[-empyre-] Welcome to the -empyre- April 2016 Discussion: Liquid Blackness: Formal Approaches to Blackness and/as Aesthetics

Thu Apr 7 04:19:19 AEST 2016

Thank you, Murat for this response. The tension you highlight, i.e. the fact that "the specific usages of blackness that are being discussed, even if from an "aesthetic," non-racial angle, are still being evaluated through a racial lens," is central to what we are trying to do: to engage the seeming opposition between race and aesthetics and claim blackness itself AS (among many many other things) a form of aesthetics.  

Here is the way the idea of “liquid blackness” enters this tension:
on the one hand, by understanding aesthetics as always racial; in other words, we don’t believe that there is a blackness that one can simply abstract from its racial connotation and deploy as a pure formal/chromatic resource away and apart from race. Jenny mentions Fred Moten’s argument in “The Case of Blackness” regarding Ad Reinhardt ‘black paintings’  to support the claim that, even when understood simply as color, blackness cannot not be “saturated” by the socio-historical. Pursuing blackness as a mere expressive matter to be freely deployed in one’s artistic act, does not automatically divorce blackness from its social life. 

On the other hand, approaching blackness AS aesthetics means to focus on how it modulates the individual and social sensorium. When Fanon is hailed by the French child in the notorious primal scene, blackness is formed by this encounter as an experience of rearrangement of his sensorium (he is turned inside out, he feels scattered and amputated, etc. ) and blackness, as Darby English points out, is produced as an in-betweeness, not as a visual gift to its observer. English invites us to think of blackness as something that happens to the body when it is hailed as black. 

Once blackness is understood this way—as a mode of organization of the sensorium, the sensible, and the sensate (which is what we mean by “aesthetics”)—then it becomes possible to understand the way it moves and what it does even when it is NOT visually present (which is one of the reasons sound is so important, as Chip articulates)

I am aware that this second part — i.e. blackness AS aesthetics— requires further development, which I hope we can pursue in the upcoming posts. 

Thank you, Murat, for the opportunity to begin to explain this important tension

> On Apr 5, 2016, at 7:16 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
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> Hi, it appears to me the specific usages of blackness that are being discussed, even if from an "aesthetic," non-racial angle, are still being evaluated through a racial lens. Black, historically, has had multiple associations, independent from race: for instance, the blackness in mourning, the blackness of an unlit room (in addition to implying race, blackness is an absolute absorption of light as in the black hole), the blackness associated with melancholy,  film noire, etc., etc.
> 
> What I am trying to say is that black (liquid black) has the ability to imply something enriching, positively powerful. Black movement knew that in the expression "black is beautiful." I remember, not much before his assasination, Martin Luther King was saying that to create real revolution one must change the negative associations of black; not, if I understand correctly, limit or see as negative every use of black in the culture.
> 
> Ciao,
> Murat 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 2:04 PM, Jenny Gunn <jgunn7 at mygsu.onmicrosoft.com> wrote:
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> Alessandra and Chip are both right to emphasize the function of liquid blackness as a reading strategy, and one that I think becomes particularly useful in instances in which race is seemingly irrelevant. But as Fred Moten has illustrated in "The Case of Blackness," the possibility of abstracting blackness is only wishful thinking. I recently viewed the opening credits of David Fincher's 2011, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in which the bodies of the protagonists played by Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig emerge in a liquid, viscous, oily sea of blackness. Why blackness? What can blackness do, what movement, multiplicity, amorphousness, does it allow for that nothing else seemingly can? As a reading strategy, liquid blackness provokes engagement with these questions.
> 
> Jenny Gunn
> PhD Student, Moving Image Studies
> Department of Communication
> Georgia State University
> jgunn7 at gsu.edu
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Linscott, Charles <linscoc2 at ohio.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 5, 2016 12:59 PM
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the -empyre- April 2016 Discussion: Liquid Blackness: Formal Approaches to Blackness and/as Aesthetics
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi all,
> 
> In his superb 2011 book Sonic Bodies, Julian Henriques writes, “Sound asks questions in the way images often settle them.” I would modulate that statement for our discussion here, offering instead that images often SEEM to settle questions. What I mean is that the “fact” of Blackness—its ready legibility in cultures largely captured by scopic regimes of anti-Blackness—can be both confirmed and denied by our approaches to images. While epidermality plays an (allegedly) commonsensical role in processes of racialization, that same visual evidence is always already sutured to ideological conceptions of race. This imbrication between what is seen and what is thought results in visuality, which is neither wholly sensory nor entirely ideological, but both/and. Thinking about visuality helps to understand the complexities of OJ and a great many other things, including the liquidity of Blackness, as Alessandra and Jenny discuss. Thus, aesthetic and formal approaches to images provide an avenue whereby Blackness is a complex and heterogeneous set of processes and potentialities—less concrete and more fluid. This is not incidental to Black sonicity, which, while not so bound up with visual conceptions of the epidermal, nevertheless faces similar ideological constraints through notions such as vocal timbre, diction, cadence, and the “Blackness" of specific sounds and musics.
> 
> Chip
> 
> 
> > On Apr 4, 2016, at 6:35 PM, Alessandra Raengo <araengo at gsu.edu> wrote:
> >
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> > Thank you, Murat, for your contribution
> >
> > Part of what I think Jenny’s comments are attempting to highlight is how “liquid blackness” entails a reading strategy that privileges aesthetics and form, In doing that, it also emphasizes how blackness might, on the one hand, both “detach” and “attach” to people and things and, on the other hand, how it might “behave”, so to speak, on its own.
> >
> > As I believe other discussants will point out, attention to the “liquidity” of blackness can bring to the foreground a fundamental instability and multiplicity as Chip Linscott’s work on Miles Davis exemplifies. Simply put, in the very disjunctions that he describes with the concept of “talking B(l)ack” (between "performing and not performing, speaking and not speaking, sounding at will but not on command, all of which are of a piece with Miles’ celebrated use of silence and noise in his music”) one might find modes of black resistance as well as modes of black expansiveness. As Chip also writes, “in pushing at the edges of the synesthetic, Blackness hinges, swinging, never settling, between the poles of vision and hearing.” In so doing, it delivers a productive "break; sound cutting through image, vision percussively sounding on the body."
> >
> > I want to offer another example of this reading strategy. For the first "liquid blackness" Symposium (Spring 2014) I asked one of the graduate students  in my program—Adam Cottrell—to write an essay about two dance performances that were part of the event. One, by T.Lang, was an excerpt from a longer piece called “Post Up” and the other, called “Heart of Palm," was a piece created for the occasion by Jerylann Warner and her company Gathering Wild Dance. In his writing on these pieces, Adam focused on the possibility to read movement as form in order to “specify ‘liquid blackness’ as the active exercise of self-variation which complicates calcified and preconceived notions of blackness.” He concluded that in these two dances “blackness bubbles” understood both as noun (a thin film of liquid inflated with air) and a verb (to flow with a gurgling sound). In this bubbling, blackness expands and multiplies, suggesting a much larger and generative scope.
> >
> >
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