[-empyre-] aesthetics / gestalten

[Johannes Birringer]

Dear Tommy , dear all

yes, i think I read your comments there (below) as a critique also of this forum and the often mostly white frames of theory, if I may say so?  And the movement, and practical matters you address,
tend to be obfuscated (as probably does the music, the sound, the performance, the vibrations of the building, however strange the frames.....) by the overdiscursive, no?

When the month started, I was of course excited to hear new folks here, folks I had not heard, and this is good.  i did not know of the *liquid blackness* research group
Alessandra Raengo mentioned (at Georgia State), and so for a while all the discouse seemed to come from the group and I just listened. 

now listening to Tommy, whose work I do know, I
am reminded of a small paragraph I saved from 2015, after a performance

>Kevin Beasley kneels before two turntables in the lower-level theater of New York's Studio Museum in Harlem. He's in the middle of a set that is by turns haunting and propulsive, mixing samples that range from extra-percussive house beats to attenuated ambulance sirens, as his spoken-word excerpts betray their midwestern origins and unmistakably American character. Lines from Malcolm X's 1962 speech "Who Taught You to Hate Yourself?" are audible one minute; the next, the Cleveland neighbor who helped free Amanda Berry after she was held hostage for a decade recounts the story of her discovery. The set culminates with the sweet and sweaty promise of Detroit techno/house artist Theo Parrish's 2011 track "Black Music," but through it all, the audio clips that kicked off the set never stop reverberating....
>>

I think from Artforum, and I saved the photo and attach it here. 

and yesterday (speaking about inventing aesthetics or practicing emergence), I read that Tania Bruguera (in Havana)
plans to open an "institute of art activism"  (Pussy Riot was invited to come to residence). 
A Nigerian MA student here, at my art school, plans a video and sculpture installation about Boko Haram and the fieldwork
she did in Nigeria. Alistair, another young artist, plans to do a black fashion show and dance cross dressed, while 
another dancer, Waka Arai, plans to build her own costume and project colors onto it (projection mapping) and then
move her masks/costumes, as a kind of table turning. the costume fabric is white, the colors varied.  

(reminded now of Adrian Piper, her early work, and critique of passing and projection). 

I see astonishing creativities everywhere, and also the dire efforts of activism, often inspiring, sometimes tiring;

Tommy, presences, and breath, you have a very poetic and musical  way of challenging us to imagine.  
And maybe i come back, at some point, to my experience of blindness last week, as
the not seeing was elementally connected to touch and thus different modes of imagining gestalten (in the plural, not one Gestalt). 


respectfully
Johannes Birringer



[Thomas schreibt]

black performance has always been liquid, or post, or excessive, or many other things because it is concerned with adornment and elaboration, individual expression within a group dynamic, and responsiveness to its own communities.  black performance does not arrive in ultimate consideration of its form, which makes it so elusive and concrete at once; so water-to-ice-to-mist, to keep with the liquid-ing metaphor.

black performance offers a thinking-through-experience-with-others by way of aesthetic invention.

over time i’ve grown bored with employing white theoretical lenses to dissect white cultural products to imagine a mobilized black possibility.  for me, these methods highlight how many, or most, theoretical modes are most interested in white readerships.  if i’m going to craft theory for black people to refer to, it will be angry, outrageous, unruly, and it will not cite authors I know that its readers will likely not care about.  bell hooks offered us this possibility when she stopped using footnotes in her writing; i find that many younger researchers now feel there might be enough critical theory circulating to follow suit.  SO, for me, literary theory is found in the singing of the spirituals (which still happens, even as historical performance); and the pre-mains of psychoanalytic theory might be evident in line-dancing or J-setting.  of course there will always be space held for academic language as its own thing, as something that requires a politics of citation that sends readers digging in the crates to try to make sense of a reference. (if only I had seen that movie! gone to that conference!  read that essay!)  but blackness is surely saturated by experience, and its experience in presence, and in breath, creates possibilities that seem worthy of attention outside of or alongside academic interrogations.

i refer to black performance in order to construct modes of theorizing around black lives. so my question would be, what if we took this as a prelude to theorizing black presence?  instead of looking at ‘white work’ or white responses to or creations of black objects (which is what the film sounds like in your various renderings of it); what if we pay attention to how we experience aesthetic possibilities and inventions that are of and for emergent black communities?

(by considering performances, though, we may move outside of the preferred liquidity here; the performances seem to offer sedimentation in their translation to literary texts ... )

wondering, and in motion, tommy




-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Kevin Beasley at turntables.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 3071 bytes
Desc: Kevin Beasley at turntables.jpg
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20160415/3acc99ce/attachment.jpg>