Writing about politically engaged art is a difficult task, yet there are a number of benefits that I imprudently believe come from doing it persuasively. One of these is the opportunity to challenge the idea that it is in any way legitimate to label people by a single attribute. By this I mean the idea that, in certain encounters, it can mean anything useful to talk about 'rich people', 'fat people', 'white people', 'black people'.

Of course, in a mere name or classification lies a version of the same everything-and-nothing quality that the grandest modern representational malfeasances, such as the ones we call gender and race, require to function. Mindful of the calcified rituals these ideas call up, one finds especially welcome the abstruse paintings and drawings in gouache by Laylah Ali titled Greenheads - in reference to the androgyne, brown-skinned, luridly costumed, stick-thin, big-round-green-domed humanoids that have, since 1996, run amok in her work. In this essay I will make a few observations about what I think is the work's central achievement: its original synthesis of, and temperate behavior toward, those aesthetic and cultural problems that discipline any serious reconsideration of what we think of as the limits of representation and representability.

What if it were possible to redress, single-handedly and from our own points of view, the politicisation of perception, social cataloging, and their effects on our mobility? What kind of art is dictated by such a need? These questions pertain to much of the important art of our time, and they are essential to the larger project in which the Greenheads have been conscripted. Importantly, besides the discourse-altering force of the ubiquitous Greenheads, Ali's work succeeds for having been structured along the very aesthetic lines lacking in much current painting that purports to advance a social-critical content. To survey the exceedingly intimate scaling, painstakingly formal organisation, and nervous flatness and finish of the frames into which the Greenheads are set is to appreciate Ali's palpable interest in such, perhaps irresolvable but still urgent, critical matters as the object of painting, the literalness of the work, and the relevance of surface to any picture that wishes also to be about the world in which it is viewed. Finally, one appreciates the economy by which we are brought to address the habits of regard that determine the quality of interaction between art, life and language that are possible in that world.

Still, most present in the work is the absence of verbal language. Reminiscent as it is of comics, Ali's work has a nagging way of portending, even seeming to require, the very speech bubbles that it withholds. Instead, Ali lets the stresses fall in instance after provoking instance on a given picture's stillness - showing an obsequiousness to the Greenheads' complete, suspended expressivity - and its general disinclination to capitulate to the narratives earmarked for application to the 'unseen' or 'unsayable'. Ali dwells on that from which the blind eye turns, imposes silence on characters plainly full of speech, and frustrates audiences' learned desire for confirmation of linkages implied by form and sequence. She does all this as a part of requiring us to confront the shallowness and over-determination of modern naming, speech-giving and knowledge-making practices. To what context will we hitch the scores of amputated limbs, otherworldly brutality, athletic apparels, and variations on the theme of conquest and chains of command? This depends on the way we look. The pictures' unsettling deafness is at once embellished by their rippling upfrontness and mollified by Ali's cool resolution of para-social tensions. The artist promotes a certain exasperation, subtly modifying or completely deferring those correlations that would make a taxonomy, or even a journalism, of Greenhead culture possible. Furthermore, she emphasises the differences that, once upon a time in the West, would have made such a taxonomy seem anthropologically 'indispensable'. Thus can she keep mum about the Greenheads' raison d'être, while being quite articulate (and possibly loquacious) about her confidence in the 'body as a part of speech'.² This is such a seductive formulation that the question of decipherment begins to look like a moral and hermeneutic quandary of cosmic proportions. The Greenheads' fatuous reveling in punishment and their seemingly fathomless capacity for self-regeneration become warning signs; the pictures become strangely accessible pictograms for the 'final' displacements after which psycho-political, group-on-group violence often strive, but that they have failed - so far, one worries - to achieve.

But what do the Greenheads want? To judge from its cover it would seem that Ali has stowed away some answer to this question in the brochure-like artist's book she produced in 2002 for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gracing the front of the book is a benevolent pair of Greenheads, one large (major/elder) and one small (minor/younger), standing in conversation and providing what quickly comes to serve as the establishing shot for the project. Just inside the black leaf, this scene is revisited in a smaller format. Appearing to declaim in good stentorian form, the major figure lifts an arm to which the minor replies by grasping itself. These paradigmatic Greenheads support the composition's frail resemblance to a narrated series: festooned in complementary but not identical costumes, the two imply their membership in a ranking system. The hierarchy is being explicated for the profit of the junior figure, which peers up from beneath a flayed head shot-through with prickly stubble and wears a single blue-and-white 'X' badge over its breast. Though we are not privy to the travails that have earned the major figure the form-fitting black helmet and the number of maroon-and-gold stars that pepper his vest, we accept that his right to declaim is deserved. We can also believe that he has a colourful yarn to spin. With the force of contextualising accoutrements and this particular repetition of scenes, Ali unexpectedly laces the book with an action structure, a gestalt that will murmur beneath its later, strategic incoherencies.

It is ever the case that Ali's project announces itself as a litany of niggling paradoxes of relation and indefinite, layered statements. While prefabricated languages of typification will fail repeatedly to capture goings-on elsewhere in the Greenheads' story-world, Ali conveys here the sense that her book, at least at the outset, is sited on the familiar terrain from which are inaugurated morality tales of the kind that populate most oral histories. Here is one among many romances embroidered before our very eyes in the service of received ideas about us and them. Yet, just beyond a gridiron inventory of eight torturous scenarios (stations or trials of a Greenhead's life?) that recommends a spectacle-within-a-spectacle-within-a-spectacle - that a story about the telling of a morality tale has to establish - the book opens onto a baptism in witnessing. The major figure marshals the young Greenhead through a dark carnival of coerced looking. Together they observe mass executions, chases, persecutions, bizarre and seemingly chemically-induced permutations of Greenhead physiognomy, protestations, failed rescues and other abject turns of fate. This litany of disaster only ends with the once-removed muses/story-tellers' inveiglement in the wretched business. In this way, Ali collapses the upfrontness of her formal method into the very subject matter that had made it necessary. What is more, she permits her characters' narrative to unhinge its jaws and subsume the element that had served as the readers' lone bulwark.

Already too much has been said in the way of imposing a reading of the book; invest a few of the weak US dollars the MoMA requires for a copy and have a go at it. To evaluate it as a formal digression for Ali, however, is to view the book as refreshing. Typically, Ali's destruction of her figures' dimensionality does nothing to arrest - and may even serve, in a double sense, to heighten - the terror that invades one's imagination of a real-life encounter with them. But this meeting is somehow easier than those that preceded it are. It may be a function of the book form's reprogramming the Greenheads' (anything but) regular temporality and imposing the very plan-based action and spatial referentiality that Ali had previously rejected. In any case the change has had, what seem to me to be, positive effects on the simultaneous approachability of the Greenheads series' form and content. Let us speak of this as a different kind of forced witnessing. The drawings' ready submission to textual sequencing - which further poeticises their inherent composure, discretion and surface consciousness - goes a rather long way toward pushing the Greenheads to a point from which they can approach and touch our ways of seeing. This puts some light on what we might call the 'beyond' of representation.

The drawings do, in other words, what good political art must always do: they militate against the suppression of the political imagination. Ali's work is nothing if not dexterous, appearing simple just as it slips from all but the most complex of interpretations. The maddening impenetrability of her work's narrative dimension (again, this is less the case with the MoMA book) may be a symptom of the startling inflexibility of the terms we put to insurrections, aesthetic and actual. For an artist to follow through on an interest in representing what extant representations might indicate cannot be represented is, principally, a function of her already having resolved to deal responsibly with, to refuse to flounder before the colossal claims that difference makes upon 'reputable' literal and formal languages. The seriousness of Ali's struggle to invent symbols over and against the distressing scarcity of imagery-to-hand for figuring difference and engendering its livability is figured again, I think, in each opportunity she seizes to reiterate how the problem of a picture's structure is always deepened by the question of power relations.

— Darby English