"The Bottom is Heaven": An Interview with Cameron Granger

Originally published in the Poetry Project Newsletter, Spring 2025

Artist Cameron Granger and I spoke to each other amidst the pulse of music in Pho Grand. In between spoonfuls, he shared reflections on his recent exhibition Doom & Gloom, and ideas that animate and enrich his broader practice. Granger identifies political stakes with an honesty and intention that is critical and without pretense. I am grateful for the time he made to think together, for the tensions of humor he embraced in the exhibition, and for the questions his practice articulates.
—Gervais Marsh

“A joke. A nigger joke. That was the way it got started. Not the town of course, but that part of town where the Negroes lived, the part that they called the Bottom in spite of the fact that it was up in the hills. Just a nigger joke. The kind white folks tell when the mill closes down and they’re looking for a little comfort somewhere. The kind colored folks tell on themselves when the rain doesn’t come, or comes for weeks, and they’re looking for a little comfort somehow

—Toni Morrison, Sula

Gervais Marsh: What are some of the questions that you were reflecting on leading up to this body of work? I also appreciate the notes you shared. It helped orient me.

Cameron Granger: Absolutely, I try to do that every time. In my work generally, I’m thinking about different intertwining power structures that shape or pull apart neighborhoods, and where that leaves all of us in the process—how we make lives in the midst of all that. With this exhibition, I was feeling the doom and gloom vibe of just being here, being a human in the imperial core, trying to make sense of all this shit going on. Two years now watching your government, which you already had a very low opinion of, stooping to even lower lows. Opening up my phone and seeing children blown apart every morning and really feeling that sort of weight.

I’ve long lost any sort of faith in government power structures. But what really is disturbing is the intense levels of cruelty from people horizontal to me. I’m trying to wrap my head around how this is possible. How has cruelty seeped so deep into every sort of interaction you have with people? But I think in-person you can still forge genuine connections with people. You can still find each other, still fumble around and come towards each other in some kind of way. Online, in particular, though, has been really disturbing to me.

I am an avid Twitter user. I came up with online internet forums. I love all that shit. Twitter was big for me, and I feel, when I go on it now, like I’m wearing a cursed amulet or something. Everyone’s interaction’s are pushing me to be mean to someone. On the most insignificant things. One of the questions I ask myself: how did we get here? This didn’t come out of nowhere, so how are we being pushed to treat each other like this? In the case of internet interactions, I know that this cruelty is making someone richer. Is there a way outside of that too, to prevent that, to reclaim tenderness and empathy towards one another?

GM: In my practice these questions are always on my mind, about the limits of reconciliation and complexities of relation. Are our attempts to reconcile flattening the various forms of violence that are happening because we want to move past violence quickly? Some things can’t be repaired. Something completely new has to happen.

CG: Yeah. I don’t think we can go back. There’s nothing to go back to. And anything we go back to, it’s just kind of papering over it because the fractures are already there. This whole project has been built on cruelty. I know there’s certain people that use the Baldwin quote, I reserve the right to critique this America because I love it or whatever. I have no love for America. I have no desire to fix the American project. But there are people here that I love deeply. I think a lot about the Black Panthers’ idea of survival pending revolution. What do I have to do to make life survivable for me, my loved ones, and the communities that I care about?

GM: Can you talk a bit more about orienting away from hope as an aspiration or an abstract form of resolve, particularly as you think about systematic state violence? What does thinking along the realities of doom and gloom—as both a conceptual framework, and as an urgent reality—open up for you in your own thinking?

CG: Yeah, shit’s cooked. To realize that and sit with it is kind of freeing to me. It frees you to think about: what is the after? Because the after can look like whatever we want it to be, but there is a responsibility in imagining that. Also the acknowledgement that there’s going to be a lot of pain on the way to that, too.

I don’t think there’s any sort of top-down thing happening. There are people still asking: what are the Democrats doing? I’m just like, same team, different shirts. I think that frees you up to really realize how much of your own safety is predicated on the people around you. I’m only as safe as my neighbor is, or you are, or the people in this room. That instills a strong sense of moral responsibility in me, too. To organize, to tap in with my neighbors, to do what I can around me. It’s liberating knowing that the only people that are going to save you are your homies or your loved ones or your neighbors.

The doom and gloom carries lucidity. It’s really clarifying. Talking about something like police violence: I used to be a reformist. I used to believe, oh we can reform this thing, get this certain bill passed. But I realized it doesn’t matter. You can have the most trained force on the planet. It doesn’t change the fact that anti-blackness, lethal force, all that shit is baked into it. As long as you divinely ordain someone with the power to take another life, that’s it. There’s no sort of safety that really comes from it.

GM: I appreciate the word lucidity, when the stakes are laid bare. This is the reality, so you stop looking to some kind of abstract idea of this person that is going to fix something, or this governmental body.

You work across screen and inkjet printing, pen on paper, collage, mixed-media sculpture, and video in the exhibition—how do you think about your relationship to working with various media, and putting them in conversation?

CG: I trained in video. That’s sort of where I have the most experience, where I’m most articulate, where I have the most language. So that feels very natural at this point. But I got to the point where these things I was thinking of felt so present in my body. They had a visceral effect on my body and the way I navigated space, the world, and it felt limiting to just keep myself in the container of video, which already in itself is very vast. I wanted to give myself the freedom to expand and follow an idea. I realized that a video or a print might not be the best form for it to take. Sometimes it’s an object, sometimes it’s a cast hand. It gives me the freedom to really let an idea take me to whatever place it goes. I’m trying to also allow myself to be playful and not box myself into one thing because it’s worked in the past or people have enjoyed it from me in the past.

It’s exciting to break down the boundaries in your work. Find new ways to speak, new ways to articulate oneself. There’s a lot of different points of connection that can be generated when you put a print in conversation with the video.

GM: What drew you to this deeper research on pigeons? How they were brought to North America, the initial plans for them, and the eventual shift that now positions them as nuisances.

CG: I live in Queens in this set of row house-type buildings on the third floor. I have a neighbor on the second floor. Awesome dude. We had, for several months, two pigeons nesting in this gap between our apartments. They were just, like, shitting everywhere, made themselves known. I remember watching Paul go to war with these birds, and he put up cardboard there. They just tore through. I remember talking to him one day; he was pissed because they were back. And I’m like, yeah, man, it is what it is. And he was like, I got something. I didn’t want to bring it out, but I got something.

And he has this cut piece of hard plastic he seals up the hole with, and that solved the issue, right? The pigeons would then just come to our balcony. I was like, damn, I got a lot of respect for these pigeons, they’re going to find a way. They’re going to find a way to make their little home regardless. You see these bird spikes everywhere, all these different ways of making hostile architecture, but they circumvent and find their way through. I was thinking about that in tandem with seeing this really cruel society that’s been built around us.

We are making this planet inhospitable for everybody around us. Something I put into practice, even outside of my art, is recognizing interlocking crises, how my problems are just one in a sort of vast ocean of struggles people are going through. So that led me to think less from just a personal and even human perspective, looking at other histories. Anna Tsing, who wrote The Mushroom at End of the World, calls these polyphonic histories: all these different life waves that are intertwining, intersecting or clashing up against each other that seem really independent, but have some sort of reliance on one another, even for a blip in time.

Pigeons eventually came to me in that sort of way. I used to always joke about the colorism between the dove and the pigeon. Damn, they the same animal, but one gets VIP treatment at weddings and the other is the rat. There’s a lot embedded into that. It’s like, wow, pigeons is niggas. I knew about the history as a messenger bird, this eventual abandonment of ‘em and how they’ve been cast as pests. What started to really crystallize everything was learning about B. F. Skinner and his behavioral studies, the pivotal role pigeons played with missile guidance software. Hearing him talk about control in societies, using pigeons to build this theory of control and planning to give this to the US as a way of continuing to expand this power. Though at some points he seems critical of control, he’s still guided by this kind of militarization.

Thinking about impending collapse and how much that ripples further out than just us. All of that brought me to the pigeons. And we live in New York, we see ‘em all the time. They’re a constant presence.

GM: Why was it important for you to think about the pigeons within this larger structure of anti-blackness that violently shapes the lives of Black people, and the historical arc of the pigeon’s life and where they’re at right now?

CG: In my previous projects, I had this series of films that are set in this fictional area called Bad City. It was inspired by Columbus, OH, where I’m thinking of segregated design. Environmental racism as a sort of supernatural force, either through these giant monsters that have leveled a Black neighborhood or these black holes that have been popping up in different parts of a neighborhood where some sort of shift has happened, like a business closed down, a home demolished, an area leveled.

This project is in line with that, taking a science fiction, speculative lens at this shit that is very real. This all-encompassing politics of death. It fundamentally restructured the world in such a way that nothing, not even a massive upheaval, is going to change. It’s existential. It’s metaphysical. I think it also alters how we think about being human. Trying to sit with this pigeon in the film, all this pigeon knows is the Skinner box. It only knows this plexiglass set of walls in the little feeding tube that is given. I feel like we are in that shit, and it is this pigeon dreaming of something else entirely, watching this collapse, taking glee in it and being like, okay, they built this whole world around all this shit, but we can go fly somewhere else.

We are up here, and the Sula quote, “the bottom is heaven.” And it’s like, well, we gon’ make something of this shit, we gon’ take these scraps. There’s sort of a glee in that. Maybe we have to become pigeons and remember that we can also fly, too. Rethink the human and what we could see ourselves as.

GM: All of that resonates. We’re grappling with this world that is fucked and anti-blackness is a fundamental structure that we have to negotiate. And also something else can be there. How do we negotiate towards something else? I don’t want to necessarily name that as hope.

In your sculptural installation, “Atrocity Exhibition,” there is a juxtaposition of the grasping silicone cast hands rising from the floor, the miniature soldiers with guns aimed towards the hands and the suspended flag printed with stars attached to the spear. Do you conceive of the State as an atrocity? How do you reckon with the atrocities, especially when on such blatant display?

CG: I think the overall concept of the nation-state is probably one of the most sinister inventions humanity’s ever created. One of the things Skinner says: he’s talking about this story of Satan falling from heaven and finding freedom in hell. I’m thinking of this mandate from heaven idea, that this State is the atrocity, and that the spear from heaven is coming down and the wretched ones are below. It feels biblical. We’re seeing everything, all the cruel machinery of this country and many countries, the whole sort of Western order laid bare, and how untenable it is to live under this. There’s something very powerful in witnessing this; but how to go beyond the witness, what can be transmuted from that? And there’s a quote from Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others. She starts talking about religious imagery, like Christ on the cross and, looking at suffering, there’s something supposedly happening on an emotional level for Christians or people in the religion, to take that into their daily lives and theoretically use it to move through the world as a more forgiving, empathetic individual. And I’m asking myself, damn, what am I supposed to take from all of this? What can I take from seeing this?

GM: What is your thinking around the idea of regard, as the concept of showing regard for others is often a fraught relation?

CG: How much of my ability to regard, to watch, to witness, is predicated on comfort. My comfort and safety is predicated on the suffering of someone else. Sometimes someone just down the block from me, and sometimes someone in a place that I’ve never been, might never be. What is my responsibility within that? To pay attention, but then also to go beyond that and organize, be involved, do what I can to tear the shit down from where I’m at. And a lot of times that is not necessarily in my art practice, that is in my daily organizing as a human in various communities. I think there are a lot of things that art can do very saliently, and it can allow you a sort of mobility in a way that’s really beautiful and can be useful. There’s also limitations to that shit.

GM: There is a CCTV set up in the exhibition, just out of the view of the piece and recording the lower half of the body. How are you contending with increasing surveillance technology?

CG: Our generation is probably the most documented generation on the planet. And a lot of that was done by ourselves. And in a way that’s really beautiful. I think there’s a real purity in the Facebook era, MySpace era, going out with the homies and everyone uploading every single photo. They use their little digicam or flip phone. But I was just listening to this podcast today, they’re talking about Clearview facial recognition software, generative AI, and how they’re just scraping people’s shit from Venmo or Facebook or Instagram, fucking Flickr. Who uses Flickr anymore? But they’re still scrubbing that shit. It’s like all these different versions of yourself have been fed to this beast. And so much of it was maybe not necessarily done consciously, but who knows what’s in the privacy things that we click all the time. What else are you going to do?

GM: I’m curious about how you’re approaching text in the exhibition, redaction as both a mode of editing or obscuring. Can you discuss the crosswords and the longer texts that are seemingly elaborations on those intersections?

CG: I’ve been doing the crosswords for a few years now. I think of them as floor plans for memories. Crossword puzzles are systems of knowledge. The one in the New York Times is very different from the one you get at the dollar store. That’s really fascinating to me. I am always trying to think of working with really sacred histories, my personal histories, my family’s histories, my community’s histories. I think this is also why I got into abstracting the narratives a bit, too. I want to create a bit of distance, a bit of a barrier, or terms of engagement. And I think the crossword format has a lot of opportunities for that. There are hints, but the answers in the grid are hyper specific, really obscure, very personal to me.

And if I don’t give you that answer, you’re not going to figure it out. And I go in, I redact some stuff, I refuse things. I have done several talks, and people ask what the answer to certain crosswords are. And I like saying, nah, no, no, sorry. You can imprint whatever you want. When you read the hint, certain memories might be triggered in your mind that are not the ones that I have. I think that’s one of the really beautiful things about language, about poetry.

I’m trying to make my work as specific as possible. But I think the specificity doesn’t negate the accessibility. If you want to spend that time with it, there’s something that I think you’ll be able to get. And if you’re not, that’s fine. I wasn’t making it for you in the first place. There’s a beautiful fluidity with that. I’ve always been interested in text. For a lot of my earlier films, I would have the image on screen, but the subtitles would be more like annotations.

And I love footnotes. I love when a book uses the footnotes as an invitation to a moment in time. I’m thinking of ways I can achieve that in my work. I think of my exhibitions as a stage or a video game, as storytelling. In the game, you walk into a deserted town just after an event happens, you have to piece together what occurred here through the different items you find or the different ways that the environment is laid out. When I’m building a show, I have the centerpiece of the show, which is normally a film. For this one, it's the “Atrocity Exhibition” piece, and then all these other works orbiting are the Codex entries where you can figure out what’s happening.

GM: I appreciate that framing. Do you think of those kinds of intersections and the structure of crosswords as poetics?

CG: Totally. Yeah. 100%. That goes back to the idea of these polyphonic life ways and these intersections. I think all of these different ways that you can look and relook at a situation, all of that memory that re-emerges, going back to Toni Morrison, all of that is there when I’m piecing together these grids.

GM: Let’s get deeper into Morrison. Could we think of the exhibition as a nigger joke, and what does dark humor make space to grapple with? Thinking with Morrison’s description of the Bottom in Sula, what does looking at the world from the bottom potentially allow one to see? As I was reflecting on that, I was also thinking about Pope.L and his crawl performances. So this orientation of the horizontal operating close to the ground, which also gets into class hierarchies and the violence of capitalism that fundamentally orients people to the world differently depending on how one is impacted by these intersections of race and class.

CG: Nigger joke. Yes, yes, absolutely. I just came from my uncle’s funeral not too long ago, and it is always one of the things that I really love about, it feels weird to say, but about Black funerals and Black home goings. This sort of show they make of death, of going out. There is something so moving and animated about Black grieving practices that I’ve been really taken with. My family, the Baptist church ceremonies, there’s so much movement and dynamics, and it’s like you have to send your loved one off with as big a display as possible. There’s an immense amount of tears that are falling, but then also the laughter. I love my people, I love our folks so much because of the ways that we make a way out of no way. And we take the doom and the gloom and we make something funny out of it because we have to, or else what else are you going to do?

GM: I completely hear you. The humor doesn’t negate the reality. The humor is part of the lucidity. The pigeons flying away is also a joke. They’re like, y’all really thought that this was going to stop us and we’re going to fly and do something else. Holding the complexity of someone whose life has ended and also laughing about the shit that they did and being like, damn, I’m still annoyed at them.

CG: Right, yes. Exactly. I think that the ability to hold all these different things at once is such a Black thing, and it’s something I’m so in love with, this refusal to be so cut-and-dry, so flat with our emotions, with our ways of being. And I think that Sula and seeing this community that built their lives around this sort of avoidance of evil or cruelty, so much so that it made them cruel. At the end you get that moment when they’re marching down in this procession on National Suicide Day and all that shit comes undone. And they realize how much of their life has been built around this joke. And they tear it all down and it destroys a lot of them in the process. But still, that was their choice to tear it down. To me, that’s the flock of pigeons watching everything crumble and then flying off. It’s destruction and that’s their choice. I think there’s a real beauty in that.

GM: That’s part of why the exhibition stayed with me, those resonances. I am someone who always gravitates towards dark humor. I think dark humor stirs up the realities that we either are forced to reckon with or we don’t want to talk about. It just is what it is.

GM: Can you reflect on the images you were drawn to in the piece “HOLLOWFOLK #2 - BLACK HERMAN COVERS THE WORLD?” What about the ceremony of the burial, the site of the grave, and the symbol of the skull resonate as generative amidst your broader thinking?

CG: For “Hollow Folk #2,” I was doing a lot of research on different Black magicians and spiritual practitioners throughout history. Black Herman was one of those conjure workers that I encountered from a piece written by Yvonne Chireau, who wrote a book called Black Magic. I was really drawn to Black Herman because he played in the face of death. He was a stage magician, but he was also a spiritual worker. He blended the two realms of Black performance and Black rootwork medicine, conjure traditions. He had this trick where he would bury himself alive on stage and then resurrect himself. And one of the legends told about him is that he passed away on stage during one of his performances, and people started selling tickets to his funeral, thinking it was part of an act.

All the images in the piece come from what I’ve been calling one of his zines. He made these small books that he would send out to fans across the country. One is of him and his daughters, and the other is him delving into a friend’s corpse for lost knowledge. I was thinking a lot about the traditional lineage of the zombie as this Black laborer in Haitian history, forced to labor on plantations even after death. How the zombie transitioned into being more of a collective resistance force and then later distorted and turned into this sort of general sort of destructive, animalistic mass; how it became distorted over time. Thinking about Black Herman, someone who toes the line between life and death plays in the face of it, makes a living off of it.

He was doing this in the twenties, packing out Marcus Garvey’s theater in Harlem. Here we are in this world surrounded by death, surrounded by forces that would do us harm, forces that want to see us erased, eradicated under their heel. Is there a way we can sort of play in the face of that?

If we are made to be the living dead as a people, caught up in this politics of death, that sort of carves up our communities and tries to tear us apart, both structurally, individually, collectively, can we play in the face of that? If they see us as monsters, zombies, the living dead, can we become this collective sort of mass and tear those structures down? We embrace that underworld as this space of chaos, the space of rebellion, space of world ending potential.

GM: What does it do for you to “chart a future beyond” the atrocity we are in?

CG: I’m doing this for the people that are in the work, the people that inspire the work, the people that I’m in conversations with when I’m making the work. We can start to strategize and imagine something other, like a world beyond this, a world outside of this, a world that’s past this.