Plantation Energy: From Slave Labor to Machine Discipline

World-weary and reanimated, a cotton gin motor could be seen spinning inside a glass vitrine, its expected industrial roar absorbed by anechoic foam lining the base of its enclosure. The machine was the centerpiece of Kevin Beasley’s A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor, 2012–18 (fig. 1) on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in spring 2019. Inside the case, Beasley placed a dozen microphones relaying the noise of the massive machine to an adjacent room. There, the sensorial experience was inverted: the walls were dark, lined with sound-absorbing pads, and illuminated during performances in various colors; wires ran to synthesizers staged along the rear wall; hi-fi speakers filled the room with the motor’s amplified live-feed; and, on benches or the floor, viewers sank into a machinic soundscape. With sound and sight separated, the motor’s absence could be read as consent to enjoy its noise as music. In this way, A view spurred critical reflection on the exploitation of black musical expression conditioned on the social marginalization of black people.1 However, Beasley refused to appropriate the motor’s sound for the musical sublime; he hardly modulated its industrial roar. Instead, the motor’s ready-made time and space—it powered an Alabama cotton gin from 1940 to 1973—was allowed to enter the white walls of the museum. More than an instrument, the motor was situated as a storage device whose inhuman rhythm recalled the accumulated history of the plantation and whose dislocation suggested that it was standing in for the plantation’s first technologies: black slaves worked like machines under the threat of the overseer’s whip.