of the scene. James Earl Jones wails. A rictus grin. For it appears that Alex Haley is a liar 35. Or to use the parlance of the craft, Haley wrote a fiction. Instead of that home, or that longing for that home—a home which history has rendered fictional. Another thing fills our hearts.
For a moment, I thought we had been long filled with something like the last damned chapter of Selvon’s book... our very own necro-nomi-canonical tome. But no, not a book: a clock 
. Holmes-ish in nature. Forever counting upwards, minutes from midnight, in armour of long desiccated amniotic fluid, minutes from midnight, never finished, eternally almost nearly born.
And the a-chronic returns to haunt us one last time. When the sound and the echo are the same thing: the search for home, and the search for futurity, is meaningless.
There is the urge to try to code positivity into writing on this subject. Whilst I think that there’s something *in* the synthesis of blackness and Britishness that produces a sort of un-cynical grimness, that could be understood as a position of strength, it is not appropriate, nor my place, to try to say something hopeful about the position we are in as a whole.
This may be my own lack, my own bleak outlook, my own interest in annihilation, obsession with destruction, my own failure, my own need to project such views on to Holmes but it is I that is writing and it would be a lie for me to lie.
So... Perhaps you are reading this one-year hence, and England looks like Aleppo, and I & Ashley & Georgia & Simeon et al are dead, or long gone to the camps. And I wonder will our white peers; our white curators and gallerists, our white cousins and uncles and grandparents stand for us when the time comes? (I think not.)
Perhaps you are reading this 100 or a 1000 years hence, and the cities have gone to seed, the reactors've boiled over and it seems inconceivable that there could exist any form of government outside of the confines of global fascismo-feudalism and perhaps any references to differing shades of skin are incomprehensible. Does anything I've said have any relationship to your life? Does art still exist? I would like it to but fear it does not. Make some art for me please.
Perhaps you are reading this one million years hence, and this inadequate little essay is all that remains to suggest that we as humans once even thought at all and were ever anything beyond the diminished, stooped cattle of a Dougal Dixon-ian
36 future that low at the moon and eat lichen. Can you see the seeds of our failure, our present unthinking a-intelligent herbivosity in this text? Can you see how it all fell apart?