Doc : Doc — Kenya (Robinson) on “Turbo Tarot,” “Fluid Master,” and Artistic Labor

Kenya (Robinson) brings together art, automotive repair, and tarot in unexpected ways. Photo on right: Credit: Kohler Co.  

Doc : Doc is an interview series from the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, where we talk shop with documentary artists and explore the evolving field of nonfiction storytelling. Through candid conversations, we illuminate the creative process, celebrate the power of documentary, and highlight upcoming visiting artists, events, and exhibitions.

In this feature, we sit down with Kenya (Robinson), a conceptual artist and automotive technician based in Gainesville, Florida. (Robinson) will be visiting CDS and Durham this October. During the visit, CDS will host two free events: Fluid Master: The Zen of Auto Mechanics, where she will give an artist talk while performing an oil change, and Turbo Tarot, where she will share her original automotive-inspired tarot deck and perform live readings. In this Q&A, we spoke about artistic labor, systems, mechanics, authorship, AI, and her impulse to document herself.

Register to attend Fluid Master on October 1 and Turbo Tarot on October 3. Space is limited, so make sure to save your spot!

Q: Can you tell me about your background and the experiences that shape your current artistic practice?

K(R): I’ve always been a creative kid, but I had a very narrow idea of what an artist was. I thought an artist was somebody who painted or drew realistically or made sculpture in steel or silver or wood. Then I understood that artists make ideas tangible, that the form follows what the idea requires.

It wasn’t until I moved to New York that I realized I had always been an artist. I was already thinking: I want to do this thing. This is what it should look like. This is when it should happen. These are the people who should be involved. These are the materials I want to use.

One thing I’m very deliberate about now is identifying myself as a conceptual artist. “Conceptual artist” still tends to be assigned to white men, while “multidisciplinary” can become this marginalized catchall that quietly implies a tremendous amount of labor.

Q: Thinking about how conceptual artists come into a space and have a vision, I was wondering what your vision for Fluid Master and Turbo Tarot is?

K(R): I noticed that so much of my work was inspired by people that I knew, whether it was my family or folks from church. I want to essentially collaborate with the audience or blur that boundary between artist and audience in real time. At my first show at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn, this little girl offered a beautiful read of my work.

Something I hadn’t even considered because I’m so close to the making of it, but it was so spot on. I was like, Wait, is this young person my collaborator at that moment? That encounter changed how I think about collaboration. Collaboration doesn’t necessarily mean we made the object together; sometimes the audience completes a piece by producing knowledge about it that I couldn’t produce alone.

Q: What initially drew you to auto mechanic work, and how has it influenced the way you do your art now?

K(R): Because of a rejection, which, obviously, artists get all the time, I remember thinking: I don’t believe it’s wise to put this kind of economic pressure on my artistic practice. My art shouldn’t have to pay the electricity bill, the grocery bill, the insurance. I needed to investigate a livelihood that could release some of that pressure. Immediately, I thought about the trades.

I was doom-scrolling on Instagram and saw this Black woman in coveralls. I remember thinking, Really? Representation DO matter!? There was something about actually seeing her. I knew Santa Fe College had an automotive program, and fortunately, I loved it from the beginning.

A car has tens of thousands of parts. Sometimes you spend the whole day putting on six bolts or taking off six bolts. But the car isn’t trying to make those bolts difficult for you. The system is simply behaving according to its design.

That has become useful to me beyond automotive work. Systems organized around gender, race, ethnicity, or class don’t have to personally dislike you in order to produce harm. They produce outcomes according to how they’re structured. Working in the shop gives me a physical reminder of that every day. That feels very germane to how I move through the world in this body.

Q: Can you tell me more about the Turbo Tarot event and the deck it’s based on?

K(R): In many ways, my exploration of tarot is based on my mother. My mother was a practitioner. I was just having a foggy day, and I saw a tarot deck, and it just reminded me of her. I remember starting to cry. The feeling was intense, so I just started exploring it.

I came to understand tarot as an analytical tool rather than strictly as a divination tool. I started the automotive program, and I was learning so much. It was practical, but it also was philosophical. I learned about hydraulic concepts, like how you cannot compress liquids. I was like, Whoa. That’s essentially the emotions and the subconscious. It doesn’t go away. It’s got to come out somewhere. Utilizing cars as a framework seemed like a natural progression.

Q: Turbo Tarot uses generative AI. I’d love to hear more about how you use AI as a creative tool, balancing the ethics of artistic vision and authorship.

K(R): I believe I’m the only person who could make Turbo Tarot, which is what art is about to me: singular expression. The tool doesn’t produce that singularity. The artist does.

I’m also interested in who is permitted to use new technologies experimentally without having their authorship immediately placed under suspicion. Access has never been evenly distributed in the art world. There is already an enormous amount of invisible labor artists are expected to perform: the budget, the blurb, the application, the documentation, the administration, and those expectations aren’t distributed equally either.

So I’m suspicious when AI suddenly becomes the place where we’re supposed to locate the ethical crisis of labor. I’m contending with the fact that we live in a society whose wealth and institutions were profoundly shaped by slavery and the dehumanization required to sustain it. AI can become a fetish object in that conversation too, a technological object onto which we project questions about labor, authorship, exploitation, and humanity that existed long before the technology did.

Q: I’m really excited for the Fluid Master event. Can you tell me what to expect in your words?

K(R): I change a lot of oil, so it’s become this dance. I do almost everything in the same order. There’s something significant to me about that repetition, and I want to document it. I’m curious about what it looks like when a routine maintenance procedure is treated as choreography. And we know women are expected to multitask, but I’m interested in which activities we’re expected to stack. What happens when one of those activities is an oil change? Does it disrupt the list?

Q: A CDS team will be documenting the Fluid Master event with three cameras. How do you draw from documentary approaches and practices in your work?

K(R): Oftentimes Black women are going to be erased. I find documentation essential. In fact, I understand documentation as an expression of my politicized identity. It’s one of the ways I say, I’m here.

But we’ve been inundated with erasure. So that’s part of how I understand myself as an artist and as a person: the expectation that, irrespective of the script of erasure, I am still responsible for the document.