[-empyre-] (no subject)

[Derek Murray]

Greetings,

To address Simon’s question of what “liquid blackness” is meant to do,
a specific visual example came to mind in the work of artist Kalup
Linzy. I want to mention this here, because the notion of “liquid
blackness” has been a great interpretive tool when considering the odd
particularities of Linzy’s artwork. One persistent issue I’ve been
wrestling with is how blackness expresses itself in material form: not
purely or legibly embodied, but not necessarily rejecting of the body
either. If we think of blackness as a political designation, as a
cultural politics, then there are particular ways in which it becomes
visible. However, for others, it’s more articulable as expressiveness
or feeling that communicates what Cornel West calls, “black cultural
distinctiveness:” very black ways of being that are not necessarily
political (or nationalistic), yet are steeped in ways of speaking,
mannerisms, and movements. I often think of “liquid blackness” as a
process that can be employed that disrupts the stifling opacity that
often plagues individual and group identities. If you’re not familiar
with him already, Linzy is an openly gay, African-American artist who
has received acclaim for his unconventional and highly performative
low-tech videos.

I wrote a chapter on Linzy’s art in my recently published book
Queering Post-Black Art, so I will briefly summarize some of my
observations here, in hope they will sketch-out one way I see liquid
blackness functioning. To begin, Linzy makes narrative videos, both
short stories and episodic series that are based upon his love of soap
operas. His projects have a makeshift aesthetic reminiscent of the
type of homegrown YouTube videos that are ubiquitous on social media
these days.

The work that initially received acclaim was 'All My Churen' (2003), a
video that exemplifies the uncanny aesthetic that made Linzy an
instant art world darling. The title is a satirical play on the
enduring and much-beloved soap opera 'All My Children'. Churen tells
the embattled tale of the Braswells, a familial clan embroiled in
life’s everyday dramas and tragedies. Despite the cheapness of its
production, the video feels like an authentic soap opera, in that it
contains the stilted and artificial dialogue, the hollowed-out
emotions, and the reductive mise-en-scène that defines the genre.
There is always something slightly embarrassing about the soap opera
form: an awkwardness in its low culture pandering that would appear to
grate against the intellectually elitist pretension of the visual
arts. Churen is so overtly farcical and outrageous that it is
initially quite jarring to view, even if its self-conscious hilarity
conceals a more politically urgent agenda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Mlehmn8cI

The artist dubs digitally altered voices over the various characters
to create a makeshift aesthetic that effectively blurs the lines
between race, gender, and sexuality. An adept and skillful performer,
Linzy’s gestures and gesticulations submerge the artist’s masculine
features into a series of personas that very quickly become
convincing. At first glance, the effect appears like a sight gag
because of the artist’s crude, intentionally facile attempts at drag.

The silliness of Linzy’s videos gives them a populist accessibility
that fits quite neatly into the world of social media and reality
television; phenomena that, in their democratizing potential, have
allowed greater access to the realm of representation. In many ways,
this echoes Andy Warhol’s famous and prophetic line: ‘In the future
everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.’ Linzy’s lowbrow
aesthetics were literally made for the internet where they can be
easily distributed and shared—a stark contrast to the elitist dictates
of the Western art market, where high-priced objects are traded, yet
are largely inaccessible to the masses. Even by the standards of
today’s technology, Linzy’s videos are shoddily made, betraying an
anti-elitist intent that embraces a mass media form that is
ubiquitous. The anti-aesthetic dimension of his work is, in many ways,
where the humour resides: the excessive cheapness of the settings, the
bad wigs, the chest and facial hair on male characters who are in
drag, and of course, the bizarreness of the dubbed voices. The sheer
comic absurdity lies in the satirical sending-up of everything that is
legible about identity—particularly the representational codes and
visual markers of a repressive hetero-patriarchal society. I see this
quality and conceptual operation as liquidity, as well as a process of
queering.

Structurally, this takes the form of dubbed over voices, whimsical
musical numbers, and the odd and surrealist grafting of
stereotypically black voices onto white bodies and vice versa. Through
a clever process of modulating the pitch and tone of the audio, Linzy
is able to record all of the character’s lines using his own voice.
This intentionally absurd and imperfect quality accounts for much of
the video’s whimsy, particularly, when the awkwardly slow cadence of
his character’s speech produces a disturbing comic affect. In a sense,
the aural dimension of these films communicates a kind of horror… The
bodies and sounds are always slightly disconnected, giving the
character’s interactions a strange quality of ventriloquism.

The connection between liquidity and queerness (as a representational
mode) in Linzy’s work constructs an absurdly artificial world that
gives the ideological rigidity of identity a strangeness and a
semiotic vulnerability that dramatically alters our perception of
these troubling and enduring cultural phenomena.

Here is a link to a full-length feature by Linzy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSymk2raCyw

Cheers!
Derek