Article:

A Redistribution of Violence. Modulationen der Sorge in Carolyn Lazards «A Recipe for Disaster»

Thinking with Carolyn Lazard’s video work A Recipe for Disaster (2018), this text asks how 1960s/1970s US television negotiates race relations while constitutively eclipsing a Black presence. It takes as its point of departure the mere auditory impression of a Black voice commenting on a scene in Lazard’s video edit that is emblematic of white reproductive labor—that of television cook Julia Child making omelets—to then address the (im)possibility of social difference in the lineages of white national culture. Drawing on critical race theory and on disability and queer studies, this contribution suggests that A Recipe for Disaster employs a technique of modulation in which layers of image, text, and sound are entangled so as to oppose integration/inclusion in the normalizing project of white nationality.