Cues On Point

In February 2020, Christine Sun Kim performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful” in American Sign Language (ASL) at the Super Bowl alongside singers Demi Lovato and Yolanda Adams. Cues On Point reflects on the linguistic layers of that experience. The two-channel video shows a mixture of ASL signs and an agreed-upon signaling system that the artist’s longtime ASL interpreter Beth Staehle used to cue Kim on how long the singers were holding their notes. This ensured that the signed melody kept pace with the sung one. The text scrolling vertically, evoking a teleprompter, is the written notation of Kim’s own translation of the songs into ASL.The work connects strongly with other threads in Kim’s practice, including the notion of the echo, which she has used to express the repetitions of communication that occur when speaking through a sign language interpreter or using a text app on a phone. The video also reflects the troubling circumstances around how the signed performance was broadcast. As Kim described in a New York Times op-ed published the following day, she was only fleetingly visible in the main broadcast, and even the ASL-dedicated online feed cut her performance short, when the camera pivoted away multiple times. In this way, Cues On Point is also a document of televisual absence, both in the specific case of Kim’s performance and more broadly in terms of Deaf representation in mass media.