In the here & now

Cinqué Hicks has blogged about mustard. He has blogged about his growing collection of handyman books. He has blogged about the McMansion with its myriad design inconsistencies going up next door.

??
He needs to get busy because now there are two of them. The houses sandwich his modest one-story bungalow like two hulking copies of A Man in Full making a Catcher in the Rye sandwich.

??
In a March 2006 post, Hicks was initially hopeful that the first house would honor the design features of his Sylvan Hills neighborhood’s modest, tidy homes. By April, he noted on his blog, www.influxhouse.com, “The house next door is getting stupider and stupider.”

??
Since Hicks moved to Atlanta from Austin, Texas, earlier this year, he has become a force to be reckoned with on the local art scene and a reminder that black artists could use more visibility in the city.

??
Hicks is a triple threat: curator of a sure-to-be-talked-about race-centered show at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery; founder of the forthcoming online magazine of black visual culture, Code Z; and most visibly, purveyor of the smart, opinionated, witty www.influxhouse.com blog, on which he segues from home construction to mustard to black cinema. And, most of all, art.

??
He’s posted photos of artists and critics, and taken big guns to task for doing a bureaucratic Courtney Love and shooting loads of money into their projects like there’s no tomorrow, describing one group as a “full-on bullshit organization.”

??
But Hicks is no hater.

??
When he first started blogging in 2003, his writing was more prone to Wonkette-style ranting and raving, he says, referring to Ana Marie Cox’s notoriously take-no-prisoner’s political blog. “I was very angry at one time,” he says, although it’s hard to imagine from his mellow attitude while sitting at his kitchen table nursing a cup of coffee.

??
Instead, his influxhouse posts are defined by a sense of generosity and hopefulness mixed with a degree of skepticism and a willingness to go after big guns rather than just picking apart little defenseless ones.

??
Hicks has only been in Atlanta since January but you can tell he gets a lot done. For one thing, he blogs about it. And he already has well-rounded and solid opinions about Atlanta.

??
He does the gallery scene, knows the artists and is making the rounds. But for the prolific Hicks, his blog is just one prong in his multifaceted attack on art and life. In addition to the online magazine he will launch, he’s also working on a show he co-curated at Eyedrum featuring a national cast of hip black (and several non-black) artists called the Carbonist School: Study Hall, June 24-Aug. 5.

??
Not the Obsidian School. Not the Ebony School. Nothing glossy and glamorous. Carbon, baby. “It is the basis of all life,” he says. “It’s absolutely everywhere.”

??
The Carbonist School exhibition, says Hicks, is largely driven by the well-regarded Atlanta-based curator and artist Charles Nelson, whom he met in 2002 at the “Race in Digital Space” conference at the University of Southern California.

??
Hicks says doing an exhibition like the Carbonist School is hard to imagine in Austin, which lacks “an alternative space with a hip reputation that would have mounted a show like this.”

??
Hicks lived in Austin after he graduated from Harvard with a literature degree focusing on the West African novel and religion in literature. He moved to Austin in 1997, “sight unseen,” and into the hipster grotto of West Austin defined by Richard Linklater’s own 1991 hep manifesto, Slacker.

??
But despite his obvious affection for the city (he stayed eight years, caught up in the comfortable languor known by locals as “the velvet rut”) and the ways it has informed his indie-alt sensibility, all was not progressive paradise. “For about a month, I did not know there were black people in Austin,” he says. “They were all on the other side of this highway.”

??
The city also only had a tentative art scene with no gallery system or collector base. And what little art scene there was tended to break down along racial lines.

??
Atlanta appealed to him because the city has collectors, a higher end gallery scene, a place to actually be an artist. Austin, Hicks says, is a place where it’s easier to “become” an artist.

??
It is also an art world that seems more integrated. And his blog has moved with him.

??
Hicks works as a freelance book packager. He blogs about art. And he engages in his philosophical endeavor of “being.” It’s a more articulate and thought-out continuation, defined by the very Austin Slacker relish-the-moment hipster creed.

??
When Hicks is introduced at parties and asked what he does for a living, the tall, lean, boyish 35-year-old says he’s a “cultural code reader.” What might sound pretentious coming from someone else’s lips sounds earnest on Hicks’.

??
He is drawn toward big themes, philosophies and zeitgeist-y ideas. He is, naturally, drawn to the idea of the manifesto, a statement of core beliefs that generations of artists have used to formulate and formalize their movement. Hicks’ the Carbonist Manifesto was written with three other Austin artists who wanted “a way to be black artists and do black art.”

??
The thing that connects the blog, the art-making, and the appreciation for the minute and the major, is the principle of always being in the present. “Being right here and right now in a very deep way,” he says.

??
And the blog is an opportunity for Hicks to really live in the moment, to take a full measure of everything he sees: from the small mustard bottle to racism.

??
The blog is a way of also engaging with how the minute, daily encounters can represent bigger ideas, in the same way the construction of a McMansion next door can say a lot about the world we live in: the out-of-scale production values, the American tendency toward a bullying command of our physical space.

??
The blog is “a great way to plug into the present moment,” he says. “It’s a more ground-level view of the whole visual environment.”