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

[Jenny Gunn]

The in-betweeness of blackness that English describes in his analysis of Fanon is very central I think to the aesthetics of blackness. The hailing of the child is intended to fix blackness there on the body of the other and not without real consequences for Fanon as Alessandra describes, but blackness ultimately remains in-between, a fugitive remainder. This in-betweeness is sonic. Like music, or even more particularly like free jazz as Chip has discussed, blackness floats, permeates, escapes, stutters, and stammers, filling and claiming the space of the in-between. These same qualities, however, can be expressed visually and materially as this month's discussion will further illustrate.

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 Alessandra Raengo <araengo at gsu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 6, 2016 2:19 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----------------------
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:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
>
>