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

[Derek Murray]

Thank you Alessandra for the introduction!

I’ll begin by briefly summarizing some of my recent research interests
as they relate to the concept of “liquid blackness.” For the past
several years, I have been writing about the controversial notion of
post-black: a highly contested terminology meant to unpack the
conceptual, aesthetic, and political dimensions of a post-Civil Rights
generation of African-American visual artists. That research resulted
in the recent publication of my first book, Queering Post-Black Art:
Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights
(I.B. Tauris, UK).

There are currently conflicting characterizations of post-black, but
in my critical formulation, the term signifies an attempt to reimagine
the parameters of what blackness means, socially, culturally,
politically—and especially, aesthetically. Above all things,
post-black represents a radical reconceptualization of the visual and
expressive rhetorics of blackness as we know it. The re-articulation
of African-American identity emergent in contemporary art suggests
that existing notions of blackness have underrepresented---or
completely failed to represent---constituencies within the community
whose experiences are not encapsulated by Civil Rights and Black Power
era value systems. Particularly, the historical emblems and visual
markers of hetero-normative blackness may not speak to the lives and
identities of individuals whose gender, sexual, and/or political
orientations often position them outside of dominant understandings of
black identity. The “post” in post-blackness is a space clearing
gesture of sorts: a radical searching for new forms of self-definition
that are unencumbered, yet deeply informed and enriched by the past.
Post-black ultimately opens up a needed conversation around the perils
and limits of identity formation—and asserts its significance in
visual culture as an iconoclastic queering of blackness, a gesture
that questions the fraught nature of its ideological and historical
parameters and visual rhetorics as potentially alienating and
non-inclusive of various form of difference (i.e. gender-based,
racial, sexual, political, non-binary, or otherwise).

I will not elaborate here on the specifics of post-black’s emergence
and ensuing debates, but I will say that I see “liquid blackness” as
doing something very similar, which is attempting to deeply expand and
complicate what blackness is—and to explore the complexities of its
expressiveness as residing in materiality, form and as a kind of
affective sensorium. I am currently completing a second book entitled,
A Materiality of Blackness: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Art,
Race, and Formalism. This new research builds upon Queering Post-Black
Art and critically considers and builds upon the relationship between
blackness and queerness, not only in terms of its sexual connotations
and politics, but also as a type of in-between-ness, a liminal space
of becoming that is indefinable. I see “post-black” and “liquid
blackness” as decidedly post-Civil Rights phenomena that demark
cultural positions that are beyond belongingness and, in many
respects, embrace a condition of illegibility. I tend to think of
“post-black” and “liquid blackness” as operations rather than
categorizations, or as rigid definitions. Rather that attempt to
remove blackness from the ideologically over-determined black body,
these notions explore its expressiveness as an affective material
presence—as something that isn’t simply visual, but also something we
can feel and smell: a presence that embodies the horror of detachment
that Julia Kristeva so effectively allegorizes in her theory of
abjection. In my recent writing on blackness and formalism in abstract
painting, I consider the materiality of blackness as an operation that
expresses itself as a kind of excremental form or base materialism.
This notion is in reference to Bataille’s Informe. Subversive in its
articulation of the belittled, the denigrated, and the repressed—
Informe is excremental form, but not in a literal sense, because it
resembles nothing: it has autonomy from fixed meanings. This
resistance or subversion of fixity that is embedded within form is
precisely the operation lies at the heart of “post-blackness” and
“liquid blackness.”

I look forward to building upon this discussion!

Derek

On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 5:43 AM, Alessandra Raengo <araengo at gsu.edu> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
>
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> 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.
>
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> 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.
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