[-empyre-] materiality, scanning, Kanye West

Tue Apr 19 11:02:37 AEST 2016

Given the focus on materiality this week, I wanted to circle back to Marisa’s post last Wed. which expanded on Derek’s evocation of the Fred Wilson’s show “Speak of Me as I am” (Venice Biennale). I am also hopeful I can echo some statements made by Cameron who was one of the founding members of liquid blackness. 

We have struggled a little last week with giving any credence or any room to the idea of the “abstraction”, or “detachment” of blackness from the body, in part, I believe, because it conjures up the work of capital and therefore a long duree that puts the slave trade and our highly financial moment in the same continuum. 

I respect the reasons for not dwelling on that but I wouldn’t want this to also prevent us from paying due attention to processes of abstraction which continue to occur at an accelerated pace in popular mainstream culture as Cameron’s example of the Kanye West  "Black Skinhead” video indicates . One of the commitments of liquid blackness as a research group, as I wrote in my introductory essay, is to be faithful to its name and therefore see these scenarios through to their “sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, but always immensely complicated conclusions.”

A film like Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) unabashedly puts in circulation an imagery of abstraction, extraction, secretion to recreate the form and the dynamics of blackface minstrelsy but also to trigger a reflection on what might be the phantasmatic (and absolutely perverse) connection between the blackness of blackface makeup with the lived blackness of black people. 

For me, Fred Wilson’s black drop-shaped glass installation (inclusive, as Derek recalls, of black pool of glass on the floor) enters a similar conversation but with a more bitingly provocative irony. The version Wilson presented at the Aldrich was called "Black Like Me”, thus inviting a quasi-nonsensical comparison: there is nothing in the show that is “black” like Wilson and yet the “ambient” blackness he created by populating the gallery with so many pitch-black objects—with eyes, and seemingly in motion as they “slide” down the gallery wall--is haunted by the vibrancy of the subject it has somehow left behind. The instability of glass as a viscous liquid that is technically in movement, is obviously a huge part of this, as well as the memory that this type of matter might store, as Marisa was trying to tell us in her post. As well as the endorsement of opacity, illegibility— “vantablack," as she also said… 

I ended up writing about Wilson’s black drops in a (forthcoming) essay that challenges Object Oriented Ontology's commitment to conceptualize the object in a manner that is entirely divorced from the operations of race. For me, one of the provocations of Wilson's show is to interrogate how we might stand before entirely (literally) black objects, how we might think about the vibrancy of matter in that context, and whether “vibrancy” is something that we ask/want matter to do for us. 

Alessandra

> On Apr 18, 2016, at 2:33 PM, Cameron Kunzelman <cameron.kunzelman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks to Alessandra and the other editors of liquid blackness for
> organizing this month and to Derek hooking it all together initially.
> 
> I was asked to write about "materiality" this week, and that might be
> because I'm a stickler for the material. The work that I did as a
> founding editor of liquid blackness was often centered around the
> material conditions that gave rise to that material--from the British
> uprisings of the latter half of the 20th century to the thermodynamics
> that might surround conceptions of liquidity itself.
> 
> A piece that I return to over and over again is the video for Kanye
> West's "Black Skinhead" and the question of the material. It's a video
> that takes place almost entirely in a 3D space starring a very buff 3D
> model of West. It's a fairly accurate representation of the performer,
> and the animation is high-quality across the board.
> 
> What the piece calls to mind for me is the operation of the liquidity
> of liquid blackness--the moment of abstraction of blackness from the
> lived body into a different mode of material. The video shows how
> blackness "stretches," becomes deepened, or becomes more pronounced
> when it is put into the material operations of computer hardware
> rather than the hardware of the human body. The video, I believe,
> gives us some great leverage for understanding how material gets
> overdetermined or delimited by blackness itself--the black hole in
> West's face, the extended perfect replication of West's body, and the
> retexturing of the model with a shiny, spiny series of artifacts.
> 
> What I think is so interesting here is that the material capabilities
> of the hardware and software that Kanye West gets scanned into allow
> for modulations and alterations that liquid blackness as a paradigm is
> always-already tracing. The materiality of digital image manipulation
> quite literally renders Kanye West into a visual generation of
> something that, as last week's writing's suggest, is happening in many
> ways across lots of artistic productions.
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