Ensemblic Practices
As Told to G/D Thyself, Ummah Chroma (Terence Nance, Jenn Nkiru, Marc Thomas, Bradford Young, Kamasi Washington), 2019
Introduction
Most of the artists discussed in this pathway are not only part of an identifiable lineage, which connects them to filmmakers from the LA Rebellion through what we called the “Howard University Pedagogy Lab,” but they are also part of larger ensembles that expresses different “soloists” at different times.
“Ensemble” is the way Fred Moten theorizes a relationship between the soloist and the group, individuation and commonality, whose model is the cooperative and improvisational relationship between musicians in the jazz ensemble, which he sees as constantly experimenting with forms of sociality, as well as formal law-making and law-breaking.
In the ensemble, voices and sounds come to the foreground for fleeting moments. Thus, methodologically, if the ensemble translates sociality and politics into a risky exchange between form and informality as group and soloist negotiate their grounding and groundlessness, then an “ensemblic” scholarship has to dare to do the same: being on the brink of formlessness because socialities can dissipate and reconfigure themselves at any point; in short, an ensemblic scholarship is not only collaborative, as we hope to have shown through this project, but, as it follows unattended lineages, it also traces current developments and attends to the signs of lineages to come.
Here, we invite you to revisit the section on Arthur Jafa’s Theories of Filmmaking and in particular the role that TNEG had in the completion of his work.
4:44
4:44, TNEG, 2017, music video for track 1 on Jay-Z, 4:44
TNEG’s most “ensemblic” recent production has been the video for Jay-Z’s 4:44. The video begins with shaky smartphone footage of a child singing an a cappella version of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good,” which leads to a clip from All by Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story. It includes viral Worldstar clips and original footage of Storyboard P and Okwui Okpokwasili, shot mostly in close-up, in a manner that breaks-up the integrity of their gestures, here responding to each other’s vibrations, “like jazz,” Elissa Blount Moorhead has said. The song itself pivots around a sample from Hannah Williams & Affirmations 2016 track “Late Nights and Heartbreak.” It also contains nods to previous work: images of scholars Saidyia Hartman and Hortense Spillers, and an anonymous woman from the 2013 film Dreams are Colder than Death – figures Jafa has described as “specialists” and “uncommon folk”—typical of his obsession with constant recombination, much closer to the dynamic process of revision in jazz improvisation than traditional archival practice. A central sequence, which resolves around a spectacular, if entirely unexpected, car flipping across a highway, follows two videos of police brutality. Like many others, it abides to a perverse melodramatic tempo --accumulation and release—and thus reveals its underlying racial violence. It is also irreverent toward Jay-Z’s contrite confession.
In the following segment, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s contrived acquiescence transitions to Al Green’s live performance of “Judy,” quickly juxtaposed to footage of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s performing “Drunk Love” during their On the Run Tour. She is wearing a golden body suit to match her golden, flowing, hair. The couple’s footage is slowed down just enough so that Green’s soothing voice wraps around Beyonce’s body in a way that Jay-Z never does. This blatantly forced synchronization is loaded with the memory of the animated object we saw a moment earlier, voicing its own existential crisis and, at the same time, harkens back to the critique of synchronization Julie Dash performed in her 1982 film Illusions, where a black singer dubs the voice of a white starlet under the watchful and pained eyes of a black studio executive passing for white. In 4:44, when diegetic sound resumes, it is arguably just as startling as the flipping car from the previous sequence.
Overall, the video displays a non-judgmental attitude toward the poor quality of many of its images, their nature and content, and emphasizes the intensities produced by bodies in motion, whatever its source--exhilaration or pain--an attitude that prompted Moorhead to state: “Someone’s sacred beauty is another person’s profane.”[1]
In a sense, the video’s dynamic transitions from informality to form, from a collectivity that is infinitely more complex than Jay-Z will ever be, provide the perfect context for an apology that is quintessentially off-beat: as Lauren Cramer states in her essay “For the Culture, For the Future: Keeping Black Time in Jay-Z's 4:44,” “Jay-Z’s apology both preempts any negative feelings his children may have when they become aware of his marital indiscretions and, at the moment it is received in the future, it is delayed.”
This temporality is, in many ways, opposite of the “lineages to come” that Larry Clark envisioned in the first frame of his film Passing Through (1977), but it is reintroduced by TNEG’s film’s rendering of the larger spaces of informality, through the filmmakers’ commitment to grapple with the complex temporality of black lives lived within atmospheric anti-blackness: “where the music comes from” –that is, informality and temporality –remains central to their concerns. and set their work aside from the tradition of the music video proper.
[1] Ericka Blount, “Meet the Creative Women Behind Jay-Z’s 4:44 Music Video,” okayplayer.
As of A Now, Elissa Blount Moorhead, 2019
From, “Facing the Band: Elissa Blount Moorhead and the (Ana)Architectures of Community Ties,” liquid blackness Teach-in, October 23, 2020.
Elissa Blount Moorhead’s multi-faceted practice has a singular investment in black “mundaneity,” self-determination, and practices of “refusal.”[1] The “mundane” is not the quotidian or the banal, and certainly not the spectacular, but rather something that becomes available when one is not preoccupied with “someone’s identity politics” (as she puts it, which I take it to mean that identity politics is not necessarily her concern).[2] Coming from a proud tradition of self-determination, Blount Moorhead said that, as a child, she could look at black art and “focus on the details, the nuances and their otherworldliness.” In other words, this lineage afforded a particular attention to black aesthetics: attention to formal solutions to questions of personal and collective fulfillment.[3]
Her work advances an aesthetically and politically driven archival practice insofar as her projects re-member (she says) variously displaced black communities while it commits to horizontal and reciprocal –radically ensemblic—creative processes. She seeks to capture the intensities of black lives, the rhythms of lineages of black knowing as they are passed on and passed through, and in this way, to affect the very evolution of cinema. Yet, her work presents –at least for us—also a distinct archival challenge. Why?
Blount Moorhead has been part and parcel of the lineage that liquid blackness has been following since 2013 – the many legacies of the experimentation with the politics of film form attempted by the filmmakers of the LA Rebellion, particularly as channeled through what we call the Howard Pedagogy Lab, i.e. the mentorship of Haile Gerima at Howard University, which informed artists such as Arthur Jafa and Malik Sayeed (whom she joined in the production company TNEG in 2013), Bradford Young and Jenn Nkiru—and Kahlil Joseph by association. Yet, because of her commitment to anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal modes of art practice she resists the reductionism of “creditation,” and therefore her specific roles and contributions have been sometimes difficult to parse out. For example, although she was vital to enlisting the community and the performers featured in Bradford Young’s Black America Again, she does not appear in the film’s credits. Instead, she is lovingly acknowledged with a family portrait within the film.
Again, she was an indispensable “creative connective tissue” in the Kamasi Washington, Bradford Young, Jenn Nkiru, Terrence Nance and Marc Thomas collaboration, As Told to G/D Thyself, securing 50+ extras and locations, and channeling an unhindered flow of creative energy. In this project, she is credited as “casting director” –a rather inadequate way of describing her participation as co-creator, but one agreed upon in order to at least index her contribution. Here is how she describes the project and some of its goals:
[1] Tina Campt, "Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal." Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 29, no. 1 (2019): 79-87.
[2] Elissa Blount Moorhead and Mina Cheon, moderated by Lee Heinemann, April 19, 2019
[3] Elissa Blount Moorhead and Mina Cheon, moderated by Lee Heinemann, April 19, 2019
Elissa Blount Moorhead and Mina Cheon moderated by Lee Heinemann, Baltimore Museum of Art, uploaded April 19, 2019
Inspired by Jafa’s idea of black creativity passed around as quantum energy, her image of a “DNA that got passed around” signals also a commitment to processes grounded in black music: musicians’ specific forms of collaboration, including improvisation, communal ethos, and risk-taking based on mutual trust. Ultimately, it expresses a confidence that the aesthetics itself can act as an archive – whether that is widely legible or not.
She explains the stakes, in this presentation with Arthur Jafa for Creative Time, titled “In the defense of nonsense”
This is a radical manifesto against the idea of the artwork and the “obsession with the singular genius” (her words) and instead toward the generativity of gathering -- we want to be “producers of conversation pieces,” she says--which, in turn, is a way to harness past linages, while ushering in what we call, the “lineages to come”:…. we want to be ”emanations of black culture”
Blount Moorhead’s interest in the “life of things” shows through her co-curation of Funk, God, Jazz and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn (2014), a collaboration between Creative Time and the Weeksville Heritage Center, one of 19th century America’s first free black communities, where free blacks acquired plots of land for a $250 value so that they could fulfill the “tax fee” required to exercise their right to vote. The show featured works by Simone Leigh (who is going to represent the US at the next Venice Biennale), and Bradford Young.
In other words, the past has to be re-membered because it is the key to “black futures.”
Ultimately, Blount Moorhead holds both her lineage and possible futures together in the same space at all times. It’s important that the futures imagined by her or her ancestors include technology that does not yet exist such as immersive 3-D or AR, which, as she told me, became available after she conceived of the As of A Now project.[1]
[1] The main character in AOAN is a boy/spirit who is unable to commit to any of his living families. In each story, the boy is a harbinger for disruption of the banality. An Abiku in Yoruba mythology refers to a child who dies and returns repeatedly. It means ‘predestined to death’. His presence is a metaphor for the instability of Black urban life despite our constant quest for equilibrium. He makes us question our alien/outlawness and our inability to enjoy routine or assimilation. Are we capable of co-existence at the site of our traumas? How do we feed our ancestors and maintain our collective sanity? I find Baltimore’s enduring aesthetics and sublime chaos endlessly inspirational and perplexing
Back and Song, Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young, 2020
The stakes of Blount Moorhead’s practice come into focus again in a conversation she and Bradford Young recently had with Arthur Jafa about their archival work in Back and Song (a 4-screen installation about forms of healing in the black community), which they described as aggregating and gathering. Together, all three reflect on the question: is Back and Song a collection of healing practices or a gathering around practices of healing (and therefore a healing practice in itself)?[1]
For us, this becomes a driving question. Every time we approach an artist, we seek to formulate a methodology that is appropriate to the ethos of their work.
[1] Ultimately, they agree on the latter, and EBM claims that the 4-screen installation, is about “things we don’t have fears around. We trust midwifery, we trust dance, we trust music. We trust frequencies of sound that are healing.” EBM and BY in conversation with AJ. BMA Stories, February 28, 2020
Methodology
Black America Again, Bradford Young with Common, 2017.
Liquidity:
As discussed in Raengo and Cramer, “The Unruly Archives of Black Music Video”,
the analytical method used in this pathway is an untraditional historiography that follows the work’s complex references and is just as improvisational as the rich history of sound culture that sustains it.
We call this a “liquid” methodology because it was developed by the research group known as the liquid blackness project, precisely to probe the way the legacy of experimentations initiated by the filmmakers of the LA Rebellion affects contemporary artistic practices that bring film studies and film education, artistic space and praxis, popular culture, and the experimental and avant-garde into a fluid exchange.[1] This mode of historiography highlights the way that creative lineages are visible sometimes only retroactively and recognizes that different generations of artists work through shared conversations that are not always legible in the traditional subdisciplinary divisions of our field.
In this way, the term “liquidity” further reflects the group’s focus on the intersection of contemporary aesthetic theory and Black studies, to attend to the way black expressive culture constantly reflects on what Blackness is and what it does.[2] Thus, in lieu of fluidity, which traditionally accounts for shifts and instability in identity categories (most notably gender), we opt for a term that evokes the “thingness” of Blackness to emphasize how forcefully it has become the subject “matter” of contemporary filmmaking.[3] Following this methodology, the authors who contributed to the In Focus Dossier on “Modes of Black Liquidity: Music Video as Black Art,”[4] and other sources in this pathway offer aesthetic maps for this unruly archive that move in at least two directions: horizontally, as Black music videos increasingly reference contemporary visual art and appear in a widening number venues, and vertically, as these videos plumb the depths of Black sonic, visual, performance, and expressive culture.
An immanent methodology that attends to the way each work self-consciously addresses its aesthetic and artistic lineages allows us to see how artists like Williams, and even Larry Clark, are a part of the contemporary Black music videos artists’ creative lineages and how their contributions have, ultimately, turned the music video into one of the Black arts.[5]
Ensembles
This pathway, as all liquid blackness research projects, has been assembled in keeping with our aspirational ethos of “black study,” i.e., collaboratively and in an ensemblic manner.
It builds on publications from several members of the liquid blackness extended community, including members of the Editorial Board of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies, such as James Tobias and Charles “Chip” Linscott and members of the founding group – Lauren McLeod Cramer and Michele Prettyman.
It has benefited from contributions from the Summer 2021 working group:
Jarred Biederstaedt
Ariel Brown
Corey Couch
Lauren McLeod Cramer
Alper Gobel
Jenny Gunn
Ashley Hendrix
djones
Gail McFarland
Cedric Simmons
For a profile of all contributors, please go to Who is liquid blackness?
liquid blackness ensemble
[1] See Lauren M. Cramer and Alessandra Raengo, “Freeing Black Codes: liquid blackness Plays the Jazz Ensemble,” in “Black Code Studies,” ed. Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal, special issue, Black Scholar 47, no. 3 (2017): 8–21.
[2] Consider Fred Moten’s trilogy “Consent Not to Be a Single Being” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017–2018), Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), Steven Best, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
[3] We deploy a term mobilized since the 2000s in sociology, architecture, digital imaging, and photography to describe unfinalizability and constant becoming. See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity Press, 2000); Marcos Novak, “Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace,” in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, ed. Randall and Ken Jordan Packer (London: W. W. Norton, 2001); Joanna Zylinska, “On Bad Archives, Unruly Snappers and Liquid Photographs,” Photographies 3, no. 2 (2010): 139–153; Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy: Or the History of Photography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). Yet when applied in a racial context, “liquid blackness” describes the complex of material forces and conditions that have to be negotiated in order for Blackness to act expansively and to be free to explore its own genius and possibilities. For more information on the liquid blackness research group’s history and methodology, see “What Is liquid blackness?”.
[4] Alessandra Raengo and Lauren McLeod Cramer, IN FOCUS: “Modes of Black Liquidity: Music Video as Black Art,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 138-168.
[5] Hype Williams, interviewed by Jeff Mao, “Hype Williams,” Red Bull Music Academy, YouTube video, 1:11:28, June 5, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSUav71UBmk.