Occlusion

This article considers the 1970s work of Anthony Ramos, a Black American artist of Cape Verdean descent who served an eighteen-month prison sentence as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Based on original archival research and highlighting Ramos’s video editing prowess, I argue his work theorizes racial integration not as an event, but a structure; that is, a context or method for shaping the activities that are possible or legible within it. Focusing on the ways that Ramos’s work traverses race in American and anti-colonial projects on the African continent, the article moves from Ramos’s work with Allan Kaprow to the systems of early video art distribution to show how he persistently interrogated racialized expectations for authenticity and affective labor, as well as the forms of conscription that undergird social structures like authorship and legal contracts. Ultimately, Ramos’s art demonstrates that pretense, collaboration, comparison, and “response” can be important forms of creative control in an era of vexed institutional enfranchisement.