Black Church Arson in the Museum

This paper explores the material and representational politics that are catalyzed by Anti-Mass, an installation made by Cornelia Parker from the remains of a burned Black church located in the deYoung Museum in San Francisco, California. Applying an attention to religious materiality (the interpretive circuit between words, bodies, and things), semiotic ideology (an approach that explores competing and ascendant meanings), and an ethnographic sensibility, I argue that three hermeneutic fields coalesced around Anti-Mass in the museum. The first interpretation is a Killmonger hermeneutic that read Anti-Mass as a profaning of Black sacred matter. The second is an Anti- hermeneutic, which sought to preserve representational openness prized by abstract expressionism. The third is a resurrection hermeneutic, which reflected popular notions of US multicultural transcendence and a more melancholic meditation on anti-Black religious violence expressed by adjacent artwork and embodied by the ethnographer herself via a lump corpothetics.