Blackness, Aesthetics, and Liquidity (2014)

Introduction 

The “Blackness, Aesthetics, Liquidity” research project has a special place in the history of the liquid blackness research project’s development. From the first “call for submission” to the final structure that the Symposium assumed—with two keynote lectures, an artists’ panel, live and video dance performances, and a concurring exhibition of artwork at the DAEL Window Project—the key idea was to pursue a free form. This approach was inspired by the desire to put in dialogue scholarly, artistic and curatorial practices as well as bring into contact different institutional and non-institutional spaces and audiences. In keeping with the idea of fluidity, malleability, and porosity that liquid blackness pursues as a research group, the Symposium too was an exciting, risky, and certainly “messy” concept and enterprise—as Hamza Walker described it in his opening remarks at the 2014 liquid blackness Symposium. This beautiful/fluid/organized mess would not have succeeded without the careful and generous work of an incredible number of people; as a result, this project gave us an opportunity to make an emphasis on community—through thanks and citation—a formal and integral part of our scholarly practice.  

Lecture by Hamza Walker

T.Lang Dance and Gathering Wild Dance Company Performances

Research

This research project began with an essay and brief bibliography by liquid blackness founder, Dr. Alessandra Raengo, published on our website in the Summer of 2013. The piece, which outlined some of the stakes of thinking about blackness aesthetically and thinking about its aesthetics in liquid form, has been a vital gathering point for the research group: it served as our first “manifesto” and it became the call for submissions to our first symposium. The artists who responded to that call shared their work and insights at our symposium—which included a series of interconnected events: a night of dance and video performances, an artists’ panel, and an installation project with Georgia State University’s Digital Arts and Entertainment Lab—and that work served as the objects of study for two liquid blackness publications: “Blackness, Aesthetics, Liquidity” (April 2014) and “2014 liquid blackness Symposium: Reflections and Movements” (July 2014). Finally, due to the sprawling nature of this project and its emphasis on points of gathering, beginning with Raengo’s essay, we consider the process of acknowledging our collaborators as a part of our study that performs liquidity.  

The First liquid blackness Manifesto/2014 Symposium Call for Papers

“It remains exceedingly attractive and possible in this post-black, postsoul age of black cultural traffic to love black cool and not love black people.”

-Harry Elam

Reflecting on Blackness for Sale—conceptual artist Keith Obadike’s eBay auction of his own blackness—Harry Elam asserted that in contemporary culture, blackness has become capable to “travel on its own, separate and distinct from black people.” Because of this newly found detachability of blackness from black subjectivity, identity and history, Elam argued, “it remains exceedingly attractive and possible in this post-black, postsoul age of black cultural traffic to love black cool and not love black people.”[1]

The purpose of liquid blackness, a research project on Blackness and Aesthetics of the Film Media and Theatre Department at Georgia State University is to begin a conversation among scholars, artists, and curators about liquidity as a primary aesthetic form in which blackness is encountered in our contemporary visual and sonic landscape. The idea of the liquidity of blackness emerges both from an observation of salient contemporary aesthetic forms as well as a sort of thought experiment. If, as Harry Elam has argued, blackness does indeed “travel on its own,” then what aesthetic arrangements have become possible as a result of that?

What happens if we leverage, rather than condemn, this type of mobility? What happens when blackness is deliberately held in suspension, by the critical act one might perform in attempting to understand its contours? What if we could think of it, not as an attribute, but rather in its own terms, like a thing, like a substance, a “shadow [that] escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering”?[2] What if we held blackness in balance, so to speak, not necessarily to sever it from its lived experience, but in order to confront and come to terms with the many other ways in which it exists?

If blackness is placed firmly in the middle, held at the center of our conversations, affective investments, aesthetic concerns, if it is therefore made accessible, discussable, touchable, usable, re-purposable, then the focus might shift to new considerations: not what it represents, but what it does and can do, to its affective charge, and its sensorial reach; to the relations it facilitates, the fantasies it coagulates, and the sensible and sensorial configurations it orchestrates. One would therefore not be seeking a black aesthetic but rather to understand blackness as aesthetics.

Thus, as a research group, liquid blackness privileges the aesthetic mode of liquidity because it offers a provocative and generative characterization of one of the most mercurial, yet vigorous modes of interfacing blackness in contemporary visual and sonic culture, as well as the affects and intensities that this mode of engagement produces and circulates.

Liquidity is also meant to describe the fluid relationship between creative, critical and curatorial practices, as well as a bleeding between artistic community and academic community this research project is committed to pursue.

Finally liquidity intends to convey the desired adaptability of liquid blackness as a research group and platform for scholarly and artistic work, which will hopefully grow in pursuit of its research questions, spilling into those spaces where critical and creative thinking grapples with ideas of what indeed lies between us all, with the conviction that, given its enormous role in filling this in-between, there is no question about blackness that is not worth asking.

Here are some conceptual clusters that the idea of the liquidity of blackness is intended to evoke. They are meant to perform evocatively in order to trigger both critical and artistic responses.

• Sensuousness – liquid blackness is sensorially rich and erotically charged

• Affectivity – liquid blackness exists and moves in between bodies

• Formlessness – liquid blackness fills all available space and fluidly transforms with the shape of its container.

• Penetration –in its shape-shifting qualities, liquid blackness is capable of infiltrating anywhere.

• Fluctuation– liquid blackness moves through ripples and waves, like electronic signals

• Modulation – liquid blackness oscillates and vibrates within a spectrum of possibilities

• Absorption and assimilation –liquid blackness manifests fantasies of racial amalgamation

• Intensity– liquid blackness channels “intensive affective flows”[3]

• Viscosity– liquid blackness produces fantasies of tactility and experiences of stickiness

• Density– liquid blackness is tangibly material and thick

• Slipperiness: liquid blackness can be seemingly touched, but not held, or held in place

• Elasticity – liquid blackness can stretch, bleed, and slightly give in

• Allure– liquid blackness beckons and yet withdraws

• Vibration– liquid blackness is animated by the vitality of black matter

• Unboundedness– liquid blackness is unstoppable and pervasive

• Virality– liquid blackness proliferates and procreates, gaining incremental vitality with each reproduction.

• Channeling– liquid blackness is a channel, a vehicle, a medium – it carries, funnels, and puts in contact

• Plasticity – liquid blackness mutates within constantly mutating conditions

• Organicity– liquid blackness wades fluidly through processes of appropriation, sampling, grafting, injecting, rejecting, implanting, and transplanting.

• Glide– liquid blackness slides transversally across and between surfaces

[1] Harry J. Elam, Jr., “Change Clothes and Go: A Postscript to Postblackness,” in Black Cultural Traffic.  Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, eds. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Jackson Kennell (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 386.

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 20.

[3] Steven Shaviro, “Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales,” Film-Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2010).

Select References:

Elam, Harry J., Jr. “Change Clothes and Go: A Postscript to Postblackness.” In Black Cultural Traffic. Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Jackson Kennell, 379-88. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005.

English, Darby. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Boston: MIT Press, 2007.

Fleetwood, Nicole R. Troubling Visions. Performance, Visuality, and Blackness.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Lhamon, W.T., Jr., “Optic Black: Naturalizing the Refusal to Fit.” In Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, edited by Harry J. Elam Jr. and Kennell Jackson, 111-40. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012.

Murray, Derek Conrad. “Hip-Hop Vs. High Art: Notes on Race as Spectacle.” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (2004): 5-19.

Prettyman Beverly, Michele. “Phenomenal Bodies: The Metaphysical Possibilities of Post-Black Film and Visual Culture.” PhD Diss., Georgia State University, 2012.

Raengo, Alessandra. On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value.  Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2013.

—-“Optic Black: Blackness as Phantasmagoria.” In Beyond Blackface: Africana Images in the US Media, edited by Akil Houston. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2010.

—-“Reification, Reanimation, and the Money of the Real.”  World Picture no. 7 (2012).

Shaviro, Steven. “Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales.” Film-Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2010): 1-102.

Thompson, Krista. “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop.” The Art Bulletin (2009): 481-505.

Publications

liquid blackness 1, no. 3 “2014 liquid blackness Symposium: Reflections and Movements” Contents

 Katharine Zakos – Reflections on the First liquid blackness Symposium

Kristin Juarez – Getting Outside an “Always-already”: Form, Medium, Figure. A Conversation with Hamza Walker

Lauren McLeod Cramer – Post liquid blackness: Form, Satire, and Clearing Gestures. A Conversation with Derek Conrad Murray

Dorothy Hendircks – Toward an Uncodified Vocabulary: Movements in “liquid blackness” 

Adam Cottrel – Blackness Bubbles: Figure, Form, Movement

Jasmine Tillman – The Art of Blackness: Queering and Advancing the Black Representational Space

Shady Patterson – All That’sBlack Ain’t SOƱL’D: Performativity of Blackness in Fahamu Pecou’s Work

Christina Roma – liquid blackness meets The Window Project

Michele Prettyman-Beverly, Dorothy Hendricks, Lauren McLeod Cramer, Kristin Juarez, Alessandra Raengo – Post-Symposium Reflections

liquid blackness 3, no. 2 “blackness, aesthetics, liquidity” Contents

 Alessandra Raengo – Blackness, Aesthetics, Liquidity

Michele Prettyman-Beverly – The Liquidity of the Virtual Body: A Conversation with Nettrice Gaskins

Kristin Juarez and Christina Price Washington – Dislodging the Visual: Yanique Norman’s Amorphous Beings

Kristin Juarez – Ekphrastic Fear: The Invisible Bodies in the Work of Nikita Gale

Cameron Kunzelman – Solidity and Liquidity

Kristin Juarez – When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong: The Incoherent Image in Consuela Boyer’s Video Work

Lauren McLeod Cramer – Chopped and Screwed: Mediating the Black Body

Joey Molina – Collage and Hip-hop: The Remix of Feminine and Masculine

Michael B. Gillespie – 2 Nigs United 4 West Compton: A Conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson

Acknowledgements – from Dr. Alessandra Raengo

To begin, it would have been impossible to navigate the territory of the Atlanta art scene without the capable guidance of Kristin Juarez who delivered our theoretical questions to destination with many of the artists that contributed to the Symposium. Among the very first interlocutors about the viability of an initiative around the idea of “liquid blackness,” Kristin has shared her experience and personal contacts to make possible not only the exhibition of artwork for the April 2014 edition of the DAEL Window Project, but also the artists’ panel featured at the Symposium. She was key in the drafting of the calls for submissions as well as in determining the very structure of the event.

Similarly, Lauren McLeod Cramer and Cameron Kunzelman have been crucial to the intellectual work behind the structure of the Symposium and its publications, while Katharine Zakos has been the key social media operator and, together with Dorothy Hendrix, central to our fundraising efforts in the community. Window Project artists Consuela Boyer, Chr!s Reel, Joey Molina, and Fahamu Pecou were shepherded by Kristin Juarez and Christina Price Washington in the process of adapting their work for the venue. Writers contributing to our pre-Symposium publication worked primarily under the editorial guidance of Lauren McLeod Cramer and Cameron Kunzelman.

Chris Hunt designed all publicity visual materials generated for the Symposium, with original images he had created together with Joey Molina and Michael Sanders. Chris and Joey were also responsible for our publication’s design and layout.

Michael Sanders was instrumental in establishing a collaboration with Brian Egan at the Mammal Gallery (an event that came together also thanks to the hard work of Christina Romo and Richard Moye), while Lauren Cramer, Chris Hunt, and Cameron Kunzelman were central to our connection with Karl Injex at The Sound Table where we mingled with the artists and speakers after the end of the Symposium.

Gathering Wild Dance choreographer Jerylann Warner’s enthusiastic reaction to the “clusters” of ideas we initially formulated, in our first attempts to describe and reflect on the idea of “liquid blackness,” was key to attracting the attention and commitment of fellow choreographer Bubba Carr and T.Lang. My exchanges with Jerylann were the impetus behind the idea of incorporating live performances in the Symposium, as a way to use bodily movement to both complement and challenge more traditional scholarly reflections.

Finally, my conversations with Dr. Michele Prettyman-Beverly and her invaluable input have been central to the pursuit of the liquid blackness initiative. For years, Michele and I sought ways to bring together the very dialogue that materialized at the Symposium and to create a forum for a more uninhibited, experimental, and open conversation about race, visual culture, and aesthetics to take place. As she articulates in her contribution to this publication, this public exchange has made it possible for a variety of people to openly care about these issues.