[-empyre-] Liquid Blackness- Week II: Aesthetics

[Alessandra Raengo]

Welcome to the second week of our monthly discussion on “Liquid Blackness: Formal Approaches to Blackness and/as Aesthetics”

This week’s conversation will focus on aesthetics and will be lead by 

Derek Conrad Murray
Thomas F. DeFrantz
Marisa Parham

Please see their bios below. Thank you all for agreeing to participate in this discussion and thank you again, Derek, for inviting me to moderate it. 

Before I turn the conversation over to Derek, I want to mention that the first writing I ever did about the idea of “liquid blackness” as an aesthetic category was a series of terms that I hoped could be evocative for both scholars and artists. In other words, I immediately attempted to practice the “liquidity” that the research group pursues as we move fluidly between the academic, the artistic, and the curatorial worlds. 

This piece of writing is available here: http://liquidblackness.com/about/  

Here are the terms: sensuousness, affectivity, formlessness, penetration, fluctuation, modulation, absorption and assimilation, intensity, viscosity, density, slipperiness, elasticity, allure, vibration, unboundedness, virality, channeling, plasticity, organicity, and glide. 

The thought experiment they describe is one where blackness is approached as a “thing” which our collective critical act can hold in suspension and in the middle of our intellectual conversation. The terms were simply supposed to describe some of the ways this liquid “thing” might behave. 

This piece of writing has now been included in the catalog for Mark Bradford’s solo exhibition "Scorched Earth"  at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2015), curated by Connie Butler.

I’ll now turn it over to Derek.

Alessandra





Derek Conrad Murray is an interdisciplinary theorist specializing in the history, theory, and criticism of contemporary art, African-American and African Diaspora art and culture, Post-Black art and aesthetics, theoretical approaches to identity and representation, critical issues in art practice, and the methodologies and ethics of art history and visual studies. He is Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Murray has contributed to leading magazines and journals of contemporary art and visual culture such as American Art, Art in America, Parachute, Art Journal, Third Text, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University Press), where he currently serves as associate editor. Murray is also a member of the editorial advisory board of Third Text. Murray’s most recent article “Notes to Self: The Visual Culture of ‘Selfies’ in the Age of Social Media,” was published in Summer 2015 in Consumption Markets & Culture. Murray is the author of the book Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015). 


Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies at Duke University, and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. Books: Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (Errol Hill Award, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002),  Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture (de la Torre Bueno Prize, Oxford University Press, 2004), and Black Performance Theory, co-edited with Anita Gonzalez (Duke University Press, 2014). Creative: Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts, and Monk’s Mood: A Performance Meditation on the Life and Music of Thelonious Monk, performed in Botswana, France, South Africa, and New York City.   He convenes the Black Performance Theory working group. In 2013, working with Takiyah Nur Amin and an outstanding group of artists and researchers, he founded the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. which will stage the conference Dancing the African Diaspora: Afrofuturism in 2016. He recently taught at New Waves Institute in Trinidad, and ImpulseTanz in Austria.


Marisa Parham is a Professor of English at Amherst College. She is also the Director of the Five College Digital Humanities Initiative, which focuses both on helping artists and scholars to integrate technology into humanities scholarship and creative work and bringing those disciplines to influence technological growth and spread.  Her research and teaching focuses on texts that problematize assumptions about time, space, and bodily materiality, particularly as such terms share a history of increasing complexity in texts produced by African Americans.