Hang Time:
The Hanged Man & the Aesthetics of Suspension
Dear reader,
How long can you stay still? How long can you stay with that which you can’t resolve? Tarot reading requires a willingness to peer the window, to look long into the frame of the card so as to critically discern the visible from the visual. If you see the collapsing facade of a house come apart, is that because a cyclone is soon to evacuate thousands around you, or is the structure of an intimate relationship no longer tenable, no more a sanctuary, nor for either party.
Red reading requires the emphasis of certain aesthetic modes be appropriate to ethical conditions. For in a such a reading, the querent comes to the red reader to create some kind of buffer zone around them and their vulnerable person. In the porosity of the divination, a solemn, rigid, rational solidity gives way, becoming a liquidity that manifests an opening between the self and the world. The cards create a wedge in our experiential temporality, and strategically so. A red reader can diagram the architectures of white supremacy in their lives and the lives of their clients, internally and externally, so as to suspend that anti-black logic.
The red reading is a caring container for queer, marginalized bodies that holds them without suffocating or compressing their integral movements. Rather, this space becomes one that inspire acts of defiance, refusal, and charts potential space, place and times for alternative moves. Thus, to the traitors the Hanged Man turns.
Obviously, queers need care. So I offer you this class as the second installment in the FADO container. The Hanged Man is one that reminds you how hard it is to stomach public executions. The Tower sends all the capitalists crashing to the ground but someone is suspended in space by the Hanged One.
Their fall upward is an initiation, a peaceful abandon within a durational drag. A consciousness is clarified from a corporeality bound by white rope.
In Hang Time we will survey a bit of the historic iconography of arcanum 12, discuss the body as a site of consumption, spectacle, the hangman’s noose and then some of the Black artists who strive toward suspension. These artists pursue aesthetic modes to delay, unmoor, halt the dominant gaze, the trajectories, and the technologies of surveillance, domination and captivity. We will question the automatic association of agency with motility.
We are suspended in a dangerous limbo, at the threshold between life and death. How long can we hang here?
Curious about FADO enrollment options?
As a reminder, there are two primary ways to participate in the full Fado container.
The first way is to enroll for the total course by setting up a payment plan (at $65 monthly rate vs the $80 stand-alone sign up rate) or invest in the total course tuition upfront. This will give you year-long access along with additional resources unique to students who enroll in the full course.
The second option is to enroll via these individual substack class announcements. Students who sign up for any single class, w/o signing up for the full course, will maintain 2-week access to the class recording.
x,
Christopher