[…] In There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed, and possibly throughout Huxtable's work, kewt is expressed in a multitude of self-knowing ways. It is reflected in the manner in which Huxtable comports herself in relation to her viewers, literally the making-object of herself. In so doing, she offers up the intersection of race, gender and queerness for the gaze of others, which points to the longstanding, problematic history of representation of such subjects – which has been redressed in vastly different ways by artists such as Adrian Piper, Carrie Mae Weems, Mickalene Thomas, Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson and Tracey Rose, to name only a few. This sly self-object-making move, or kewt-being, forces viewers to engage with their own feelings about Huxtable's playful significations of, for instance, femininity, which is to say all the socially constructed, embodied symbols that have operated to render them minor. In Huxtable's public demonstration of becoming-minor, the viewer becomes cannily aware that more is quite literally at play; Huxtable simultaneously flips this position while enacting it. She is reacting to a specific set of conditions realised in the very execution of the performance and in the broader world in which it takes part. Further, Huxtable's approach to her ‘archive’ – all the myriad source materials for her texts and performances – renders these references kewt. The narratives that we categorise as historical fact are not merely questioned but approached as minor, negligible and trivial. Huxtable makes history submit.

Here it is useful to comment on the proliferation of a strikingly broad range of people who have seemingly drawn Huxtable as a figure in art, as opposed to the artwork itself. A cursory review of her press clippings reveals an overwhelming number of references to her as a model or muse, as opposed to what she is: an artist. In this context, we can better understand her artistic choices in performance, particularly the affective registers of alienation in her slightly bored, distant voice, and her use of the papers she reads from as a kind of shield from direct encounter – despite the fact that she is there, ostensibly performing for the viewer and thereby available for our sensual (visual, aural, etc.) consumption. Huxtable's live presence, a thoroughly mediated encounter, is mimetic of online interfaces – literally the ways in which the screen filters our digital experiences, mitigates cyberspace encounters, and is the primary (self-) reflective surface for the banal and the spectacular alike – through which she first began to create and disseminate her art. She beckons, while simultaneously estranging. One can only get but so close, and any sense of proximity is already, always, a fantasy, a total projection of one's own imagination. This is to say that the performance itself is a highly fantastical, sensually enveloping wonderland. Nevertheless, vital to understanding Huxtable's performance is the fact that the alienated viewer is just as responsible for creating this world through projections of a desire that animates the encounter as Huxtable is for creating the conditions for its emergence. The performance is a vector wherein the viewer, sensually compressed – both fulfilled and denied by Huxtable's coolness – responds to such exertions of soft power³ with an overwhelming desire not to merely watch but to rapturously consume, wanting to have, wanting to be like, wanting to be with.⁴

[…] That ‘force’ (a coming to a sharp edge or point) is fundamentally related to ‘cute’ (the most ‘objectified of things’) makes clear that the inherent relation of power to cuteness ‘is thus the name of an encounter with difference – a perceived difference…that does something to everyday communicative speech’.⁵ Juridical and judicial advances for LGBTQI people in the US have been a long time coming. Though as it relates to the trans community, there now lurks a kind of cultural fascination we can approximate to the fetish. Here we can truly contemplate the stride from cute to kewt in the fetish's contingent encounter with the cute and its historical relation to discourses on beauty, which is haunted by Immanuel Kant. We can also mark the shift whereas the fetish (especially as it relates to popular culture), with its foundational constitution in power and eccentricities, is equally ghosted by G.W.F. Hegel's total inability to value cultures of Africa.

Much as camp and kitsch negate the typical moral and aesthetic judgments assigned to beauty by philosophers of the nature of art, Huxtable's kewt art is an uncontainable expression unconcerned with symmetry, proportion, taste, or any other preordained delineation of what has been deemed beautiful in the historical arc of Western aesthetics. If anything, her work reveals the ways in which the project of aesthetic assessment is challenged, if not found entirely inadequate, when pressed through the vector of her imagination. Perhaps this is most substantially conveyed in the distinction between so-called high and low culture, and Huxtable's disavowal of formalisms in art for the power of quotidian speech and pop culture references – but not the kinds one might expect. For the everyday lexicon of queer communities of colour is extra-being, maximal, fifth-dimensional. The overall sensibility is more hieroglyphic, or rather, the hieroglyph as thought image, animating the ways in which minor aesthetics like kewt amplify psychic structures, distorting image, language and style to such an extent as to emphasise and create emotional responses to feelings, ideas and moods in the work.

Because the degree of our femininity has always been questioned (at best), black women tend to be spared stereotypical representation...