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The iconic image from Jenson Leonard’s video art piece “Workflow” is the disembodied head of Michael Jackson. Or, more precisely, a warped, eyeless, 3D-animated MJ mask whose grotesquerie jars in contrast to the video’s matter-of-fact title.
A similar dynamic arises in the five-minute video loop itself. The disjunction there is between the anodyne musical soundtrack playing while the mask, in a warbly, robotic baritone, recites an unsettling monologue like some motivational speech’s sarcastic evil twin: “You are scalable, You contain platitudes. Clean and renewable, black from the waste management down. These are micro-credentials too big to fail.”
“Workflow,” at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s Wood Street Galleries, is among the headier and more provocative artworks in town at the moment. It’s also a sort of homecoming for Leonard.
The native of South Bend, Ind., came to Pittsburgh at age 16, in 2006. After graduating from Central Catholic High School and Duquesne University, where he studied creative writing, Leonard worked odd jobs, wrote poetry, and eventually got into creating memes.
“Memes, so what,” you say? Leonard, posting as Cory in The Abyss, was nationally known for it. In 2018, after he left Pittsburgh to study at the Pratt Institute, Vice featured him in an article titled “The Socialist Memelords Radicalizing Instagram.”
Leonard’s posts included “Tyler Perry’s ‘Madea’s Proletariat Uprising’” (Madea brandishing an automatic pistol with a riot squad in the background) and one sporting Universal Studios’ globe logo but reading, “Universal Healthcare — What a Concept.”
In contrast to poetry, Leonard said, “There was an ease and immediacy to yelling on the information highway. … Making that move to expressing myself online felt more truthful to my voice.”
But eventually, memes felt confining, too. At Pratt, Leonard turned to video art, honing his skills at residencies. But his work continued to critique capitalism through a Black lens.
“Workflow,” which debuted at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works in July, was inspired by artist Aria Dean’s essay “Notes on Blacceleration.” The video, Leonard said, explores how Black Americans confront their current status as commodities in a labor market which they first entered as commodities, during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Leonard is now a professor in the department of media studies at SUNY Buffalo. “Workflow” was brought to Wood Street by Anastasia James, the Trust’s director of galleries and public art.
In a darkened gallery sit two workstations, each resembling “a high-frequency day-trading console” and each playing “Workflow” on a bank of six flat-screen monitors.
Along with the Jackson mask, the video’s visuals consist of stock footage of totems of the globalized economy. Vast ports full of shipping containers, an oil refinery, wind turbines, robotic factory floors, the gleaming windows of downtown skyscrapers — all huge, all repeating grids, all devoid of human presence. And that schmaltzy soundtrack — an instrumental version of Jackson’s “Human Nature” at half speed — never rests.
With its skillful wordplay, the script uses “the language of corporate personhood as a poetic device,” said Leonard. It also plays off the idea that Blacks aren’t considered people but corporations are. “You’re more than the sum of your outsourced manufacturing components. Know your neural net worth. Walk with your overhead held high.”
Leonard likens the monologue to giving yourself a pep talk in the mirror before a job interview: “You’re doing the work of commodifying yourself through that kind of speech.”
See “Workflow” on break from your own day job. It’s at Wood Street Galleries through Feb. 11.
