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

[Marisa Parham]

Alessandra and Derek, I will try to circle back later to Derek's invocation of the Fred Wilson exhibit. It is indeed a great example for thinking about liquid and blackness, and especially the difference between liquid and liquidity, particularly as it is in the latter, to use Alessandra's terms, that transvaluation and exchange especially come into play. Liquid assets are ideally, and literally, excess. In the case of slavers, it is what has been produced by slaves, who must produce assets in excess of their exchange value. What does it mean to turn liquid as an act of resistance against liquidity? I'm not sure 'liquid' can be a noun. Liquid is a state. I keep hearing Ellison: "change the joke and slip the yoke."

I think I should take a moment to respond to Alessandra's questions, which I haven't had time to sit with until now.  

Thank you so much for bringing the Elizabeth Alexander piece to this. Yes! To this I add Morrison's theory of rememory, of memory untethered from bodies but also waiting for bodies, memories that put bodies through processes, with or without their consent. I am thinking now of Beloved's emergence from the water and how, in the film version, Newton's skin is always glistening and her pupils are often dilated; I'm guessing to reproduce Morrison's description of her having eyes so "big and black that there seems to be no expression there at all." This blackness that shortcircuits the onlooker's orientation in space and, I think we are to assume, also time. Blackness weaponized through its own truth telling, it's refusal of reference, vantablack. At best this literally leaves the onlooker suspended, struggling to navigate its mastery over the object that is being looked at. Also again, excess, which gets us back to abjection in a different way, to pick up on some Derek's earlier points.  

In closing for now, an excerpt from Teju Cole, writing about Roy DeCarava’s work photographing black skin. It's not quite going to liquid and liquidity, but I like it here because it is helping me conceptualize what it means to subvert being required to come into a recognizable or controlled form by virtue of or in response to someone else's looking.  

"... Instead of trying to brighten blackness, he went against expectation and darkened it further. What is dark is neither blank nor empty. It is in fact full of wise light which, with patient seeing, can open out into glories.  

This confidence in “playing in the dark” (to borrow a phrase of Toni Morrison’s) intensified the emotional content of DeCarava’s pictures. The viewer’s eye might at first protest, seeking more conventional contrasts, wanting more obvious lighting. But, gradually, there comes an acceptance of the photograph and its subtle implications: that there’s more there than we might think at first glance, but also that when we are looking at others, we might come to the understanding that they don’t have to give themselves up to us. They are allowed to stay in the shadows if they wish." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/magazine/a-true-picture-of-black-skin.html  

The Cole is also, by the way, a way to think about what Alessandra refers to as "the fine line that separates the recognition of sentience from the recognition of pain.” Historically, a person’s articulation of pain has (technically) been one of the criteria for demonstrating a person’s sentience. As we all might imagine, however, pain could never be registered as such whenever the person in pain was not already recognized as sentient. This is why babies would be operated on without anesthesia, lost to some slippery signifying between speaking, “having language,” and being sentient, as sentience is proven by providing testimony to pain, through language and memory. The looking that determines the line in a state context has always already been compromised. What therefore is at stake in evading the very possibility of being seen? 


— Marisa  




----------empyre- soft-skinned space———————————  

Thank you, Derek for such a delicate and thoughtful post. The question of the fine line that separates the recognition of sentience from the recognition of pain highlights some of the most important stakes of the current conversation, which—I agree with Derek — is, or at least can certainly be, a productive type of “making.”  

I do want to acknowledge Marisa’s arrival and contribution to our discussion, which I personally find very exciting.  

I have questions for her:  

in relation to her description of formlessness as "a feeling about forms that exceed [the] capacity to discern pattern”, together with the implications of her theory of haunting, I wonder if this is also a way to talk about impersonal affect? In other words, affect that does not attach to any specific subject and sits in the middle — defines and shapes “the middle,” in fact?  

I would imagine, but I am guessing, that this would be the type of memory lodged in the black body that Elizabeth Alexander talks about in her response to the Rodney King video.  

And for me, but I could be wrong, it also speaks to Tommy’s reference to status change ( “water-to-ice-to-mist, to keep with the liquid-ing metaphor”), where blackness might act as an agent of transvaluation, as we see at work, for example in Fred Wilson’s “Metalwork" in which Wilson lays slave shackles alongside a silver tea set of the same area.  

Again, I mention a work that might be known to highlight (as Huey Copeland emphasizes) that blackness here acts as an agent of transvaluation insofar as it is the one thing that guarantees the relationality (the “likeness”) between these things. The silver tea set can be melted down and turned into coin, just like the slave is a material form of monetary value.  

I offer this as a response to Tommy and Marisa, and a way to engage something I am interested in: their expertise in forms of in-betweennes and their investment in movement, to hopefully help us think about possible ways to describe this blackness.  

Alessandra  


From: Derek Murray (mailto:derekconradmurray6719 at gmail.com)
Reply: soft_skinned_space (mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au)
Date: April 13, 2016 at 20:23:01
To: soft_skinned_space (mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au)
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Liquid Blackness- Week II: Aesthetics

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Alessandra,
>  
> Since you brought up Fred Wilson, I thought I would mention his
> installation 'Speak of Me as I Am' at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003).
> His installation considered both the historical and present-day
> presence of African people in Venice, Italy. Like much of his work, he
> explored the ideological and visual meanings of blackness, which took
> both literal and metaphorical forms. In some instances, reference was
> made to historical paintings where black peasant and aristocratic
> figures were imaged. In other instances, there were beautiful
> figurative sculptures of blackamoors, carved in wood. With these stark
> black sculptures, Wilson was drawing attention to the rather mundane
> omnipresence of figurative representations of black subservience
> throughout Italy: in museums, restaurants, hotels, etc.
>  
> The most powerful part of the installation consisted of conceptual
> pieces playing with blackness as both object and as a kind of
> liquidity. Wilson hired glassmakers to create a traditional-looking
> seventeenth-century chandelier, constructed of black ebony glass. The
> chandelier was installed in a kind of neoclassical pavilion—that, if I
> recall, was adjacent to a room of sculptural black drips (entitled
> 'Drip, Drop, Plop') which were hung sporadically along the walls like
> tears slowly making their way to the ground. On the floor beneath them
> were black pools of fallen drips. On many of the drips and pools of
> blackness, were little white and black eyes: cartoonish in rendering,
> yet evocative of blackface minstrelsy. The entire exhibition combined
> melancholy with whimsy, pessimism and optimism—albeit with a hint of
> satire.
>  
> One of the reasons why I mention this was the way blackness was
> presented historically and ideologically as a symbol of subservience,
> beauty, marginalia, as well as metaphorically as a seeping, dipping,
> liquid-like presence that is ever-present, even as it infiltrates and
> flows through the cracks of Eurocentrism. I also think it speaks very
> powerfully to the porous nature of culture and history—a reality that
> productively undermines the essentialism that often expresses itself
> through national and racial/ethnic identity.
>  
> There were many other dimensions to Wilson’s installation, but these
> are some of the highlights. I recommend looking it up online, because
> it’s quite striking.
>  
> Derek
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