Taking Stakes in the Unknown: Tracing Post-Black Art 9783839452943

Table of contents :
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Contents
Acknowledgement
I. Introduction
II. Destabilizing Meaning
1. The Textures of History
2. What is the script of your time?
3. Economies of the Double-bind
III. Historical Entanglements of Black Revolutionary Women
1. De-Interpellating Interpellation—Visual Disobediences
2. How do I look? (Very good, I must say I am amazed!)
3. O my Body, will always remain in question!— Reviewing the Fanonian Moment
IV. Heterotemporality as a Way of Understanding the Contemporary
1. Reclaiming our time
2. Riffs on Real Time and the present that is fleeting though captured
3. Rewind Selecta
4. Hetero-temporality
V. Paradox Synchronicities
1. Contextualization
2. IWHISHIWAS or WISHIWASHI ?
3. From Leitkultur to Leightkultur
VI. Abstract Facts
1. Enter and Exit the New Negro
2. Enter and Exit the New Negro—From Invisible Visibilities
3. Enter the New Negro
4. Ambiguity as Chance—Abstraction as Means of Identity
VII. Post-Post-black
VIII. Bibliography

Citation preview

Nana Adusei-Poku Taking Stakes in the Unknown

Image  | Volume 180

Nana Adusei-Poku (PhD) is a Senior Academic Advisor and Luma Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies and Contemporary Art at Bard College. Her main research interests are cultural shifts and how they articulate themselves through the intersections of art, politics, and popular culture; artistic productions from the Black diasporas and critical pedagogy in relationship to decolonial aesthetics. She has articulated these interests through her academic work, the development of performative Lectures & Workshops as well as curatorial projects. Her articles have been published in Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art, eflux, Kunstforum International, Flashart!, L’Internationale, multidudes, Darkmatter, Afterall and Yale Theater Magazine a.o. and translated into English, German, Portuguese, French and Swedish.

Nana Adusei-Poku

Taking Stakes in the Unknown Tracing Post-Black Art

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de © 2021 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Leslie Hewitt: Riffs on Real Time (1 of 10), 2002-2005 30 x 24 inches (76.2 x 61 cm), Courtesy the artist and Perrotin Typeset by Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5294-9 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5294-3 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839452943 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Acknowledgement  �������������������������������������������������������������������������� 7 I. Introduction ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 9 II. Destabilizing Meaning �������������������������������������������������������������� 41 1. The Textures of History ���������������������������������������������������������������� 41 2. What is the script of your time? ������������������������������������������������������ 42 2.1 I am everything and now what? �������������������������������������������������� 52 3. Economies of the Double-bind �������������������������������������������������������� 59 3.1 ADS IMITATE ART, ART IMITATES LIFE, and LIFE IMITATES ADS. ����������� 64 3.2 The Economy of Blackness in Unbranded ������������������������������������ 66

III. Historical Entanglements of Black Revolutionary Women ����������� 89 1. De-Interpellating Interpellation—Visual Disobediences ������������������������� 89 2. How do I look? (Very good, I must say I am amazed!)  ��������������������������� 92 3. O my Body, will always remain in question!— Reviewing the Fanonian Moment ���������������������������������������������������� 104 3.1 The Colonial Gaze  ���������������������������������������������������������������� 105 3.2 Entanglements �������������������������������������������������������������������� 110

IV. Heterotemporality as a Way of Understanding the Contemporary ���������������������������������������� 113 1. Reclaiming our time �������������������������������������������������������������������� 113 2. Riffs on Real Time and the present that is fleeting though captured ������������������������������������������������������������������������ 116 2.1 Possible Presents  ���������������������������������������������������������������� 121 3. Rewind Selecta �������������������������������������������������������������������������� 123 4. Hetero-temporality ��������������������������������������������������������������������� 125

V. Paradox Synchronicities   �������������������������������������������������������� 129 1. Contextualization ����������������������������������������������������������������������� 129 2. IWHISHIWAS or WISHIWASHI ? �������������������������������������������������������� 134 2.1 Taking a Closer Look ������������������������������������������������������������� 135 2.2 Disposed Desires ����������������������������������������������������������������� 136 2.3 Retrospective Introspectives �������������������������������������������������� 139 2.4 Visual and Temporal Polyphonies ��������������������������������������������� 142 3. From Leitkultur to Leightkultur ������������������������������������������������������ 143

VI. Abstract Facts ������������������������������������������������������������������������ 155 1.

Enter and Exit the New Negro �������������������������������������������������������� 155 1.1 Quare—“Built in History” �������������������������������������������������������� 158 2. Enter and Exit the New Negro—From Invisible Visibilities ��������������������� 160 2.1 (Qu-)hair Politics and Material Connections ��������������������������������� 162 3. Enter the New Negro ������������������������������������������������������������������� 165 3.1 Exit the New Negro ��������������������������������������������������������������� 167 4. Ambiguity as Chance—Abstraction as Means of Identity ���������������������� 169 4.1 hidin’ like thieves in the night from life, Illusions of osasis makin’ you look twice ������������������������������������ 172 4.2 Norman Lewis—the not quite “invisible man” of abstract expressionism ������������������������������������������������������ 173 4.3 Playing by the Rules—Turn off the light!  ������������������������������������ 178

VII. Post-Post-black ��������������������������������������������������������������������� 183 VIII. Bibliography ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 193

Acknowledgement

This research is the product of a journey—personal, collective, and epistemological—and without the support and guidance of many scholars, artists and friends this book wouldn’t have been possible. In the beginning of my studies it was a challenge to defend the intellectual value of Taking Stakes in the Unknown- Tracing Post-Black Art in the German academy and thus I am honored that this project overtime has been championed and is seen to have intellectual value. For all of this and more I feel incredibly accomplished to have this text published with a German press and to contribute to the ongoing discourses of race and visual culture. I would therefore first like to express my gratitude to those who have funded and supported this project: the graduate program “Gender as a Category of Gender” at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies; the Women’s Funding scheme by the Women’s Representative at Humboldt University Berlin; the Erasmus funding scheme, which allowed me to study at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences’ Gender Studies Department. I equally thank the Research Department Creating 010 at Hogeschool Rotterdam for their support in terms of time to pursue my research, the German Studies Program at Columbia University New York, the Residency Program Denniston Hill, New York and The Center for Curatorial Studies, New York. The coordinates of this project spanned from Berlin over London to Holland and then United States, and made stops from Dakar to Paris. My sincerest appreciation goes to my supervisors Gabriele Dietze and Huey Copeland, who have left their mark on my thinking and constantly challenge me. Their support, encouragement and belief in this project has often given me the confidence to stand my ground, for which I am eternally grateful. I also would like to thank Mamadou Diouf, Lawrence Chua, Paul Gilroy and Angela McRobbie, for their mentorship. I have encountered so many inspiring thinkers and I am extremely grateful for their input, critique and thoughts on my project, including: Lotte Arndt, Sonja Boyce, Avtar Brah, Ama Josephine Budge, Pauline Boudry, Lawrence Chua, Florian Cramer, Antke Engel, Lukas Engelman, David Freedberg, Coco Fusco, Michael Gillespie, Kavita Philips, Julia Roth, Gayatri Spivak, Greg Tate, Linda Hentschel, Renate Lorenz, Julie Mehretu, Rene Mussai, Tavia N’yongo, Elizabeth Povinelli, Annie Seaton, Sadie Wearing, Deborah Willis, Michelle Wright, my students at the Humboldt Universi-

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Taking Stakes in the Unknown

tät zu Berlin, Züricher Hochschule der Künste; Willem de Kooning Academie Rotterdam; Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and at the Center for Curatorial Studies Bard College. I cannot thank you, Alhena Katsof, enough for being a critical friend, deep thinker and perceptive editor. Special thanks, goes to all the artists who have allowed me into their studios, and thus often into their lives and thoughts. I appreciate your generosity and here in particular: Hank Willis Thomas, Philip Metz, and especially Leslie Hewitt, whose practice and intellect have often left me lost for words and intellectually activated. I acknowledge the galleries Galerie Perrotin, Yancey Richardson, Jack Shainman and Hauser&Wirth for their generosity in providing the included images and support. I must also acknowledge the profound impact of the Studio Museum of Harlem and the work of Thelma Golden on this project’s formation. Finally, I would like to thank my mother and father, who have shared with me from an early age an appreciation of learning and to my love NIC Kay, thank you for your patience and care.

I. Introduction “I believe there is an aesthetic that informs the art works of black peoples [...] since aesthetic formulations derive from cultural responses, not from inherent racial endowments.” (Bearden 1974, 189) Post-black—a term popularized by African Americans—was an attempt to explore and, some might argue, define a collective Blackness in aesthetic, cultural, and historical terms for the 21st century. The provocative prefix was easily read as akin to the term post-race and subsequently as a claim to the end of Blackness. For some, post-black1 epitomized a hopefulness and anti­ cipative futurity at the beginning of the century. Within a linear logic– that is—the belief that the passing of time is an indicator of progress / change / evolution, post-black reprised a centuries old desire to realize a multiplicit, nuanced, and untethered Blackness freed from both the gratuitous violence and structural oppression that brought it into being whilst easing obligations to resist such violence and oppression. I read post-black as a symptom of a discourse that was already in the making in Black Studies (in the US) and Cultural Studies (in the UK) since the beginning of the 90’s and was launched by the arrival of post-structuralism in the English speaking world. Whether one engages with Hortense Spillers close reading of Louis Althusser in the Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: The Post Date 1994, listens to Stuart Hall’s speech Race as a Floating Signifyer 1997 or thinks with Eduard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, which was first translated into English in 1993, the time prior to the turn of the century was marked by a decisive shift in Black intellectual thought towards a fusion and further integration of post-structuralist, post-marxist and post-colonial theory. These

1  I will use two different spellings throughout this text: when I use “post-black” it refers to Thelma Golden’s conceptualization and when I use “postblack” I refer to Robert Farris Thompson’s concept. When I use Black with a capital B, I am highlighting the political dimension rather than pointing to skin color. I am also emphasizing that hyphened identities like African American or Afro German, may be useful in their specific context, but it is the term “Black” that works as an umbrella for an African Diasporic experience.

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Taking Stakes in the Unknown

frameworks made it clear that it is not possible to hold on to essentialisms nor to think about Blackness as exclusively African American. This shift in the ways in which Blackness became a subject of study was not always welcomed with excitement, much as the introduction of Gender as a performative concept became a deeply contested ground for some Feminists who felt that the subject of their battle “the body” was being taken away from them.2 An example for this kind of backlash in regards to Blackness was Debrah Dickerson’s The End of Blackness- Returning the Souls to their rightful Owners from 2004. Dickerson’s book made the claim that Blackness is a rather limiting and a harmful concept, which speaks stronger to an undermining of the potential of Black people, sovereignity and patriotism than to long term change and liberation. Her claims were made in an essentialist tradition exclusively for African American’s3 to take responsibility for themselves4 and their communities, echoing Neoliberal ideology that systemic violence and exclusions can be overcome through willpower and hard work, and arguing that it is African American’s themselves who hold responsibility for deeply rooted socio-political and socio-historical inequalities. (Dickerson 2004, 128) What many theories like Dickerson’s have in common is the notion of grappling with a “post-movement” condition, specifically the Civil Rights Movement. Meanwhile, mass incarceration of African Americans was addressed in the 1980s, in part through Elizabeth Alexanders’ popular publication The New Jim Crow. The conversation did not disappear into the 1990s and, as we know, remained on an all-time high whilst the beating of Rodney King and the Los Angeles Uprising were also present in public memory.5 Within this mesh-up of controversial ideas it is not a surprise that the use of post-black as a curatorial frame for exhibitions of visual art was perceived as profound provocation. With further investigation, one would come to understand the Post in Post-blackness as analogous to the more established terms Post-modern and Post-feminism. Post-modernism as first introduced by Jean-Francoise 2  B  arbara Duden is most known for this position in the German context. (Duden 1990; Duden and Noeres 2001). 3  D  ickerson refers to African Americans here with the frequently invoked and negligent understanding that America means the United States only—thus excluding South America and Canada—and that Slavery hasn’t existed outside of these constructed National confines when she writes: ”For our purposes, blacks are those Americans descended from Africans who were brought here involuntarily as slaves. This definition would include free blacks, even those who owned slaves. Immigrants of African descent, even if descended from South American or Caribbean slaves, are not included in this definition. The End of Blackness is specific to the American experience of slavery and its aftermath.” (Dickerson 2004a, 259 Introduction: Note 1.). 4  D  ickerson writes: “The last plantation is the mind, and through those magnolias blacks can‘t see that they have the ultimate power in post-movement America the power to disregard nonsense and refuse to be sidetracked from accomplishing what‘s important[…].” (Dickerson 2004a, 128). 5  B  oth aspects are also mentioned in the Freestyle Catalogue Essay by Hamza Walker (2001, 16).

I. Introduction

Lyotard in 1979 (1984) and post-feminism which first appeared in 1985 through the author Toril Moi signify a shift from one epoch into the next and that different concepts, political frameworks, and ideologies exist in synchronicity; not yet over, consistently about to become past if not countered or contradicted by the very same paradigms.6 I see post-black as an iteration of Blackness and as a category of knowledge. It is every time everywhere; it has created access and exclusion into specific spheres and conversations; it is a historical category and part of my everyday experience; it is part of vocabulary and shaped differently depending on the context and individual (encounter). In sum, the meanings of Blackness exist in synchronicity and often contradict each other. Post-black is an iteration deeply rooted in ontological and historically gratuitous violence7 that people of African decsent have endured since the mid 17th century, when humans from the African Continent became categorized into the current hierarchy.8 There is no essence to blackness, no intrinsic truth and post-black is simply one of many iterations. Even though being Black is not the only aspect that shapes one’s reality, none of the texts that attempt to bring the framework of post-black to art engaged with the politics of gender and sexuality apart from the art historian Conrad Murray, dedicated his book “Queering post-black art” to this important shift by arguing, by way of the exhibition Freestyle curated by Thelma Golden in 2001, that Queerness was able to emerge through postblack art exhibitions due to the move away from the “hypermasculinist” representations of the Black Arts Movement (Murray 2016). Murray poignantly emphasizes that the prevalent homophobia and mysogny that existed in the Black Arts Movement, Black Power Movement, and Civil Rights Movement weakens the potential of Black politics to grapple with the complexities and politics of liberation.(Murray 2016, 29) Not only does Murray define a specific practice of “post-black artists9, he also expands the possibilities to think about post-blackness as an opportunity to rethink the fact that “queerness seems to always fall outside the auspices of normative blackness” (Murray 2016, 14). Instead of thinking “queerness outside of the auspices of normative Blackness” this project holds the position that Blackness is intriniscally queer, because according to enlightenment epistemology to be “black” was to

6  S ee e.g. Angela McRobbie’s discussion on how 1970s and 80s Feminisms are undermined by “post-feminist” ideas of Women’s desires and rights paired with an unrelenting neoliberalism in her 2009 publication The Aftermath of Feminism. 7  I am borrowing here from Frank Wilderson’s analysis that posits Black people a priori claimed by gratuitous violence. (Wilderson 2010, 126). 8  F or further reading on this subject see: (Crenshaw 1995; Back and Solomos 2000; Piesche 2005).  urray writes: “I characterize the aesthetic strategies of post-black artists as creating a se9  M miotic vulnerability, or in other words, a liquidity or porousness in the semiotic function of blackness that transcends its historical and ideological opacity . . . blackness—as Thelma Golden suggests—is something to be embraced, but not necessarily autobiographical, or specific to their individual experience. (Murray 2016, 23).

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not be considered human. Thus, a person identified as black, could also not be inscribed into the normative dualism of gender, rendering Black Life as fundamentally queer.10 I agree, however, with Murray that the artists’s work presented in Golden’s exhibitions at the Studio Museum and the way this generation aesthetically deals with race, gender, and sexuality is different from the “politics of representation” in the 1990s. Significantly, the artists’s media, strategies, and aesthetic modes range from abstraction and pop to minimalist references and beyond. What makes post-black so interesting in this framework is that it emerged out of a curatorial practice and artistic practices to become part of a larger public discourse. Readily understood as a hostile or rejective proclamation, I seek to argue that Post-black had the potential to perform what Hortense Spillers phrased as, “[…] the capacity to perceive community as a layering of negotiable differences,” and further, “[d]oing so would allow us to understand how change, or altered positioning, is itself an elaboration of community, rather than its foundering.” (1994, 106). What was introduced as a curatorial device and art historical proposition, tasked with bringing attention to the practices of a select group of Black artists, ignited furious discussion in the United States and later internationally amongst Black people. The inherent conf lation with the term post-race and the rousing assertion of potentially hierachical newness in Black art practices, post-black was appropriated and redefined, often by non Black people to undermine the values and struggles of the Civil Rights, and Black Liberation Movements, and the present social political realities of racism. The introduction of the term post-black art by Golden, the then newly appointed Deputy Director (later Chief Curator) of the Studio Musuem in Harlem in New York City, with the exbitition Freestyle on display from April 28th —June 24th 2001, was a maneuver met with modest enthusiasm.11 Golden was not a novice to the field when she conceptualized the exhibition, which was the first in a series of shows, followed by Frequency November 9th-March 12th 2006 and Flow April 2nd- June 29 2008 (Fig. 1-3) .

10  Also see: (Tinsley 2008; Sharpe 2016, 30–32). 11 When Golden introduced the term post-black, she did not know that the art historian Robert Farris Thompson had already noted in 1991: “A retelling of Modernism to show how it predicts the triumphs of the current sequences would reveal that ‘the Other’ is your neighbor—that black and Modernist cultures were inseparable long ago. Why use the word, ‘post-Modern’ when it may also mean ‘postblack.’” (R. F. Thompson 1991, 91) In doing so, Thompson highlights the intertwined nature of the development of modernism in the West and the inspiration it borrowed from African and Afrcian diasporic art.

I. Introduction

Fig. 1: Installation View Freestyle, 2001 Studio Museum in Harlem

Born 1965 in Queens New York, she developed an early interest in curation which led to a curatorial apprenticeship at the Metropolitan Museum whilst she was still attending New Lincoln School—an experimental private secondary school.12 Golden was well aquainted with the Studio Museum when she started her position, having held an internship there in 1985 whilst completing her BA at Smith College. Her internship grew into a curatorial position after she had completed her degree in Art History and African American Studies. She quickly moved on to become a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she curated two highly discussed and controversially yet greatly successful projects: the Whitney Biennial 1993 with John G. Hanhardt, Lisa Phillips, and Elisabeth Sussman and in 1994-95 Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art. Golden left the Whitney Museum after David Ross resigned and Maxwell Anderson arrived as its new Director, introducing a “curatorial re structuring” resulting in her removal from the Whitney Biennial 2000 curatorial team. (Enwezor 2001, 26) Golden henceforth worked as a special-project curator for contemporary art collectors Peter and Eileen Norton from 1998 till 2000 before re-joining the Studio Museum later that year. Freestyle traveled nationally after its debut at the Studio Museum to the Santa Monica Museum of Art in Los Angeles September 29th- November 18th, 2001, and the term post - black travelled with it. Golden was a skilled and well-established curator upon the opening of the exhibition with an intimate understanding of how Black artists were historically, institutionally, and economically positioned. Alongside her intuition, knowledge of African American Art History, and understanding of cultural discourses culminated in the game changing Freestyle. The exhibition was a survey show that introduced audiences to a young generation of artists of African descent whose work 12  T his internship took place whilst Lowery Stoke Sims was the first African American curator at the Metropolitan Museum.

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ranged in themes and styles. It gathered 28 artists: Laylah Ali, John Bankston, Sanford Biggers (in collaboration with Jennifer Zackin), Mark Bradford, Louis Cameron, Adler Guerrier, Kori Newkirk, Rico Gatson, Kojo Griffin, Deborah Grant, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Tana Hargest, Kira Lynn Harris, David Huffman, Jeral Ieans, Rashid Johnson, Vincent Johnson, Jennie C. Jones, Arnold Kemp, Dave McKenzie, Julie Mehretu, Adia Millett, Camille Norment, Senam Okudzeto, Clifford Owens, Nadine Robinson, Susan Smith-Pinelo and Eric Wesley.

Fig. 2: Installation View Freestyle, 2001 Studio Museum in Harlem Freestyle proved to be a transformative exhibition for Golden, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the artists and Black art discourse (Stokes Sims 2001). 13 Golden’s proposal was straightforward yet effective. Freestyle was not a critique of the art worlds exclusion of Black artists, or a political manifesto, or even a claim to a post racial reality. Golden basically, and characteristic to curatorial work; spoke to artists, made studio visits, and exhibited their work in a group exhibition. The exhibition took place in a fairly small 8,050 square feet gallery on 125th steet in Harlem with the assistance of Christine Y. Kim— Goldman’s assistant curator at the time. 14

13  G  olden explains during an interview on the Charlie Rose show: “[…] that major expansion for museums in the city means sort of big blow-out situations. But we are in the midst of just unveiling a new facade. So, there‘s a physical reality of transformation at the museum. But also, ideologically. You know, we‘re at a place now where we‘re thinking about what The Studio Museum can be. And this show and these artists really represent a generational shift that allows us to both look back in a very different way and to embrace the past, but also to look forward.” (Freestyle” - Charlie Rose 2001). 14  G  olden explains during an interview on the Charlie Rose show: “Well, I came to The Studio Museum about 17 months ago when the museum underwent an amazing transition where the board hired Lowry Stokes Sims, who is a pre-eminent curator of modern art, who came to be the director. And Lowry hired me to come on. And the first thing I really wanted to do was to really do what I do best, which is to make an exhibition of emerging artists and art historical proposition.

I. Introduction

Fig. 3: Installation View Freestyle, 2001 Studio Museum in Harlem The exhibition catalogue features a frontcover which showcases a bluetainted still from Dave McKenzie’s video work Edward and Me 2000, a back cover with Eric Wesley’s sculpture Kicking Ass 2000, and 90 pages of images and text. Each short essay of 1-2 pages paired an artist in the exhibition with an early to mid-career curator, art-historian, or artist.15 For her contribution titled Post…, Golden proposed that there had been a shift in artistic practices of Black artists around the turn of the century. This shift was supposed to distinguish Black artists born after 1960 from previous generations. Deriving from conversations with the artist Glenn Ligon, Golden described the term in her essay titled post… as “[… ]‘post-black,’ at first, as a description of artists who were adamant about not being labeled as ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.” (Golden 2001, 14) Golden proposed the term fully aware of the contradictory politics it implies—the fixation of a term like black and its simultaneous dissolution—and highlighted its chronological dimension as well as its ideological repercussions (2001, 14). The second contextualizing and equally short essay called Renigged was contributed to the catalogue by curator and writer Hamza Walker, who gives a critical account of his experiences of diversity politics and hyphenated identities. His observations capture succinctly the disparity between the potential of post-black and the existing social reality. He emphasizes that hyphenated identities, which were introduced during the wave of Multiculturalism in the 1980’s and 1990’s, were artificial markers for the end of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Era. Walker deliberately and proudly chose not to embrace the hyphenation in order to stress the Black American experience as an open ended narration rather than a (aristotelian) story with 15  I t is worth highlighting that many of the writers are now in leading positions in the field of African Diasporic Art and its related institutions, often in directorial roles. The pairings in the catalog also created a dialogue that has since been carried by the “post-black generation”.

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beginning, middle (catharstis) and end. (2001, 16) Walker further elaborates on the example of a 1989 Newspaper article that announced the end of the integration era, which inclines him to ask: “So we had gone from post-segregation to post-integration. What happened to proper integration?” (2001, 16). Whilst asking rightfully for the real manifestation of what the article claims has already taken place, Walker highlights that his own observations of Black experience don’t resonate with this proclamation of a post-integration era. He experiences deeply rooted, systemic structures of racism that manifest in institutional settings whether at school or in the professional world, which shows the many ways that multiculturalism, Affirmative Action and diversity politics didn’t keep the promise of integration, equality, or equity. Whilst pointing towards theoretical developments in Cultural studies, Walker stresses the discrepancy between theory and practice. Hence, his insistence to claim Black as a self-marker comes with an inconclusiveness as to what Black means: “I found discussions about race incredibly difficult to maintain because I had no idea for whom I was speaking, if anyone. The only voice I had was negational, one.” (2001, 17) He introduces the term “renigged” in his closing remarks f lagging it as used exclusively for himself and as a catalyst to ”think about change and historical agency - questions that every generation will have to come to terms with, at some point.” (2001, 17) Walker emphasizes that his generation is confronted with a new set of questions that didn’t exist prior. Golden and Ligon used the term post-black in a sociological and art-historical mode, as well as to describe a specific form of art, by a specific group of artists. The questions that Golden highlights in her short essay on post-black art underline this observation: “‘[… ]after all of this [the Black arts Movement], what’s next?’ How would this notion play out in the beginning of the twenty-first Century? How would black artists make work after vital activism of the 1960s, the focused, often essentialist, Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, the theory driven multiculturalism of the 1980s and the late globalist expansion of the late 90s?” This quote can be effectively paraphrased into one short question: What does it mean to be Black in the contemporary and what kind of aesthetics does it produce? Freestyle was Golden’s answer to that query. The most discussed and critically analysed quote regarding the term was given by Golden in a short interview: “There’s no single way to think about it. I’m interested in its diversity and in bringing multiculturalism to the mainstream. I’ve become interested in younger black artists who are steeped in the postmodernist discourse about blackness but don’t necessarily put it first. (Painter) Glenn Ligon and I started calling it post-black. Post-black is the new black” (Seattle Post, March 2003). This example shows how eloquently Golden highlights two strategies and uses provocation as a PR strategy. First, her emphasis on the potential of the term to transport notions of multiculturalism—thus making room for Black presence in mainstream art—and secondly, Golden signals a change in the politics of representation by shifting away from post-modernist discourse. The provocation is the last sentence, as it somehow overwrites the sociohistoric dimension of the term Black in the

I. Introduction

US American context. I attended Golden’s talk Post-Black Art Now on March 11, 2009 at the Tate Britain, in which she elaborated on the Freestyle exhibition, the framing post-black, and gave an insight into the exhibition Black Romantic: The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art (24–June 24, 2002). Afterwards, the Black British artist Raimi Gbadamosi who was in the audience asked Golden whether there is a desire to exhaust the word “Black” in post-black as part of a new empowerment process? Her answer was a stringent “no” it’s the opposite she wants to explore new boundaries to be defined of Blackness. (Golden 2009) By insisting on the category “Black,” Golden clarified that within the concept of post-black art, the political dimension still exists and identity politics are pitched against racism with the desire to overcome a sociostructural fixity for Black individuals. Gbadamosi’s question would not have been possible if the concept didn’t have so much room for interpretation. This expansiveness and refusal to define can also be considered a provocation. Golden elaborated on this aspect and related it to its art historical situatedness when she addressed the issue in an interview with Charlie Rose who asked her to define post-blackness on his Television talk-show “Charlie Rose”. “Well, that was a provocation of a sort. You know? I really with this exhibition wanted to sort-of open up a dialogue that would allow us to think about the kind of work that African-American artists make a little bit differently. And there’s a whole discourse of black art that emerged in the black arts movement in the ‘60s but, of course, has gone on as long as African-American people have made work in this country. And I wanted to at least create what would even seem to be an artificial rupture because it comes from nothing but the fact that I did the show at this moment—but to create a rupture that would think about this body of work, this group of artists, this generation they represent, as being post-that. So, in the way that we speak about ‘post-modern’, ‘post-feminism’, ‘post-anything’, that this would set up a way to begin to talk about this a little bit differently.” (Golden in “Freestyle” - Charlie Rose 2001) My analysis of this citation is twofold: Golden’s artificial rupture was necessary to bring much overdue awareness to the multiplicity of practices that Black artists were engaged in during the early 2000’s;16 and second this rupture also potentially acknowledged, however indirectly, socio-cultural and socio-political shifts of the time. The “sort of” in Golden’s response reveals the spaces left open for misinterpretation or better yet free interpretation of what these ruptures would bring into being. Rupture from the latin word ruptura means, to part by violence and to create or induce a breakthrough. Whether in interviews or in her essay, Golden consistently leaves the reader with generalizations and yet insists on the process of redefining Black Art and 16  F or another argument with a strong focus on why multiplicity in Black art wasn’t recognized see (Bey 2014).Bey argues that the discourse of representation in the 1990’s marginalized the variety of styles practiced by Black artists.

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Blackness from the beginning of this century onwards: “Most importantly, their work in all of its various forms, speaks to an individual freedom that is a result of this transnational moment in the quest to define ongoing changes in the evolution of Black art and ultimately to an ongoing redefinition of blackness in contemporary culture” (2001, 15) [emphasis by author]. The art historian and curator Courtney J Martin has written that the exhibition was oddly positioned in the art market calendar of 2001 having closed on June 24th, just two months prior to the monumental break that was the events on 11th of September 2001 (Martin 2016, 155), which would forcefully metamorphize the world as we knew it forever. At once, the “war on drugs” dating back to Republican US president Richard Nixon transformed into the “war on terror”, a term that dates back to former Republican US president George. W. Bush. “Although no longer explicitly racial, the ‘color line’ still runs through all these forms of domination. Paul Gilroy speaks of a ‘hemispheric order of racial domination’, while Mills speaks of ‘the metaphysical infrastructure of global white supremacy’” (Stam and Shohat 2012, 63). In other words the proclaimed “war on terror” rearticulated and transformed its worst expression and institutional practice17 of racism against Black human beings into a form of racism against (assumed) Muslims18 (Dietze 2009). That doesn’t mean that racism against Black individuals ceased, but rather that the targeted groups of racism expanded and the language of racism became even more entrenched in global systems of capital and oppression. Systemic forms of racialization were magnified and the idea of multiculturalisms which peaked in the 1990’s slowly came to an end; neoliberal ideology with its promises of endless growth, infitite wealth through entrepreneurship, and market sovereignity continued to grow exponentially. The idea of neoliberalism and its diversity politics may have had strength during the era of politicians such as Clinton, Schröder, and Blair, but their diversity politic and economic promises were crashed in 2008 and this shattering exposed the widening gap between financial wealth and poverty. After it’s introduction by Golden and discussion in Touré’s publication Who’s afraid Post-Blackness - What It Means to Be Black Now (2011) in which he interviewed 105 individuals working in various fields and with a public profile including 17  H  ere I refer to e.g. the German Rasterfahndung procedure, which is a practice by which state officials go through the National Database operating on the suspicion that everybody is guilty until proven innocent, targeting individuals due to a Muslim name or heritage from a country with Muslim beliefs (whether it is a secular or non-secular country). I also refer to border police practices at national airports, which filter individuals with Muslim names and consider them high-risk passengers. In addition, the political as well as cultural debates on the failure of multiculturalism and the national implementations of “integration” programs for families with heritage from countries of Muslim beliefs should be seen in the light of these events, actions, and oppressive strategies. 18  I am deliberately using racism against Muslims instead of Islamophobia as the latter term suggests and implements that it is a physical/mental/thus biological disease from which one can be cured. Racism has many branches, which don’t necessarily depend on phenotype and has various articulations.

I. Introduction

Michael Eric Dyson, Harold Ford Jr., Henry Louis Gates Jr., Malcolm Gladwell, Kamala Harris, Melissa Harris-Perry, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Glenn Ligon, Paul Mooney, Soledad O’Brien, New York Governor David Paterson, Greg Tate, Kara Walker, Cornel West, Kehinde Wiley, and many others, the term was seen as part of a neoliberal class discourse, where the individuals that lead the discussion represent the Black American middle class and those who are in power are able to talk about it19. But what about those who still operate on the margins of society? Neoliberalism operates by emphasizing an interest in personal growth, as opposed to forms of solidarity, and instrumentalizes ideas of Blackness. This is why it is important to highlight the questions the artists in Freestyle raised as they interrogated the Global network cultures and hybridity that Neoliberalism stresses, as well as the conservative retreats it creates. If nothing is stabile—including Blackness—we have to open our thoughts to a way of thinking that intrinsically includes this instability. In sum, the early 2000s dealt with a set of variables and glitches that opened up the possibility for a reconfiguration of what it means to be Black in the contemporary. Since art is an intrinisic form of knowledge production, the term, as well as the exhibition, Freestyle did what art can do best: articulate socio-political as well as socio-historical discourses in a way that foreshadowed the conceptual and political changes that were already a present reality, but that hegemonic cultures were not yet ready to embrace. The “messianic” position that Barack Obama would hold when he was elected in 2008 as the first person of African descent as President of the United States, would connect Freestyle forever with the changes it heralded. It is no surprise that the public discussion about post-black was repeatedly intertwined with the discourse surrounding the now former US president’s identity whilst it’s origin in the arts was quickly marginalized. For example, in Michael Eric Dyson’s foreword to Touré’s book Who is afraid of Post-Blackness, he writes: “When it comes to defending Barack against the charge that he’s not Black enough. I tell folk, ‘Well, I’ve known him for over fifteen years, and what I’ve noticed is that he’s proud of his race, but that doesn’t capture the range of his identity. He’s rooted in, but not restricted by, his Blackness.’” (Dyson in Touré 2011, xi) What is striking in this example is that there is still a questioning of ones Blackness, which derives from an idea of essence as well as correct performance20. Obama on the other hand responds to this framing with these words following Dyson’s narrative, “That brother knows how to run a phrase.” (Touré 2011, Dyson in xii) His use of “brother” re-establishes Obama’s Blackness into the realm of Black politics, solidarity, and community, but his identities remain nevertheless puzzling for many individuals.

19  M  any of these individuals are not from a middle-class background, however moved into the middle class through their education or profession. 20  T he already mentioned author Debra Dickerson belonged to a cohort of Black intellectuals who would claim that Barack Obama was not Black because of the way in which she defined being black as I outlined in Footnote 3.

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The notional closeness between Dyson’s citation and Golden’s short essay post… is striking and captures the political shift towards ambiguity in the early 00’s. Among many things, Freesyle pointed to the complex tensions and question of creative freedom when art is paired with an ethnic/identity and political signifier. The deliberate usage of “Black” in Golden’s work indicates that the aim was not to engage in a debate exclusive to African Americans, but to open a conversation that included the wider African Diaspora. Post-black art retained the notion of Blackness in art, which I see connected to what Romare Bearden vividly expressed in his Letter to the editor, in reaction to Allan Shields’ article “Is there a black aesthetic?” (1973). Bearden wrote: “I believe there
is an aesthetic that informs the art works of black peoples [...] since aesthetic formulations derive from cultural responses, not from inherent racial endowments.” (Bearden 1974, 189) His argument, that aesthetic formulations derive from experiences, is intrinsic to the condition of being Black during his time, as well for the conditions of Black people in the contemporary. So, to think with and through representation has to remain part of a critical engagement. Thus, the epistemological problem of simultaneously acknowledging “difference” in artworks produced through the specificities of being in the world as a Black subject—and at the same time, the notion of the universal nature of art—informs this project’s tension. This aporia can also be read as the allegorical meaning of Blackness, since it is part of the great classificatory system of dif ference21. Despite the fact that Bearden’s position derives from a particular set of experiences in time—racial segregation, brute violence, and static inequalities—the quest that lies within these pages has not yet come to an end.22 I argue that we cannot fall into eternal essentialism when it comes to Black aesthetics and Black politics, rather we must look at Blackness as an object of knowledge and knowledge production.23 When I refer to Black politics in this project, I am following the theorist Tommie Shelby’s definition, because what I am aiming at is not simply an, “interest group seeking advantages through traditional political processes. Black politics is instead about identifying, correcting, and ultimately eliminating race-based injustices. In this way, black political solidarity should be understood as black collective action in the interest of racial justice, not on behalf of an ideal of blackness.” (Shelby 2005, 151) Shelby’s last point—that

21  Also see: (Hall and Jhally 1997, 6). 22  I n the last days of the first version of this project civil unrest occurred again in the US, because of a decision by a Grand Jury to free the white police officer who shot a Black unarmed boy named Michael Brown. The officer Darren Wilson called Brown a “hulk” and “demon” in an interview and insisted on having a clear conscience about having shot the boy. The violence against Black bodies is a historical and ongoing reality. (“Michael Brown Shooting | US News | The Guardian” 29.11.2014). For further an analysis of the prevailing consequences of racism and inequalities, see: (Shelby 2005) and (Marable 1983). 23  H  ortense Spillers essay The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual- The Post Date emphasizes this and gave me the tools to situate myself as part of a generation of scholars whose “canon” was already formed by the impact of post-structuralism.

I. Introduction

Black politics is not about an ideal of Blackness—corresponds with the artworks that I will examine and underlines my view that these artworks have a political function, by opening up a dialogue that is necessary in order to develop new epistomologies. Throughout my research, which included many informal and formal conversations with artists, scholars, and cultural practitioners from predominantly the US, UK, and Germany about “post-black”, I encountered neutrality or great hostility towards the term. Whilst in the UK the term Black has grown to include all persons of color, in Germany the term Black is exclusively used by small groups of people of African descent and thus has not been established as a political force in mainstream culture. The term post-black thus frequently fell on contested ground and was often considered “another US” invention, which is perceived as dominating the discourse on Blackness in Europe and beyond.24 It gradually became more evident, that post-black— particularly the “post”—was not widely experienced as a term or strategy that could open a new discourse but instead a devicive provocation. Paul C. Taylor addressed the danger of the term by focusing on the temporal dimension and progress narration of “post”. Taylor connected it to a tradition of “rhetorical gestures,” which he calls “post-erize,” meaning the impulse to mark the end of a certain historical era and proclaim the beginning of a new one. By contrast, a ref lection on post-modernism, “[post-black] squanders a fascinating opportunity to put the posterizing impulse in the service of a comprehensive understanding of contemporary racial conditions.” (P. C. Taylor 2007, 626) His critique thus echoed many critical voices that highlight the consistencies of racial inequality and stress the misleading temporal dimension of the term post-black, which may, for some readers, suggests the end of racism. Taylor’s critique can be contrasted with Cathy Byrd’s interpretation of post-black, which she compares to a genealogical development—like from modernism to postmodernism—as a form of fundamental background, when she writes: “Years of protests and hard-won legal battles in the social, political and economic arenas, along with decades of black-centered art, have freed the latest generation of black artmakers to say whatever they want with their work. Just as Post-Modernism builds on Modernism, ‘post-black’ relies on a rich history of intensely ‘black’ art” (Byrd, 39). Whilst acknowledging the “post-erizing” impulse, this project leans towards Byrd’s argument of historical embeddedness and regards post-black in the same way that Stuart Hall has framed the notion of “post.” Hall discusses the term in a context of the role of the Museum in his text “Museums of Modern Art and the End of History”: I do not use the term [post] to mean “after” in a sequential or chronological sense, as though one phase or epoch or set of practices has ended and an absolutely new one is beginning. Post, for me, always refers to the aftermath 24  F or curatorial context see the critique by Will Furtado on US-centrism of Black representation in Europe. (2018).

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or the after-flow of a particular configuration. The impetus which constituted one particular historical or aesthetic moment disintegrates in the form in which we know it. Many of those impulses are resumed or reconvened in a new terrain or context, eroding some of the boundaries which made our occupation of an earlier moment seem relatively clear, well bounded and easy to inhabit, and opening in their place new gaps, new interstices. (Hall 2001, 9–11) Looking at post-black from this angle shows that we are dealing with a set of synchronicities; by which I mean not only temporal, spatial, geographic, and cultural synchronicities, but also the ideological synchronicities of being Black. The part of the interstices that Hall talks about and that have changed in the discussion about contemporary Black art are categories such as race, gender, class, and here in particular sexuality.

* After Golden’s exhibition Freestyle, the term post-black became embedded in curatorial discourse through the work of curators like Valerie Cassel Oliver, Peter Gorschlüter, Tanya Barson, and Hamza Walker who continued to utilize it in their own projects and further developing and interpreting the term. Cassel Oliver’s article—which is part of the catalogue to the exhibition Black Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art since 1970 at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, TX—gave, in 2003, a genealogy of the intersectional cultural and political discourse of Blackness in the US from the 1960s.25 She describes the following timeline: coming out of the 1960s’ struggles, from “negro” to “Negro,” followed by a self-identification and political empowerment strategy, to the use of the term “Black” or “people of color” by the end of the 1970s, then arriving at the 1980s and 1990s with hyphened identities, namely Afro-American and later African-American. All of this history, she says, has to be considered as the background for the term post-black. With the term post-black, Cassel Oliver also saw a resurrection of Blackness in the arts rather than a move away from it. (Oliver 2005, 26) Each of the self-identifications—whether negro, Black, African American or post-black—are a part of the process of naming political, cultural, and structural strategies, they represent markers for Black American histories and struggles. These strategies in Cassel Oliver’s analysis are framed by an investment in and contemplation of W.E.B DuBois ideas of “double consciousness,” which he developed in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. DuBois describes the state of mind of Black human beings who have a double perspective on racial discourse. In other words, they are simultaneously included and excluded from the concept of modernity. (Du Bois 1997, 5)

25  I am using Cassel Oliver’s approach as it demonstrates how this genealogy is understood and engaged in the arts. For an in-depth philosophical discussion and analysis of Black nationalist movements in literature, see: (M. M. Wright 2004; Smethurst 2005).

I. Introduction

While Blackness in these examples is attached to Black intellectual thought deriving from the US, diasporic knowledge f lows from the 1940s to 1960s led to a formation of Black nationalist discourse (Edwards 2003; M. M. Wright 2004; Smethurst 2005), which includes thinkers from the African continent like Leopold Senghor and Kwame Nkrumah as well as the Carribean like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. These important connections remain unmentioned in Cassel Oliver’s analysis and genealogy. Equally important and left unmentioned are the gendered and hetero-normative dimensions of Blackness, which is persistently framed as a predominantly masculine and heterosexual project. Michelle Wright describes this dynamic in her analysis of leading Black intellectuals—e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Amiri Baraka, Eldridge Cleaver, Alain Locke— when she writes: “… their (re) construction of a gendered agency in nationalist discourse disabled the possibility of a Black female subject at the same time that it enabled the Black male subject who, like his white male counterpart, comes into being through the denial of another’s subjectivity—in this case, Black women.” (Wright 2004, 132). Whilst Golden provided a list of inf luences like new media, suburban angst, urban f light, globalism, and the Internet for her show (and the artists it featured), Cassel Oliver only highlights the inf luences of popular culture. For her, to arrive at the point of Post-Blackness one can simply follow a chronology of events and cultural productions that are connected to hip-hop culture and its protagonists such as Public Enemy and their album Fear of a Black Planet 1990, or KRS-1’s Criminally Minded 1987, in which African American youth expressed their concern with the sociostructural situation of Black individuals in the United States in a poetic way that resembled the Black Power Movement from the 1960s and 1970s. Cassel Oliver argues that young, Black fine art students were affected by the ideas presented in rap music and related forms of cultural production. Thus, this connection to hip-hop music is important for Cassel Oliver, because it it is an inf luential phenomenon that mirrors the social and cultural discourses within Black communities. Three years ealier the artists in Freestyle were even called “The Hip Hop” Generation in an article that was published prior to the exhibition by Vibe Magazine (2001, 139) accompanied by group portraits that reminisce of band promotion images (Fig. 4, Fig. 5) and examples of their works (Fig. 6).

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Fig. 4: Vibe Magazine Article on Artists of the Exhibition based on the East Coast.

Fig. 5: Vibe Magazine Article on the Artists of the Freestyle Exhibition based on the West Coast.

I. Introduction

The example of hip hop allows us to draw an analogy between the arts, Black politics in the early 00’ and neoliberalism; Greg Tate summarizes this eloquently when he writes: The omnipresence and omnipotence of hip-hop, artistically, economically, and socially, have forced all within Black America and beyond to find a rapprochement with at least some aspects of its essence. Within hip-hop however, as in American entrepreneurship generally, competing ideologies exist to be exploited rather than expunged and expelled—if only because hiphop culture and the hip-hop marketplace, like a quantum paradox, provide space to all Black ideologies, from the most antiwhite to the most procapitalist, without ever having to account for the contradiction. The aura appeal of hip-hop lie in both its perceived Blackness (hip, stylish, youthful, alienated, rebellious, sensual) and its perceived fast access to global markets through digital technology. The way hip-hop collapsed art, commerce, and interactive technology into one mutant animal from its inception seems to have almost predicted the forms culture would have to take to prosper in the digital age. (Tate 2003a, 7) Not only does this passage capture the paradoxes of hip-hop as a music form, it also shows the different layers (art, commerce, and fast access to global markets) that signify the hip-hop culture that significantly inf luenced a generation of artists. Tate profoundly points to the paradox of an accumulation of Black ideologies from various spectrums, which are nonetheless under pressure to account for a single, Black subject position in the eyes of white, political and capitalist society. Tate underscores my own emphasis, which is not only that these differences are an intrinsic part of Black Sociality, but that the very potential for change exists in the negotiation of these myriad positions.26 Golden saw popular culture—particularly music—dominated by a young generation of Black artists and suggested, through her writing and curatorial work, that post-black art would add visual artists more heartily to

26  W  hat they have in common in their considerable divergence of time, location, and calling. I think that the inspirational genealogy between the performative realm of music and fine arts is connected to Hortense Spillers’ argument that the realm of the performative is not driven by a single ego but through synthesis and is rooted in survival. She explains: “Across nearly a century of African American musical performance, implied in the foregoing figures, a variety of syntheses is at work, so that, for instance, Billie Holiday and Leontyne Price are not judged by the same musical standards, do not perform the same instrumentality just as Theolonious Monk and Keith Jaret teach demonstrates a respective brilliance is performative excellence, and it seems to me that this is the page of music from which the black creative intellectual must learn to read.” (Spillers 1994, 94).

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this already culturally-inclusive discussion.27, 28 Golden’s proposition is both in friction against and complicit with the neoliberal economy’s demand for hyper-individualization, abled normative bodies, and depoliticization, following Paul Gilroy. The attempt to add visual arts and discourse to the more performative realm of Black culture is a necessary and strong endeavor but it comes with the same pitfalls as the commercialization and eventual commodification of hip-hop, as Tate describes. The idea of post-black as a brand is also addressed by artist James Musson (a.k.a Henessy Youngman), who recommends the term “post-black” in his YouTube video tutorial performance, as one of the key strategies for becoming successful as a Black artist, despite the fact that he doesn’t know what the term is supposed to mean (ART THOUGHTZ: How To Be A Successful Black Artist 2010). These observations—curatorial branding, artistic self-proclamation and hyper-individualization—emphasize that post-black has to be understood within the logic of the art market and not solely on the basis of identity politics or curatorial gesture.

27 In an interview with Charlie Rose Golden she stated what she desired the audiences to take from the exhibition: ”I want them to see the range and depth of the creative production being made by young black artists working today. I mean, we‘re in a moment where popular culture is full of the voices of young black people, but I felt that the voices of young artists were not necessarily always heard. So I really wanted to put them into the bigger cultural conversation that‘s happening.” (“Freestyle” - Charlie Rose 2001). 28  M  usic is an integral part of Black artistic production. An example of this inclusion of music, and especially popular culture can be seen in Glenn Ligon’s show To Disembark (1993), in which he included next to his paintings nine untitled wooden crates, some of which covered a tape recorder playing music by KRS-1 but also by Billie Holiday and Bob Marley. Paul D. Miller (a member of Public Enemy) used sampling, cutting, and montage techniques deriving from DJ and hip-hop culture to remap visual representation of Black bodies in his piece Re-birth of the Nation 2006 or the many examples of artists working with Michael Jackson’s music and iconic image that appeared before and after his passing e.g., Hank Willis Thomas, Time can be a Villain or a Friend 2009, Marc Brandenburg, Untitled 1 2009, Susan Smith Pimelo Sometimes 2000. The former Studio Museum Harlem’s resident artist Kamau Amu Patton’s work transforms sound into painting—as seen in the exhibition, Evidence of Accumulation at the Studio Museum Harlem 2011—in an aesthetic journey that is strongly invested in philosophical questions by Wittgenstein or Rudolph Arnheim for example. Patton thus pushes the ideas of Blackness and music that are constantly perceived as either jazz, hip-hop, or reggae to a less recognized sonic sphere. His work exemplifies the shift that post-black tries to describe. Like generations prior to him Patton might be a Black artist, but his practice and thinking is not limited by philosophy from exclusively Black intellectuals or music by Black artists.

I. Introduction

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Fig. 6: Vibe Magazine Article on the Artists of the Freestyle Exhibition with work samples.

I. Introduction

Another exhibition that contended with the notion of post-black in art was AfroModern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic curated by Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter at the Tate Liverpool, 2010.29 It was organized in seven sections that explored the inf luence of Afro Diasporic Art and Culture and European Modernism spanning the Harlem Renaissance and ending on the debates around post-black. Working at an institution in the UK, Barson and Gorschlüter based their project on the Black British Scholar Paul Gilroy’s book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). In the book, Gilroy discusses the connections between Enlightenment philosophy and the economic and intellectual shifts that resulted from the enslavement of Africans in conjunction with the beginning of modernism in European philosophy. Gilroy also suggests a theoretical framework to understand Blackness and Diaspora as a heterogenic culture produced by Western discourse, since Enlightenment on the basis of humanistic thought, which can be described as “rhizomorphic, fractal structure,” shaped as an “intercultural, transnational formation.” (Gilroy 1993c, xii)30 The Black Atlantic thus becomes a counterculture of modernity and points towards aesthetic relations, exchanges, and hybridity. These connections were traced in the Tate Liverpool exhibtion through pieces by modern artists including but not limited to multimedia artist Sonia Boyce, sculptor Constantin Brancusi, photographer Renee Cox, the filmmaker Maya Deren, painter Aaron Douglas, the video artist Stan Douglas, the painter and mixed media artist Ellen Gallagher, and video artist Isaac Julien, sculptor Ronald Moody, visual artist Helio Oiticica, painter Pablo Picasso, conceptual artist Adrian Piper, visual artist Keith Piper and painter Rubem Valentim. Despite its promising attempt, the show was not successfully perceived by critics (J. Jones 2010) and its curator Tanya Barson admitted to having wanted too much from the exhibition, as she explained to me in an interview in 2009. Notwithstanding this self-criticism, I would argue that exhibitions such as Barson and Gorschlüter’s, which foregrounded and prioritized rethinking (art) history, set yet another beginning to raise awareness of intercultural connectivities and hybridity. The exhibition ended with post-black, which in the British context meant works by e.g., the painter Chris Ofili (who is a former student of Gilroy) and David Hammons, and the overall statement was as ambivalent as in Freestyle. While the statement regarding post-black as a term may have been ambivalent, the exhibition AfroModern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, opened up an important interconnected29  T he exhibition was a citywide initiative by Tate Liverpool with the following partners: Bluecoat, FACT (Foundation for Art Creative Technology), Metal, Walker Art Gallery and Liverpool University. The University of Liverpool later also developed an interactive research website and timeline that features key events of the Black Atlantic along with, British and US American artists and art-based events. These are listed in tandem so as to highlight their entanglement. 30  F or a critique on Gilroy’s approach and the expansion of his concept into an idea of practice rather than a drawing past events see: Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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ness between the different parts of the Black Diaspora, expanding the term (with all of its porosity and potential conf lict) beyond the US. Whether in the US or in the UK, Golden’s observation that Black artists desire, “to be Black artists, but not to be constantly perceived as such,” can be applied to Black artists in the entire Black Diaspora. This position is neither new nor generationally specific, if we look at the long history of artistic practices and intellectual investments where makers have expressed a similar desire.31 What was new, however, were the socioeconomic and spatio-historic circumstances, as well as particular shifts within the politics of representation that mark what Hall described as, “the movement in black politics, from what Gramsci called the ‘war of manoeuvre’ to the ‘war of position’—the struggle around positionalities.” (1995, 444) This reference leads me to highlight the optimism ref lected in post-black art in the US and in the Black British context, which both underwent key shifts in the meaning of Blackness in the 1990’s. In 1989, Hall described this significant shift within black cultural politics and coined the term “new ethnicities.” Well aware of the difficulty of the term “ethnicity,” Hall used it conceptually to indicate the subjectivities as well as identities, which are embedded in specific histories, languages, and cultures that shape us (1995, 446). These subjectivities are inf luenced by such situatedness and various context-specific cultural discourses. Hall called our societies “diasporized,” a notion that is echoed in Edouard Glissant’s work on creolization (1997); such societies are marked by a wide range of cultures and perspectives and are informed by their hybridity, and therefore produce different, particular subjectivities. Now one has to recognize that Hall’s observations are based on cultural and artistic movements that are specific to his context—the UK of the late 1990s. The Black British Arts movement was at its full blossoming with prominent names such as David Baile, Sonja Boyce, Sheila Burman, Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani Kayode, Pratibha Parmar, Keith Piper, Marlene Smith, and John Akomfra—a member of the Black Audio Film Collective (now Smoking Dogs Film). A group of artists, filmmakers, poets, and theorists claimed the term “Black,” less as a signifier for dif ference than as a radical and unbridgeable separation; the term was applied as a political unifier for all non-white artists. But Hall also saw this idea as closely related to difference nonetheless, and as part of a difficult political endeavor when he wrote:

31  A  record that shows the diversity of positions that existed during the 1960s can be found in Samella Lewis’ Black Artists on Art (S. S. Lewis and Waddy 1969; 1971) As the title promises, the publication features black artists of various generations and disciplines. Each artist is represented in the book by a portrait, an image that serves as an example of their work, and a short statement on their practice or art in general. These statements stress that Black artists have desired to be considered “just artists” for much longer than the temporal marker post-black claimed to indicate.

I. Introduction

… [it] is positional, conditional and conjunctural, closer to Derrida’s notion of dif ferance, though if we are concerned to maintain a politics it cannot be defined exclusively in terms of an infinite sliding of the signifier. We still have a great deal of work to do to decouple ethnicity, as it functions in the dominant discourse, from its equivalence with nationalism, imperialism, racism and the state, which are the points of attachment around which a distinctive British or, more accurately, English ethnicity have been constructed. Nevertheless, I think such a project is not only possible but necessary. (Hall 1995, 446–47) Not only does Hall describe the difficulty of the “sliding signifier” Black, he also highlights here that any new vocabulary needs a systematic strategy to become part of a larger political project to change the dominant discourse. Hall’s observation and call to name the changes in the politics of representation and the emergence of subjectivities that don’t fall into the classical definition of national belonging or racial markers also heralded a decisive shift in the politics that followed from this observation. Whilst post-black started to be discussed in the British context through AfroModern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, Hamza Walker, who wrote the essay Renigged for the Freestyle catalogue, pushed the term already to the side and highlighted instead its underlying theme of race and its undoing through art. His exhibition Black Is, Black Ain’t in 2009, which he curated at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, was inspired by Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man and explored “a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained.” (2008)32 The exhibition was undoubtly inf luenced by the post-racial discourse, which dominated public debates around the time of Obama’s election. The simultaneous embrace and yet rejection of the term Black as embedded in post-black can be considered a blue print for this development. The term post-black and its development through exhibitionary platforms was a provocative example of just how powerful curation can be. Curators coin new terms, envision corrective or innovative approaches to the contemporary and the past, frame styles into art-historical and social discourses and introduce artists into a wider market.33 To “curate” means to take care of something/someone or to administer, and derives from the Latin verb curare. “Curator,” on the other hand, can also be interpreted or translated as overseer, manager, or guardian. Each of these descriptors is very differently charged in relationship to Black Artists. In particular, the notion of the “overseer” is 32  W  alker’s show featured the following artists out which only seven are women: Terry Adkins, Edgar Arceneaux, Elizabeth Axtman, Jonathan Calm, Paul D‘Amato, Deborah Grant, Todd Gray, Shannon Jackson, Thomas Johnson, Jason Lazarus, David Levinthal, Glenn Ligon, David McKenzie, Rodney McMillian, Jerome Mosley,Virginia Nimarkoh, Demitrius Oliver, Sze Lin Pang, Carl Pope, William Pope. L, Robert A. Pruitt, Randy Regier, Daniel Roth, Joanna Rytel, Andres Serrano, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas. 33  For my use of art market see: (Graw 2009, 62ff).

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a reminder of the history of the exploitation of people of African descent on plantations, the “manager” still holds the capitalist corporate power, whereas the “guardian” takes a protective position albeit perpetually entangeled with the contested powers of the state. In a field, that is dominated by white curators the irony is that the way Black artists are taken care of (or not) often reproduces stereotypical frameworks and tokenization. These artists are exposed to what a student coined in my seminar as “curatorial racism,”34 a term that refers to contemporary acts as much as to the centuries-long, historic exclusion of Black artists from the canon and the market, as well as the devaluation of their contributions to culture at large. 35 The Studio Museum in Harlem is an institution that is rooted in a mission “to be the nexus for artists of African descent, locally, nationally and internationally, and for work that has been inspired and inf luenced by black culture. […] a site for the dynamic exchange of ideas about art and society.” (Studio Museum in Harlem 2020) The Museum hence has to be seen as a place that challenges ingrained patterns of curatorial racism and allows space to think futher about Black art, which is often not possible in mainstream institutions. This doesn’t mean that the Museum exists in a vacuum, I would argue quite the opposite that it often sets new standards for the ways in which Black artists are shown. The introduction of post-black art as a genre or category to think through has impacted global interests and discussions about contemporary African art, changing how, when, and where these artworks are shown. Important discussions have emerged through group shows—e.g, Afrika Remix curated by Simon Njiami, which premiered at the Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf and traveled through Paris (Centre Pompidou) and London (Hayward Gallery), all in 2004, or the exhibitions by Okwui Enwezor The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994, which was exhibited at the Villa Stuck in Munich and at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin in 2001, then travelled the same year to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and in 2002 to MoMA P.S.1 in New York.36 Okwui Enwezor persistently refused to present African Contemporary Art in the primitivist tradition, either without much context or as a formalist exercise, which exhibitions like Seven Stories of Modern art in Africa by Catherine Delisse in 1995 at the Whitechapel Gallery London and Africa Explores by Susan Vogel at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1991 weren’t able to prevent. After Enwezor’s groundbreaking exhibitions like Documenta 11 in Kassel Germany 2002 and the Paris Triennial’s Intense Proximity 2012, a new way of focusing on historical connections 34  A  special thank you to A.L. Rickard, who used the term during a class presentation at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in May 2020. 35  Also see: (Cooks 2011). 36  I am aware that the list of exhibitions is not complete as it is not my intention to write a short history of exhibitions that try to frame contemporary African or diasporic artists, but to point out that these shows constantly reproduce a split between Western and Other (now often referred to as global) art.

I. Introduction

between anthropology and colonial history within a frame of object/ subject relations came into being: African and Diasporic artists are included in order to contribute to the set of curatorial questions posed. Enwezor’s massive contributions and the fact that the notion of Blackness was being further diversified in the US with Obama’s presidency together inspired Flow, Golden’s third exhibition in the post-black trilogy, which ran from Apr 2—Jun 29, 2008. Instead of focusing on the idea of post-black, the exhibition engaged yet another term.“Afropolitan” was popularized in an article by the author Taye Selasi, which I will discuss in-depth later. In the arts, Afropolitanism gained prominence when it was first introduced in a catalogue essay for the exhibition Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent by the political theorist Achille Mbembe. Flow was based on the term and furthered the discourse about Afropolitanism in the arts. The term was used for many reasons, not least of all because the Studio Museum included, for the first time, Black artists from the African continent, and therefore acknowledged the historic as well as contemporary interconnectivity of cultural production within a global frameset. Contemporary African and diasporic artists like Grace Indiritu, Julie Merethu, and Chris Ofili were included in the exhibition. This list of names already hints at the difficulty of the term, because although Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Chris Ofili is usually considered a Black British Artist despite his Nigerian origins, their African heritage remains their predominant marker, despite equally referring to cultural hybridity and movement through the mainstream perception of cosmopolitanism. The term Afropolitan is as contested as post-black.37 As mentioned earlier, it derives from Selasie’s writing (formerly Taiye Tuakli-Wosurnu), who was celebrated in the international media as a promising debut author for her book Ghana Must Go.38 As a woman of mixed African heritage—Ghana and Nigeria—who was born in the UK and grew up in the US (Massachusetts), Selasi coined the term in a short essay for Lip magazine in 2005: “Like so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many. They (read: we) are Afropolitans—the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you.” (Tuakli-Wosurnu 2005). Being Afropolitan in this short quote is marked as a hybrid group of culturally and intellectually educated individuals, who are dislocated from their place of origin. As a literary genre—with authors like Teju Cole, Chimananda Ngozi Adichie and Tayie Selasi—Afropolitanism marks an important shift in the representation of African-ness in global discourse. It is, it could be argued, a reaction towards the ongoing, narrow narratives about diaspora subjects (as 37  W  hile Selasi has used Afropolitan as a kind of trademark it is worth reiterating that the term Afropolitanims already appeared in Achille Mbembe’s text for Afrika Remix in 2004. For a discussion of Afropolitan vs. Panafrican, see:(Wainaina 2013) 38  For media on Selasi see: (Freudenberger 2013, Evans 2013, Spiegel 2013, Müller 2013).

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forever, only displaced through the Middle Passage) and the Afropessimist perspectives of the 1980s and 1990s (Gikandi 2011). “Afropessimism” in this speaks to a specific form of representation of the African continent that is dominated by a Western perspective that foregrounds economic and political crises and its resulting catastrophes, hunger, and epidemics. “Fitting neatly into traditional Western notions of Africa as the ‘other’ of modern reason and progress, Afro-pessimism has proven hard to dislodge because it seems to be the only logical response to political failure and economic stagnation in Africa.” (Gikandi 2011, 9) Mbembe, the most quoted political philosopher in this context, also integrates Afropolitanism into a narrative that stresses its distinction from Afropessimism. Mbembe describes Afropolitanism as, “an aesthetic and a particular poetic of the world. It is a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity—which does not mean that it is not aware of the injustice and violence inf licted on the continent and its people by the law of the world. It is also a political and cultural stance in relation to nation, to race and to the issue of difference in general.” (Mbembe 2007) Mbembe’s use of Heidegger’s “being in the world” (2006)—which is Heidegger’s proposition to overcome the split between subject/object relations and thus proposes a distinction form Hegel’s dialectics—allows an understanding of Afropolitanism as a relational phenomenon, which is in itself hybrid. He also emphasizes the international diversity of the continent itself and therefore includes the African continent in a conceptualization of the global as an active agent, rather than a constantly overdetermined monocultural entity. Enwezor conceptualizes the term as a space in-between, which recalls Homi Bhabha’s “third space.” Enwezor writes, “[B]etween the categories of identity (ethnicity, religion, nation) lies the space of cosmopolitan African identity. This identity is global in its stance and transnational in its traversal of cultural borders.” (Okeke-Agulu and Enwezor 2009, 25) This framing, which is based on the classical Greek idea of kosmopolitês (citizen of the world) can be understood as a form of antithesis to the polis—the state to which citizenship is intrinsically bound in Aristotelian Philosophy. With it, Enwezor challenges existing monolithic ideas like cultural, national or religious identity and emphasizes hybridity. Simon Gikandi’s definition derives from the literary field: “To be Afropolitan is to be connected to knowable African communities, nations, and traditions; but it is also to live a life divided across cultures, languages, and states. It is to embrace and celebrate a state of cultural hybridity—to be of Africa and of other worlds at the same time.” (Gikandi 2011, 9) In her coming of age novel, Selasi describes a search for self, identity, and scattered family history and arrives at the following point which correlates with Gikandi’s observation: “This wasn’t my parents’ Africa, the past, that static site of hurt and home. It was mine: dynamic now. This wasn’t some ‘real’ west Africa either. It was my west Africa, my version of home, not just a place, but a  way to be in—a way to know—the world.” (Selasi 2013) Among the many things that are interesting about these descriptions is that, like post-black, they each implement a generationalist discourse and are based upon a notion

I. Introduction

of cosmopolitanism, which is predominantly an idea of movement—whether one of economic upward mobility or actually geographical mobility. This idea of movement is still marked by the particularity of Africanness as a locatable nevertheless f luid paradigm. This paradox is also highlighted by Enwezor, because for African artists it is exactly this particularity—their being reduced to African Identity— which is constantly reified. In other words, African identity is predominantly bound to notions of origin. In terms of the logic of the art market, the spectacle of Africanness is not always a disadvantage for the curators of specific shows who often instrumentalize and produce this constructed otherness. (Enwezor 2009, 25) Salah Hassan’s discussion of the term in the catalogue for the Flow exhibition creates an important link to post-colonial theorists like Hall by drawing connections between the phenomenon of Afropolitanism and Hall’s idea of new ethnicities, which addressed changes in the politics of representation regarding the Black body. Introducing intersectional representations, which included categories like gender and sexuality, Hall emphasizes: Another element inscribed in the new politics of representation has to do with the question of ethnicity.… If the black subject and the black experience are not stabilized by Nature or by some other essential guarantee, then it must be the case that they are constructed historically, culturally, politically—and the concept which refers to this is ethnicity.… It seems to me, that in the various practices and discourses of black cultural production, we are beginning to see constructions of just such a new conception of ethnicity: a new cultural politics which engages rather than suppresses dif ference and which depends, in part, on the cultural construction of new ethnic identities. (Hall 1995, 446) I am in agreement with Hassan that Afropolitanism can be placed within Hall’s framework, because the idea of an Afropolitan artist group can be seen as a logical result of the very same processes that Hall describes. Nevertheless, I see a danger in the stringent alignment that Hassan suggests, because he does not take into consideration the range of changing representations (including sexuality, gender, and class) that Hall talks about as part of the new ethnicities and none of these categories are critically ref lected upon or addressed in the many of the aforementioned discussions on Afropolitanism. At times, these various representations are addressed by some of the artworks that are produced by Afropolitan artists, but if so, the theorization of those artworks rarely mentions the specific and wide-ranging representations put up for discussion. Hall highlights the politics of representation, always with a focus on counterdiscourses. Reading these authors closely and looking at the visual examples one can draw an analogy to post-black and certainly there are similarities between the two concepts including the fact that both are used as brands in order to promote and mark specific consumer groups. So, why are there still distinctions produced between Afropolitanism and post-black? I propose that these

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distinctions are more likely due to art market logics and politics of representations than the actual experience of being Black or African in the Western hemisphere. It is no doubt interesting and important to learn from hybrid perspectives and to raise awareness that to be African or of African decent is not the static or consistent experience portrayed by Western representations for much too long. It is equally important not to create a particular and exclusive connection between African life and any one concept, like cosmopolitanism for example, as that too narrowly defines what is otherwise a rich and complex field of thought. Going back to the list of artists that were part of Flow, it is difficult to name them all as Afropolitans because they fit into more than just one category—some of them are called post-black, others are described as Diasporic Artists, American, Black British, or simply African. Herein lies the potential of the term post-black more than any other; it includes all of these categories and therefore implements the multiplicity of specific situated knowledges and aesthetics. The terms post-black and Afropolitanism were generated during a shift in the field of curating, one that is marked by a change in the role of the curator from being a caretaker or administator, into someone whose ideas were at the forefront of exhibition-making practice. This shift, “from curator to creater,” peaked in the 1990’s and highlights an important market logic in the arts as well as in academia (O’Neill 2012, 14). In this light, Golden’s work stands in a tradition of curators like Nicolas Bourriaud, who will always be connected with books and exhibitions like Relational Aesthetics (1998) and Altermodern (2009) or Benjamin Buchloh with Institutional Critique (1990). A phenomenon that hadn’t happened in the history of the Studio Museum before and certainly not by a Black curator who dedicated her career to exhibit and support Black artists. New terms that take hold within the cultural sphere are like currencies that in turn create market value on various levels: for the person who “invented” it, the phenomenon it was applied to, and the creation of value through its successful application. Although not well placed in New York City’s art calendar the success of post-black as a timely exhibition framework meant that it became entangled with the art market. Most of the artists from the first show that introduced post-black (Freestyle), as well as the second show (Frequency) are now represented through established galleries, which is partly due to the fact that the post-black label brought attention to these young Black contemporary artists. (Martin 2016, 155) But the question remains whether post-black labeling alongside economic success changes the discursive framing of the artist’s work as well as its analysis.

* I have argued in this introduction that post-black is intrinsically rooted in the Black experience, which is not only restricted to political claims. Socio-historically produced Black experiences and aesthetic practices have been ignored and could find no foothold in the traditionally narrow perspective of

I. Introduction

art made by Black artists.39 Despite the fact that many exhibitions and institutions still reproduce a gap between African/Diasporic/Global and Western art, the parameters of representation have changed since the formulation of post-black, as have the representations and meanings of art pieces by Black artists, which one might argue are always located within a racial discourse, but not exclusively. Post-black therefore describes another kind of Blackness, a differently performed difference within a “multiplicity of multiplicities.” (Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Touré 2011, 5) The discussion about Blackness has shifted from being focused on the external—by which I mean the visual representation of the Black subject within a hegemonic frameset that fixed it as a stereotype and tried to deconstruct this dominant gaze—towards an internal discussion. Nevertheless, the visual vocabulary that once fixed the Black body in time and space, still has a deep impact and informs all of the works discussed in my project. The shift from the focus on external perspectives to an internal one not only determines contemporary discussions about Blackness, but in doing so, it denies a dialectical intrusion and describes a process of powerful becoming and decoding that contradicts the politics of representation from the 1990s. The photographer Dawoud Bey has a convincing argument about this new display of manifold styles and practices, when he writes about the 1990s academic and artistic approaches: The field of semiotics became a critical point of departure in art discourse. For artists of color the prevailing discourse came to center almost solely around issues of race and representation. And while these new texts did indeed do much to foreground new and previously excluded voices, I also believe they were terribly disruptive and had a deleterious effect, since they completely eliminated or ignored whole categories of art production that were still taking place among black art practitioners. It seemed that in order to create an unbroken linear progression towards the moment of multicultural postmodernity, any artists whose works that did not fit this unbroken revisionist trajectory were conveniently eliminated.… The move towards pluralism, contrary to what it implies, ironically only allowed for a certain kind of black art practitioner. (Bey 2014) I would also argue that creating a “different difference” has always been part of the discussion about Blackness since the beginning of Black intellectual thought and creative practice in the diasporas and on the continent, but within these discourses the diversity of Black identities hasn’t been paid enough attention. The “multiplicity of multiplicity”, an expression used by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in relation to post-black, means a multitude of identity formations and could also be replaced by hybridity. On the other hand, I use “different difference” to describe a conceptualization of Black individuals that is not embedded in the binary structure of “us” and “others,” as described by Said and Hall. Rather “different difference” points towards a self-determi39  For a critical examination of this view, see: (Piper 2001; K. Thompson 2011; Rothkopf 2011).

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nant difference, which has to be modified in order to describe the present. Particularly, the construction of a Black identity in connection to gender and sexuality has been constructed in a monological way, which was based on a heteronormative masculinity that marginalized any aberrations.41 In her consideration of the term, “Institutional Critique,” the art historian Isabel Graw finds it to be a limited frame for art and criticality. She proposes: “[P]erhaps we first of all need to take the lessons of institutional critique seriously, in order to then leave them behind if possible. [Transl. NAP]” (Graw 2005, 8). I see this as an essential approach in my own analysis of post-black. Graw’s observation is also applicable to the artists who have been called postblack or Afropolitans. While the terms might have created some currency for these artists, curators, and writers what is much more interesting—and pressing—is to examine the ways in which these terms open up new avenues for debate and complexity. For this, we must take the time to look at these artist’s practices, the references they use, the questions they raise, and the spaces thought that their works open up. 42 Contemporary scholars from the Black diaspora who work in art history and visual culture such as Huey Copeland, Darby English, Kobena Mercer, and Krista Thompson highlight art historical readings that steps away from identity-policy driven standpoints in order to open up the debate. They are working to rewrite art and cultural histories, refuting the traditional divide between Western cultures, history, and development and the rest of the world. They are pursuing this while still emphasizing the distinct insights that Black artists produce. Instead of boxing Black artists into a single unified trajectory, it is important to ask: from what do Black artists draw their inspiration? What are the cultural discourses that engage their work? Just as English once asked regarding Ligon and his work, “The central question here is not, What can painting be and do? but what can painting be and do for this artist?” (English 2007, 205). While aspects of this may apply to any artist, Black artists are consistently perceived to be different and posited outside the norm within the art historical canon and market both. Famous artists such as Wasily Kandinsky, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jackson Pollock, were seldom questioned about their identity as a source of inspiration, although it is of course informed by their invisible whiteness, gender, and sexual orientation. This “unmentioned invisibility” reproduces a notion of racial and gendered normativity, and represents the real paradox that we have been facing. 40

40  O  ne can also think about a “different difference” in relation to Jacques Derrida’s conceptualization of Dif ferenance, I argue that in relation to Blackness that the term holds a heterogenous space for the production of meaning outside of the binary. Also see: (Derrida 2012). 41  Also see: (Diagne 2011). 42  S ince it is one of my key arguments that post-black means the recognition of the multiplicity of Blackness, my observations will only allow small insights into the full spectra of aesthetics articulations in this dissertation.

I. Introduction

Post-black thus functions in this text like a prism through which I have shed light onto select art practices, some specific artworks and their inter-connected meanings. In each case, my analysis imagines what kind of role post-black may have played in opening up various forms of artistic development in a younger generation of artists. It also delivers a notion of art as a “set of practices,” (Edwards 2003) or as I would argue on the basis of Ella Shohat’s and Robert Stam’s analysis of postcolonial knowledge f lows, as an aesthetic multidirectional polylogue. Hence, I will aim to focus more on aesthetic developments, political framworks, and temporal-material considerations rather than on the subject position which is “behind” a piece. (English 2007, Mercer 2008.)43 Through this indepth reading and contextualization of work the following chapters will assert the ways in which the artists redefine Blackness. Chapter II “Destabilizing Meaning,” starts with a discussion of Glenn Ligon’s work Untitled (I AM A MAN) from 1989 with a focus on its historical embeddedness then moves to consider the distinct position of Hank Willis Thomas and the way in which he attends to the same visual resources as his predecessor, Ligon. The second part of the chapter is devoted to Thomas’s series Unbranded: Ref lections on Black Corporate America 1968–2008, which interlocks the economy of blackness with popular consumer culture—a phenomenon that can be seen as both one of the driving forces of reinvention and evidence of the deep entanglement between Blackness and capitalism. Chapter III “Historical Entanglements of Black Revolutionary Women” opens with a discussion on the epistemic possibility of post-black using the example of the work Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Trois Femme Noir by Mickalene Thomas as well as the theories of Frantz Fanon and Louis Althusser. Not only does this chapter engage with the queerness of post-black aesthetics, it also challenges the colonial gaze through a decolonial approach on the gaze and the process of subjectification. Chapter IV “Heterotemporality as a Way of Understanding the Contemporary,” draws attention to the temporal politics inherent in the work of contemporary Black artists. As well as offering a critique on the linearity that the term post-black produces, this chapter also stresses the complex temporal dimension and chronopolitical challenge of post-black. It does so through a close study of the artist Leslie Hewitt and her series Rif fs on Realtime. In order to grasp this specific temporal politics, I develop the term hetero-temporality in dialogue with Hewitt’s work. My aim is to highlight the importance of a contemporary political strategy that includes a three-dimensional discussion about Blackness with time as a variable. Chapter V, “Paradox Synchronicities” moves from a focus on African American artists to the Afro-German Artist Philip Metz, and thus expands 43  M  arc Bradford’s piece Enter and Exit the New Negro, which I discuss in an article of the same title, is a good example for the way in which post-black aesthetics use material in order to challenge identity conceptions and provoke discussion. For further reading. see: (Adusei-Poku 2012a).

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this study to include the wider African Diaspora. Metz’s two pieces—iwhishiwas and Leightkultur—show that post-black inquiries about Blackness are dependent on context, but they are not specific to the US thus reconfirming what Mercer calls the dialogics of diaspora 44. Metz’s work opens up questions and subjects that create a polyphonic discourse about the conditions of existence as a black subject within the diaspora. Chapter VI, “Abstract Facts,” engages in a spiral reading of the artwork Enter and Exit the New Negro by Mark Bradford, with which I highlight the quare potential of the piece as well as the quareness of post-black itself. Since post-black was first described within a generational frame, I will engage with the abstract expressionist painter Norman Lewis in relation to Bradford in order to highlight, by means of a specific example, generational differences that are embedded in the “new politics of representation” as coined by Hall. The book closes with Chapter VII “post-post-black” which examines why it would not be possible to introduce the term in 2020 and looks at what has shifted in the discourse.

44  For further reading o the subject see: (Mercer 2012).

II. Destabilizing Meaning [T]heir past and present sufferings confer no special nobility upon them and are not invested with redemptive insights. (Gilroy 2010, 158)

1. The Textures of History What are the aesthetics that underlined and communicated the moment, so named and imagined as post-black? (Golden 2001) Throughout my research— which included exhibition visits, day till night and night till dawn conversations with artists, gallerists, and collectors—I came to the conclusion that there are no consistent post-black aesthetics. Multiplicity and heterogeneity are what mark the works and their producers. This multiplicity is the result, in part, of a vast body of work that was produced over the past century by a wide range of Black artists and artists-as-pedagoges from Samella Lewis to Augusta Savage and Haile Woodruff, who have inf luenced and informed the works that are up for my discussion, far beyond the scope that standard art history affords. As an example of this rearticulation of themes and aesthetics, it is particularly interesting to look at the artist Glenn Ligon whose own thematic engagement is a kind of bridge between previous artists and teachers and a younger artistic perspective encapsulated by post-black art. Ligon was born in 1960 in the Bronx district of New York City, and is a formative figure in the shaping of post-black art. I am opening this first chapter with a reading of his work because it helps to understand the logics that were applied by Thelma Golden when she first coined the term and also because his work was a source of inspiration for post-black artists such as Hank Willis Thomas. This inspiration also works vice versa: Ligon remarked in an interview with Golden that his own practice has been inf luenced by younger artists because they have an indifferent approach towards “identity politics” and in their struggle for acceptance in the art world they choose to consider themselves as mainstream (Rothkopf 2011, 247) as opposed to a racialized exception, due to their ethnic background. It is worth noting that Ligon comments were made about ten years after the conceptual framing “post-black” was introduced by Golden’s Freestyle exhibition and is likely the product of a decade’s worth of conversations and ref lections that stem from that show.

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2. What is the script of your time? As an established artist, Ligon had from March to June 2011 his first mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, which was curated by Marc Rothkopf and represented twenty-five years of practice. Ligon is a trained sculptor, who became known through his pieces Untitled: Four Etchings (1992), Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991–93), and the installation To Disembark (1994) (English 2005, 35).1 His work follows the formal expressions of the Black American conceptual art tradition which engages in the political dilemma of changing representational practices— thus deconstructing representation—and at the same time investigating and re-establishing ideas of Blackness through image, text, sound, and light. Ligon stands out because the common fatigue of this effort, of trying to subvert and reimagine the representation of Black bodies, is lucid and made tangible in his various works. Richard Dyer speaks to the impossibility of representation when he writes: … reality is always more extensive and complicated than any system of representation can possibly comprehend and we always sense that it is so – representation never “gets” reality which is why human history has produced so many different and changing ways of trying to get it. (Dyer 1993, 3) The latter statement that “history” has produced so many changing ways of “trying to get it,” is a recurring theme for each of the artists that I examine in this study. Not only are debates about the past, present, and future of representation a key aspect of contemporary art, but this is especially so for Black artists who contend with representation as part of systems of oppression that rely on the concept of progressive time.2 The art historian Darby English, who has written extensively about Ligon’s work (English 2007), calls his practice a “commitment to difficulty” (2005). In doing so, he speaks to the dialectical necessity of in-between-ness for Black individuals as well as the production of culture that is translated into the formal structure of Ligon’s pieces. English discusses this notion by looking at Ligon’s use, reference, and inspiration of modernist and postmodernist art traditions as well as his references to specific racialized historical moments. As it would be too extensive an enterprise to introduce Ligon’s whole oeuvre, I will high1  I t is not surprising that these important works were produced after Ligon’s training at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program which exposed him to theories and concepts that led him to question his language as an artist and being in the world. 2  T here are many fields in which the notion of time and history are explored. From my teaching practice, I can see not only a consistent investment in archival discourses, but also a constant negotiation of artists‘s mediums, which students use in order to revisit questions that older generations of artists have opened up. Time, in particular in many Black artists’s work, can be understood as embedded in an ongoing historical conversation about the prevailing conditions that history produces and constantly re-establishes.

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light one of his works, Untitled (I AM A MAN) (1988) (Fig. 7), which is directly connected to Willis Thomas’s, I AM A MAN (2009). The different ways in which the two artists deal with their work’s source—a signboard featuring the text that is repeated in each title—exemplifies my argument that despite the fact that post-black artists may deliver new and different, less race-oriented aesthetics, these pieces should be read as a discursive rather than aesthetic development.

Fig. 7: Glenn Ligon Untitled (I AM A MAN) 1988 Glenn Ligon, Oil and enamel on canvas, 40 x 25 in (101.6 x 63.5 cm), © Glenn Ligon and National Gallery of Arts

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Ligon’s intellectually invested painting Untitled (I AM A MAN) (1988), has the status of a “misbegotten primogeniture” according to Rothkopf (2011, 20). The 1990s in New York—where Ligon grew up, lived, worked, and studied—was an era traumatized by the AIDS crisis and shaped by its activism.3 It was a time of signifiant political shifts and events: the world witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, heralding the end of the Soviet Union; the beginning of the end of Apartheid in South Africa, which began in 1990 with the negotiations that led to Democratic elections in 1994; and the US started the Gulf War with the codename operation Desert Shield. All of this took place around the time that Ligon painted Untitled (I AM A MAN). The notion of discursive knowledge production and intellectual investment is key when Ligon explains why he shifted his painting practice from abstract expressionism towards a more formal expressionism. This shift can be seen as a distinctive response to the political climate, which also coincided with the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the rise of right-wing politics in the US, as well as conservative social and economic policies (Enwezor 2011, 51; Oliver 2005, 22). These political changes, which took place in the wake of postmodernism, raised questions among Black artists revisiting the former essentialist notions of Blackness, its political meanings and strategies (Oliver 2005, 22). All of these circumstances were important, but I suggest that one of the strongest inf luences was probably Ligon’s participation in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP) in 1985. Founded in 1968, the program is essential to understanding the emerging discourses in the art scene in New York City during the 1980s and 1990s, an era that is marked by Ron Clark becoming the ICP director in 1981, a position he still holds today. His interests superseded structuralist and form-oriented practices led for decades by artists like Donald Judd and Barnett Newman and replaced them with the notion of discourse through post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism, and semiotics (Comer 2005, 29). Clark’s approach emphasized the closeness of knowledge production between the academy and the arts, and has shaped numerous artistic and art-historical practices. Not only are these intellectual inf luences important to Ligon’s work, they are also voiced in some of his artworks such as Notes on the Margin of the Black Book, which consists of a series of framed pages taken from Robert Mapplethorpe’s iconic Black Book series, for which Mapplethorpe photographed Black male nudes. Ligon installed the framed pages on the wall in two rows and placed index cards with some seventy theoretical texts by intellectuals, activists, and philosophers between the pages. For example, Ligon included post-structuralist analysis by Kobena Mercer on one of the index cards, creating an intervention by placing Mercer in both a critical dialogue with the images and the subject positions they are calling upon. This shift away from structuralism takes place in the moment in which Black artists begin to see themselves articulated within the theoretical work of the day. The writings of Homi 3  N  umerous historic activist projects were founded in response to the crisis including Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.”

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Bhabha, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, Cornel West, and many others establish an authority that would become institutionalized at universities in departments for Black studies and postcolonial studies. Given all of this activity, Ligon has acknowledged that he left the ISP program puzzled, in crisis, and in search of a visual language that would express what he wanted to tell: “I had a crisis of sorts when I realized there was too much of a gap between what I wanted to say and the means I had to say with. To me this seemed similar to the crisis Philip Guston went through when he made the transition from abstraction to figuration in the seventies—in part, in response to Vietnam War, feeling that the work he was doing wasn’t adequate response to the tumultuous world he found himself in. The crisis I faced prompted a move toward the direct quotation of texts” (Ligon in Enwezor 2011, 51). Ligon decided not to simply depict bodies in his paintings, particularly not Black bodies, and produced Untitled (I AM A MAN), which represents the first painting from his oeuvre “that depends exclusively on text for its means” (Copeland 2005, 123). It is essential to connect the reading of the piece Untitled (I AM A MAN) with the origin of the historic phrase: I AM A MAN. Thus, the Civil Rights Movement and the photographs that have imprinted themselves into the visual, cultural, and collective memory of generations of US Americans is the starting point for my reading. Despite the fact that the most referenced photograph in connection to Ligon’s piece is Ernest Withers’ depiction of Memphis sanitation workers and their protest for the right to form a union, the font in Ligon’s painting derives from another signboard captured by the photographer Builder Levy (Fig. 8). I will engage more with Withers (Fig. 10) when I will engage with Willis Thomas’s work. It is interesting to observe the process of art historical myth-making through the unquestioned reproduction of Withers’ photograph as the source for Ligon’s Untitled (I AM A MAN).4 I think that it is equally important to acknowledge the ongoing impact of the photographic and graphic design materials that were produced through the Civil Rights Movement. The Movement intrinsically changed the visual culture in US society rejecting racist stereotypes, political documentary, and shaping new visual empowerment (M. Berger 2010). Thus, Ligon’s return to these sources also shows his engagement with discursive political construction and the presence of a Black public identity through visual culture. Part of the graphic inspiration for Ligon’s piece can be considered Builder Levy’s Marchers in Memphis (1968), a kind of political documentary photograph in which a row of ten young Black men fashioned in 1960s youth style hold a variety of signboards in front of their torsos. Their gazes confront the spectator (even the assumed gaze of second man who wears sunglasses) so that when the viewer reads the slogans on the signboards, it is understood that they ought to be heard through the men’s eyes. Fred Moten talks of the sonic substance of the photograph, which allows one to hear and listen to photog4  For an example of this reproduction, see: (Ligon et al. 2005, 120; Rothkopf 2011, 20).

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raphy, as well as see it. Keeping this in mind, these men are yelling; they are screaming with their eyes what is written on their torsos. Their march is made audible by the rhythm of their steps and the performance of political freedom—which the philosopher Hannah Arendt described as the moment in which one speaks out in public and thus can participate in politics. These sonic layers are made vivid through the eyes of the protesting men. Each gaze is different and thus produces a different voice, and even if their signboards have two different slogans—I AM A MAN and UNION JUSTICE NOW—the men form a singular line, and behind them, there is another line of cohorts, this one includes a woman and a white man standing in an equally strong line. The image expresses movement and political agency, something that Ligon began to conceptually investigate by reproducing the signboard as a largescale painting.

Fig. 8: Builder Levy, I Am a Man/Union Justice Now, Memphis, Tennessee, 1968 Gelatin silver print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta © Builder Levy According to Rothkopf and Enwezor, as he was developing his first conceptual pieces, Ligon took cues from artists like John Baldessari, Mel Bochner, Jospeh Kosuth, and Ed Ruscha. I propose that feminist conceptual artists from the 1960s like Barbara Kruger as well as the signboard aesthetics from the AIDS Activist Group Act Up must also be considered in order to understand Ligon’s political understanding, aesthetic expression, and visual narratives though. He plays through all of the aforementioned visual references, mingling them with a remembrance of African American history in order to decode racialized bodies into the formal language of black and white paint in a deliberately large format.

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Although he is embedded in the language of conceptual art, it is possible to call Ligon a history painter or even an archival painter who uses, transforms, and renarrates US history, translating it into the contemporary. In a conceptual turn, his artworks sometimes become historical artifacts in and of themselves. Take, for example, when Ligon gives the painting Untitled (I AM A MAN) to a conservator to forensically visualize and account for the cracks and traces of time in the material of the painting. Ligon’s gesture comments, in particular, on art historical practices of measuring and producing value, authenticity, and process. I think there is a distance between the origins of that sign and me as an artists in the late 80’s making a painting of that sign and one of the ways that distance between one historical moment of another is measured in the painting by its cracks. The fact that the painting is ageing, the fact that it is falling apart, which is for me about changing notions what it means to carry a sign I AM A MAN or what it means to make a painting many many years later of that sign; to think about history as a process rather than a series of fixed events. The thus two produced images are not always exhibited as a pair but if so, they create an interplay of tracing time, lost times and distance from the contemporary. (Ligon 2011) The cracks that he refers to in this quote are the result of a production failure, because the artist mixed enamel and oil paint, which immediately cracks once it dries. It is also the result of the gaps that the passing of time (in a linear conceptualization) produces; gaps that cannot be filled with memory and that recall the f luidity and unfixity of our animate existence. The question at stake in this painting is how to appropriate such important historical text (which has become, in turn, an important sign) into the contemporary moment and how to make a political claim while doing so? This question connects to the artist Sharon Hayes, who also investigates the notion of past political claims in the contemporary. In her performance-based artwork In the Near Future (Fig. 9), Hayes uses historical signboards from various political contexts—women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights movements—and appropriates these signs in staged “one-woman demonstrations,” through which she investigates the role of the protester, the speech act, or the appellating potential of historic protest signs and the contemporary political construction of public space and public speech. The actions—as Hayes calls them5 —are documented with photography and produce a similar dynamic as historical protest documentation. This is particularly so by the fact that the photographs of interactions—for example, Haye’s conversations with pedestrians—are edited out of the final installation. The artist calls this the “editing process,” because she wants to point to 5  H  ayes referred to these “actions” in a conversation after her talk at the conference Not Now! Now! The temporal politics of art-based research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna organized by Renate Lorenz on October 17, 2013.

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the second level of “spectator” to be addressed through the recorded actions, in other words not the passers-by, who represent the first level of encounter. I have included Hayes in my discussion, because her focus on the appropriation and inquiry of political signs, which includes I AM A MAN, informs my reading of Ligon’s piece and opens the question of how he addresses the spectator. In other words, one could ask, what kind of power does Ligon’s painting emit when there is no one carrying the sign, no animate subject that claims the space, as in the protesters in Levy’s photograph?

Fig. 9: Sharon Hayes, Untitled from Series In the Near Future, 2009, © Sharon Hayes At a key moment of political, intellectual, and social transition, Ligon raised important questions. How do we make a political claim in the contemporary? What are its dynamics and how can text, speech, and the notion of political freedom be reproduced through the synchronicity of temporalities that appropriation produces? How does an artwork produce political immediacy and occupy various discursive fields at once—the art market, the gallery space, and the history of African Americans in the US? These questions are as valid today as they were in 1988. They stress what visual culture theorists Meg McLagan and Yates McKee explore in their analysis of “non-governmental activism” when they say, “[T]hese different modes of circulation [of visuals and technologies that produce political content] address distinct publics and make possible varying forms of political action, enabling particular claims to be made while foreclosing others” (McLagan et al. 2012, 10 Addition by author). Not that I want to proclaim Ligon to be a non-governmental activist, but it is evident that the political signboards6, can be seen as highly charged politi6  F or examples of political signboards as political resource see: Untitled (I AM A MAN) 1988, by James Baldwin, Untitled (I Remember the Very Day That I Became Colored) 1990 by Zora Neal Hurston, and comedy or “political commentary” as Ligon calls it by Richard Pryor such as When Black Wasn’t Beautiful #1, 2004.

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cal resources. Ligon’s visual vocabulary has its sources in art production and is equally locatable in US visual culture of the 1960s, specifically in the historic events that allowed him as a Black artist to gain access to the sphere of art production that his predecessors fought for.7 By bringing these claims into the gallery space, Ligon not only challenges the white cube, he also activates images, signs, and texts that push the boundaries of the realm of the political. Untitled (I AM A MAN) is historicized again and again. It is a painting that pulls out of the past and exists for the future. I think that this—in conjunction with formality, historicity, and pleasure—creates the intertextual link between the painting and the photograph; an unconscious pairing that recodes and transforms both the photograph and the painting. The transformation is f luid and leaves the reader/spectator, caught in-between, echoing the concept of double consciousness as theorized by DuBois. Engagement with the painting becomes an analytical multitask—a historical investigation and tracing of political energy, contemporary connections, and boundaries of subjectivity as expressed through the undetermined “I” of the signboard. Highlighting the notion of men in connection to Builder’s photograph shows that the painting also connects to the history of photography. In doing so, it invokes exhibitions like Edward Steichen’s famous Family of Man from 1955—one of the first American photo exhibitions, which was highly criticized for its racialized, mono-perspective on the choice of subjects and sujet (Sekula 2003). I mention Family of Man not only because its title stands in connection with Ligon’s painting, but also because this connection opens the possibility that visual technology and inscribed knowledges are transcoded into the painting, questioning the subject, texture, and the intertext of the political. The anthropometric graphic design of the painting and the single standing “A” in Untitled (I AM A MAN) lead me back to the quote by Huey Copeland, who in his analysis of Ligon’s work strongly draws on Frantz Fanon’s canonical essay the “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” and consequently delivers an evocative argument that the image not only represents the claim of Black male workers against poor treatment, discrimination, and dangerous working conditions, it also has to be considered as a claim for human rights. It is a claim that finds its source in the ontological oppression of the Black subject, and that stands in constant correspondence with whomever reproduces the claim. The reproducer in this sense is the “dead author”. The masses that carried these signboards have vanished, the singularity of this historical moment lies in the past, but lingers in the presence. The “I” is the echo of the 7 I don’t want this statement to be mistaken as a claim that the situation for Black artists at the end of the 1980s was easy or not attached to racist exclusions and economic devaluing—that would be hubristic—but it is nevertheless undeniable that the artists from the Harlem Renaissance and Jim Crow Era, faced more forceful limitations and fought hard to counter them. I would emphasize that while the manifestation of structural racism may change over time and take different shapes, even improving in various small ways, the way one experiences these structures, which remain brutal at the core, is nevertheless traumatic and requires dedicated political and social work.

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representation of the Black man in the original photographs, but is nevertheless reproduced and retold in the present. Who then is the interlocutor and who is the appellated? How has the affect of the sign changed over time? The philosopher Jaques Ranciére uses Rosa Parks and her actions on the bus in Montgomery, as well as the events that followed, which grew into the Civil Rights Movement, as an example of the dialectical splitting that is inherent in politics. Specifically, Ranciére is referring to the split between citizen and human, which was overpowered by the political action of the protest itself, when he writes: And the Blacks of Montgomery who, a propos of this conflict between a private person and a transportation company, decided to boycott the company, really acted politically, staging the double relation of exclusion and inclusion inscribed in the duality of the human being and the citizen. (Rancière 2006, 61) Consequently, when keeping this dimension of the indexical meaning of the signboard in mind the question appears: Who is the sovereign, the citizen, and the human who, according to Ranciére, has no rights? These layers are all embedded in the mode of representation as well as the source text that Ligon appropriated and apprehended for this painting. Ligon highlights these questions by bringing the claim I AM A MAN into one of the discursive centers of knowledge production, in the perceptive/aesthetic sphere, and in doing so, exposes the politics of that sphere. Drawing on Plato’s notion of illusion and reality, which is the duality through which politics are produced or rather through which political aims are executed, allows Rancière to argue that the claim I AM A MAN is a claim for citizenship (albeit a highly gendered one). Rancière writes: Political subjects exist in the interval between different names of subjects. Man and citizen are such names, names of the common, whose extension and comprehension are litigious and which, for this reason, lend themselves to political supplementation, to an exercise that verifies to which subjects these names can be applied, and what power it is that they bear. This is how the duality of humanity and the citizen was able to serve the construction of political subjects who staged and challenged the twofold logic of domination, i.e., that which separates the public man from the private individual all the better to shore up the same domination in both spheres. (Rancière 2006, 59) This logic of domination is therefore not only part of the signboards or the painting, it is equally inscribed in everyday visual culture for Black subjects. In the sense of double consciousness, as famously described by Dubois, the subtle knowledge of this phrase I AM A MAN is emblematic for the experience of Black individuals and creates the contemporary correspondence. With the phrase, “[T]hey know it is by abiding bankruptcy of vision that black male bodies in public spheres go phantasmatically misrecognized,” Copeland expresses the self-awareness that speaks from the boards. I AM A MAN

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painted by a Black artist does not tell us anything personal about Ligon per se, but by choosing this historical artifact in particular the artist has left a trace of himself, circulating around masculinity and acknowledgement like an eternal shadowing satellite. The composition of Ligon’s painting is centered around the “A,” which as Copeland emphasizes becomes a thread and questions not only the constructedness of manhood, with all its weakness and failures, but also deconstructs historical narrative because the centered “A” plays with notions of sexuality and gender too. In my interpretation, the “A” reinscribes difference into the painting and into the message and points towards positionalities and multiplicity, as the indefinite article deprives fixed meaning. But this reading can go one step further and ask for the philosophical possibilities of a Black subject to reclaim their ontology. What could this ontology mean, if there is no consistency, not even in language, when there is neither an author nor a reader, nor a spectator, when the boundaries of subject and objecthood melt and fuse with each other? The “A” has to be discussed with historic specificity as it can be seen in an inter-textual dialogue with the Campaign for Abolition’s slogan, “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” emblematized by Josiah Wedgwood and distributed on Porcellaine Medallions. The kneeling enslaved African on the medallion seems to rephrase the question into a statement and, in doing so, the Black object pleas to become a subject in a persistent way. Thus, instead of reading Ligon’s painting from a solely gendered position, as in a statement about manhood, it is helpful to highlight the ways in which the “A” brings in the question of humankind. The phrase, “Am I not a man and a brother?” is a claim for humanity. This claim is equally inscribed into the people depticted in Levy’s photograph and creates the intertextual background for their signboards. Despite popular belief there are actually two versions of the emblem. There is the famous, “Am I not a man and a brother?” and the lesser known, which features a woman with the words, “Am I not a Woman and a Sister?”. Following my argument, that the signboards are intertextually connected to the male emblem, it becomes apparent that the claim for humanity is exclusively reserved for Black men and depends on the opposition of women who are reduced to bearing life. This observation becomes more lucid, once one understands that the Abolitionist original was produced when women did not have the right to vote, and thus the emblem depicting a woman was part of a suffragette strategy to implement awareness for the particular vulnerability of the Black Women.8 Bringing these observations together, English’s framing of Ligon’s practice is key: “The tendency in Ligon’s work to equivocate between distinct idioms remains at all times just that: a tendency, a constant disposition to move, never to settle in one site of it means pulling up stakes in another” (English 2007, 206). What is left is a large-scale painting, which materializes race and at the same time deconstructs it, plays with gender dichotomies and renders them nev8  F or a more in-depth discussion about the gender politics of the Abolitionist emblem see: (Dietze 2013b, 57–63).

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ertheless invisible/ungraspable. What is especially intriguing for my work is the way in which the appropriation of the historical signboard (made famous by photographs) allows for the absence of bodies (i.e., the representation of bodies), which thus puts the categories of race and gender into the sphere of the imaginary or into the sphere of the gaze, with its temporality amidst the notion of absence. As English states, Ligon is “committed to difficulty” holding a heterotemporal dimension of his piece, meaning the synchronicity of different temporalities at once, the use of the archive, and transformation of categories. Ligon’s work challenges our imagination and pushes the way we are trained to perceive artworks, but also the way we are trained to interpret art in connection to the artist. English argues, “… the painting fuses three ostensibly irreconcilable representational modes—the formalist painting, the political statement, and the private question—into something fraught but whole” (English 2007, 206). Despite the fact that I agree with this quote, none of these paradigms should be considered as distinct; every art piece includes the political and the private, which are connected through form. By distinguishing them, as I have pointed out with Rancière’s quote earlier, English reproduces the illusion of the political and private sphere—“Political subjects exist in the interval between different names of subjects.”(Rancière 2006, 59) This interval, this possibility of interpretation and translation is at the core of Untitled (I AM A MAN) as an artwork as well as the political claim it represents. In contrast to English’s statement, I would argue that it is precisely through the fusion of these three representational modes that the painting is part of the political questions that were at stake in the 1980s (and also today). It is an inquiry into the possibilities of political speech, which is never without urgency and always requires reassessment. It is also an inquiry about the various layers of identities we carry at a time in which the fixity of identity categories, which were once activated for the political claim for equality, became destabilized through sexuality and shifting inf luences of feminist and queer theory. So who makes this inquiry and on which grounds? It is important to look specifically at the ways in which this inquiry dependent on the temporal context in which it is posed, as I will introduce in the following example.

2.1

I am everything and now what? Identity politics is kind of passé but blackness is an empty space that is so hard for a lot of people to get out of. It’s a black hole. (H. Willis Thomas 2011)

When the artist Hank Willis Thomas started to work on his series deriving from the signboard I AM A MAN, he was unaware of Ligon’s version. Hank Willis Thomas was born in 1976 in New Jersey, he studied Photography and Africana studies at New York University (1998) followed by an M.A./M.F.A. in Photography and Visual Criticism from the California College of the

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Arts. I want to mention that a profound inf luence for Willis Thomas interest in photography and the Archive is his mother Deborah Willis, she is one of the most inf luential African American photo-theorists, authors, photographers, and curators. Due to this expertise and her training as historian, she was appointed for about ten years as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem New York (very closely located to the Studio Museum in Harlem). It is therefore no secret that Willis Thomas’s narrative starts with his mother’s inf luence, in terms of her workplace, her creative and intellectual surrounding, as well as her aesthetic expertise, which led to several collaborations. This was an encouraging environment, which offered Willis Thomas the necessary encounters with African American (visual) history, culture, and the arts from early childhood on. On entering the Schomburg Center, for example, one encounters the famous painting by Aaron Douglas Aspiration from 1936. Hank Willis Thomas was commissioned by the Rubell Family Foundation to produce a work for a show called 30 Americans, in which predominantly African American artists were selected to show their work. I had seen Glenn’s [painting] but ironically forgotten about it until we were in a show together. My interest in making the work I made came from an invitation to be in an exhibition.…9 I made different work for the show, but that was what inspired the piece. I also met Earnest Withers in Memphis once fyi. The picture is really famous. I probably saw it as a child. My mom worked as a curator for prints and photographs at the Schomburg Center so it was ever present. Glenn’s image and my image are inspired by two different photographs. There were at least two designs of that poster. I don’t know the first time I saw Glenn’s piece. The show we were in together was 30 Americans and I was already making the paintings. I frequently find myself making things Glenn and Kerry James have already worked through. (Additions NAP H. Willis Thomas 2013) The work was already in progress when Willis Thomas got the commission. When the young artist learned about Ligon’s piece, he asked if Ligon would mind if he produced a work deriving from the same signboard. According to Willis Thomas, Ligon answered: “No, I don’t mind, just make sure it is good.”10 While Willis Thomas’s approach is very different from Ligon’s, not only on a conceptual and formal level, but also on an ideological one, there is a shift between these generations that are articulated as post-black. In contrast to Ligon, the graphic design reference for Willis Thomas is Withers’ (1907–2007) photograph of the striking Memphis sanitation workers (Fig. 10), who had gathered in front of Clayborn Temple on March 28, 1968. 9  T he exhibition Willis Thomas is referring to was titled I AM A MAN at the Modern Museum of African Diasporic Arts curated by Kevin Powell September 25, 2008 – January 18, 2009. 10 This content derives from an informal interview, which I conducted with Willis Thomas on September 20, 2011. He repeated the story in June 2013 during a follow up interview.

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Fig. 10: Ernest C. Withers, I AM A MAN; Memphis, Tennessee, March 1968, Decaneas Archive, Boston The photograph represents one of the many iconic and historic moments of the Civil Rights Movement. There is something special about it, because it works through bodies and text. The black-and-white photograph shows the workers holding signs that say “I AM A MAN.” As they are standing in one line their bodies and posters can be read as a collective signboard or as Copeland has argued, “… the posters held above heads, before faces and torsos, function almost like shields meant to def lect the ‘scopic malice’ and consequently, the locus of speech, of perceptual interest, is displaced from those whose dark skins render them virtual signs onto the literal ones they carry” (Copeland 2005, 122–23). Two men rush by the line of shielded men and parts of a woman can be seen on the left side of the image.11 It is the almost stubborn static repetition of the phrase, well coordinated by the photographer himself, which gives the image such visual strength. Despite the fact that intellectual engagement transforms the spectator into a forensic researcher for truth through such documentary materials, the photograph also calls upon

11  P  lease note some additional interesting research that I gathered to ensure that the woman in the photograph does not remain anonymous: Through Deborah Willis’s network, I learned more information on the woman in the photograph. Ronald A. Walters, the General Manager of the TV-station WREG-TV in Memphis wrote: “Unable to see her full face, I do believe she is Ann Hall Weathers. Mrs. Weathers was an elementary school teacher. Prior to that, she worked for the USO. For years, she taught at Florida Street Elementary School. She was married to Bill Weathers, a Tuskegee Airman. She was active in the NAACP and other civil rights activities. Mrs. Weathers was a noted Memphis personality. She was unique and had a distinctive deep voice. I can still hear it. She was prominent in Black society including the Memphis Jack and Jill of America, Inc. If this is Mrs. Weathers, and I believe it is, her photo would be in many other group shots in a variety of Memphis activities. When this photo was shot, she lived on Pontotoc Avenue near downtown Memphis. She later lived on South Parkway East near Lamar until her death in the early 1990s”(Pacini and Ronald 2012).

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the spectator through the affective emotional potential of this vocal—though materially silent—protest.12 With I AM A MAN Willis Thomas produced a series of twenty paintings that are double-hung and shown in black frames. They play with the original phrase, transforming the monologic structure of the piece into a polyphonic inquiry (Fig. 11).

Fig. 11: Hank Willis Thomas, Pitch Blackness Exhibition at Shaiman Gallery NY, Installation view I AM A MAN series, 2008, © Hank Willis Thomas and Jack Shainman. Willis Thomas adapted and transformed the phrase for his piece I AM A MAN. The adaption of the original signs enhances the historical reference, as the spectator encounters, through the formal double-hanging, the shield-like performance of the Civil Rights Movement protesters who are represented in their absence. The phrase I AM A MAN is transformed into I AM 3/5 MAN, AM I A MAN, I AM A MAN, BE A MAN; I AM YOUR MAN, I AM MIA,13 AIN’T I A WOMAN, I AM A WOMAN; I AM THE MAN, WHO’S THE MAN, YOU THE MAN; WHAT A MAN I AM MAN, I AM HUMAN, I AM MANY, I AM AM I, I AM I AM, I AM AMEN. Following Willis Thomas’s own narrative, the first row of images has historical references dating from 1789 to 1968, and the second row represents a play with different associations, analogies, and contemplations from the contemporary moment. 12  T his tension is the Kantian dichotomy of the epistemological investment concerning the truth/meaning of the image, which Allan Sekula writes about in his essay the “Traffic in Photographs” (Sekula 2003). 13  “MIA” is a military acronym, which means “Missing In Action.”

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In the U.S. Constitution, blacks were considered three-fifths of a man. Then there was the slogan adopted by the Quakers, “Am I not a man and a brother?” There are a lot of other references, like “Ain’t I a Woman?” is a reference to Sojourner Truth’s famous speech, but also the Women’s Liberation movement. The final painting in the group says “I am. Amen.” The greatest revelation should be that we are. (H. Willis Thomas 2011) Through this intense play of appellations, self-ref lections, gender crossings, and propagandist texts, Willis Thomas offers everything and nothing in relation to the historical material. By everything, I mean an exaggerated mode where the sources are so rich they are swollen with references from African American history and culture, whereas the second row is unanchored from historical reference and consists of sheer wordplay. Hence, the first row of images, which he allocates within a timeline, is contrasted with the nihilism of the second row. Whereas the first row appears to make collective claims like the sanitation workers with I AM A MAN, the second row gets lost in a remix of words and vowels. With I AM I AM, the individuation of the subject finds its final solution through a spiritual confirmation that centers the individual and the notion of existence, which nevertheless leaves out the political and socioeconomic conditions of that existence. This observation is particularly interesting in connection to Hall’s definition of the parameters of representation, “[which] is possible only because enunciation is always produced within codes which have a history, a position within the discursive formations of a particular space and time”(1995, 446). Thus, Willis Thomas displaces the narratives around these quotes and assembles them such that their representational mode is scattered. Willis Thomas engages in a direct dialogue with the audience by addressing the spectator with variations that include: “I am your man,” “You are many,” and “You the men”. He also poses questions like, “Who is the man?” Some of the short sentences recall movies, others are delivered like slogans, and some exemplify wishes or desires. Willis Thomas’s piece shows that we are everything and nothing at all, neither the artist is visible nor the audience. What is visible is an intertwinement of history and Black American Culture—I think most prominently through the original phrase I AM A MAN and Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?”14 —and the search for a self, which slips through the phrases, appears in questions and vanishes in the Christian spiritual phrase I AM AMEN. Willis Thomas’s piece also references the Dada art movement and what can be described as the beginning of conceptual arts. Here, Ligon’s singularized “A” is replaced by a play with words—shuff ling, repetition, and finally 14  S ojourner Truth (ca.1797 – November 26, 1883 ) was an African American abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Facing racial inequalities and marginalization by white suffragettes, Truth stressed in her speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851, the racial demarcations that white feminists produced in their activism. For further reading see: (Gilbert, Truth, and Painter 1998).

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a kind of confusion (I AM, AM I and I AM I AM). It is almost like a DJ remix through which Willis Thomas creates a poetry-like ending. What once was a claim for justice, freedom, and dignity loses its code and its subject when it moves from the realm of political agency to economic appellation within consumer cultures. Willis Thomas’s piece creates a spectacle of voices, phrases, genres, histories, and visualizes them; Ligon, in contrast, works with subtlety, the “A” as a question mark, the quest for ontology, the still clean signifier of scale and composition. This “A” is an indefinite article that leaves space for a variety of identity significations, which are particularly important in 1980s New York given the AIDS epidemic and the stigmatization of gay men. Ligon’s piece plays with the explicit in a subtle and very private, almost intimate way, whereas Willis Thomas highlights—through the implementation of a series of historical phrases—that the private is the public, that the way in which being is constructed now appears like an empty phrase due to changing contexts. I was born in 1976, and I was amazed that just eight years before I was born it was necessary for people to hold up signs affirming their humanity. The phrase that I grew up with was “I am the man,” which is also influenced by African-American culture but takes a very different starting point. What I was interested in was, how many other ways could I read that phrase? (H. W. Willis Thomas 2014) The temporal proximity of having been born eight years after key events in the Civil Rights Movement and yet having grown up without needing to engage in that same fight motivated Willis Thomas to revisit the phrase. What can also be observed in this passage of time is the shift towards a neoliberal conception of the self in which the individual becomes the focal point for freedom, wealth, and success. It is this manifestation of different political codes in combination with the historical embeddedness of the phrase that poses new questions in the contemporary moment. Thus, Willis Thomas performs less of an ontological query and rather, plays with the history of African American political speech, the visual code of protest, and mixes them together with other cultural references that speak to the very essence of being. It almost seems tragicomic to end the series with “I am. Amen.” Ligon and Willis Thomas are not the only artists who are fascinated with political speech and specifically the Civil Rights Movement signboards in connection to temporality and political agency in contemporary times. Artists such as Hayes have addressed the subject, as mentioned earlier, as have Kerry James Marshall and Sam Durant: … Practitioners who came of age in the wake of the civil rights and Black power movements are looking at the past both nostalgically and critically, attempting to retrieve vital figures that might freshly frame and challenge structural inequalities that persist even now. In the process, and like many analogous works by their peers Durant’s, Haye’s, and Jones’s projects concentrate on emblematic visual episodes from the recent history of African American

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counterhegemonic production and, more specifically, on the possibilities and problems that the iconicity of those episodes creates for any politics of re-presentation. (Copeland 2011b, 185) The way Willis Thomas approaches his source material creates a connection to mass media (I AM THE MEN, for example, is a reference to Blaxploitation Cinema) and to the history of slavery (I AM 3/5 MAN15). The philosopher Walter Benjamin describes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” two phenomena of his time that are connected with the technological development of mass media, which I think are important for this discussion. First, drawing on the Greek definition of Aesthetics (theory of perception) he stresses the “aesthetization of politics.” I am using this expression despite the fact that it is strongly attached to his analysis of the instrumentalization of mass media as fascist propaganda and here particularly film. Benjamin’s argument is that spectators don’t realize that the medium appears to liberate them from their class status while conversely maintainaing the very same status and collectivizing one goal. Benjamin hence stressed the problematic control of the state over the medium of film, but at the same time—which is my second extraction—he highlights the blurred boundaries between producer of meaning and its perceiver, when he writes: With the growth and extension of the press, which constantly made new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local journals available to readers, an increasing number of readers—in isolated cases, at first—turned into writers. It began with the space set aside for “letters to the editor” in the daily press, and has now reached a point where there is hardly a European engaged in the work process who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish some- where or other an account of a work experience, a complaint, a report, or something of the kind. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character. The difference becomes functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment, the reader is ready to become a writer. (Benjamin 2008, 34) Not only does this quote resonate with “Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes, which was written after Benjamin’s essay, it also foreshadows the contemporary use of media—such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook—which determine in many cases the way news and trends are distributed. Willis Thomas’s work connects to both of Benjamin’s statements: on the one hand, his source image is iconic and his work can be seen as an “aesthetization of politics”16; on the other hand, the author is undeterminable. 15  I n the original US constitution, enslaved Africans counted as 3/5th of a person. For further reading see: (Walton and Smith 2000). 16  P  articularly when one learns that the photograph, and the signboards it captured, were staged by Withers himself and therefore an act of political activism and yet ambigous in light of his role as FBI informant.

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Who is the author of the political claim put forth in Willis Thomas’ work? Whose claim is it when political statements, signboards, and graphic designs are part of our everyday visual culture and when you can buy them printed on T-shirts at the street markets in Harlem or Brixton? These are the questions that are at stake and that determine the political moment as well as the forms of subjectivity that are connected to it. Here again is a distinction between the two works by Ligon and Willis Thomas; it is a distinction that is determined by the historical political circumstances in which they produce their work. Both artists use the “vocabulary of the masses”that performed political freedom or, more precisely, through this use of vocabulary (the acts of speech and protest) the masses were able to become politically free subjects. However, the twenty-one years between the creation of the works has again shifted the inscribed meaning of protest as well as the artists’s subject position as Black men. When Willis Thomas says in an interview that identity politics are passé and that Blackness is an empty space—“a black hole”—he claims a position that is distinctive for some contemporary Black artists. Nevertheless, Blackness is his subject of study. This may seem to be a paradox, but Willis Thomas is engaged in a constant interrogation and is less interested in a political claim that needs the category “Black” in order to exist. Since most of Willis Thomas’s work speaks from an African American perspective and is strongly connected to African American culture and history, the social realities of Blackness are not denied nor its history refused. Instead Willis Thomas is working through history and what to do with it in the contemporary, a time in which the tectonics of power cannot be exclusively interlocked with race and the consideration of gender demands more complexity of this history. Each of these artists has created a signature based on the signboard according to their artistic imaginary and the questions they faced. I have already mentioned the reference to consumer culture and socioeconomic processes in Willis Thomas’s work and this will become more apparent in the following discussion, which will include further engagement with the key artists of the post-black generation, who have fascinated me since the first encounter.

3. Economies of the Double-bind The series Unbranded: Ref lections in Black Corporate America 1968/2008 was commissioned for the show 30 Americans (2008) at the Rubell Family Collection in Raleigh North Carolina, which, as I mentioned earlier, featured thirty-one Black American contemporary artists. Unbranded: Ref lections in Black Corporate America 1968/2008 coincided with, and was therefore marked by, Barack Obama’s run for presidency and finally his election. I am emphasizing this in order to stress the connections between the category race, the field of the art market, and the wider discourse of racialization through marketing strategies as they are mirrored in Unbranded: Ref lections in Black Corporate America 1968/2008.

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The Rubell Family started to collect art in the 1960s and more extensively since 1989, when Steve Rubell, who cofounded Studio 54 and owned hotels, came into an inheritance. Exhibitions organized by the collection draw on curatorial expertise and with each show new artworks are introduced so that the collection is constantly being updated and expanded. The Rubells see their collection as a “personal vision,” and are constantly hunting for emerging talents and new art. (Thornton 2008, 82–85). The following explanation framed 30 Americans: As the show evolved, we decided to call it “30 Americans.” “Americans” rather than “African Americans” or “Black Americans” because nationality is a statement of fact, while racial identity is a question each artist answers in his or her own way, or not at all. And the number 30 because we acknowledge, even as it is happening, that this show does not include everyone who could be in it. The truth is, because we do collect right up to the last minute before a show, there are actually 31 artists in “30 Americans.” (Rubell Family 2008 Homepage 10.07.11) This quote captures the curatorial concept and specificity of the show, which insisted that despite the fact that all of the exhibited artists were Black, their artistic production and its aesthetic output was not attributed to or limited by their ethnic origin. This is especially clear through the statement, “racial identity is a question each artist answers in his or her own way, or not at all.” By using national identity as the frame, a diverse range of artistic positions and interests were included without reducing the artists or artworks into a racialized, anthropological position. Nevertheless, the nationalist term “American” is embedded in what Michelle Wright analyzes in the context of Black Nationalism citing Larry Neal’s famous “The Black Arts Movement” essay from 1968 in which he declares a complete disruption of the Western idea of modernity and, following a linear time frame, declares a new beginning based on African American ideas and culture. If one looks at the Rubell’s exhibition as the demarcation of a new beginning, coinciding with Obama’s election, it becomes clear that this reframing of Black artists by a broader nationalistic framework does two things; it supports the idea power structures do change, as evidenced by Barack Obama’s presidency, and it also indicates that the show embraced and coopted notions of Blackness within a nationalistic paradigm. Not to mention that this concept remains negligent to the Diasporic exchange through which these artworks came into being. This reference to being American reconnects to Touré’s notion of post-black, who in a nationalistic turn writes at the conclusion of his book, Who is afraid of post-blackness?: “We are quintessentially Americans” (2011, 189). Blackness does not disappear, but the notion of becoming a subject—fought for over many years, in terms of becoming a full citizen—is echoed in what Touré gathered in his observations about Obama’s election when he cites Blair Kelley and writes, “Are we citizens now?” as well as, “It was as if suddenly many of us could finally feel valued by America” (Touré 2011, 190). Acknowledgement, pride, and affirmation spill forth from of these quotes and affirm the

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idea of being American as one of citizenship. Only through a Black president is this affirmation process apparently complete, which I think is interesting, because it also suggests that despite the fact that African Americans are technically citizens with the right to vote, the conceptualization and experience has been the opposite. Now with a Black president, this opposition is unraveled into a notion of communitas that does not question persistent systemic forms of exclusion and oppression. I cannot go into depth here as it would lead me too far away from the aim of this chapter, but I have to stress that the implications of Obama’s election and the exhibition at the Rubell Family Collection stand together within this narrative and created new conditions for the value of African American artists. This shows how closely related the domain of political shifts are to the sphere of art, which is always impacted by power. The sociologist and art historian Sarah Thornton stresses in her analysis of the art world17 that, “great works are made—not just by artists and their assistants but also by the dealers, curators, critics and collectors who ‘support’ the work” (2008, xiv). This can be expanded when it comes to race and ethnicity to include the discourses that frame these categories and therefore provide the grounds for value to rise. My tracing of the logics of the market began with the observation that the exhibition 30 Americans drew its inspiration from shows like the previously mentioned Freestyle and Frequency exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Black Is, Black Ain’t at the Renaissance Society, and thus stands in a curatorial dialogue with earlier shows and institutional trends or investments (Rubell Family Collection Homepage 2008). This connection demonstrates the way the field of art reacts to curatorial work, which in this case led the Rubell’s to consider art by African American artists to be worthy of collecting, thus acknowledging its value. While the cultural value and discursive power of a collection over time shouldn’t be underestimated, I want to highlight that the art pieces also represent an investment by the collection, which is both wagering that the work will rise in value over time and helping to ensure its rise. Enwezor, a curator mentioned earlier in this text, defines art collections from an oppositional perspective and writes that, On the most prosaic level, art collections are metonyms of desire. Yet they tend to proceed from the assumption that they are compendiums, representing great bodies of objective knowledge that have been carefully evaluated and systematically organized, such as to gather together diverse strains of objects, 17  T hornton distinguishes between the art market which includes dealers, collectors, and auction houses, and the art world, which is critics curators and artists themselves (Thornton 2008, xii). I am using “market” as an overall term and don’t necessarily draw this distinction, because whether I am writing about art or if I deal with it, we are part of the same symbolic value production and therefore part of the same market, but on different levels. I am not drawing this distinction so rigidly, because the commercial market is charged with negative assumptions, whereas the non-commercial market still carries the myth of having a different more honorable value system, and I suggest that neither is better than the other.

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images and materials into a cohesive totality. A compendium or collection is, not only about what is contained within but also about how its content links to and connects with other structures of knowledge, and how such knowledge is communicated, transmitted, and disseminated. (Enwezor 2010, 23) It is important to emphasize that next to the creative value, the notion that a collection always represents a substantial investment has to be considered and it is doubtful, if a collection could ever represent a compendium of objective knowledge.18 Over lunch in New York City, close to the gallery district in Chelsea, a collector once told me that instead of African photography, he would collect different art if his aim were to make money. No doubt, the trading of “Old Masters” is a far more lucrative business and a much more expensive one to buy into. Going back to Enwezor’s quote, it is not only questionable whether any knowledge about art is objective, but we must investigate the different mechanisms of desire that motivate people to buy. Enwezor’s quote vividly illustrates what Isabel Graw’s analysis of art in contemporary culture delivers: “The concept of art … bore a heavy symbolic charge from outset, and it remains over determined by normative and idealistic notions of value” (Graw 2009, 66). She further highlights that in the moment a piece of work is declared to be art, it is part of the economy as evaluation, which is a key aspect of the economic. The conclusion, that I am drawing from these statements, is that the logic in which the Rubell Family Collection has been designed since the 1990s and the way Enwezor frames the idea of a collection, operate within the same parameters: namely, the art market and here in particular the commercial art market, which sometimes overlaps with the market of institutions, as well as the intellectual market. (Graw 2009, 66–67) Within this framework, it has to be emphasized that this market is not an egalitarian and democratic one, as Thornton has wittily put it: It’s a “symbolic economy” where people swap thoughts and where cultural worth is debated rather than determined by brute wealth. Although the art world is frequently characterized as a classless scene where artists from lower-middle-class backgrounds drink champagne with high-priced hedge-fond managers, scholarly curators, fashion designers, and other “creative,” you’d be mistaken if you thought this world was egalitarian or democratic. Art is about experimenting and ideas, but it is also about excellence and exclusion. In a society were everyone is looking for a little distinction, it‘s an intoxicating combination. (Thornton 2008, xii) Needless to say, Thornton forgot to mention the intersecting categories gender and race and how they operate within this neoliberal frameset when she writes about access to the art world in terms of class. That observation aside, 18  T wo recommendable examples for an eloquent examination of the connection between collecting, display, and the role of the museum can be read in: (Piesche, al-Samarai, and Kazeem 2008)

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it is important to highlight that the notion of exclusion, and the prevailing structures of power that enforce it, are sustained—however f lamboyant the vernissage and party may be. I am not writing this in order to devalue the symbolic or cultural achievements that collections represent, especially if they are publicly accessible and, as Graw observes, overlap with the production of knowledge. Rather, I am stressing these aspects in order to emphasize the way 30 Americans (and therefore Willis Thomas’s Unbranded) are experienced in a specific context. When Black artists became more visible (through the hard work of Black curators as well as the larger political world they were working in, which included the historic event of Obama’s successful candidacy), the foundation revisited its collection and realized that they had been collecting Black artists since the 1960s.19 It is interesting to see that these discursive, political, and cultural shifts changed the role of Black artists within the collection and how they were brought to the fore. The narrative of the foundation and the narrative that is created through the exhibition 30 Americans are not contradictory. They exemplify how history repeats itself in market terms, always in conjunction with political shifts. Graw has argued that market value and Bourdieuian “symbolic value” produce each other. The “symbolic value” of art in Graw’s argumentation is established through verification with and reference to art history and criticism, which she vividly points out through the example of Andreas Gursky’s reference to the Renaissance painter Caravaggio. In an interview, Gursky referred to Carravagio’s use of light, which he compared to the lighting he used in his pit-stop series; henceforth this reference became the interpretational mode for art historians and critics of Gursky’s work alike (Graw 2009, 21). Thus, whether it is the 1960s Black upheaval—as part of the Black Arts Movement and Civil Rights Movement—or if it is a shift in the disposition of racialized power structures, the value of art is determined as much by its political framing, which market forces have championed it, and how it has been positioned within a historical trajectory of value as it is by aesthetics. In order to apply Graw’s critique to the artworks that I am discussing one must consider their racialized, symbolic value. This racialized value obeys a different logic than a large-scale photograph by Andreas Gursky. Not only does the notion of racialized and symbolic value have to be applied to my analysis, but another Bourdieuian paradigm must be considered when we talk about Black artists—“symbolic violence”—which is also at play when art appears to be too political or too culturally specific leading to its exclusion from the market. This exclusion has been discussed for many years by art-activists, including the Gorilla Girls and the conceptual artist Adrian Piper (Piper 2003). The“symbolic value” of artworks could be described as the interplay of racialized politics, the art market, art history, and knowledge production. Historically, Black aesthetic production was framed as if it existed in another 19  T his date is no coincidence i.e., Black conceptualism, as I have introduced it through Valerie Cassel Oliver’s analysis in her article Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art since the 1970, has been part of the art market since.

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aesthetic universe though, with distinct rules marked by a racial divide. I use the term “economy of Blackness” to grasp at the content of Willis Thomas’s Unbranded and to place it within the surrounding circumstances of the art market as it relates to politics, which I have only cursorily portrayed. This means I agree with what Paul Gilroy has called the moral economy of the Black Atlantic, a conf luence of black political trajectories, the art-market, symbolic value, and intersectional specificities that meet in Willis Thomas’s work. The overlapping of these spheres has to be anticipated, because none of the fields I am engaging with in this analysis are detached from each other—neither the formal, content, or theoretical framing. I emphasize that to think about postblack without considering the economy of Blackness would draw only half of the picture, which might not be as beautiful and a positive success story as it may appear in first sight.

3.1

ADS IMITATE ART, ART IMITATES LIFE, and LIFE IMITATES ADS. 20 It is not a racial problem, it is a problem whether you are willing to look at your life and be responsible for it and then begin to change it. (Baldwin in Ové 1969)

The title of this subchapter is borrowed from the homepage of Hank Willis Thomas’ website, which is inspired by Oscar Wilde’s anti-mimetic argument that proposes, in contrast to Aristotle, that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” (Fig. 12)

Fig. 12: Hank Willis Thomas, Homepage Opening 5.10. 2010 © Hank Willis Thomas 20  I would like to express my gratitude to Hank Willis Thomas who has been very helpful during the research of this piece, especially by sharing the original images of the advertisements with me and engaging in endless debates and conversations.

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This statement becomes much more clear when read together with the following quote in which Wilde emphasizes the power of perception using the example of impressionist painting and argues that we are creating a reality from it: Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. (Wilde 2008, 12) The argument about the recognition of beauty and coming into being is difficult, especially when I place it in relation to the statement that “ads imitate art, art imitates life, and life imitates ads,” because what Willis Thomas draws upon is the constructedness of life and what it means to be a cultural product. The notion of Blackness sheds a different light on these quotes and changes the implications of such discursive construction, whether in regards to the field of advertizing, the constructedness of life, and/or the perceived power of art. Advertisements are a mirror for cultural desires and offer key insights about consumer culture. They are also a barometer for society’s ideas about race, especially as it intersects with the culture of capitalism. From the distribution of colonial products to contemporary outcries about the representation of Blackface on billboards, the latter of which promised “delicious dark chocolate doughnuts” in Thailand,21 advertisements are particularly helpful in understanding the entanglements of desire with socioeconomic market forces, which are inevitably rooted in the history of capitalism and therefore the slave trade. Coming from a perspective on the economy that is deeply informed by history, I understand advertisements not only as a site for desire, but as playing a major part in defining identity. On the one hand, an advertisement can be read as a mirror for hegemonic views, a site for the creation and maintenance of bodies and cultural norms. To read advertisements within this framework I draw on the argument made by cultural theorist Greg Tate, who analyzes white American fascination with Black cultures using Marx’ concept of “commodity fetish”: It is my belief that capitalism’s original commodity-fetish was the Africans auctioned here as slaves, whose reduction from subjects to abstracted objects has made them seem larger than life and less than human at the same time. It is for this reason that the Black body, and subsequently Black culture, has become a hungered-after taboo item and a nightmarish bugbear in the badlands of the American racial imagination. Something to be possessed and something to be erased. (2003b, 4)

21  T he Thai franchise of the Dunkin Donuts doughnut company launched its product “Charcoal Donut” with a woman in Blackface.

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The field of advertisement that Willis Thomas engages with is not only one of the strongest public arenas for racial representation, it can equally be used to analyze contemporary discourses on race. The commercialization of the racial discourse through commercial advertising is also related to Gilroy’s approach. Not only does Gilroy identify the depolitization of a Black counterculture, but he stresses Blackness often serves as a desire enhancement for white consumers through its allure of danger and pleasure (Gilroy 1993b, 4). The economy of Blackness is made visible in Willis Thomas’s Branded and Unbranded series. The artist engages directly with economic forces and their entaglements with race, gender, visuality, and power, while at the same time highlighting the mutual involvement of Black and White Americans (and beyond) in that economy. It is especially interesting then that Willis Thomas became most known through the very artworks in which he articulates a distinct visual critique of those market relations and their embedded racial politics.

3.2

The Economy of Blackness in Unbranded

The reason I have chosen to focus on Willis Thomas’s artwork Unbranded: Reflections in Black Corporate America 1968–2008 is that many of the various notions I have already touched on become traceable through the visual allegory ref lected in the piece including the economy of Blackness, perception, the imaginary, market value, and the question of power.22 Unbranded: Reflections in Black Corporate America 1968–2008 has to be understood in connection to an earlier work by Willis Thomas called Branded (Fig. 13, Fig. 14), which consists of a series of photographs in which he used the state of the art tools of twenty-first-century consumer society to create advertisement-like images. These elucidate the way African Americans, as Renè De Guzman summarizes, “have been branded (in the advertisement sense) with associations that ultimately dehumanize them, which has a use in commerce on the one hand, and maintains a racial and class inequities of the old order of the other” (De Guzman 2008, 95). Branded is effective, because Willis Thomas created the images by using archival material and symbols from well-known sports and alcohol brands, like Nike and Absolut. The intertextual focus, inquiry into visual culture, and depiction of racially motivated political struggle that are important themes throughout Willis Thomas’s work are all apparent in Branded, a piece that resonates on various levels with the history of slavery, its connection to capitalism and global economies, the physical suffering of the Black body and the contemporary adjustments made by the oppressive structures that violate us23. 22  I saw the piece at MoMA PS1 where it was exhibited as part of Greater New York (May 23 – October 10, 2010), after the 30 Americans show. My observations are thus based on the installation there. The Greater New York exhibition was the third of these quinquennial exhibitions that showcased contemporary artists. In 2010 this included sixty-eight artists and collectives based in the New York area. 23  B  y “us,” I am referring both to the experience of being racialized, as well as those who perpetuate racist thinking, which has been cultivated and culturally internalized over centuries.

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Fig. 13: Hank Willis Thomas, “Absolut” from B®ANDED Series, 2007 Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

Fig. 14: Hank Willis Thomas,„Branded Head” from B®ANDED Series, 2007 Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

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To make the piece, Willis Thomas created a series of paired former advertisement images, that follow a timeline starting in 1968 and ending in 2008 (Fig. 15). By producing new imagery, I argue that the artist moved on to a practice of post-production, using a shared visual archive, but before I return to and elaborate on this argument I will describe Unbranded: Ref lections in Black Corporate America 1968–2008 in more detail.

Fig. 15: Hank Willis Thomas, Partial Installation View “Unbranded: Ref lections in Black Corporate America 1968–2008”, MoMA PS.1, show Greater New York, 2010 The timeline that creates the score for Willis Thomas’s piece starts with the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination and ends with Barack Obama’s election as the first Black president in the US. The large photographic prints are presented in white frames and are hung in two long rows that follow the shape of the gallery, one ontop of the other. Each pair is connected by a small sign that shows the year in which the images were distributed in journals and magazines. Above and below the year is the title of each image, which either draws from the text of the original advertisement or is newly entitled.24 The formal arrangement of the images creates a dialogic narrative, not only through the double-hung images, but also because these images are of photographs that have been produced and viewed in another context, specifically as advertisements from predominantly African American magazines. Due to a fortunate coincidence, Thomas had received a collection of magazines from a friend of his family, which led to his engagement with this particular visual and cultural archive. Inspired by the video artists Paul Pfeiffer, Willis Thomas freed the images of their slogans and left them plain, without text. While Pfeiffer had removed bodies from images of basketball games, a highly racialized sport in which 24  Willis Thomas explained this in a conversation with me in July 2011.

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Black Men represent the majority of players whilst the management is mainly white men, Willis Thomas created an intimate portrait of each of his “readymade” advertisements. Pfeiffer’s series The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2000) (Fig. 16), draws on Albrecht Dürer’s engravings from circa 1497–98, to highlight the prophetic and iconographic character of athletes in the sports arena.

Fig. 16: Paul Pfeif fer, “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”(9), 2004 photography, Fujif lex digital c-print, Courtesy of the Artist and Thomas Dane Gallery Through the technique of erasure—like in Dürer’s etchings—, which is at play in both Pfeiffer’s and Thomas’s work, the two pieces engage in a dialogue in which notions of Blackness, the body, identity, perception, and logics of economy are all ref lected. Pfeiffer also examines the character of the spectacle in contemporary consumer-culture by creating glossy-like aesthetics that seduce the viewer to engage in the adornment of the Black, masculine, faceless bodies that are marked by the title as the messengers of the end of existence. In Pfeiffer’s work, the images and their protagonists stand on their own and are anonymous, their movement eerily stilled. In contrast, the Unbranded series treats every image like a cherished family member—individual, but related. We encounter images whose purpose it was to sell products and in doing so, each of these former adverts reveals something about its place in history, culture, and economy. Willis Thomas uses images that stand in connection to the desires that are used in consumer culture and advertisements. The art historian and curator Nicolas Bourriaud argues in his book Post-production that, … artists’ intuitive relationship with art history is now going beyond what we call “the art of appropriation,” which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and

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moving toward a culture of the use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing. The Museum like the City itself constitute a catalog of forms, postures, and images for artists—collective equipment that everyone is in a position to use, not in order to be subjected to their authority but as tools to probe the contemporary world. There is (fertile) static on the borders between consumption and production that can be perceived well beyond the borders of art. When artists find material in objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, the work of art takes on a scriptlike value: “when screenplays become form,” in a sense. (Bourriaud 2002, 6) This “script-like-value” is specific and yet once removed from its original context, the demarcation between signifier and signified becomes blurry, especially when it comes to race. These magazine ads, for example, use a forceful visual vocabulary which has not only shaped and produced ideas about African American identity, but also reproduced the intrinsic connection between the Black body and its former status as a commodity within the historical framework of slavery and colonial exploitation. My argument moves away from how these images might function as sheer stereotypes about Black culture and commodification, towards a critical perspective that understands these images as having been produced within one shared culture—fueled and at the same time reframed by its corporatization. Unbranded shows us that these images are part of the production of the sexualized Black body, visually consumable and incorporated into the self-conception of African American identity. Due to the fact that the spectator encounters about eighty images, it is not really possible to describe each one in detail here. This does not seem to be necessary though, because it is precisely through the mass of images and genealogy of visual representations of Blackness that the piece unfolds and finds its strength. Furthermore, the shere number of images is a conceptual necessity because the economy of Blackness itself is produced through the mass distribution of images, which recalls Benjamin’s observation that with every new medium the sensory perception of the masses changes (Benjamin 1972, 18). Apart from Benjamin’s argument that sensory perception changes, the distribution and development of advertizing strategies has also shaped the way we perceive images. A key question, which I will disccuss throughout the chapters of this book, has to do with the ways visual perception establishes, ref lects and contradicts one’s self image. My argument here is that Unbranded understands that the notion of Blackness plays a key role in capitalism and attempts to f latten the idea of Blackness to the point that it is revealed as a nihilistic trope.

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Fig. 17: Hank Willis Thomas: “Ode to the Ill Nana,” 1998/2007 LightJet Print, 36 x 28.25 in (91.44 x 11.12 cm), and right: “Caramel Cocoa Butta’ Honey Lova’, You’re Like No Otha’”, 1982/2007, LightJet Print, 38.5 x 30 in (15.16 x 11.81), Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

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Fig. 18: Hank Willis Thomas, “Caramel Cocoa Butta’ Honey Lova’, You’re Like No Otha’”, 1982/2007, LightJet Print, 38.5 x 30 in (15.16 x 11.81), Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

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Fig. 19: Hank Willis Thomas, “OJ Dingo” 1980/2006 and “Things that Make you Go Ooohh!“, 1999/2006, LightJet Print, 35x 28 in. (88.9 x 71.12 cm), Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

Fig. 20: Hank Willis Thomas, “OJ Dingo”1980/2006 and “Things that Make you Go Ooohh!“, 1999/2006, LightJet Print, 35x 28 in. (88.9 x 71.12 cm), Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

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Fig. 21: Hank Willis Thomas,Martin Luther Burger King, 1986/2007, LightJet Print, 36x 20 inches, Edition of 5, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Galler Willis Thomas’s artwork is emblematic of the questions that I have posed about post-black art, its economic meaning, and black representational space, because it asks how to think about Blackness through a critique of the corporate, economic values that have haunted Black people since first contact with European merchants in the sixteenth century. It would be obsolete to argue with identity politics, an essentialist idea about Blackness, or to solely blame the white imaginary for the visual representations in the piece. Instead, I argue that one of the aspects of the aesthetics of a post-black visual imaginary is manifested in this piece, because the stereotypes about Black people are not retraceable to a single source; they have been historically grown, and nurtured to include: the depiction of Black Women as sexually available (Fig. 17 and 18), Black men as sexually uberpotent (Fig. 19 and 20)25, constant references to slavery and liberation from it through Abolition and the Civil Rights Movement (Fig. 21), the trauma of misogyny embedded in interracial sex (Fig. 22), the establishment of a successful subjectivity through economic and professional success (pull oneself up by the bootstraps!), and last but not least the ultimate transition of Uncle Ben from his character the “house slave”, 25  S ee Gabriele Dietze’s chapter called “Black Poster Boys and the Big Tribunals” (Dietze 2013a), that has to be mentioned in order to highlight the difficult entanglements and discourses, that Willis Thomas’s artworks opens up. Of particular note are two images from the post-civil rights era, which show the growth of Black male empowerment through an enforcement of sexual aggressiveness and feminist claims for self-determination.

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to becoming the “chairman” of Uncle Ben’s, a Masterfoods Company subbranch (Fig. 23),26 with his face and name plastered on a package of parboiled rice for more than sixty years now.

Fig. 22: Hank Willis Thomas, „Gucci: It’s Time for Jungle Fever”2001/2006, Digital c-print, 35x 28 in (13.78 x 11.02 cm), Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery The Uncle Ben’s portrait, which Thomas presented in a golden frame with a caption saying “chairman,” does not directly derive from an advertisement. It is inspired by an article in the New York Times, which discussed “Masterfoods” ’s new approach to represent Uncle Ben as an empowered Black ideal in their new Campaign (Elliott 2007). The contemporary is thus marked by a proclaimed shift of representation: Vincent Howell, president for the food division of the Masterfoods USA unit of Mars, said that because consumers described Uncle Ben as having “a timeless element to him, we didn’t want to significantly change him” […] ‘What’s powerful to me is to show an African-American icon in a position of prominence and authority,” Mr. Howell said. “As an African-American, he makes me feel so proud.” (Elliott 2007)

26  F or a more in-depth historical background of figures like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima and the products they are used to market, see Marilyn Kern-Foxworth’s book Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1994, Chapters 3 & 4).

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The social advancement of Uncle Ben appears to be not only a moral, but also a political necessity in light of Obama’s 2008 run for the presidency, but becomes a substitution for an entire (and diverse) group of people.

Fig. 23: : Hank Willis Thomas, Af ter 61 Years in Service, I, Ben, Promoted, 2008/2008, LightJet Print, 63,5x50 inches and right: Newspaper ad and image of Uncle Ben in his of fice, Masterfoods USA 2008

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Fig. 24: Newspaper ad and image of Uncle Ben in his of fice, Masterfoods USA 2008 This obligatory re-establishment of the brand maintains a connection with the historical context of Uncle Ben, so much so that the unrevised reproduction of his image echoes a brutal past, which remains inescapable, even with the new “job title”. While Uncle Ben’s position within the corporate hierarchy is changed and his Blackness is under revision as well, the underlying brutality remains.27 I am following Gilroy’s analysis of contemporary consumer culture, which underlines this vividly in the piece: “The antagonistic view of capitalism ventured here not only departs from the idea that African slaves were once traded just like any other commodity, but also tries to invest the modern history of commerce in human beings with an analytical significance which is alive to the possibility that it still has ethical implications for the present.”

27  A  fter the resurgence of the BlackLivesMatter protests in relation to the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the ongoing discussions on antiblackness in June 2020 the Company Masterfoods decided to rethink their logo of the Uncle Ben brand, acknowledging its deep-rooted racism. A PR article like the one that Willis Thomas refers to in his piece Unbranded: Reflections on Black Corporate America 1968-2008 which framed Uncle Ben as chairman would be impossible in 2020 as a “corrective” measure and shows that the discussions on race and anti-blackness remained on a surface level in 2008 with Barack Obama’s race for and later presidency.

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The visual economy and imaginary trope of slavery occurs in the piece almost rhythmically, whether it is the image of breaking chains to promote a special Martin Luther Burger King (Fig. 21), or a grinning smile that echoes minstrel shows and common depictions of Africans as exaggerated laughing stock. By showing us how assumed black public culture, or as Gilroy framed it “the moral economy,” has changed politically as well as culturally over an arc of time, Willis Thomas also highlights that which remains the same. The changes are traceable through the imagery: fashion and hairstyles change over time and there is a special focus on children in the Black family. Constructed images of Black domesticity that embrace 1960s nuclear family values give way to the gendered rise of the Black middle class in the 1980s wherein neoliberal values are promoted with depictions of successful businessmen and perfectly styled women in elegant surroundings. In these images, women hold the position of a secretary or receptionist, whereas the men appear to aspire to higher positions. Elsewhere, woman are depicted as part of the family, such as the lady who leads her family jogging through the park. Gender goes through the advertisements like a leitmotif, as some images target female consumers and reproduce normative ideas about the female sexed body and its position in the heterosexual matrix; men are often “called upon” by their sexual potency and fantasies of superiority. This split enhances what Wright calls the production of women as “Other of the Other” and reveals a dichotomous structure within the racial bias. Moving to the 1990s, one can observe this duality even more strongly as biopolitical aesthetics enter into play; very glossy and toned half-naked Women are presented with majestic sexual authority. The full scope of what Angela McRobbie calls “backlash of Feminism,” are on display in the material from the 1990s, which takes feminist achievements for granted and undermines them at the same time by reproducing the same normative paradigms of sexist exploitation. The representation of Blackness in glossy popular culture magazines is directed towards its main target group, Black youth. As Gilroy writes, “[I] maginary blackness is being projected outward, facelessly, as the means to orchestrate a truly global market in leisure products and the centerpiece of a new, corporately directed version of youth culture centered not on music and its antediluvian rituals but upon visuality, icons, and images” (Gilroy 2001, 270). Particularly the heteronormative gender bias remains a canvas for ideological projections and sustained sexual fantasies throughout the series— from the focus on womens’ buttocks to the muscular masculine body

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Fig. 25: Hank Willis Thomas, “The Johnson Family”, 1981/2007, LightJet Print, 31x 30 in (78.74 x 76.2 cm), 1982/2007, LightJet Print, 28x 36 in. (71.12 x 91.44 cm), Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery Finally, the piece arrives in 2008 where the illusion and articulation of power has shifted, as I elaborated on earlier with the example of Uncle Ben, but the visual signifiers appear to remain the same. Some of these shifts and changes are explainable through the idea of post-soul (post-black somehow follows post-soul), a music-based concept that I haven’t yet engaged with, but which is as important. The connection to music is grounded in an understanding of African American cultural production, which found spaces for productivity in entertainment and music, placed at the margin and center simultaneously. .

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Fig. 26: Hank Willis Thomas, “Introducing New Extra Strength Fulla Waves of Course, Thik, and Unruly Hair”, 1982/2007, LightJet Print, 28x 36 in. (71.12 x 91.44 cm), Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

Fig. 27: Hank Willis Thomas, Movin’on Up, 1976/2008, LightJet Print, 32,75x 30 in (83.2 x 76.2 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

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Fig. 28: Hank Willis Thomas, “available in a Variety of Sizes and Colors”, 1977/2007, LightJet Print, 32 x 35 in. (81.28 x 88.9cm) , Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

Fig. 29: Hank Willis Thomas, “...and the Rest was Her Story 1985/2007”,LightJet Print, 36x28.5 in. (91.44 x 72.39 cm), Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

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The author Greg Tate refers to Nelson George, who uses the term “post-Soul era” in order to distinguish it from the postmodern era. This shift is summarized by Tate as follows: Soul music, widely understood as the classic sound Black gospel vocalists like Sam Cooke made as they turned away from praising Jesus and toward the more lucrative romantic pop market, subsequently produced a secular faith of sorts—one built around the verities of working-class African American life. Soul culture succinctly describes the folkways of African Americans concocted in the desegregating America of the fifties and sixties as the civil rights movement was on ascendancy. Post-Soul is how George describes the African-American culture that emerged out of the novel social, economic, and political circumstances the sixties Black movements produced in their wake….28 Its signature was not its smooth Blackness but its self-conscious hybridity of Black and white cultural signifiers.…29Yet with post-Soul’s new forms came new psychological relationships to older (and arguably, perhaps, even outdated) takes on such platitudinous topics as Black oppression, Black propriety, Black identity, Black community, Black family, Black femininity and feminism, and, most of all, Black marketability. For the first time in history, mainstream success became a defining factor in the cultural value of an African-American arts-movement—primarily because it would be through the country’s major channels of mass communication and mass marketing that debates about these figures moved from the margin to center, from the hood to the floors of Congress. The seventies and eighties saw lively debate arising in Black America over whose idea of African-American culture would prevail in the public imagination.… Camps and divisions within Black culture became more pronounced and hysterical as time went on: old-guard Afrocentrists versus freakydeke bohemians and newly minted Ivy League buppies, all of the above thrown in relief by those gauche ghettocentrics who would come to be known as the hip-hop nation. (Tate 2003b, 6–7) All of the aspects that Tate touches upon can be traced in the eighty images in Willis Thomas’s piece. To claim that Unbranded only gives an eloquent insight into the cultural shifts that took place over the course of four decades, which Tate describes in the above quote, would overlook the fact that the visual 28  P  ost-Soul would include the plays of Ntozake Shange, the novels of Gayle Jones, the films of Spike Lee, the music of Fishbone, Tracy Chapman, and Living Colour, the presidential campaigns of Jessie Jackson, the music and the cosmetic surgeries of Michael Jackson, the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and of course that postmodern expression par excellence, hiphop. All this work managed the feat of being successful in the American mainstream in a language that was as easily referenced by white cultural models as African American ones. 29  H  ence Basquiat referenced Rauschenberg and Dubuffet before Bearden, as the members of Living Colour and Fishbone found Led Zeppelin and the Sex Pistols as praiseworthy as James Brown and George Clinton. By the same token, all of these artists left an African American critique of racism visible in the foreground—recognition that Black discontent was as alive as white supremacy in the land of the hybridizing freakyfree.

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imaginary is embedded in a hegemonic discourse about the Other and nevertheless discursively infiltrated by shifts in the representation of Blackness and Black politics. During an artist talk at Duke University, Willis Thomas pointed out that he was particularly interested in the way in which white marketing specialists imagined and still imagine Blackness, by emphasizing that most of the decision-makers in advertising companies are white. Unbranded thus maps a clearly determined terrain, in the way it is implemented into the narrative of whiteness, or more precisely expressed, in the way it highlights how ideas about “Black culture and individuals” were shaped by white people. Marylin Kern Foxworth’s study of the portrayal of Black people in US advertisements underlines this argument, when she writes about racial advertisements that they, “perpetually erode the self-esteem and motivational behavior of African-Americans … and [have] alienated and subjugated blacks” (1994, 168). This argument is related to Hall’s encoding-decoding model in which he shows that the producer of meaning, the receiver, and interpreter often fall together in one subject, thus meaning is discursively produced and cannot be assumed to be linear; this model is helpful to argue that the ideas about Black culture, which Willis Thomas traces, are as much part of the ideas of Blackness as they are part of a white imaginary. It is important to note that the bias argumentation, which consists of two opposing positions—advertisements mold the opinion of its audience (e.g., J. Berger 1972; Peterson 1958) or advertisements ref lect positions and phenomena that are already present within a society (e.g., Brown 1981)—fall together in Hall’s concept, ending an old imbroglio. Hall grasps the complexity of our perception through a post-structural approach and argues for the discursive production of meaning (Hall 2006). Returning to the title Unbranded: Ref lections in Black Corporate America 1968–2008, incorporation is a useful term because it already consists of a notion of the corpus (the body), and therefore creates a bridge to corporeality, which I will connect with modes of perception. Hall argues that the way we perceive images or meaning allows for three options: we can perceive media from a hegemonic position; from a negotiated position, which is aware of the critic but nevertheless follows the dominant position; or we have an oppositional position, which doesn’t allow conforming with the messages/meaning that one perceives. Unbranded: Ref lections in Black Corporate America 1968–2008 makes spectators aware of the act of perception, which leads me to the second challenge that the piece poses. Through temporal distance, the piece creates a viewing position, which is from its outset alienated from the original purpose of the images. Just as Duchamp’s famous ready-mades, like the Pissoir—first overlooked or a myth undetected—, relied on a shift in context to allow for an investigation of an object on its own accord, and not exclusively as part of everyday culture, so too does Willis Thomas invite us to re-think these images and their meaning. They become artifacts of past discourses that nevertheless function like avatars of the present, constantly echoing and mirroring the past and the present in an interplay that obscures reality and imaginary.

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I will explain my position by ref lecting on Barthes’ essay and semiotic approach, “The Rhetoric of the Image”. Barthes’essay appears to be the most cited regarding Unbranded: Ref lections in Black Corporate America 1968–2008. In his famous essay from 1964, Barthes deconstructs the rhetorical power of an advertising image for the Italian food brand Panzani, which he considers to be signified a priori and to be signified by the intentional purpose to ensure an optimum reading: “… the advertising image is frank or at least emphatic” (Barthes 1977, 70). What Barthes makes clear in this quote is his presumption that the image is clearly encoded, which he expands on in a distinct reading of the image. For Barthes, signs are produced through cultural knowledge, linguistic messages, and the narrative of the image, which together form a quasi-identity that disconnects the image from its code (“message without code”). This argument leads him to conclude that there are three levels of messages that the image delivers, “a linguistic message, a coded iconic message, and a non-coded iconic message” (1977, 72). The linguistic message can be disconnected from the image but the other two—following Barthes—create an undividable liaison that becomes their distinct purpose in the context of mass media. By following this argument, Unbranded can, in a strict semiotic reading, be interpreted as an attempt to highlight the mixture of two levels of messages, of the symbolic and the perceptual, or in Barthes terms the connotated and the denoted messages. The symbolic message thus is fused and perceived at the same time. Barthes reading may be exceptional and avantgarde, but what has to be considered regarding Unbranded is not only the representational space of the art world, but also that we encounter images that have gone through a kind of double-coding and tend to forget that they have went through the process of demontage. I would therefore argue that the advertisements speak to the spectator and lay the processes of encoding bare. The spectator is confronted with a set of consciously selected images as well as the decision to remove all the branding information, and finally the framing of the images through a historically charged timeline. As such, the spectator is placed in a cultural narrative that sources its rhetoric from a specific way of naturalizing culture. It is a narrative of the individual on the grounds of the visual. Robin D. G. Kelly emphasizes this narrative and the didactive nature of Willis Thomas’s work in an essay in which he writes, “even when he deliberately removes elements from the original ‘document’, i.e., in his Unbranded series, the titles of the pieces and very concept of the show reveal to the viewer the original context and intent behind the ads”(Kelley 2008, 103). Despite the fact that this reading offers a plausible interpretation I think that it is possible to extend the argument, because even without the title, the context of the images are easily accessible. My emphasis is on the embedded cultural codes that remain in the continuum of African American consumer discourse—the logics and history of Uncle Ben remain in the same hierarchical structure from which they originate. Willis Thomas’s timeline starts with the end of an era and the beginning of another one. The images in the work thus become an archive of Blackness in American consumer culture. For example, the image that is juxtaposed with Uncle Ben shows supposedly

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female legs, which are rhythmically composed into a braid of different skin complexions (Fig. 30).

Fig. 30: Hank Willis Thomas, “Your Skin Has the Power to Protect You”, 1994/2008, LightJet Print, 20 x 36in. (50.8 x 91.4 cm),Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery The caption says, “Your Skin has the Power to Protect You” and therefore taps into a debate about race. Whereas, during colonialism and slavery your Black skin meant an endangered life and that you would be dehumanized, it is now proclaimed to represent a protective shield. The various complexions are ambiguous and suggest racial mixing; one encounters supposably female bodies woven like a carpet. The repetition and rhythm of the braided legs also suggest infinity and endless reproduction. Women’s bodies are used to portray the notion of racial mixing, within the old paradigm of the female sexed body as obedient to masculine normatizing trajectories and incubators.30 The image uses the sexed body like a statement that pushes against singular essentialist views about race, and instead tries to embrace ambiguity and mixing as a loophole out of the racial dilemma. In it’s own way, the photograph recalls Nancy Burton’s Human Race Machine (2002), a machine that morphs portraits into different racialized appearances. A key aspect of her project is to show not only that race is a social construct but also to give people an opportunity to question their own perception of race depending on 30  S ee Michelle Wright on the notion of Black Feminism and Black Nationalism. (M. M. Wright 2004, 139).

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their appearance.31 The art historian Jennifer Gonzales critically engages with Burton’s piece in an article about race in contemporary art, in which she highlights not only the notion of racial tourism that the project attracts, but also the attempt to reach sameness without acknowledging difference (Gonzales 2003, 382). Connecting this thought with the ambiguity of race as it is represented by the various skin types in the last image of Willis Thomas’s piece, one can see how the image becomes a metaphor for sameness, leaving the historical precondition of racial hierarchies and miscegenation laws aside. But these hierarchies prevail and they linger in captions like, “your skin has the power to protect you”. It is as if Willis Thomas has connected the two variables that create our contemporary condition. The historical embeddedness of the racial discourse through Uncle Ben and the utopic hybridity represented by the braided skin; one clinging upon the other, in constant resolution and bound to fail. It is a masked aporia that questions not only the very idea of difference and Blackness, but it also leads to a dead end in which one has to ask if the ideas that we carry about ourselves aren’t empty codes. What if we came into being because we acknowledge the fact of Blackness over and over again, despite its emptiness? It is a nihilistic view and an honest one, which does not seek blame or shame, just acknowledgement of the fact that whatever color we are, we participate in the game. We grow up in a culture in which the end of oppression is symbolized by access to lifestyles that are promoted and marketed in order to fuel the capitalist system, often at the expense of actual freedom and still deeply embedded in gratouitous violence. Gilroy’s analysis of the shift from the politics of freedom (also lucid in soul music) towards a notion of “racialized biopolitics” affirms this argument. He argues that the shift from the politics of “freeing the mind” towards a privatized politics of embodiment is at the core of neoliberalism. According to Gilroy, most remarkable is the role that visuality played in this shift: “This is achieved almost exclusively through the visual representation of racialized bodies—engaged in characteristic activities, usually sexual or sporting—which if they do not induce immediate solidarity, certainly ground and solicit identification” (Gilroy 2001, 185). While Gilroy mourns for the times of a liberating, interactive Black public sphere in which the focus was not on the privatization or marketization of Black politics (predominantly in music), Willis Thomas’s work demonstrates how racialized politics in fact played an integral part in the self-conception of Black subjectivities during the times Gilroy writes about—primarily the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. It is even possible to argue that the Black public sphere has been heterosexualized, overaesthetisized, and biologized from its very beginning (and continues to be). Marketing is about desires, attention, and identification; self-liberating magazines for Black consumers like Ebony—many of the adverts in Willis Thomas’s work are from that magazine—featured numerous ads that attempted to capitalize on the message of the Civil Rights Movement in oder to build a new, upwardly mobile Black consumer group. The images 31  For more information visit: http://nancyburson.com/human-race-machine/.

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are evidence that even liberating slogans like “Black is beautiful”—primarily represented through natural Black hair—were quickly integrating into marketing strategies, in this case to promote hair products.32 One of the strengths of Willis Thomas’s piece is that he delves into and puts this complicated relationship on display. In Willis Thomas’s work, the various narratives of “what it means to be Black,” create a mirror stage through which the constructedness of Black culture becomes clear. As images, especially advertisements, circulate and travel around the world, they frequenly arrive in other parts of the Black Diaspora in modified forms, and are certainly filtered through a range of contexts and codes.33 Given that marketing culture deeply inf luenced how Black American culture is perceived and promoted, Willis Thomas’s piece challenges the spectator to reconsider naturalized cultural aesthetics and the consumption of Blackness. What we encounter through his technique of montage and demontage is an economic archive and a chronical of consumption. These juxtaposed portraits are full of deformations and assumed truths that leave the spectator in a state of uncomfortable uncertainty, which I see as the state of post-black.

32  G  ilroy romanticizes the time before the shift towards biopolitics in the 1990s, often painting an inaccurate picture of history. His argument that this shift marked the “racial community” as exclusively “a space of heterosexual activity” has to be challenged, because the racial community has always been marked as heterosexual. The images confirm this notion because sexuality is represented across time as heterosexual and there are repeated performances of male dominance in the form of objectifying Black Women. While I agree with Gilroy that there has been a shift towards biopolitics, which visualizes itself in the form of glossy hyper-standardized bodies in the 1990s, I have to disagree with the idea that heterosexuality is emphasized after the 1990s, because heteronormativity is constantly present over the period of forty years that Willis Thomas surveys. Even in the moment in which gay activism entered the public realm (I am talking about the US context,) Black Queer of Color critique is and was marginalized, well after Stonewall. Non-heterosexual sexualities may have been present in some creative’s formats, e.g., in the writings of Langston Hughes or James Baldwin, but they were not translated into the visual sphere. 33  S ee Gilroy’s discussion of records within Black Atlantic cultures in the Chapter “Wearing your Art on your Sleeve” (Gilroy 1993a).

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III. Historical Entanglements of Black Revolutionary Women 1. De-Interpellating Interpellation—Visual Disobediences “O my body, always make me a man who questions!” (Fanon 2008, 206) “You see me so therefore I exist.” (Mickalene Thomas Studio Visit 2012) “Moreover, we tend to privilege experience itself, as if black life is lived experience outside of representation. We have only, as it were, to express what we already know we are. Instead, it is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are.” (Hall 1993, 111) When I first encountered Mickalene Thomas’s paintings I was compelled by the scale, colors, and sparkle that radiated across great distances. I was drawn to her work from the outset and, like many Black women who visit her solo exhibitions, I felt “held” in a space where Black Femmes gazed back at me from the large scale paintings, photographs, and wallpapers that featured 1970s clothing, big afro hair, Swarovski stones, lush makeup, and a sexiness that could make me blush from time to time. The scale of Thomas’s work allows no escape from the Black Femme gaze, which surrounds the spectator’s body.1 Having grown up in a predominantly white, European context, I had yet to see images of Black feminity that were as powerful and desirable. 1  A  feature which I only know from one other Black Woman painter- namely Julie Mehretu and her dyptich paintings HOWL, eon (I, II) (2016-2017) 324 x 384 in. (823 x 975.4 cm) for SFMoMA- but I don’t want to derail here.

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Born in 1971, in Camden New Jersey, where she was raised by her mother, Thomas went to school in Portland Oregon to study Theater arts and pre-law, before moving back to the East Coast to receive a BA in Fine Arts (with a major in painting) in 2000 from Pratt Institute New York. Following, she earned her MA in Fine Arts in Painting at Yale University New Haven in 2002. Thomas was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum Harlem in 2003 before Golden curated her into Frequency, the second iteration of the “F” shows in 2005-6, with two pieces from her Brawling Spitfire Wrestling Series 2005. Thomas has received consistent praise from critics and curators alike, foregrounding the centrality of bold studio portraits of Black Women in her work, which redefine beauty whilst formally investing in an array of materials and forms. Her extensive oeuvre, which ranges from photography and collage to painting and video installations, relies heavily on the history of painting, particularly 19th century Western movements such as the Hudson River School and the French modernists. She plays with this modern canon, mixing it with pop art’s 1970’s popular culture symbolisms. Her work consistently shows us that while her art practice can’t but be situated in the midst of a chronopolitical dialogue—a political argument that utilizes time as a political tool and a political engagement with History that was traditionally reserved for White CIS2-gendered men—it is not defined by it. Thomas’s interest in finding empowerment through contradiction is articulated in her bold appropriations, modifications, and re-articulations of paintings by many of Modernism most celebrated (white and male) artists: Custave Courbet, Edouard Manet or Claude Monet, Stuart Davis or Andy Warhol. This strategy also extends to using specific techniques popularized by collagists such as Romare Bearden and Henri Matisse. Studying Thomas’s paintings, I am prompted to ask: what does it means for a Black woman to portray predominantly Black women? Are Black women the artist’s objects of desire, and would the artist’s own gender or sexuality matter here? Does this protrayal place the subjects of her artworks into a long history of objectification, whereby women are represented as nudes by white male painters? Or, is it possible that Thomas is expressing, “…[t]he desire to see likeness.” (Willis and Williams 2002, xi) Is she carving out space in the visual realm for otherwise predominantly marginalized or exoticized Black female bodies? I am particularly interested in the possible meaning of Thomas’s approach in terms of the fixity of the Black body in the visual realm and what kind of counterstrategies or strategies beyond “counter” her practice might point to. To consider these questions requires not only an engagement with her formal and representational strategies, but also with the way in which a close reading draws attention to a deeper attitude that imbues her work. The following

2  C  IS- describes a person whose biological sex and gender identity are congruent, whilst trans* is used as signifier describing a person who’s gender identity does not correspond to their biological sex.

III. Historical Entanglements of Black Revolutionary Women

excerpt from an interview about Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Trois Femme Noir (Fig. 31) offers an example of Thomas’s attitude and position: I’m hoping that people will look beyond me just being a black artist—which some people do—and look beyond the style of my work, and the fact that I paint black women. Would the conversation change if I started painting white women? If I started painting men? What would that be about? Would that shift the conversation? It would create a new conversation, for sure. (Ayers 2010) Her approach raises questions that go beyond the threshold of the skin. She asks viewers to ref lect upon the matter of fixation—their own as well as the bodies represented. I am thus proposing an extended reading of Thomas’s work in connection to Fanon’s text The Lived experience of the Black in Black Skin White Mask, in order to negotiate Fanon’s elaborations on the colonial gaze and his notions of fixity in the visual realm, which are thrown into question by the layering and composition of Les Dejuner sur l’herbe: Trois Femmes Noir. I have chosen these two contrasting positions in order to reopen a debate about strategies of representation, political practice, and agency. My argument is that Thomas’ work comes from a form of diasporic visual disobedience, which calls into question Fanon’s notion of visual and ontological captivity through the (colonial-) gaze. I am connecting these thoughts with Louis Althusser’s notion of ideology and argue that Thomas’s work creates a constant de-interpellation of interpellation—a dialogue that creates gaps to rethink fixed subject positions be it race, gender, or class, with a focus on knowledge production narratives in (art) history. The gaze—as a primary mode of racialization—and its loopholes, are at the heart of my investigation. This f luid, slippery, and subjective process of perception, which is always thought of as embedded in—and an essential part of—visual culture, establishes ideas of self and other. Every body is racialized and gendered in every bodily encounter (Ahmed 2000, 44). I am interested in the gaze, because it helps me think about the interplay of knowledge production as it draws from the imaginary and the supposed real, from representations—although these are not strictly divisible. We are called upon by gazes from the outside, or as the phenomenologist Merelau-Ponty has framed it in his book Signs, “I borrow myself from others; I create others from my own thoughts. This is no failure to perceive others, it is the perception of others” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 159). In other words, the gaze is not a matter of perceiving the other but rather a matter of perception and imaginary. A blurring of the latter has socio-historic, economic and everyday consequences. “I create others from my own thoughts” can be expanded by Eduard Glissant’s writing in The Poetics of Relation (1997). In Glissant’s examination of the colonizing/colonized relationship, the gaze can be rendered by the imaginary. Although Glissant states that the two entities stand in an ontological bind, the monological dualisms are variable and the notion of difference is f luid rather than fixed.

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Acknowledging differences does not compel one to be involved in the dialectics of their totality. One could get away with: “I can acknowledge your difference and continue to think it is harmful to you. I can think that my strength lies in the Voyage (I am making History) and that your difference is motionless and silent.” (1997, 17) Glissant’s argument is particularly interesting because it offers the option of choice and agency regarding how to think about differences and how to use them productively by rejecting the “dialectics of their totality.” Glissant’s argument demands that we think about being a subject as if the subject were in a state of constant f luidity, constant undoing and reimagining, rather than being stagnant and universal. This is a decolonizing strategy and the process of becoming and unbecoming is at the core of my endeavor to interpellate the idea of interpellation by Louis Althusser in connection to the process of visual racialization as mapped out by Frantz Fanon, because the notion of choice loosens the fixity in which the Black body appears to be trapped (at least on a subjective level).

2. How do I look? (Very good, I must say I am amazed!) Thomas’s work is engaged with complex questions that interrogate the idea of modernity; she claims space within that framework as a Black Lesbian painter, though her sexuality is rarely addressed in the analysis of her work in museum and gallery presentations (see Melandri 2012).3 By appropriating, modifying, and rearticulating classical paintings—for example, by Custave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet or Stuart Davis—she centralizes Black Women while evoking questions about subjectivity and innovation. Thomas should not be understood as the first African American artist who is working along these lines. The praise she has received, and the often uncritical consumption of her work, is a symptom of the absence of a public discourse around Black art in the United States. Previous generations of artists such as Barkley Henricks depicted Black women in powerful ways, and so did Henry Ossawa Tanner, as did Archibald Motley, who devoted an entire series of paintings to Black women, although he focused predominantly on mixed race and light skin women, which has to be problematized in relationship to classism, the idea of racial uplift and colorism4. Even so, Thomas’s persistent centralization of the Black Womxn in her practice makes her work exceptional.

3  Q  ueer readings of her work are more common in the academic discourse i.e. (Murray 2016, Chapter III, 111-143). 4  For further reading on the subject of colorism and gender see: (Brody 1998).

III. Historical Entanglements of Black Revolutionary Women

Fig. 31: Mickalene Thomas, Le déjeuner sur l‘herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, 2010, c-print, 47 x 58 in (paper) (119.4 x 147.3 cm), Courtesy the artist. Thomas’s photograph, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, which would later become a collage and a painting, is an appropriation of Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. It places her practice in the long history artistic engagement with the renowned painting, which has been directly addressed by artists including Claude Monet (1865 unfinished), Paul Cezanne (1876– 1877), Pablo Picasso (1960), Alain Jacquet (1964), and Renee Cox (2001).5 It is interesting to note that in their interpretations of Manet’s masterpiece, none of these artists broke the gender composition of the original painting though. Manet’s brushwork signaled an important change of style from the seamless blending of colors in order to create a “realistic” representation of life and working from grisailles as an underlayer, towards a much more dynamic representation that endeavored to capture colors, light and immediacy, It follows that in art historical discourse, there was also a decisive shift in the understanding of art and life. Manet, and some of his contemporaries, were interested in expanding the subject of their paintings, moving away from the dominant classical and historical themes of the time, towards a depiction of everyday life without the hierarchies that existed in genre and history paintings. The centralisation of vision, with its temporal immediacy, that can be found at a premium in Manet’s paintings indicate a further develop5  C  ox only indirectly refers to Manet, because her version Cousins at Pussy Pond 2001 is stronger along the lines of Marcantonio Raimondi’s detail from the engraving The Judgement of Paris approx. 1510/20.

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ment towards the formation of the modern self—a refining of visuality that dominated late 19th century discourses.6 Notions of white disembodiment in relationship to the imperialistic and industrializing world makes the painting a fruitful playground to explore questions of race and gender. At the time, Manet’s work Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe was the subject of a scandalous debate, because it represented an unprecedented composition of nude, still-life, portrait, and landscape painting. Not only did the eclecticism of his composition, which is determined by the various genres of painting, but the diffused, shadeless, unnatural light that creates an artificial photographic aura became the talk of the town in early 19th century Paris. The sitting arrangement with two dressed men and two nude women, was inspired by Titian’s Concert champêtre, whilst the overall composition goes back to the Renaissance, to an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi.7 Manet’s painting was a turning point for female representation in the Western world. The scandal surrounding Le Dejeuner was in fact caused by the contrasting gaze of the nude women, which implied the female subject as a challenge to the spectator’s gaze. During Manet’s time, this challenged the very borders of obscenity; the female nude was supposed to entertain the spectators gaze only and be placed in a position of objectification (J. Berger 1972, 57; Nead 1992, 11). Manet obfuscated the quiet enjoyment of the spectator’s gaze with a sort of visual interpellation through a subject that was not supposed to have any agency. So maybe here we already have a sense of Thomas’ fascination with Manet as source material, especially given that the Black female subject has been consistently placed outside of culture, and even the realm of the human subject, since the Enlightenment.8 Much as Thomas created a photograph, which was then followed by a collage and later painting, Manet painted Le Déjeuner in his studio and worked through various layers.9 The f lat—even one-dimensional background, makes it appear as if it were produced in a studio. Manet was inspired by many visual references. For example, a detail of the menioned Raimondi engraing Judgement of Paris that was part of the visual culture of Paris and circulated among artists and intellectuals. The nudity of the two women and the two dressed men as well as the composed triangle of their bodies indicates that Titian’s Pastoral Concert (ca. 1510 and 110 × 138 cm) was also a visual reference

6  “ From early modern notions of perspective to the retinal images that Descartes put at the center of his philosophy of mind, the visual was the dominant model of representation in the reimagination of a modern identity, and this has led scholars of theories of the mind, the imaginary, and epistemology to conclude that modernity was “resolutely ocularcentric” and to identify the “ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the modern era.” (Gikandi 2011, 44).For further reading also see (Mitchell 1989). 7  A collaboration with Raphael, see, for example (Cachin et al. 1983). 8  Also see: (Piesche 2005). 9  Studio can also be translated as “indoors” in this sentence.

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for Manet,10 and complements my argument that his work was already an early form of appropriation. His brush stroke technique shows he was inf luenced by Japanese art, which creates an enamel-like effect on the skin of the nude women (Cachin 1983, 294). This European fascination with, or exoticism of, Japan—which can still be seen today, for example, in the French labels Givenchy or Louis Vuitton (Said 1978, 66; Ives and Metropolitan Museum of Art New York 1974; Ono 2003; Guichard-Anguis 2001), is more prominently revealed in his Olympia painting. Manet’s Olympia is one of the most discussed paintings in cultural and gender studies, particularly with regard to female race relations (Gilman 1985; Grigsby 2015; Murrell 2018). It was also an inspiration for primitivist painters like Gauguin (Foster 1993, 73), which speaks for the impact it had in regards to the depiction of female sexuality, which within the realm of fine arts and specifically modernist painting was frequently coupled with notions of racialization.11 For this work Thomas appropriates aspects of Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe by Manet, replacing the three sitters with three Black female presenting individuals. To paraphrase Lisa Farrington, their “body-political” presence stresses their “culturally unseen,” position, reminding us of the way in which these Black female bodies were all-to-often framed as “un-representable” and held in the dualism of being considered lacking in “beauty” while carrying the allure of the exoticized, ultimate Other (Farrington 2003, 15). On a deeper note, Thomas’s work unravels the presence of the Black women in the photograph in relationship to photography’s brutal historical subtext: the rabid and libelous terms of the 1798 American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This document exiled the African from the human community12 and captured people of African descent in the eternal phantasma of the primitive only to be resurrected and internalized in the modern artistic imaginary.

10  I t is not clear if Gorgione or Titian painted the image, but it is assumed that Titian finished it after Gorgione’s death in 1510. 11  A  lso see- Griselda Pollock’s discussion of Manet’s painting Repose (1873) (Pollock 1999, 258–59). 12  F or example, see this quote from the Code Noir (1685). “NEGRO, Homo pellinigra, a name given to a variety of the human species, who are entirely black, and are found in the Torrid zone, especially in that part of Africa which lies within the tropics. In the complexion of negroes, we meet with various shades; but they likewise differ far from other men in all the fea­tures of their face. Round cheeks, high cheek-bones, a forehead somewhat elevated, a short, broad, at nose, thick lips, small ears, ugliness, and irregularity of shape, characterize their external appearance. The negro women have the loins greatly depressed, and very large buttocks, which give the back the shape of a saddle. Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race: idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man when left to himself.”

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Thomas’s work foregrounds the absence of Black Women as emancipated subjects with agency in modern art. She does so in opposition to the prevalent depiction of what Art historian Judith Wilson calls the “legions of Black servants who loom in the shadows of European and European-American aristocratic portraiture” (Wilson 1992, 114). It is this absence—looming or haunting—that remains a consistent signifier of the Black Diasporic Archive and is rearticulated in Thomas work. Thomas centralizes those subjects who never had a voice, whose stories seem lost and yet who contributed to a profound shift in the life and cultures of Europe’s modern metropoles13.

Fig. 32: Henri Matisse, The Back (III) by May 13, 1913 - early fall 1916, Bronze, 6 2 1/2 x 44 x 6 (189.2 x 112.4 x 15.2 cm), © 2014 Succession H. Matisse/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Thomas’s photograph was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and shot in it’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, which was designed by architect Philip Johnson. Thomas references le dejeuner’s natural pond with Johnson’s square modernist architectural pool, which we see almost like an 13  F or more details on the Black presence in Paris around the turn of the Century see: (Murrell 2018, 7–85).

III. Historical Entanglements of Black Revolutionary Women

anecdote in the left midsection of the photograph. Thomas, displaying her full awareness of Manet’s usage of light, creates different layers of illumination that obscure the depth of the space and foregrounds the front of the image. Three women dominate the photograph through their hyper-plasticity, in contrast to the rather f lat background. The woman taking a bath in the architectural pool holds the pose of Henri Matisse’s bas-relief sculpture The Back IV (1913–1916), which is prominent feature of MoMA’s sculpture garden (Fig. 32). The garden’s wall, which sits in the background, is illuminated in a warm golden light that centers on Matisse’s bronze sculpture and makes the tree on either side appear like soft but f lat silhouettes. Matisse returned several times to the subject of The Back and produced four versions in order to give the subject deeper resonance. By folding the Matisse into her frame, Thomas poses yet another question about representation in art. How much form and how much shape does Matisse need in order to describe a single figure? Matisse’s formal inquiry about shape and form pushed his pieces closer to abstraction—carving out more and more details from the sculpture, and deprive the bodies he depicted of their individualism. The representation of three graceful Black women and a sculpture by Matisse in a contemporary painting might not be considered scandalous, but the centering of those three bodies, which graceful as they may be are nevertheless abjected by modernity’s aesthetic codes, challenges the relationship between the spectator, historical example, and the contemporary perception. In contrast to Manet’s nude, white woman who is positioned to the left of the painting, Thomas’s Black women are adorned in patterned sleeveless dresses, which creates an emancipated atmosphere. In other words, their clothed bodies create symbolic balance. I am foregrounding this “body-political” aspect of Thomas’s work, because the dark skinned Black female body is predominantly part of the “culturally unseen,” the “un-representable” in the historical US context, due to its alleged lack of beauty (Farrington 2003, 15). By claiming this space and by making these beautiful women visible, Thomas follows a long-standing tradition in photography from the beginning of the twentieth century (Willis 2009) and connects with contemporary Black feminist interventions by Renee Cox, Carrie May Weems, Lorna Simpson or Carla Williams, among others. The photography theorist Deborah Willis highlights this issue of the “culturally unseen” in her book Posing Beauty and points out that, “A rereading of beauty through historical, fine art, and advertising photographs reveals how racialised beauty was posed and reconsidered as a political act, linking virtue to commercial enterprise…” (2009, xiii). I see beauty—as it regards the Black female body—as bound up in a paradoxical dualism: although photographs of Black semi-nude bodies existed in the shadowy sphere of pornographic and ethnographic photography (often one and the same)14, which encapsuled a sexually charged fascination with the 14  F or the relationship of early photography to race and pornography see Marcus Wood, who discusses the fetishiziation of Black – particularly female – Bodies under the disguise of Anthropology. (Marcus. Wood 2013, 277–79). Additionally, see Mireille Miller-Young who

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Black female body (Willis and Williams 2002) these semi-nudes also stand as collective cultural abjection in the public sphere. Thus, in the context of Thomas’s work, the notion of beauty is replaced by a more urgent affirmation of existence or presence, which I will return to later in the text. Zooming into the details of Thomas’s reconstruction, one notes the deliberately vibrant dresses that the three women are wearing and the fabrics they are placed on which feature layers of leopard, African, and 1970s-patterned fabric. This visual vocabulary, which pulls from popular culture aesthetics, is reminiscent of the richness of color associated with female protagonists from Blaxploitation movies like Foxy Brown from 1974 and Cleopatra Jones from 1973. In the context of Blaxploitation movies, acknowledgment of young black women was to be confronted with powerful female heroines. Black spectators were able to enjoy “Black Revolutionary Women,” as the film theorist Kara Keeling frames these female protagonists, who would succeed via smartness, physical power, and sexual superiority.15 This superiority is played out in the movie narratives so that the Black female protagonists’s sexual and gender ambiguity is consistently negotiated on the basis of intersections of race, gender, and sexual orientation. The Black Revoluntionary Women embody a supposed lesbian, becoming the heroine for other black “damsels in distress” while also, as in the case of Cleopatra Jones, fighting against white butch lesbian villains. Keeling emphasizes her “queer analysis” of Blaxploitation movies, especially those starring Pam Grier, stating that “the apprehensive relationship between blaxploitation’s narrative systems as heteronormative attempts to reign in and regulate the nonheteronormative ruptures made available in the film’s excessive combinations of images and sound.” Thomas’s piece also opens a dialogue with colonial and postcolonial photography from the African continent. Next to the 1970s-patterned fabrics, Thomas placed layers of leopard print, what we read today as African, on which the women are sitting and which create the foundation of their comfort. This gesture recalls the hypersexualisation of female bodies who, in French Orientalist paintings but also in photography, would often be depicted completely naked and stretched out on patterned fabrics equipped with props to invoke imaginary Ottoman Harems. This aesthetic practice, which was common in all African Colonies and existed on the juncture between anthropologic and pornographic fetishizing gaze, has resulted in a consistently instrumentalized form of othering.16 Complexly, these signifiers were also part of a practice of representation of self. Take, for example, photography by Seydou Keïta and his Bamako Stuemphasizes the deep entanglement of the white western fantasies about Black Woman and the high currency of their nude depictions. (Miller-Young 2014). 15  I t is noteworthy, that many black associations, including the NAACP filed against the movie companies, with the critique that incriminating stereotypes about Black people were being reproduced for profit. 16  P  articularly the leopard print or skin has been as source for all sort of racial sexually charged fantasies such as in the homoerotic studio photography by Eric Holland.

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dio photography in pre-independent Mali. Keita engages in a visual creolization of sorts that establishes an aesthetic relationship between the muslim inf luenced world, African diaspora and the African continent. It follows that the Africanisms Thomas utilizes are connected to 1970’s Afro-centric aesthetics, which became a consistent source of inspiration and exchange for the formation and reinforcement of a “common sense Black Nationalism” and the Black Power movement17. I argue that what appears in her art as a layering and critique of modernism also emphasizes the aesthetic intertwinedness of the Black Atlantic. Or, in other words, Thomas’s visual narrative unfolds, what the Martiniquan philosopher Edouard Glissant called, “la creolization du monde.” The Cameroonian artist Samuel Fosso’s piece “The Liberated American Woman of the 70’s” from 1997, which is part of his Tati series, revisits the lush patterns and studio backgrounds which are part of the Westafrican canon of photographic self-representation. However, this example envisions Fosso—who is known for his photographic practice of Masquerade—as an idea of female liberatedness. The aritst presents himself in drag, in a colorful patchwork outfit with purple stilettos, blue nail-polish, f lamboyant jewelry and cowboyhead made of a straw material. Emancipation here seems to be translated into a liberated non-apologetic style, a Westafrican Gaze towards the US, that as Fosso describes in an interview depicts, “a dream that narrates slavery, segregation, and the desire to be free, to get revenge, to be independent from whites, from men, to be economically independent, to make a career for herself.” (Schlinkert 2004) Fosso’s dream of the liberated American Woman from the 1970’s is echoed in Thomas’s visual vocabulary. This is not to say, however, that le dejuner sur l’herbe: trois femmes noirs is limited to appropriations of colonial and post-colonial photography, because apart from these historical references and those associated with African American popular culture from the 1970s, Thomas’s visual references—like the leopard print carpet runner in Le Dejeuner—also draw on pictorial photography from Fred Holland, Wilhelm von Glöden and Julia Margaret Cameron, among others, with its implicit homoeroticism.18 This play with different cultural and historical references evokes a question about the truth or authenticity of Black identity and, as I will argue shortly, gender as it is encoded in these different references. Thomas’s photograph opens a moment of disruption and reorientation through which post-blackness can come into being. This post-blackness is also carried by Thomas’s representation of skin and gender, because the styling, as in the make-up, hairstyles, and clothing, prints and accessories appear almost like a parody that allows for notions of dis-identification, which means, in the vein of Muñoz and Butler, not a counteridentification, but rather such a plethora of signifiers as to create an ambiguity; a failure of identification or slippage. The bodies remain in the performative and don’t allow clear affiliation, because 17  Also see: (Keeling 2007; Gillespie 2016, 35–37). 18  Also see on Julia Margaret Cameron (Schirmer 2003) and on Fred Holland (Kaye 1996).

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the strong make-up allows space for gender ambiguities, particularly since Thomas also works with transgender models without disclosure, in order to affirm their existence as women, their presence, and beauty. The enamel skin I have mentioned regarding Manet’s brushstroke is ref lected in the oiled skin of Thomas’s models, which in turn recall the show character of bodybuilders. The oiled skin highlights the multiple facets of skin complexion from darkbrown, to medium to light-brown, and accentuates the artificial studio lighting that displays itself on the skin like cold and icy ref lections. This skin can also be read as a form of fetishization, as Kobena Mercer has described by using the example of Mapplethorpe’s Black Book series, in which he claims that the Black oily and shiny skin has become synonymous to Latex and fetish culture (2005). The intricate composition of Thomas’s photograph speaks to a deeper dialogue with the history of Modernity. Whereas the original painting depicts two white men talking to each other, excluding the nude women from their circle, Thomas depicts her models interacting with each other and with the spectator. As in the original painting by Manet, Thomas’s appropriation challenges the spectator’s gaze, but in new ways. I propose an examination of the sculptural codes embedded in the photograph by looking closely at the women’s positions and poses including their intertwined legs. The body of the woman on the right side stands in way that emits physical intimacy and receptiveness towards the two women in the background, who likewise share physical closeness. I already mentioned that Manet’s Le Dejeuner and Olympia (1863) found their way into the composition. I draw this connection through the Black women who holds the f lower bouquet. She fulfilled not only the role of a servant, to contrast the main figure’s whiteness, but she was also used to enhance the level of emancipation that the white nude women holds and marks the “presence of illicit sexual activity” (Gilman 1985, 208–9). The Black woman from Olympia, who was identified by the name Laure, offers her mistress, the white nude, a f lower bouquet. The discourse that Thomas opens up includes the inspiration for the original painting Le dejeuner sur l’ herbe, as well as other representations of Laure and painters associated with Manet. Through these references, Thomas creates a contemporary narrative that emphasises Black Women’s aptitude. Laure is linked to Frédéric Bazille’s homage to Manet’s Olympia called Young Woman with Peonies (1870) (Fig. 33), which depicts a Black woman who bears a large bouquet of f lowers and offers a nosegay to the spectator (Murrell 2018, 23).

III. Historical Entanglements of Black Revolutionary Women

Fig. 33: Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies, 1870, oil on canvas, overall: 60 x 75 cm (23 5/8 x 29 1/2 in.) framed: 83.8 x 99.4 x 7.6 cm (33 x 39 1/8 x 3 in.) Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. The gesture and gaze of the model in Bazille’s painting addresses the spectator and offers the same a f lower. The Pop art painter Mel Ramos, on the other hand, also addresses the spectator with the maid’s gaze in his 1974 lithographic interpretation of Olympia, in which he replaced the nude woman with his hallmark: a white pinup. In his version, the Black maid, on the other hand, has large hair like the models in Thomas’s work. Whereas this offer of f lowers is an open suggestion in Bazille’s and Ramos’s interpretation, Thomas introverts the offer into the visual realm of the photograph. In other words, the woman sitting on the right gallantly holding a bouquet of f lowers in her left hand and offering a single f lower to the women juxtaposed to her, while she looks at the spectator narrates a distinctively different story than the Black woman in Olympia. The scene becomes more complex, because as previously mentioned, the original painting by Manet is based on Raimondi’s The Judgement of Paris. In this ancient myth, which determines the notion of beauty as “light-skin,” because an “apple of discord” is presented at a wedding banquet with the inscription, “for the fairest one.” By transposing the signifiers between myth and source painting, Thomas turns the apple into a f lower to highlight the women’s sexual prowess. The role of sexuality and femininity in Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noir is reinscribed in Thomas’s interpretation because of a small detail from the original painting—a frog in the lower left corner, which in colloquial French of the time represented wordplay because grenouille meant

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both “frog” and “prostitute”19(Spence 1997, 14). By omitting this detail from her appropriation, Thomas asserts that the three Black women are not associated with sex work—labor that is culturally stigmatized and that devalues the female subject position. Sexuality is in fact decoded from its heteronormativity in Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe and encoded into the multiple variations of sexualities and choices in Thomas’s version. The artist Kara Walker notes: “But, while relying on the familiar arrangements of white-male painting tradition, Thomas allows her photographic compositions to spiral inward, away from the superficial tropes of exotica, toward the complex sexuality of her models” (2009). Thomas’ composition of bodies, their relations, and the use of 1970’s references and aesthetics opens up a connection to Black Feminist/Womanist Thought that created the basis for may thinkers and artists who have since honored the legacy of a typically diminished subject position. Not only does agency play an important role, Thomas repeatedly points out in interviews that her models are invited to dress themselves within a certain range of dresses and requisites (see, for instance, Mickalene Thomas Studio Visit 2012), thus we can fairly reason that the physical exposure of the woman on the right, when her breast-line is playfully, partly exposed on the side of her dress, comes through participation and agency—notions that radiate forth from the photograph. Of equal note, the entanglement of the women’s legs highlights their physical intimacy. As one offers f lowers in an overly-homoerotic manner, she confronts the spectator with a soft, but determined gaze. The sitters’s gazes hold the spectators’s bodies in their grip, lucidly emanating the multi-dimensionality of desire, internally between the three women, with their external audience and with the photographer as well. I argue that this gesture addresses the power of the erotic as a feminist instrument as described by the philosopher Audre Lorde (Lorde 1984, 56). The erotic in this reimagination of Manet’s original painting is used as a source for solidarity amongst Black Women, as a source for the pleasure to revel in mutual desire and admiration for each other. Lorde’s argument springs from the 1970s feminist debate on pornography,20 and stands in a tradition of “womanism” as coined by Alice Walker, which is also referenced by Thomas who emphasizes the wholeness of a Black feminist investment that subsequently leads to a loving embrace of “other women sexually and non-sexually” (A. Walker 2004, 10). Thomas hence returns to this core of Womanist thought for the contemporary. Thomas further develops her visual eclecticism in the photograph of the scene, by employing collage techniques that are similar to Romare Bearden, 19  O  ther interpretations include Michael Fried who understands the frog and the bullfinch in the upper middle of the painting as signs for temporality, namely speed “of seeing, rendering” and the “moment of vision.” George Mauner reads the frog within the frameset as symbol of the natural, and as the “inevitable paradox of life” as a dualism of the sacred and profane. (Mauner 1975, 28,40). 20  L orde frames the erotic as something distinct from pornography, which feels less sexual and more on the side of love and sharing. What Lorde describes as the “power of the erotic” emphasizes love and the entirety of the erotic.

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an artist who was a part of the Spiral Group.21 Then Thomas makes a large scale painting of the collage, increasing the scenery onto three panels that amount to a scale of 304.8 cm x 731.52 cm. The reference to Bearden is vivid in the cut-and-paste optic of her figures, although in Le Dejeurner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femme Noires. Thomas uses the photograph as the basis and then paints atop it, differing from Manet with her brushstrokes that are applied with a one-dimensional style to recall Pop art painting. Her painting is underlined with bright blocks of color (aquamarine blue, orange, crème violet, and black). The women are cut apart, but remain as the most unfragmented (or unharmed) formation of the collage. Their collective silohette is underscored by a gauge-like cutting, which emphasizes their centrality in the image and pushes their surroundings into the background, clustered like an echo that has lost contact to its source. Like the Chicago-based painter Kerry James Marshall, Thomas uses rhinestones to adorn the women’s hair, bodies, dresses, accessories, and parts of the surrounding fabric. Thomas claims that the rhinestones highlight the potential of the image to ref lect upon the spectator. I would add that the rhinestones literally emphasize the radiation of the painting by highlighting the hair as nimbus, whilst exceeding the potential of color. Since rhinestones translate color back into light, sometimes up to the point of glare and invisibility, they dissolve the illusion of fixation and clarity, depending on the angle from which you look at the painting. Rhinestones are also a key element in Caribbean Carnival as well as in drag culture, evoking notions of play and gender ambiguity. Vision and perception are intrinsically called into question by this work and the cultural referents that it calls on, and are furthered by Thomas’s bold use of contrasting depth and color forms. Flat swaths of orange, purple, black and turquois hit up against warm backgrounds that offere as sense of depth. Flat figures appear in the foreground as well as areas rendered like wood panels, while the entire painting appears cut up, marked through glitches and fractured compositions. Thomas’s painting was shown in the window display of The Modern (MoMA’s high-end in-house restaurant), which faces West 53rd Street, a busy thoroughfare in mid-town Manhattan. Everybody who passed the artwork was addressed, questioned, or simply called upon by the bright colors and giantesses, who represent a particular subjectivity. This publicness prompts a return to one of my central questions as it concerns the depiction of the Black body and perception. I am drawn to a philosophical discussion that the reading of Thomas’s work opens up, through its various turns of situated appropriation, because it reconnects to the concept of post-black, and therefore also, to what it means to not want to “be called a Black artist”. The colonial gaze as a source of Black subject formation, as we engage it through Fanon, is systematically countered through Thomas approach to representation. It 21  I will not engage with the installation that Thomas created for her exhibition at MoMA PS 1 and focus instead on her large-scale painting variation, in order to keep in close dialogue with its historical source—the Manet.

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complicates Fanon’s fixity and proposes an important possibility: that the racial dynamic can be undermined, as it is by Le Dejeurner sur l’herbe: Trois Femmes Noir.

3. O my Body, will always remain in question!— Reviewing the Fanonian Moment It gets very complicated in terms of who is really in control of the gaze: is it the person who is taking the image? Or is it the sitter who is giving you that image? It’s like holding up a mirror. Who has the lens? Is it the sitter or is it the artist? Or is it the viewer? The whole psychological idea of autonomy is brought into question, I think. (Thomas in Ayers 2010) I’m not going to be put in a corner. I’m going to muscle my way to the table, sit down next to you at the Whitney. And do it without Winsor & Newton. I don’t like the idea that we belong at the margins. I don’t want to be a victim, fuck you.22 (Bradford in Siegel 2010). I take Fanon literally—“O my body, always make me a man who questions!— and do not only look at his work as a writer, philosopher, or politician, but as a body in and of itself. Let’s take his final words at the end of his enigmatic book Black Skin White Mask into consideration and transport them into the contemporary, into a time in which Black Women are represented in museums (unfortunately still in comparatively insufficient numbers) and into a time in which his writing has become a contested ground for gender debates.23,24 22  T his statement by Mark Bradford is from an interview, in which he discusses the notion of being a “Winsor & Newton,” referring to a major art-material supplier that is not only pricy, but also part of a specific means of producing paintings. Thus, not to take part in this economy also means using other means of production and an insistence to be acknowledged despite this alternative approach within the realm of high art. 23  I t is important to note that many of the representations that Thomas draws from (especially those that are not from Modern painting) did not yet exist during Fanon’s time and were thus not part of his visual culture. 24  F anon’s work is a core reference text for the “studies of black visuality” (Fleetwood 2011), but nevertheless a lot has changed on various political, cultural, and even geographical levels. Ideas about Blackness and Whiteness have gained layers of practice and analysis over the past twenty years, which is why it is important to emphasize the hybridity and

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3.1

The Colonial Gaze

The gaze in postcolonial theory is strongly connected to the idea that identity is visible. I reference the canonical text by Fanon “The lived experience of the Black man,” which seems, despite its various sexisms and ambiguities (Young 1996, 30; Kimmel 2006, 6–7; Sharpley-Whiting 1998), formative and inexhaustibly capable of providing deep insights into the processes of racism, racialization, and the notion of embodied difference. As a Black German person growing up in a predominantly white environment in the 1980s, Fanon provided affirmation that I was not “crazy,” too sensitive, subjective or aggressive. With his text I started to understand the impact of the colonial Gaze on my formation of self. I consistently return to the text in order to find answers and greater understanding for the complexities of existence as a Black human being or as a somebody that is marked as different. The Fanonian moment, or the “primal scene of imposed identity,” as Hal Foster called it (1993, 69), occurs when Fanon sees a small boy turning to his mother and saying “See Mama, a Negro. I am frightened” (Fanon 1986, 112)25 This leads to a chain reaction of analysis through which Fanon exposes the socioepidermal schema in which the Black body is bound. The child’s gaze creates the “neurotic alienation” that remains key to the Black visual query. Fanon’s thinking was deeply inf luenced by Hegelian Dialectics as well as his training in Psychoanalysis, which is why I propose a reading that takes them both into account in conjunction with the notion of power, its discursive dependency on social networks, and the gaze as proposed by Foucault. I am not reading Fanon’s text exclusively by “privileging the psychic dimensions” (Bhabha 1994, 60)—a strategy that has been criticized by authors like Ato Sekyi-Otu in his book Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (1996, 6–7). Sekyi-Otu convincingly argues through a close reading, and partly revised translation, Fanon’s text should be read as an intelligently dramatized dialectical narrative in which psychoanalytical language is descriptively applied to express the “political experience” of the colonized, rather than to essentialize an ethno-psychological idea of racial psychology (Sekyi-Otu 1996, 7). Hortense Spillers’ analysis looks at Fanon’s use of psychoanalysis as part of his metaphorical language. She emphatically obviates the idea that psychoanalysis can be used for Black individuals due to its constitutive epistemological embeddedness in a colonial logic and discourse (Spillers 1996). impurity of the very same categories racialization and gendering produces that I’m looking at in this chapter (Haschemi Yekani, Michaelis, and Dietze 2011). 25  F anon is not the only Black writer who reports such encounters with the scopic regime. Among many others, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor (Macey 2001, 88), the author George Lamming (1991), Toni Morisson (1992), and bell hooks have written about it. Fanon’s writing in Black Skin White Mask has been described as, “directed at the subtly paternalistic discourses and intonations of [French] whites claiming ‘there is no racism here’” (Stam and Shohat 2012a, 47)[addition by author]. A spatio-temporal momentum thus marks Fanon’s text, his rage and analysis derives from a very specific perspective, which is connected to his encounter with racism and white dominance in France.

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Mary Anne Doane, emphasizes that sexuality, in connection to fear and desire, creates the most intimate intersubjective connection in psychoanalytical theory, which in relationship to whiteness constantly conf lates with notions of Otherness and the exotic/erotic. She points out that for Fanon, psychoanalysis can only be used when the Black body comes into contact with whites/colonizers: “For Fanon, the psyche is always already articulated with the social and the object of his analysis is not the individual but the social network of gazes, desires, fears, and transgressions born of the colonialist/ imperialist enterprise” (Doane 1991, 217). Teresa de Lauretis’s remarks clarify this point as she shows the dialectical tension that the text offers, “Fanon’s unique apprehension of the body as the material ground of subjective formation, which led him add the notion of ‘sociogeny’ to Freud’s ontogeny and phylogeny, extends the theoretical reach of psychoanalysis to a conceptual space located between them, a place beyond the individual’s psychic history (ontogenetic development) but closer home than species history (hylogenetic inheritance), and that is to say, the place of culture” (2002, 54). To read Fanon from this perspective offers a useful tool to understand not only his use of psychoanalysis throughout the text but also clarifies that the body in a Foucauldian reading becomes a playground of culture as many feminist theorists have remarked. De Lauretis’s reasoning of Fanon specifies this notion, as she uses Freudian psychoanalysis and stresses his conceptualization of consciousness as a “sense organ” (de Lauretis 2002, 55). I am therefore convinced that Fanon’s text represents an example of cultural practice in which our bodies are instruments, or more specifically, material discursive tools. This observation stands in a strong correlation to the production of Blackness and the economy of Blackness in which artistic practice is embedded and allows divulging cultural patterns of Othering. Fanon writes, “I am over determined from the outside. I am a slave not to the ‘idea’ others have of me, but to my appearance,” adding that “The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed” (1967, 95). His awareness, that the white gaze is the only valid one within the regime of white supremacy, which is to say the colonial regime, emphasizes that Black subjectivity does act as an external counterbalance to the power dynamic in which the Black body is kept. And, as I argue throughout these chapters, that the internal space of Blackness holds an archive of counterstrategies that can manifest through artistic practice, as a practice of the imaginary. I propose that Fanon may in fact be questioning his own analogy of fixity by looking at various reactions and interactions as tactics of resistances, even when they appear to be impassable. For example, he already hints at an idea of agency when another undetermined voice (but presumably the woman addressing the boy) says: “Look how handsome that Negro is,” and Fanon reacts with, “The handsome Negro says, ‘Fuck you’, madame” (Fanon 1967, 94). The object is disobedient and speaks back! The fact, however, that Fanon’s address includes a gender dynamic that tries to reinstall the Black male on the basis of gender as a superior subject on the canvas of the white “honorable” women highlights the difficulties that the text produces. Ultimately, the black

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man’s masculinity remains excluded, or “castrated” as Philip Kim argues, because his voice and direct defense remains punishable. I relate to Fanon’s experience from within the different socio-geographical-political landscape of Germany, where resistance was an act that invoked dozens of physical fights and brutal violence as a schoolchild from ages of 7–9. These fights were a result of insults that predominantly included the N-word, my father’s “assumed inferiority,” or my mother’s fantasized “deviant sexuality,” and were levied by older white male schoolmates and kids from the neighborhood. Not all of these fights ended in my favor, but most of them did, which raised my confidence and created the space to play and have fun just like other kids. Nevertheless, I was stamped—just as Fanon writes—as violent and aggressive, which produced an un-womaning/un-sexing of me as a disobedient female subject with “traditionally masculine” features, which of course derived from my “Foreignness” and “African Heritage.” Any disobedient behavior was brought back to this formula during my education. So to say “fuck you” (or “bugger” as it is used in other translations) in a physical or oral way still traps the Black subject. I identify three steps of racial subjectification in Fanon’s text that are crucial to understanding counterstrategies to the racial binary and the gaze it produces. 1) Before the “Contact Zone”26 The first state of being, which Fanon describes as he is hit by the gaze and subsequently identifying call of the white, male child, transports him into the sphere of the white imaginary or, as he also calls it, the “irrational.” He is hit by the stereotypical representations that are part of the ideological justifying infrastructure that enabled the barbarism, exploitation and injustice of colonialism and slavery (Jahoda 1999). One of Fanon’s biographers, David Macey, describes this stage by saying that it is the moment when Fanon’s being-inthe-world is connected to becoming a “being looked at,” being for others. It allows the white gaze to center the Black body as the constitutive abject of its being. 2) Debate Fanon’s second move is to turn in his analysis of the gaze to the poems of Negritude writers like Leopold Sedar Senghor, David Diop, Aime Cesiare, as well as African American poets like Richard Wright and Chester Himes. In doing so, he acknowledges the notion of multiplicity and of non-universalisms (Fanon 1967, 114) that are embedded within the works of these authors whose creative process deal with various forms of racialization. As Fanon 26  C  ontact Zone here is used with reference to Louis Mary Pratt’s definition of the “contact zone,” which she elaborates as, “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1991, 34).

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writes, “the black experience is ambiguous, for there is not one Negro – there are many black men” (Fanon 1967, 115).27 He is thus determined by the multiple gazes; the gaze of Black men upon themselves and at each other in the writings of Senghor at the peak of the Negritude movement, for example, with its mythologies about the African continent and essentialism of the African soul and irrationality.28 Additionally, Fanon explores the inscription of the white gaze into cultural practices and knowledge production: “They inscribed on my chromosomes certain genes of various thickness representing cannibalism. Next to the sex linked, they discovered the racial linked. Science should be ashamed of itself!” (Fanon 1967, 100). He establishes several routes that first appear to lead him outside of the fixity of his Body, trying to negotiate the position that is discursively drawn upon him, in order to finally respond to the call “Look Mama, a Negro,” which is constantly produced through representations in visual culture. 3) Acknowledgement and Retreat Although his epistemological quest appears to end in a liberating success, the last part of The lived experience of the black man describes a moment of resignation and inner conf lict. In it, Fanon narrates a visit to the cinema in which he articulates his expectation that a representation of himself on screen will appear. In this case, the psychic-identity—a term I am borrowing from Judith Butler29 —that was invoked and thusly designated by the voice of the child becomes a trap. Fanon wonders by asking, “A feeling of inferiority?” He answers, “No, a feeling of not existing” (Fanon 1967, 118). In other words, to be represented as the racialized Other is not to be represented at all. Fanon’s dramatized analysis almost reaches its peak; the described hyper-visibility of his body culminates in an awareness of an embodied invisibility; the invisibility of his idea of self, which he pursued until he was confronted with the racism of the French capital. Fanon still negotiates his position; he refuses the symbolic “castration,” which we can also read as symptomatic of his misogyny. The movie he is watching is Home of the Brave (Robson 1949), which portrays the experience of a Black American soldier in the US Pacific War. The last scene is a conversation between the Black soldier and an older white soldier whose leg has been amputated because of a war injury. When the Black soldier tries to talk with his supposed white “friend” about the way he is discriminated against by other white soldiers, the debilitated man reframes his complaint within the ideological frame of whiteness and says, “Get used to your color the way I got used to my stump. We are both casualties.” (Fanon 1967, 119). In contrast 27  F anon himself is more than one man: soldier for the French army in 1943-45, doctor in a psychiatry where he was confronted with the traumas produced through colonialism; a soldier and a healer, somebody who took life and tried to save life, already trapped in the dialectic paradox of his own actions. 28  Also see: (D. V. Jones 1964- 2010). 29  Also see: (Butler 1997).

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to the Black soldier in the movie, who takes his white friend’s advice into consideration, Fanon refuses this symbolic amputation and in doing simultaneously performs an act of resistence and reaffirms the intrinsic ableism of the scene. In other words, he rejects the notion that the color of his skin is part of a narrative of “abnormality,” a casualty of human nature in the logics of Darwinism. Darby English points out that rather than finding himself, Fanon loses this version of his “self” when he describes the cinema scene, awaiting and predicting the appearance of the “necessary other” that he phantasmatically embodies. English explains that “Fanon does not appear, he remains unmoored, shifting between the sites marred at once by the ‘I’, the anticipated figure, and the characterization whose imminent arrival would unite them” (2007, 38). It is this tension of looking for the self and being bound in representational modes that my inquiry tries to push farther.30 Without ref lecting on the acknowledgement and identification of the Black figure as a symbolic representation of himself Fanon retreats into a conf lict between the universalism provided by the Negritude (“Infinity”) (Noland 2009, 204) and the “Nothingness” that is inscribed into his body by the white Gaze and burden of “historical racial schema”: I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers; my chest has the power to expand to infinity. I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the cripple. When I opened my eyes yesterday I saw the sky in total revulsion. I tried to get up but eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralyzed wings. Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep. (Fanon 1967, 119) His experience becomes larger than his body, as it is trapped between the notion of no-body and the ultimate. He is dislocated and retreats into the unbearable weight of silence What is left after this excessive exercise is an expression of sheer pain (“I began to weep”), which marks the endpoint of a conversation that started with “Dirty nigger!” or simply “Look! A Negro!” When I revisited Frantz Fanon’s The Lived Experience of the Black Man, I consistently asked myself what if Fanon had reacted differently. How would 30  T hrough Gabriele Dietze’s analysis of “remasculinisation,” I see a parallel with James Baldwin’s literary critique, in his novel Native Son, of Richard Wright’s depiction of black masculinity. Baldwin criticizes Wright’s design of the figure of Bigger Thomas, who affirmed white stereotypes of Black men. Baldwin, in contrast, highlights that access to history, ethics, human dignity, and arts is not dependent on skin-color (Dietze 2013b, 275). In my estimation, Baldwin’s thinking was beyond the point that Fanon investigates, because hesimply deconstructed, ignored (which does not mean that the social realities skin-color brought were not painful to his core (Baldwin 1972), and rejected them. My argument thus would be that in contrast to Fanon, whose thinking is invested in an establishment of humanity through masculinity, due to his quare position, Baldwin is able to go beyond the thresholds of gender and sexuality and therefore offers a more progressive readings through a non-normative subjectivity.

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he have reacted the next, third, or twentieth time in such a racializing encounter?31 Despite the speculative nature of my questions, I insist on asking them, because the serial repetition of the Fanonian Moment is what fixes Black people in the visual paradigm and yet the repetitions of these moments, with all of their variations, also offer possibilities to change the psycho-social realities of racial fixation.

3.2

Entanglements

As I previously stated there are three important steps to understanding racial subjectification and the gaze through Fanon’s text. The third, which I called “Acknowledgement and Retreat,” is the most difficult or even dangerous sphere of Fanon’s thought, because he fully acknowledges the ideology which is projected onto him. Hortense Spiller’s argument that he is caught in a binary disposition, supports my thought. She argues that this binary leads him to fully embrace the colonial and heteronormative ideology of black/ white as well as man/women dichotomies (Spiller 2003, 390). The notion of acknowledgement leads me to Louis Althusser’s notion of ideology, as a mode to think about acknowledgement, the gaze, historical/contemporary presence, and looking relations within Thomas’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femme Noires (2010). Because it is, after all, ideology that inscribes itself into Fanon’s text as well as the Black body, whose depiction is at the core of Thomas’s work. My argument here is that the colonial gaze, which Fanon describes as embedding a historico-epidermal schema is also part of an ideological discourse, which calls upon the Black subject. This argument confronts an intriguing gap between the notion of Althusser’s concept of interpellation and Lacan’s idea of the gaze, that intersects with Kara Keeling’s notion of perception. A discussion of Althusser’s analysis of the ideological state apparatus in detail is beyond the scope of this work, but I will highlight two key aspects of his argument. Althusser’s notion of ideology is based on the idea that every ideology calls on “abstract individuals as subjects,” and thus depends on the acknowledgement of the subject. The various rituals and ways of recognizing the subject in Althusser’s theory are the basis for our acknowledgement that we are indeed subjects: specific, individual, distinctive, natural, and irreplaceable (Althusser 2012, 265–73). In other words, the interpellation of the subject supposes that subjects have always been subjects, and don’t have to become subjects. That is, following Althusser’s example of the family (ibid. 2012, 270), this prerequisite creates a second layering of acknowledgment and encoding of the subject. In other words, it subjugates individuals as passive beings involuntarily defined under the scope of scientific discourse, but it also simultaneously and counterintuitively creates the potential for autonomy and resistance through mobilizing these new identities. So, what I identify in Fanon’s text is that ideology, 31  A  s I have described on my own reactions to racism, it becomes apparent that physical engagements in form of fights has given way to more complex ways of protection or disavowal.

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which can also be translated in the given example as the idea of whiteness or much simpler, the ideology of difference, calls upon a subject with the words “Look Mama a Negro,” but the problem is not only Fanon’s acknowledgement. Instead, it is as Althusser points out, the difficulty that every ideology has a material dimension and manifestation. This manifestation depicts itself in colonial exploitation, slavery, killings, brutal violence, or everyday racism, as Fanon describes it. What is crucial is the moment in which Fanon starts to look for himself in the movie; it is the acknowledgement of a certain representation that inscribes his body into the discourse of binary differences and their socioeconomic and historical consequences. The cinema scene is the moment, in which a decolonization project has to start. Althusser explains distinctively, that every “primary” ideology can also produce “secondary” ideologies as a sort of “by-product,” and sees here the roots for the possibility of change and revolution.32 My argument is that Althusser’s idea of change is already part of a contemporary practice and exemplified in, for example, contemporary art (which can be seen as the ultimate “by-product” and nevertheless part of the powerful primary ideology of capitalism). Thomas’s practice creates a narrative of acknowledgement that de-objectifies the women in the portrait. In the example of Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, the visual depiction and affirmation of the black female subject is transformed into an inscription; into ideology: “[T]he existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing” (Althusser 2000, 33). I interpret this process as a form of common sense from a Black Woman’s perspective, which is then inscribed into the visual regime of representations, with the women as visible subjects rather than objects at the periphery. Thomas’s elaborations on the gaze of the sitters highlights this point: “I think that when the eyes meet there’s a recognition and acknowledgement and validation: you see me and I see you. To me that’s a very important quality in my work. The sitters are aware of their empowerment but also of the viewer’s response to it” (Thomas in Ayers 2010). The artwork is part of the logic of the gaze, as described by Fanon and in this chapter, which is why it is so important to understand these by-products of ideology as foresights of potential change, even as they exist within an affective and conscious interplay. The Black female body is a complex subject, as I pointed out earlier, due in part to its public evaluation in Western societies through practices of spectacular exposure—used as medical test subjects and as a marginalized labor force. The Black female body is therefore not easily ascribable into the notions of subjectivity and resistance that Althusser opens up. Bearing this in mind, I argue that the affirmative process of claiming the space of beauty is bound to the very same logics of exposure. The concept of beauty that I have stressed in this reading is intrinsically bound to a philosophical history that has called attention in the decolonial project. According to Walter Mignolo, 32  T his revolution in his view can only take place in a complete renewal and restructuring of the entire state apparatus in order to have an effective outcome.

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“‘Art’ that originally meant ‘to make’ became ‘art as aesthetics and aesthetics as art’. Which means that ‘to make’ was associated with values attached to the beautiful and the sublime” (Mignolo 2012, 5). Thus, the notion of beauty derives from a Western value system that this text calls into question. My critique of the value system of beauty is stressed, because it is part of an idea of subjectivity that is granted by the acknowledgment of the spectator and its public presentation. In contrast, a decolonial approach tries to challenge the presented ideas of virtue and sublimity, which are intrinsically connected to beauty. This argument comes with the notion that beauty in the works of Thomas is in fact a claim for existence in the framework of Western thought, a form of visual presence.

* The post-black art discourse opens up pertinent and challenging questions, that relate back to the ways in which Blackness has been defined. I have highlighted Fanon’s text as a formative example for this study of Blackness in the visual realm, even though, or perhaps precicely because of the text’s limitations when it comes to engaging with the ways Thomas uses disidentification as a tool to complicate both race and gender of her subjects. Despite the fact that Fanon ruminates on resistance, he does not succeed in envisioning a form of existence that does not trap him in the color of his skin in The Lived Experience of the Black Man. Who is called on by whom? Who is an authority of composition and representation? Whose desire is addressed? These questions cannot be answered only from the perspective of the threshold of the skin. Thomas’s visual language in Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femme Noires is too complex and too queer to be kept in simple heteronormative and racial dichotomies. As Thomas’s women gaze back at the viewer and at each other, they question our ideas of self until the lines blur and dissolve into the glitter of their crowns. The complex dialogue between Thomas and Manet, which is anchored in a chronopolitical dialogue, doesn’t allow the Western Canon to exist comfortable and selfevidently. The layers in Thomas’s work show that a Black subject can undermine and call into question the interpellative structure that Fanon so eloquently described. I consider Thomas’s works under discussion to be the depiction of the postscript of the Fanonian moment. Thomas practices a form of visual disobedience that derives from the consistent interpellative structure of race in visual culture. In other words, her artworks hold two truths at the same time—fixation and a breaking out of it. While visual representation may not be the only site to contest the question of ontology, it is able to elucidate complex relationships between race and visuality, which lie at the heart of our ability to envision ourselves—in full color.

IV. Heterotemporality as a Way of Understanding the Contemporary1 1. Reclaiming our time To confront every second as if it has always been in existence, though its materiality is fleeting. (Hewitt in Menconeri 2009) If we are to understand racial politics and inequality in non-phenotypic, non-essentialized terms, then we must attempt to comprehend the meanings of race against the canvas of space, time, and history. (Hanchard 1999, 235) The curatorial concept of post-black in the suite of exhibitions Freestyle, Frequency and Flow invites questions about time, history, and the contemporary. Despite Thelma Golden’s emphasis on chronology (and its inherent generationalism),2 what I encountered in these exhibitions, and especially in the first of the series, Freestyle, were artworks that confront the spectator with temporal overlays and synchronicities produced through in-depth discourses about African American histories and their archives. These artworks persistently highlight the ways in which Black people have been exploited by the politicization of time through temporal modalities like delay and acceleration, as well as promises of a salvational futurity. The frequent engagement with archives works against erasure and against a Eurocentric, linear understanding of time that presents Blackness as monolithic. Instead, multiple histories complicate and enhance the body that is Blackness. Rather than present a totalizing claim about Blackness, the exhibitions introduced viewers to young (at the time) artists working in search of meaning, drawing from a vast 1  Some parts of this chapter have been published in (Adusei-Poku 2014). 2  I hesitate to use the term generation in this context because it may reinscribes Black politics into a progress narrative, which I try to avoid.

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sea of experience and from the violent histories of enslavement and imperialism. Through their work, we understand that the notion of of Blackness cannot be separated from the histories that produce it as a racialized category. Hence, through Golden’s exhibitions the notion of post-black opens up the framework of blackness to include a multiplicity of throughlines that have shaped the Black subject and continue to impact the Black Diaspora today. In this chapter, I will argue that Blackness is nonlinear and moreso, is produced in heterotemporality. I will explore various layers of time and modes of temporality that ref lect the multiple categories, histories, and relations that Blackness occupies, each of which I consider key to the contemporary meaning of the term.

Fig. 34: Leslie Hewitt install selection from the series Rif fs on Real Time, 2013 Installation view: Leslie Hewitt, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, 2013 An important artwork that speaks to this question is Rif fs on Real Time by Leslie Hewitt (Fig. 34), who was part of the exhibition Freequency. As a trained sculptor, Hewitt eventually changed her practice from making three-dimensional physical sculptures to photography and film. Her range of experience is ref lected in the composition and arrangements of her photographs, which have been described as “sculpturally constructed,” (Molon 2012). The sculptural element links her work with that of conceptual photographers like Miriam Böhm, Anne Collier, and Jimmy Robert, all of whom explore the realm of photography through its explicit materiality. Each of these artists include ephemeral objects in their sculptural presentation of photographs and in the photos themselves, frequently using popular visual culture (like advertisements), and applying conceptual strategies. I met Hewitt, who was born in New York City and who received her BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Scienec and Art and an MFA from

IV. Heterotemporality as a Way of Understanding the Contemporary

Yale University, while she was Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Berlin. The Berlin Fellowship Program has a long-standing tradition of inviting artists of color to their program including i.e. William Cordova, Julie Merehtu, and Wangechi Mutu, Paul Pfeiffer. It is also an institution that can be seen as a result of the post-WWII period and the Cold War. I am mentioning this detail as it shows that the routes and movements of the artists and the art that I am discussing are connected to many historically embedded relations and are not exclusively created within or inf luenced by the US context. The fact that a young Black Woman artist was offered this kind of fellowship shows that some circumstances are different for Black Woman artists working today then they were even twenty years prior, while other pressing and oppressive issues remain. It is important to recall here the article by Adrian Piper called The triple negation of the Colored Women Artists. In this article, Piper discusses the negation of colored women artists (CWA), institutional racism, and the impossibility of becoming part of the art history canon. She also highlights the constant “othering” that foregrounds their work as “colored” artists and she emphasizes the double bind of racism and sexism that colored women artists have to battle with simultaneously (Piper 2001). Piper describes: “For example, a CWA who expresses political anger who protests political injustice in her work may be depicted as hostile or aggressive; or a CWA who deals with gender and sexuality in her work may be represented as seductive or manipulative; or a CWA who chooses to do her work rather than cultivate political connections within the art world may be seen as exotic or enigmatic” (2001, 59). I will argue that Hewitt’s work contends with all of these features. Hewitt explores the realm of the two-dimensional photograph through the three-dimensional code of the objects she depicts and then, installs her photographs as though they were sculptures (Fig. 35). Sometimes her framed largescale photographs lean against the wall and appear alternately like forgotten f lotsam or immovable monuments. Their scale, formal lucidity, and format are reminiscent of Donald Judd’s minimalist installations, which, despite their static appearance, also raise questions about the processual nature of being (Judd 1984). Hewitt’s work is not only interested in sculptural forms, but also in the relational aspects of race and its marginalized histories, contemporary perceptions, rhythm and repetition, and archival meta-narratives. She combines space with time through the use of iconic texts from literature, as in Midday Series for example, and by invoking both bodies and situated knowledges within her frame. I argue that her approach not only activates the political dimension of sculptural photography, but can also be read as a critique on the sometimes sterile, orderly constructions and socially one-dimensional aspects of German photographers—like Thomas Demand or Miriam Böhm—because her work operates through the visibility of racialized social relations.

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Fig. 35: Leslie Hewitt, Rif fs on Real Time (1 of 10), 2006 -2009, Chromogenic print, 30 x 24 inches (76.2 x 61 cm) (LH-12-PH), Courtesy the artist and Perrotin.

2. Riffs on Real Time and the present that is fleeting though captured Racialized social relations are lucid in Rif fs on Real Time, a series of photographs printed at 76.2 x 61 centimeters, which depict various layers of rectangular shaped objects. These can also be described as three-layer collages that “are sculptural as well as image-bearing” (R. Hopkins 2011). Hewitt is interested in relicts, ephemera, leftovers—the hidden stories in the attic whose narrators have failed to survive their rediscovery. She questions the dramaturgy of histories, genres, and the eagerness of the spectator to make sense of historical debris by shaping it into narrative. Writing about the way these leftovers reappear as layers curator Kate Menconeri writes, “Hewitt reshuf-

IV. Heterotemporality as a Way of Understanding the Contemporary

f les historical and everyday ephemera in a new suspended time and context to consider the role of images and objects in our personal and collective consciousness” (Menconeri 2009).

Fig. 36: Leslie Hewitt, Rif fs on Real Time (7 of 10), 2006 -2009, Chromogenic print, 30 x 24 inches (76.2 x 61 cm) (LH-13-PH), Courtesy the artist and Perrotin. My reading of Riffs on Real Time begins with the layer that is furthest away from the viewer. The basis, ground, and biggest layer in the work, which reappears in each piece from the series, is made from the monochromatic dark red or blue carpet of a timber parquet f loor. The way Hewitt color codes the layers of squares is reminiscent of Josef Albers’s color studies and yet unlike Albers’s pristine swaths of color, Hewitt’s wooden f loors show signs of everyday use; they feature marks, scratches in the enamel, paint stains, grain, and dirt. The wood shows off natural signs of growth, which visualize the duration it took to shape the grain into the dark and light lines that mark the individual biogra-

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phy of this material. The stains and scratches on the wood guide our imagination, pointing towards possible human interactions with the f loor in different locations that might include the artist’s studio, the garage, or a workshop. The second layer, which appears on top of the squares of timber f loor, varies between magazine images, receipt sheets, paper with sketched figures, notebooks, and other unidentifiable books and maps. All of these objects document moments in time. They are material witnesses of historical moments and part of a public discourse that either heralds a shift in politics or testifies to a status quo. They appear personal and yet they don’t need to be deciphered or “known” to be understood. In an example that I would like to further explore, the second layer consists of a magazine page showing young, predominantly male protesters on a street (there is only one person presenting as a woman, who wears a pleated skirt and appears on the lower, right-hand side of the image). They are wearing school uniforms and bonnets, in the fashion of 1970s South Africa. Only the word “Release” and letters “AA” are readable from the the banner on the mid-left side of the page and the board on the upper-right part of the photograph respectively. The street appears rural, as urban indicators like houses or stores are missing—a tree in the upper middle of the image and the blurry scenery in the background lead to this assumption. The camera may not have been able to capture the background and the scene reminds me of the Hammatan, the dry and dusty wind from the Sahara, which obnubilates the Ghanaian sky and landscape from December until February; it is a tense time in which dryness and the dust dominate the landscape . Since the protesters are of high school age, their bodies tell us that the picture shows the Soweto Uprising, which is synonymous with the protest by South African students against being taught in Afrikaans—a Dutch colonial language. Their protests, which included the participation of an estimated 20,000 students, began on June 16, 1976 and resulted in wide-spread acts of resistance. The students were defeated by the Apartheid regime’s brutal violence, with an estimated number of deaths ranging from 176 to 700.3 On the lower side of the image that Hewitt has staged in her photograph, we can see the name of the magazine that published this image of the children, the year of it’s publication and the page on which it appeared. It is from an issue of Ebony magazine dated October 1976. This detail draws an important connection between the African Diaspora and the African continent, since Ebony represents the first Black “lifestyle” magazine in the US that was simulatenously banned in South Africa, as stated by the photo editorial with the title, “The Handwriting on the Wall” to which this image originally belonged (“Handwriting on the Wall-South African Race Relations” 1976). Despite the spatial distance and different political conditions between South Africa and the US, this detail creates a metaphorical bridge to the third layer of the collage. The third layer in the series Riffs on Real Time consists of snapshots and amateur analogue photography of black life in the United States. The trace of time is 3  F or further readings on the Soweto upraising, see (Brickhill and Brooks 1980; Ndlovu 1998; Perbi 2005).

IV. Heterotemporality as a Way of Understanding the Contemporary

materialized through the faded tint of the vintage photographs and inscribed by the styles and designs they depict. These snapshots are part of a public discourse and can be considered as diasporic documents of Black life and subjecthood (“Handwriting on the Wall-South African Race Relations” 1976). The snapshots can be read as intimate memory capsules with their own sociohistoric and inter-subjective narratives. As the art historian Huey Copeland argues, “Hewitt highlights vernacular photographic practices that conjure alternative visions of Black life. Not content to target the brief intervals in which African American politics perennially unfolds in mainstream narratives, she proffers the expansive envelope of everyday temporality” (Copeland 2011b, 185). Hewitt’s collection of snapshopts offer spatial dimensions too, revealing various landscapes, workspaces, or still-lifes devoid of human protagonists. They are also material witnesses to photographic histories and the developments of technology that have since take place as the paper that they are printed on is no longer produced. Thusly, Hewitt’s inclusion of snapshots within her photographic constructions reveal socio-historic-relations that transgress time and space. In the given example, the third layer depicts a scene in a garden that seems set in the early 1970s, as is implied by the style of the long green-and-white lawnchair that dominates the frame. Although the people depicted in this image don’t offer a clear determination of how much time has since passed, the photograph’s age is indicated by the faded colors, red tinge, and pale edges. The photographic format, a 1970s quick-print indicated by square paper with round edges, can be found in almost every household’s photo collection. The photographs represent the artifacts of family histories—images that were taken with outdated camera technologies and printed on paper that is often no longer produced or has become an expensive, niche product ordered exclusively online. By including these anachronistic media, Hewitt underscores the notion of temporality in relation to the construction of Blackness. The snapshot shows four people at a barbecue. Two men sit opposite each other, one on a garden chair and the other on a small bench. The Black man on the right leans slightly forward while the fair man on the left, in a black-andwhite pleated short-sleeved shirt, has a relaxed posture that reveals a white napkin placed on his lap. Their bearing gives the impression that they are in conversation. One lawn chair to the left of the photograph is empty and adds to the notion that more people are part of the scene than we currently see captured in the photograph. The color of the green-and-white braided plastic-chair lawnchair with wooden armrests is contrasted by the deep red color of the shirt of the Black man sitting on the bench. The skin-color of the standing man and of the man wearing the black-and-white shirt doesn’t allow the assumption that they are white, but they appear fairer than the rest of those depicted. Hewitt’s juxtaposition of this photograph—which includes the representation of racial ambiguity by way of a range of Blackness—with the image of segregated, dark-skinned South African protesters seems to highlight two contrasting political paradigms. The composition of colors, planar intersections, faceless bodies, and generic ambience doesn’t reveal much meaning or personal detail. The very

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ephemerality and banality of the image creates a tension between the magazine picture of the protesting students and the snapshot. The family memory captured in the snapshot is contrasted, and literally embedded within, the historical discourse of freedom struggle in South Africa. Neither image is free from affective capacities—quite the opposite. The historian Tina Campt writes in her conclusion to Image Matters about the affective temporality of family photographs. She realizes that she is unable to read in her own family photographs the potential of “multiple touch, sonic rhythms, synchronies, ensemblic improvisations or experience the humming of music.” (2012a, 203) These personal photographs are saturated with affect and are thus caught in a “before and after” of a specific moment from her own biography. While looking at the family snapshot in Leslie Hewitt’s work, such an affective saturation does not occur. One sees someone else’s family or friends at a barbecue. The captured scene invokes an affective play of visual and sonic impressions like laughter, movement, and the scent of deliciously spiced barbecue smoke. The image illustrates a notion of being together and enjoying each other’s company that is embedded in a heteronormative value system. While we are socialized in that system, such scenes can also mean the opposite for many of us—family photographs also produce shame, pain, or frictions depending on one’s own experience, memories and family constellations. Campt underlines this argument by saying “my wounded kinship with my own family photos provides both a primary motivation and a significant reinforcement for my conviction that such images are powerful objects of affective condensation that register both the intensity of positive affects and the equally intense wounds of negative affects” (Campt 2012b, 203). Thinking about Hewitt’s inclusion of this family snapshot by way of Campt, we can see that for Hewitt, public protest and intimate gatherings are likely not simple binaries. The image of the Soweto Uprising stresses the notion of being hurt. It represents not only the historical wounds from this demonstration of will—a cry for political freedom—but the contemporary wounds amassed by the recollection of the historical event.4 These images, which capture various violent histories of injustice, create virulent wounds and polyphonic emotional landscapes that moves across our notion of time, brigning the past into the present. Taking the three layers that I have just described, Hewitt creates a fourth by capturing them through her own photograph, which ultimately challenges the act of looking. In her phorograph, space becomes symbolically compressed. We are presented with a bird’s-eye view, which, according to Western art aesthetic histories and specifically movements like the Neue Sachlichkeit, is supposed to give an “overview on the world”. Here, intead, space is transcoded into a kind of close-up suspension so that we, the viewers, have to look closer and investigate the image layers in terms of their histories and relations. Photographers like Alexander Rodchenko, Aenne Biermann and Germaine Krull, who were instrumental in creating the Neue Sehen at the beginning of the twentieth century, used a bird’s-eye view in urban photography in order to 4  On the connection of speech, political freedom, public acts, and politics, see: (Arendt 1977).

IV. Heterotemporality as a Way of Understanding the Contemporary

make visible things and connections that the f laneur in the street wouldn’t recognize, giving voice to counterideological views in art and politics. (Krull and Sichel 1999; Kühn 2005; Rodčenko and Archipenko 1993) Hewitt follows in this tradition, in part, bending it to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist ends. By using this technique, Hewitt inspires the viewer to search for narrative or meaning between the objects and scenes depicted in the layers of images, which are connected by the very fact that Hewitt has photographed them together. The power of their associations opens up the notion of time, encourages us to envision unpictured moments, exposes a hidden interlocutor—the eye of the photographer—and transposes the past, present, and future. Rif fs on Real Time creates rhythmic structures with the photographs arranged in an orderly, stoic and even industrial way. The scale of each photograph (76.2 x 61cm) means that the images gain an additional sculptural quality: lined up in front of a white gallery wall, Hewitt’s photographs appear like windows into a surreal world in which the ground becomes the horizon. None of these photographs are organized around a vanishing point; instead, the spectator is drawn into an archive. Hewitt describes her approach to photography as follows: “What if we understood a photographic image as an abstraction of facts, extracted from life in its fullness and dimension? I understand photography as a compressed version of the world, funneled through a monocular point of view” (Hewitt 2012). Photography as a medium can abstract meaning and allows the “viewer”5 a principal perspective, as Susan Sontag described when she said that, “to photograph means to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.” (Sontag 1971, 4) Sontag’s quote highlights the fact that through this lens of knowledge and power the spectator of photography experiences forms of emotion as well as histories of wounds, perhaps all the more so in Hewitt’s photographs where the various archival layers create an emotional landscape. Hewitt does not elaborate further on who directs the “monocular point of view,” but her statement shows that it is a technical as well as subjective gaze; read with Susan Sontag, it is one which appropriates and empowers unseen, unfelt emotional knowledges, narratives, and relations of history.

2.1

Possible Presents

Writing further about Hewitt’s work, Copeland highlights her use of archival materials by drawing on Hal Foster’s notion of the “archival impulse”, which expresses itself in Hewitt’s photographs through the clustering of historical documents, amateur photography, and objects like books, magazines, and snapshots (Copeland 2011b, 186). In his essay the “Archival Impulse,” Foster describes the practice of artists-as-archivists, with the examples of Tacita 5  I am using “viewer” and “photographer” in a similar sense here on the basis of Jaques Lacan’s observation, when he writes that he photographs through a gaze that puts spectator and photographer in the same position. (Lacan 1999).

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Dean, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Sam Durant. He shows the ways in which these artists reframe, gather, oppose, or “connect what cannot be connected” from archival materials and thus “recoup failed visions in art, literature, philosophy, and everyday life into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the non-place of the archive into the no place of utopia” (Foster 2004, 22). Copeland elaborates upon this notion so that it includes tracing gaps in the narrative of history and identifying these gaps as “construction sites.” (2011b, 186) For Copeland, the “construction site” of history collapses when different notions of time, history, and the contemporary fuse in the process or act of looking—an experience which is at the forefront of Hewitt’s artistic work.6 The gaps in the narrative of history that Copeland describes are deep; they map an abyss caused by consistent erasure and systemic violence, which has been expanded into a notion of non- futurity for Black Existence. It is not an accident that it is so often dystopia, which marks Black futurity in both contemporary and historical representations. As Copeland frames it, “In their deliberative composition, Hewitt’s photographs record the pleasures and difficulties involved not only in mining the archive but also in expanding its purview by forging connections between the shards of black memory and dominant cultural narratives” (Copeland 2011b, 186). Rif fs on Real Time not only encapsulates this observation, it also displays the complexities, multiplicities, and relations of our existences. Hewitt’s photographs are sometimes described as having a quality of Mise en abyme (Hewitt 2012), a formal technique that can be described as the depiction of an image of the image within itself (in a sequence appearing to reoccur infinitely), or simpler still, as the copy of an image within itself. Famous examples of Mise en abyme in painting include Velazquez’ Las Meninas (1646) or René Magritte’s La Reproduction Interdite (1937), in which one encounters an image within the image through a prominently placed mirror. In connection to Hewitt’s work, the Mise en abyme can be thought of, more precisely, as a form of repetition, motion, or even the rhythmically visualized layers of synchronic of time. Her work catches the viewer with the similar affective expression of rhythm and finitude. Once the viewer realizes that none of the images in her photographs repeat the objects depicted, the piece unfolds one of its strongest assets: the deferral of our gaze and enjoyment of deceleration. Writing about different temporalities in the context of contemporary art, critic Stefan Heidenreich points out that, “the relation of art to temporality has always been connected to the promise of eternity” (Heidenreich 2009, 78). I argue that this promise, which is deeply connected to the value system of art, is reneged when the gaze is decelerated because in that slowing down various temporalities, aesthetic relations, and sociohistoric specificities become tangible and apparent. That “promise of eternity” is connected—through the art market and its attendant value systems—to an idea of genius, which is implicitly embodied through cis white masculinity. The notion of the eternal in Western Art (which stems from practices of Christianity) is only reserved 6  For further reading on the archive, see: (Enwezor 2008).

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for Human beings, which according to Western philosophical traditions are defined as male, sexually conforming white subjects. Thus, the juxtaposition of places-in-time in Hewitt’s work, this particular expression of temporality, highlights the broken philosophical underpinnings of eternity. Let me hence return to the discussion of the layering of time and Black Life.

3. Rewind Selecta The historian Michael Hanchard emphasizes in his article “Afro Modernity” the temporal dimensions of racial inequality. He uses the distribution of data to demonstrate examples of “institutionalized temporal disjuncture.” In his article, this data tracks the distribution of school books between whites and Blacks or access to institutions, services, and food during the time of racial segregation in North America. His attempt is primarily to highlight the consequences and strategies of overcoming significant institutional disjuncture, which he calls “racial time” and consequently reveals the ways Africans and people of African descent have been shaped into modern subjects: “Racial time is defined as the inequalities of temporality that result from power relations between racially dominant and subordinate groups” (1999, 253). Hanchard organizes racial time into three strands: First, waiting and inequality of labor time, as expressed by the delay of goods and access to knowledge, using the example of the Jim Crow era (1999, 265) or the paternalism of white slave owners who would determine the lifetime of enslaved Africans according to how qickly they were “worn out” through labor. The second strand is the appropriation of time that it takes the subordinate groups to reach the status of political equality through independence from colonial powers or revolutions against social injustice. The third strand is part of a progress narrative, which is less inspired by the personal progress of the individual or group than a connection between an aff liction caused by a historical injustice with Christian connotations, which discloses a revelation of justice in form of a vengeful God. Thus Hanchard does not join the debate about whether or not there are different modernities or only one Western modernity (i.e. Smethurst 2011; Gilroy 1993d; Lemke 1998; Chatterjee 1997; Eisenstadt 2000; Kaviraj 2000). His attempt is rather to look at the ways in which Black individuals have already been a part of and have practiced modernity. In its understanding of time, Hanchard’s argument is comparable to German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s theory of temporal disjuncture, or “non-synchronicity,” which is produced through the temporal lag that happens during the processes of modernization. For example, Bloch examines the writings of Marx and Engels, according to which the working class does not partake in the advantages of the Industrial Revolution and is thus also affected by temporal disjuncture (Bloch 1961). Hanchard’s emphasis follows this tradition, but with an intersectional and postcolonial focus that allows him to underline and complicate the temporal disjunctures produced by racial and labor exploitation. Hanchard’s work may recall Johannes Fabian’s efforts along similar lines in Time and the Other, in which Fabian writes, “Time, much like money and lan-

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guage, is a carrier of significations between the Self and the Other” (Fabian 1983, xl). Hanchard uses a similar argument as Fabian, but with an invaluable twist when he says: “Like the movement of capital within the international political economy, Afro-Modern politics has treated national-state boundaries and territorial sovereignty as secondary considerations of their imagined community. Afro-Modernity is at once a part of and apart from the parameters of Western modernities” (1999, 267). This imagined community has the distinctive feature of temporality and therefore a formative character. Consequently, Hanchard’s thinking is not limited to the space of the North American African Diaspora. His elaboration also includes the African Continent, South America, and the Caribbean, which adds a spatio-temporal dimension of the Diaspora to his thinking about racial time. This highlights the spatial expansion of such a disjuncture (or “allochronism” in Fabian) as a strategic tool in the oppression of people of African decent.7 It follows that the politics and strategies that emerged in order to counter this tool of oppression addressed both the temporal and spatial dimension, which he shows with examples from Cuba, Brazil, North America, as well as West Africa. Hanchard conclusively argues that “there are many vantage points from which one can view and experience this thing known as modernity: as nightmare or utopia; as horrible past or future present. These contrasting views caution us against modernity’s reification and implore us to view modernity as a process of lived experience, with winners and losers, as well as strivings for redemption, recovery, retribution, and revolution, each experience tumbling into another and becoming—dare I say—history” (1999, 268). Hanchard’s analysis is important for the argument that I present regarding the concern of race, temporalities and art. Extending Hanchard’s argument into the contemporary, we can see that when it comes to the canvas of time, space, and history (and the specific perception of history that is favored), chronocentrism continues to dominate our current moment. Nowhere is this more clear than in Hewitt’s composite photographs, which draw on the mechanisms of modernity to explicate the formation of historical narrative over time. I aim to emphasize the synchronicity of multiple temporalities that a subject can occupy (across historical and contemporary disjunctures). Indeed, these multiple temporalities even interact within each subject. Thus, there is no “pure” history—there are everyday lived experiences with multiplicities of disjunctures and storylines. Enigmatic but resolute and complex observations about Blackness and time are thoroughly engaged by physicist philosphers who describe it along a space-time continuum.8 I am interested in a theory of time that derives from lived experiences, as they are articulated by contemporary aesthetics, in order to develop a methodology that can address current conditions of racalised existences. 7  F or example, Kwame Nkrumah, highlights the temporal delays and connection of the colonial economy but also the transnational application of racial time in the Diaspora. (Hanchard 1999, 262–63). 8  For a succinct analysis of Physics and concepts of Blackness see: (M. M. Wright 2015).

IV. Heterotemporality as a Way of Understanding the Contemporary

4. Hetero-temporality The artistic practices that I research focus on what it means to be Black in the twenty-first century. I argue that synchronicity of racial time and multiplicity of temporal disjunctures are expressed in contemporary Black aesthetic practices because they are integral to the Black experience. The disjunctures that a subject occupies are simultaneously played out on different temporalities and through a corporeal schema. The notion of synchronicity is ref lected even in the title of Hewitt’s piece, Real Time. It sits relation to Henri Bergson’s concept of time, which includes “real time”, a term that describes the very moment in which we experience time. Bergson argues that there are two distinct times: duration and real time. In simplified terms, this means that duration is the way we measure or experience time. In other words, duration is how we memorize and how we are able to process, articulate, and record time. Drawing on Bergson’s theories, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze refers to duration time as a “coexistence” of the past within the present, rather than time as succession.9 Real time, in contrast, is the actual moment of perception without the “before or after,” framing this ungraspable and f leeting phenomenon. In Bergson’s words, “Everyone will surely agree that time is not conceived without a before and after—time is succession. Now we have just shown that where there is not some memory, some consciousness, real or virtual, established or imagined, actually present or ideally introduced, there cannot be a before and an after, there is one or the other, not both; and both are needed to constitute time. Hence, in what follows, whenever we shall wish to know whether we are dealing with a real or imaginary time, we shall merely ask ourselves whether the object before us can or cannot be perceived, whether we can or cannot become conscious of it.” (Bergson 2002a, 218) With this quote in mind, what becomes clear in connection to Hewitt’s photographs is that real time creates a gap or a disparity as it accumulates the (non-)possibilities of a “before” and an “after”. This, in contrast to how Bergson conceptualized duration as “the continuous progress of the past which grows into the future and which swells as it advances” (Bergson 2002b, 1731).10 9  Also see: (Deleuze 1991, 51–73). 10  I don’t want to leave unmentioned the problem of vitalist philosophy and its implications in anti-Semitic and racial discourses. According to philosopher Donna Jones, the following problem arises through the biologism in Bergson’s vitalist philosophy: “For if life is essentially a mnemic force—indeed, if living being is memory in its genetic, immunological, motor, and psychological properties, then any entity is constituted through its history.… Bergon’s philosophy does not clearly guard against a biological reductionist reading and in fact encourages it at many points. Having analogized the living being to a thoroughfare through which the impulsion of life is transmitted, Bergson has the individual carry his entire past, a past that extends back to his earliest ancestors and that is augmented with passage of time” (D. V. Jones 1964- 2010, 104).

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In connection to Rif fs on Real Time, Bergson’s proposal, whether one can or cannot become conscious of an object—imagined or real11 —is important because each photograph poses this question anew, creating multiple experiences of temporality, which I call “hetero-temporality,” in order to stress the sociohistorical dimensions in Hewitt’s work. The term “hetero-temporality” should not be understood in contradiction to Jack Halberstam’s use of queer time. In Halberstam’s approach “hetero” is a signifier for sexual orientation and heteronormative orders of space and time that are embedded in a discourse of situated knowledge and sociological observations. For Halberstam, queer time is, “the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence–early adulthood–marriage–reproduction–child rearing–retirement–death, the embrace of late childhood in place of early adulthood or immaturity in place of responsibility. It is a theory of queerness as a way of being in the world and a critique of the careful social scripts that usher even the most queer among us through major markers of individual development and into normativity” (Halberstam in Dinshaw et al. 2007, 183). The term “hetero” brings attention to heteronormative restrictions and determinations of time. It can also point to the disjuncture in an individual’s biography though, especially in regards to queer time.12 I think this approach is extremely valuable when talking about disjunctures in historical narratives, and it can be thought of alongside the notion of racial time that Hanchard proposes. People of color are not only affected by queer time but also by racial time. This aspect or intersection is neither ref lected in Halberstam’s nor Hanchard’s writing. Each writer either excludes race (Halberstam) or heterosexual normativity (Hanchard). My conceptualization of hetero-temporality is not embedded in a discourse of queer/hetero binaries. Instead it positions hetero in contrast to the “singular” or “mono” conception of linearity and therefore of linear time. It includes racial as well as queer time as well as the gaps in time described in Real Time. My decision to frame Hewitt’s work within the concept of hetero-temporality also derives from Michel Foucault’s use of heterotopia and the etymological derivation of the word “different.”13 “Different” is not seen as a biol11  T he notion of imagined or real in this context of photography poses again the often-discussed question of the “truth claim” of the photograph as material evidence of an event. See: (Tagg 2009). 12  F or an even more advanced proposition of Queer time, see artist and theorist Renate Lorenz’s approach to time; she proposes as a queer-counter conceptualization by way of the term “transtemporal drag,” which is based on Elizabeth Freeman’s temporal drag. Transtemporal drag is conceptualized as an alternative form of subjection. (Lorenz 2012a, 103). 13  T his notion of difference is also connected to an acceptance of difference or to a non-understanding of difference that is derived from Edouard Glissant’s notion of opacity. While

IV. Heterotemporality as a Way of Understanding the Contemporary

ogist ascription of sex, but rather as a way of incorporating differences and multiplicities into the idea of time itself. Huey Copeland’s use of “archival fever” and its utopic potential (as well as the observation that both “archival fever” and the utopic potential appear simultaneously), is a space and time concept. Foucault describes “heterotopia” as exactly that zone that is “… probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites.” He calls them, “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and in-verted” (Foucault 1986, 24). Foucault’s notion of heterotopia describes a utopic, yet existing “practiced” and nevertheless elusive space—or as I would frame it, a gap—which delineates the border of a society. I argue that Hewitt creates a space of equally elusive yet experiential character such that we may not even consciously— sometimes not willingly—enter. As such, her photographs emphasize the spatio-temporal dimension. Instead of demarcating a “real” space, the sculptural layers in her photographs show us that we are perceiving historical narrative (and therefore our world) through “real time”. In other words, each time we view Hewitt’s work is the very moment in which we experience time taking place. Thus, hetero-temporality is connected to the space-time continuum, to the temporalities that photography is able to capture, and that which the spectator perceives. It should therefore be understood as intersectional, because it includes more than one category and understands categories (such as race and heteronormativity) as unstable and f loating. In Rif fs on Real Time, Hewitt creates layers of objects f lattened into relation within a photograph, which, in turn appears in a series of photographs that in their seriality echo and communicate with each other, constantly reminding and emphasizing historical overlaps and connectedness in a multidirectional polylogue that destabilizes the various categories, signs, references, and images that are embedded in her works. The histories and contemporarinesses that Hewitt addresses are often not present in dominant cultural narratives. Instead, she establishes the presence of these marginalized histories with a reading that goes beyond the racial epidermal schema by calling attention to the multiplicities of positions and gazes we inhabit simultaneously and their interconnectedness. I argue Glissant is not focused on reproductive heteronormativity, his notion of opacity can function as a similar critique. Glissant stressed that, “If we examine the process of understanding people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgements. I have to reduce. Accepting differences does, of course, upset the hierarchy of this scale. I understand your difference, or in other words, without creating a hierarchy, I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system. I create you afresh.—But perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale. Displace all reduction.” (Glissant 1997, 190)

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that this is only the point from which we can even begin to think about an idea of Blackness that does not fall into the pitfalls of an enclosed totality. What I see in these photographs and their embedded layers are relational connectivities, the presence of histories, and the multiplicities of being that are embodied in the spectator in connection to the art piece. Being in the context of this art piece is to break out of the singularity of our perception, constructions, or identities, and is to realize their intrinsic multiplicity—not within a temporal analogy or linearity, but in every minute we breathe. Being a Black woman thus means that I am more than Black—I am a multiplicity of Black. Being a Black woman means to understand life at its fullest wherever I am. This realization can ultimately lead me to “consent not to be a single being,”14 which is a painful and yet incredibly freeing and pleasurable experience. The multiplicity of multiplicities that I have mentioned in previous chapters is also a multiplicity of temporalities—there is no past or future, there is only a now. As discussed earlier with the example of interpellation, we carry different and various moments within us when we look at photography. These moments transcend the boundaries of linear time which is linked to relations of dominance and subordination and as such, is another social construct used as a tool of oppression. Rif fs on Real Time offers a visual and spatiotemporal dimension that I call the heterotemporality of Blackness. The heterotemporal dimension of Hewitt’s artworks elucidate the complexity of the multiplicities of Blackness that exist in synchronism. Hewitt’s work helped me to understand why it is so difficult to theoretically grasp the assumption of a gap in what it means to be Black in the contemporary. Since the spatio-temporal aspect is of great importance in my conceptualization of Blackness, I will move on to a discussion about the Black Diaspora, in which new questions emerge due to the context in which artwork was produced, but in synchronicity to the notions that I have explored thus far.

14  See Fred Moten’s trilogy: (Moten 2017; 2018a; 2018b).

V. Paradox Synchronicities 1. Contextualization In the following chapter, I will look at several artworks by the Black German1 artist Philip Metz in order to expand the discussion about post-black into the Diaspora, which is often overlooked. Metz’s work—and his subtle engagnement with questions of race and gender—first caught my attention in Berlin where it is predominantly featured. His practice and position is as diverse as his biography, which is particularly interesting given the almost non-existant public and institutional debate on Blackness, racism, and xenophobia in Germany and Europe at large. The situation in Germany is complex regarding the presence and history of people of African descent, as neither the educational system nor general public discourse are aware of the long-standing entanglement between Germany and people of African descent, nor are they aware of this history’s ability to highlight gaps in the national narrative. Black Germans occupy a paradoxical position as pointed out by Patricia Mazón and Reinhild Steingröver: On the one hand, the rest of German society views them as undifferentiated, monolithic “other.” On the other hand, they may appear upon closer examination to be a “postmodern” minority group, in the sense that the group itself is composed of individuals from very diverse backgrounds and may have little in common, both in their daily lives and in terms of their connections to Germany and Africa. (2005, 4) I am not opening up a discourse of victimhood, when I highlight that, Black Germans and Black individuals are mistreated repeatedly during their lives (some would say daily, with frequent occurences) through encounters with symbolic, institutional, or physical violence due to their phenotype and, I have to add, epistemic violence as well. I highlight this in order to point to the shared experience of Black Germans, which often remains unmentioned in mainstream discussions on race in German media. The experiences and 1  I have chosen to use the term Black German as the general description for Black people living in Germany, instead of the term Afro-German, as I consider it more open to the wide variety of Black people who live there.

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perceptions of growing up or living in Germany as a Black person are very diverse, thus my argument is based on the institutional and systematic discrimination by which this group of individuals is affected. Black Germans are, of course not the only group to be affected by discrimination. Take, for example minority groups like Turks, Roma, or Sinti.2 Their encounters with the German state and their (historical) genealogies differ but the physical effects are often similar and mark an everyday reality. Blackface in German Theaters3 belongs to a common stage practice and a symbolically charged debate on the abandonment of the N-word from long established children’s books—such as Pipi Longstocking (by Astrid Lindgren) and The Little Witch (by Ottfried Preußler). These are only two examples that show that the majority of presumably4 white Germans still believe in their right to perpetuate a colonial heritage and determine how to call and treat supposed minorities.5 That said, it is no surprise that German institutions, particularly the police force and Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, failed to even consider a right-wing motivation for the brutal murders of Germans with foreign heritage over the course of ten years by the German terror cell National Socialist Underground. Instead, because of their Blackness the victims and their families were suspected of having criminal

2  D  espite the commonalities of exclusion that these groups share, their socioeconomic positions are diverse. Nevertheless, common experiences have led to unified activist groups such as Kanak Attack in the 1990s: “Instead of promoting identity politics and pride in ethnic difference, for example, Kanak Attack sees itself as working toward a concrete political goal: the creation of antiracist awareness as well as a pro-active rejection of all forms of domination and discrimination” (Mazón et. al. 2005, 9). 3  O  n Blackface in theater, see: Gensing 2012, Bühnenwatch 2013, Lemmle 2012. Barbara Riesche’s first study, includes an analysis of so-called Sklavenstücke from 1770–1814. It gives testimony for the thematic presence of Black subjects in popular theater, its relation to discourses of abolitionism and performance of stereotypes (Riesche 2010). 4  I write “presumably,” because often so-called self-proclaimed white Germans are of equally diverse heritage from surrounding countries—e.g., Poland, Romania, or Czechoslovakia. I have often encountered individuals with a surname that ends with -ski or –sky, and thus carry a visible marker in their name, who consider themselves to be white Germans and perform their white Supremacy on that basis, without reflecting on their not so “pure” Germanness. Thus, difference and belonging in Germany is still connected to the idea of phenotype and blood - synonymous with whiteness. This practice can be connected to the German law for citizenship, which still follows the idea of ius sanguinis. For more information see: (Odoi 2004, 243) Gabriele Dietze also highlights this complex problem of national identity with the example of the German national Soccer Team (Dietze 2012). 5  F or more information on the debate about children’s books, see for example, the publisher’s statements Thienemann Verlag (with links to the debate in Newspapers), (Thienemann 2013) and (Oettinger 2013).Particularly Peter Greiner’s article and statement for the existence of the N-word in literature demonstrates the unreflectedness and perpetuated symbolic violence against Black (Germans) individuals (Greiner 2013). Simon Dede Ayivi contrasts this point with a critical position against the word: (Ayivi 2013).

V. Paradox Synchronicities

backgrounds, which led to stereotyped thinking and faulty practice by police officials.6, 7 In Germany, any ref lection on race and racism outside of the framework of anti-Semitism is still an exception. The theorist Fatima El Tayeb, whose groundbreaking work on the discourse of race focuses on Germany between 1890 and 1933, writes that the notion of race was established through the bodies of Black individuals simultaneously to anti-Semitism during the turn of the century. Her analysis explicates the long-standing tradition of racialized thinking in Germany, which is grounded in a practice of constantly racializing the Black “Other.” El Tayeb coined the term “silenced diaspora” as the systematic and collective blindness towards the centuries-long Black presence in Germany.8 This silencing is perpetuated through the educational system and political practice. However, alternative pedagogical projects such as “Homestory Deutschland- Schwarze Biografien in Geschichte and Gegenwart,” which is on tour in Germany and has visited international Goethe Institutes since 2006,9 is an example through which Black Germans counter the ignorance that I have just outlined and raise awareness for the silenced histories of Black Germans and Black individuals in Germany. Apart from this project, the NS-Documentation Centre Cologne launched an exhibition in 2002–2003 called Besondere Kennzeichen: Neger—Schwarze im NS Staat,10 which focused 6  A  lso see: (Reimann 2012) and the ARD broadcast special in concern of the memorial service for the victims of the right-wing terror cell NSU from 23.02.2012, in which the district mayor Heinz Buschkowsky (again a –sky) in Neukölln, one of Berlin’s most culturally diverse districts, talks about the “separation-tendencies” in “migration-cultures” and thus fuels the debate with justifications for the mistreatment of “supposed” non-German citizens.See:http:// mediathek.daserste.de/sendungen_a-z/3304234_ard-sondersendungen/9624754_gedenkversanstaltung-fuer-die-opfer (6.2.2013). 7  D  espite the massive critique on the failures in the police investigation in these cases, racial profiling is a continued police practice in Germany, although it is prohibited by law. Several initiatives have petitioned against it. Also see: („Die Kampagne”2013) For an analysis of structural violence and institutional oppression, see: (Odoi 2004, Ngounbamdjum 2004). 8  O  n the Black presence in Germany, also see: (Ayim 2002; Brentjes 1976; Oguntoye, Opitz, and Schultz 1992; Oguntoye 1997; L. Hopkins and Blackshire-Belay 1998; Campt 2004; Bechhaus-Gerst and Klein-Arendt 2004; Mabe 2007; Mazón and Steingröver 2005; Riesche 2010; Greene and Ortlepp 2011). 9  O  rganized and curated by Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland ISD-Band e.V. Funded by the Federal Agency of Civic Education (2006) and the foundation “Memory, Responsibility and Future” (2012/13).For more information, see: http://www.homestory-deutschland.de/ (2013). I would like to note that the corporate design for the exhibition was made by Barbara Mugalu, a Black-German graphic designer, who also designed an educational magazine series called Schwarz auf Weiß- Afro Deutsche Geschichte, which is now used in high schools. Also see: http://www.migration-boell.de/web/diversity/48_592.asp (Mugalu 2006). 10  T he title of the exhibition as well as continuous use of the pejorative term Neger throughout the exhibition caused a profound discussion between the organizers and the Black German community. Consequently, I would argue that the way in which the subject of a Black German presence is discussed is often repeatedly racist, despite good or reparative

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on Black victims of National Socialism. Despite these efforts—and a rich body of writing on Black German life that has grown since the 1980s11 —the prominent idea in German society is that being Black is an obstacle. Whereas Black Germans have the strongest presence in popular culture through music—e.g., hip-hop12 —many artistic projects focus on a mixture of literature, music, and spoken word. To date, there have been only a few projects that engage in the German context through the practice of Black German fine artists. These include the exhibition House of World Cultures (Berlin) as well as a project called The Black Atlantic: Travelling Cultures, Counter-Histories, Networked Identities that included an exhibition, symposia, and lectures, which was co-curated by Shaheen Merali, Tina Campt, and Paul Gilroy in 2005. The co-curators explicitly investigated the important roles that Black Germans and Black individuals in Germany play in shaping the Black Diaspora. After this exhibition, the focus on Black artists in Germany shifted from an exploration of a certain kind of Diasporic relation to the deconstructive potential of the works. For example, the exhibition Making Mirrors – Von Körpern and Blicken by an independent working group called Meta-nationale at the Neue Gesellschaft für Blidende Kunst (NGBK) explored the notion of whiteness and power relations in the German context through various artistic positions in 2011. Or, with a more open focus on the relationship between “Black” sound and the conceptualization of the White Cube, Ina Wudtke and Dieter Lesange invited artists from the Diaspora to their exhibition called Black Sound White Cube at the Kunstquartier Bethanien Berlin to investigate its contradictions as well as its critical potential. Also noteworthy is the recent BE.BOP. Black Europe Body Politics project, an ongoing series that began in 2012 and is initiated by Alanna Lockward and Walter Mignolo, who rigorously question notions of aesthetics in fine arts and make a claim for the arts as a realm for decolonizing practices.13 Nevertheless, as I have mentioned in the discussion about curatorial practices regarding Black artists in the German context, the representation of Black artists is often overdetermined by heritage, which then leads to a split between African or Diasporic (as the following exhibitions illustrated Africa Remix, A short century, Who knows tomorrow). Institutions like the Studio Museum Harlem or the Brooklyn Museum with special collections by Black artists don’t exist in Germany. This is partially due to the fact that Germany is intentions. There is an absence of critical reflection in terms of race in the public and institutional discourse in Germany, as evidenced by this project. Although some white Germans raise critical awareness upon matters of racism, their reflection does not go as far as to reflect their own perpetuated hegemonic dominance and monopoly of the rights to interpretation.  lso see: (Oguntoye, Opitz, and Schultz 1992, i.e.; Ayim 2002; 1995; 1997; Massaquoi 1999; 11  A Beldan and Popoola 1999; Hügel-Marshall 1998; Usleber 2002; Piesche 2012; Zöllner 2003; Sow 2008). 12  Also see: (Machold 2006; Templeton 2006; Mazón and Steingröver 2005, v. 19: p. 5). 13  All of the projects mentioned took place in Berlin.

V. Paradox Synchronicities

lacking in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and that Museums in the Us are privately funded whilst German Museums are state subsidized. The lack of such institutions also derives from the minority status of Black Germans who have been estimated between 100,000 (30,000 Black-Germans of mixed heritage) in West Germany before reunification and a approximately 500,000 human beings of African decendence in 2005 in the German Federal Republic (Mbombi 2011, 3). So, Black artists are poorly represented in contemporary art museums—if at all—or historical works from the former German colonies are included in ethnological museums as representative of a “primitive past. It is thus up to independent art spaces to show Black German artists’s works in heterogenic thematic group exhibitions. The situation is made all the more difficult, because Germany never experienced a Black Arts Movement like Britain in the 1980s14 or the US in the 1960s and 1970s, due to many reasons. First is the fact that even as a minority in each geographical location, there are fewer Black Germans in comparison to the US or UK. Secondly, the majority of white Germans, as well as their governments, have only a limited awareness of or ref lexive political investment in the nation’s short but effective and brutal colonial history. And third, there is very little investment in nurturing or writing out long-standing Black histories in the German context, be it through Black Germans or Black individuals in Germany or the long-standing exchange between the Diaspora, the African Continent and Germany. I am not interested in claiming that Black German artists form a specific genre, have a congruent aesthetic language, or have to be read exclusively through the notion of their Blackness, and perhaps I am doing them an injustice by unifying their differing positions in my current analysis. Nevertheless, their positions are important not only because they stand in dialogue with the uniqueness of their historically embedded subject positions in German society and the Black Diasporas, but because by looking at them together, we begin to understand how complex and diverse the experience of Black life is. Interestingly, this network of Black fine artists shapes a thoroughly different map than one might suppose based on their national identities or locations. This is why I am not attempting to engage in an in-depth historical or contemporary discussion about Blacks people in Germany, as this would be a different scholarship. Rather, I conceptually stress the interconnectedness and productivity of Black German artists as a vivid part of the rewriting of the histories of the Diaspora, as well as vibrant articulators of very specific perspectives in their own right. The Black German poet May Ayim highlighted the notion of invisible visibility in her writings (1992, 2) and thus raised awareness of the paradoxical identities Black-Germans occupy. In other words, to be an artist of African descent and live in Germany comes with very specific intricacies and shapes reality in a particular (though diverse) way, and informs one’s fine art, much as many Black German writers have illustrated in their 14  I am applying the term Black Arts Movement despite Kobena Mercer’s legitimate critique that it might be too early to talk about a closed or finished period in the UK context.

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work.15 The way the artist deals with these intricacies is often diametrical and their work opens up new questions and spaces for thought, which add to the polyphonic voices that the diaspora produces. I think it is time to give space to these voices and the questions they ask in the realm of fine arts for they are invaluable as contributors to Diasporic and German cultures.

2. IWHISHIWAS or WISHIWASHI ? iwishiwas (2007) (Fig. 37) is the name of a photographic portrait by Black-German artist Philip Kojo Metz, which caught my attention in 2012 in the previously mentioned group exhibition Making Mirrors – Von Körpern and Blicken at NGBK Berlin. At the exhibition, the piece was installed opposite an installation and temporary sculpture called Leightkultur 2001, which consisted of a chalk knoll in the corner of the room, creating a dialogue about knowledge, whiteness, and power.

Fig. 37: Philip Kojo Metz, iwishiwas, 2007-09 c-print, 19,7 x 27,5 in (50 x 69,85 cm) Courtesy the Artist Metz’s photograph and portrait of a “self” calls for attention as it depicts more than a wish—it also represents a biographic document that raises questions about our conditions of being-in-the-world as Black subjects. The short agglu15  S ee: (Oguntoye, Opitz, and Schultz 1992; Ayim 2002, 1995, 1997; Massaquoi 1999; Beldan and Popoola 1999; Hügel-Marshall 1998; Usleber 2002; Piesche 2012; Zöllner 2003; Sow 2008).

V. Paradox Synchronicities

tination iwishiwas which is on the wall label indicating the name of the work can be considered a rather grammatically odd formulation, which places the first part “I wish” in the present and the second part “I was” in subjunctive. It does not really make sense and thus produces a temporal and logical area of conf licting desires, because the “I was” remains in a sphere of speculation and assumption. This speculative space begins with the dialogue between the photograph and its title. Nevertheless something is “off” with the way the title is written, the vowels can easily be misread as wischi-waschi, a German term that negatively describes an imprecise statement or inaccurate blabber. It can also be used colloquially for “in a rush,” and therefore imprecisely conducted work and is therefore closely related to the English term: wishy- washy. Additionally, the caption, which features the letters that spell out iwishiwas, allows an associative comparison with the words in Kiswahili, which is an agglutinated language that works through pre- as well as suffixes that determine the typeface. So there is no clear denotative meaning in the way the title is written or what it might signify. In sum, two different codes are presented to the spectator, which both elude fixation. This, if I refer back to my argument that the title and the photograph are in dialogue with each other, creates the possibility for each viewer to create exponential meaning. These conceptual aspects exemplify Metz’s open-ended approach to working with extremely violent content, which I will now cover in more depth.

2.1

Taking a Closer Look 16

The photograph confronts the spectator with clean and harsh exposure. The portrayed subject sits in a black T-shirt in front of a white background. The person appears to be of male gender, with blond hair that shines a bit too glossy and seems neither to correlate with his complexion nor does the hairline fall naturally. He stares at the spectator and his gaze appears empty, because there is not a glimpse of gesture in his facial expression. The eyes seem veiled behind a mask, though there is none. “Is this a passport picture?” one may ask, particularly since it is compulsory not to smile in biometric passport pictures. Is this person real or is it a plastic doll? Have we not seen this style of hair in 1980s window displays on male mannequins? I felt uncomfortable when I first encountered the portrait because of the emptiness of the gaze and the clarity of exposure, juxtaposed with the familiarity of the subject portrayed. The uncanniness has not left me yet; “iwishiwas” echoes in my mind. I wish I was what? Do I wish that I was this man or the cold light? Upon a closer look, it becomes clear that the man in the picture wears heavy make-up, the shiny hair is a wig, his eyebrows are retouched, and the apparently empty blue eyes are due to the concealing effects of colored contact lenses. I am reading this art piece as a kind of biographical document and at the same time as a visual 16  The following analysis was partially published in: (Adusei-Poku 2012b).

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testimonial which needs to be understood outside of a predominantly identity-based approach. Darby English speaks to this need when he says: “It is no less convincing than ever to speak of Black artists as if they share an enterprise. The work of Black artists for whom questions of culture are subject but not an end in visualizing or representing race/identity obligates us to displace race from its central location in our interpretations of this work. More, it recommends a turn towards the subjective demands that artists place on the multiple categories they occupy, and that we grant this multiplicity right of place in our methodologies” (English 2007, 12). In this chapter, I will nevertheless apply both aspects that English describes. In other words, I take into account the context of the work and its subjective claim, and at the same time I will emphasize similarities within a broader network of racialized aesthetic productions.

2.2

Disposed Desires

Philip Metz is a Black-German artist, and the man we see in this portrait in masquerade or reversed blackface (Micosse Aikins 2011) is the artist himself. One can even go one step further and argue that Metz performs “ethnic drag” as coined by Katrin Sieg. Sieg’s term “ethnic drag” focuses predominantly on white identities performing the Other though, often in order to consolidate a postwar idea of white German-ness.17 Instead, Metz performs in a deconstructive fashion, as opposed to a form of identity (re-) establishment (Sieg 2002). As Metz has explained in several conversations, the photograph documents his previous desire to become a white person with blond hair and blue eyes, when he was twelve years old growing up in the south of Germany in the 1970s. Historically, it was a time when many Black Germans grew up without any Black German associations that addressed their experiences. The ground-breaking book by May Ayim, Katarina Oguntoye and Dagmar Schultz called Showing our Colours: Afro-German Women Speak Out—inspired by an intellectual exchange with thinkers like the Black American feminist poet and philosopher Audre Lord—wasn’t even published until 1986. It was the first book that focused on the biographies of Black-German women, and it coined the terms “Afro-German” and “Black German,” as expressions of self-empowerment. I am mentioning this publication because it is important to understand the cultural landscape that shaped the experience of the young Metz. This experience, which became the basis for his artwork, was one in which Black German identities were denied acknowledgement or representation of their existence in the public sphere. Although the idea for this staged photograph was planted very early in Metz’s career, its realization was only possible later, when the artist had enough emotional distance to externalize this racialized desire. Today, this desire seems absurd to Metz and he understands his childhood dream in a different light. Some may argue that we are 17  For the US context, also see: (Rogin 1992).

V. Paradox Synchronicities

Metz reveals an internalized inferiority complex, since the desire to have white skin can be read as “wanting to have a superior and majority position.” Yet the fact that he exposes the racialized desire opposes this reading. In any case, the desire to have light skin has many sources and cannot be read solely within causal logics. The discourse that iwishiwas touches upon is much more complex and subtle than it may first appear to be. It offers a contemporary Black-German perspective, which is embedded within the particular parameters of a diaspora experience; one that is characterized by a predominantly white environment and non-representation of otherness in the public realm. It is also a depiction of overcoming the violence that is projected onto Black subjects in the German context and it mirrors the emptiness of racialized desires. iwishiwas thus works through the reverse, the invisible, the ref lection, and the cultural constructions of beauty and power. It depicts a German perspective that challenges spectators to ref lect on identity per se. When it comes to Blackness, as Fanon articulates in his text and as Metz explores in his artwork, there are painful experiences and marks that one carries and must work through as a part of survival, which are—from my perspective— what form the source of strength that formulas such as “Black is Beautiful” encapsulate. It is not the fact that Metz wanted to look white that creates this mark, rather the mark manifests itself when one realizes what the experience of racism does unconsciously. The epistemic violence that one is exposed to throughout childhood and the impact it has creates a burning when one realizes the ways it has inf luenced self-ref lexive feelings of desired and rejected skin. After having such cathartic moments of comprehension though, one embraces that skin more strongly than ever before. Formally, Metz’ work recalls the German photographer Thomas Ruff’s portrait series, which he started in 1981 and continued for over a decade. In this series, Ruff photographed individuals from his circle of friends, ref lecting on the notion of surveillance and classification by using light and largescale formats to create an effect of visually investigating the sitter (Blank and Ruff 2004) (Fig. 38).18 Ruff arranged the sitters in a way that was supposed to prevent them from hiding anything from the camera. Exposure thus has a doubled meaning— the exposure of the photograph but also the exposure of oneself in front of the camera (Blank and Ruff 2004). Despite the fact that his sitters are closely examined by the spectators gaze, the serialism and documentary character 18  D  ue to the large-scale format, critics tried to categorize Ruff’s work as either fascistic art or socialist realism. As an artist from a white German background, he was particularly upset about being compared to an aesthetic tradition preferred by fascist regimes such as National Socialism, This led him to create a version of the 1980s series called the Blue Eyes Series. As Ruff has said, I “… decided in response to co-opt the cliché of Aryan art: portraits with blue eyes. I selected six male and six female portraits that I had already made, and added the iris of a female portrait that had bright blue eyes. I printed them at about 45 cm x 35 cm and hung them in a row. Surprisingly, though, they didn’t remind me of ugly theories from the 1930s, but more of discussions we have today—like genetic engineering—because the faces looked contemporary” (Blank and Ruff 2004).

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of the photographs only allow for assumptions to be made about the sitters in the portraits, which become screens for our projection as the sitters’s depictions don’t really tell us much about their own idea of self. Metz also allows his face to be investigated, but with a twist—because not only does it become clear that he is wearing make-up, his real face fades away the more one wants to see it.

Fig. 38: Series Installation view at Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid 19.09—24.11.2013 This invisibility and masking conf lict with the representation of the “self” that Metz has created for this photograph. It is a conf lict that underscores the way beauty is constructed in the eyes of the beholder. I have already talked about beauty in connection to the female body in the chapter on Mickalene Thomas; interestingly, in iwishiwas I encounter a male desire for beauty and transformation. This shows that not only female bodies are affected by the normative orders that suppress our self-perception, but men too. The desired appearance that Metz imagined for himself resembles a form of embodied “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 1987), something most men—whatever ethnic origin, sexual orientation, or social status—never achieve (Connell 1987, Kimmel 2006, Kaufman 1994, Silverman 1992). Masculinity, as the sociologist Michael Kimmel has shown, is produced through “homosocial interactions” (2006, 140), which depend on a constant process of affirmation through which the masculine status is produced. Consequently, since this fantasy of the “ideal man” depends on access to a social network, which allows this kind of affirmation. The ideal man has to be white, heterosexual, and upper or middle class. I draw this connection because, as mentioned earlier, Metz’s desire is multilayered, the matter of white skin is tied up with normative masculinity and with socio-economic stability, which in turn is expressed by a childhood desire for white skin and blue eyes. It is connected to an idea of power and

V. Paradox Synchronicities

control: a status that appears unachievable to a young, black boy. His masculinity has to be achieved through other parameters and his gender identity is thus challenged from an early age, and I would argue that it is often determined by the stereotype encounters Black children experience through their social environment.

2.3 Retrospective Introspectives The artist and photography theorist Deborah Willis argues in her book Posing Beauty—by tracing the concept of beauty from 1890 to the present—that the tradition of portraying Black beauty in photography has not only been marginalized, but it also ref lects cultural and political conditions in that, “black beauty in photography … is posed, constructed, imagined, reviewed, and contested in art, the media and everyday culture” (Willis 2009, xv).19 Whereas Willis and Campt emphasize the self-representation of Black individuals, Metz in contrast points to the symbolic violence that is and was drawn upon Black subjects in Germany through the constant denial of being beautiful or of having a position of legitimate existence. What he reveals through the visualized desire for fair skin, blue eyes and blond hair is the way in which the dominant discourse of whiteness, with all its norms and restrictions, affected him as a child—so much so that he rejects his own body. Thus Metz visualizes a retrospective introspection into the archive of his emotional-landscape as a ten-year-old. The way Maria Do Mar Castro Varela and Nikita Dhawan describe “mimicry” appears to be suitable for his wish: “Here, mimicry can hardly be seen as a resistance strategy produced from within dominant discourses, but a violence on the body of the one who mimics that is a result of internalized colonial regimes and racism” (2005, 328). In the context of their article on the female skin-bleaching economy in India, Varela and Dhawan explicitly distinguish their concept from Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry (1994, 121–22), which he conceptualizes as a tool to subvert dominant discourses. They emphasize that “[the mimicking woman] functions as an ideological play-ground for the intersection of capitalism, racism and (hetero-) sexism” (2005, 328), thus as somebody who is the victim of the dominant discourse. They insist, and I agree, that performance and mimicry of an idea of beauty within the postcolonial context has to be read within the intersection of various categories such as gender, race, class, as well as sexuality20. Nevertheless, this argument is applicable to a wider discourse on beauty and gender, because what Metz shows—particularly with reference to his former desire—is the awareness and sensitivity of black children of these dominant discourses. One of the most famous examples is the social psychologist Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s experiment from 1939, in which they asked Black children to determine whether a white or a Black doll looks nicer. Their findings showed that the majority of children would pick the white doll as 19  Tina Campt argues very similarly in her publication Image Matters 2009. 20  Also see: (Do Mar Castro Varela and Dhawan 2005, 238).

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the nicer and beautiful one (Clark and Clark 1952). Initially conducted during the Jim Crow era in the US—when segregated schools, transportation, and recreational centers enacted the systematic oppression of Black people—the test has been since repeated on several occasions and showed almost the same results in 2005 and 2009. I will nevertheless argue that Metz’s photograph unifies Bhabha’s as well as Varela’s and Dhawan’s conceptualization of mimicry. I have already highlighted that this photograph is retrospective; Metz needed the temporal distance to turn his pain into artistic material, and a trained make-up artist to transform his external appearance into the fictive person he once desired to be. The past overlaps with the present, two—if not more—different versions of Metz’s identity fall together: one wants to fit into the dominant system that surrounds him while another is so distanced from this desire that a mockery of the desire becomes possible. Thus two forms of mimicry are visualized in iwishiwas, one that acknowledges and internalizes the normative parameters of the dominant culture and one that rejects, plays, or even mocks the same parameters. Metz performs quite the opposite of Fanon’s proposal, because in Fanon’s text there are only two choices: “to turn white or disappear” (Fanon 2008). Metz turns white, but he becomes even more visible, present and complex than before. In this way, Metz deconstructs the idea of Whiteness as well as the idea of Blackness through his use of reverse blackface. In other words, in iwishiwas Metz uses a strategy of visual representation (Hall 1997), which is usually applied onto bodies that are culturally constructed as the Other. Blackface represents the brutal practice of minstrelsy, in which white actors paint their faces with black dye like charcoal in order to perform racialized stereotypes on stage (Bean 1996, Sotiropoulos 2006, Ochieng’ Nyongó 2009), and as mentioned in the introduction, it is still a contemporary phenomenon in German theater and Opera. It is often justified as part of “high art”—as, for example, in the staging of Parsifal at the Wagner Festival Bayreuth in 2004 or in the Magic Flute at the Komische Oper Berlin in 2006. The classical blackface performers in the US predominantly staged cabaret and comedy pieces and a smiling/grinning face is one of its key characteristics. The German examples are particularly complicated, because the depiction of Black protagonists on stage (predominantly in blackface) follows a hybrid representation, which is composed from the US genre as well as the much older German tradition of representing the “Moor.” The Moor is the evil, pagan, and malicious character—in medieval German Christmas or mystery plays, or in the Viennese baroque operas, as well as “Volkstheater” pieces in the eighteenth century—who performed through their roles as servants and harem guards in “oriental” clothing, the white imagination about the exotic Other. Barbara Riesche’s analysis of the German Sklavenstück (slave piece) genre—which existed in a short period from 1770–1814 and coincided with a public debate in German about abolition—shows that these stereotypes were replaced by characters that had a history and heritage coming from the

V. Paradox Synchronicities

African Continent, or in other words, the Black body was recoded into the synonym for slavery (2010, 3).21 Thus the term “reversed blackface”—as it was introduced by Sandrine Micosse Aikins with a monological reference to the US context—has to be specified in its application to the German context, as well as for Metz’s use. The term highlights the apparently common need for a form of embodied spectacle on theatre stages. But the multilayered historical background of blackface in Germany also calls the reverse blackface into question, because what is the genre that this kind of blackface is inscribed to? It does and does not exist, it is visible though invisible, and it has no specified character—nevertheless, as in the US context, the reversal becomes a powerful tool of ref lection. This notion is particularly emphasized by Metz’s severe look, which allows for no amusement or bewilderment. Instead his face becomes a canvas for our projections, just as Ruff’s portrait photographs do too. Particularly, Metz’s eyes are lifeless; they stare and yet don’t look at anything, at the same time. The reverse suddenly becomes an empty desire or wish—whishiwashi or nonsense. Metz’s visual vocabulary is reminiscent of artists like American Cindy Sherman (e.g., Untitled 2002) and the Ghanaian Samuel Fosso (e.g., African Spirits 2009) who constantly question the idea of self through “masquerade” and performative modes of representation and identity (Kent 2006). The graphic designer, photographer, and commercial filmmaker Jean-Paul Goude as well as the singer and artist Grace Jones (e.g., Grace Reviewed and Corrected) also played with this kind of masking and transformation.22 Metz’s work nevertheless differs from its predecessors by not only turning himself into the desired object, but also by giving the spectator his personal narrative, which 21  R  iesche does not explicate that these characters are embedded within the dichotomous structure of the noble savage/wild beast. 22  A  lthough, particularly Goude’s work is informed by his unreflected fetishization of exotic women and reproduction of stereotypes. Goude reflects in his biographic work “So far so Goude” (2006) on the main influences of his childhood in 1940s France (Saint-Mandé) in the following order: the Zoo, the Colonial Museum with its outside decoration that featured exotic animals as well as black female nude bodies, and the Circus with its freak shows (Goude 2006, 10). He thus works in the tradition of what Miriam Kershaw refers to as “… exploration by European male artists of a new African - Oceanic aesthetics using female bodies as their inspiration” (Kershaw 1997, 19). The climate, in which Goude was raised and which he takes his inspiration from, was shaped by the imperialist project and its representations in France. I would also like to add Carole Sweeney’s notion of modernist primitivism: “… the cultural primitivism of early twentieth century was not simply a naïve love of black culture by a small group of avantgardists, nor does it refer to an influence on les annes folles or the jazz age. Negrophilie was modernist primitivism, brimming with the dynamic and vigorous energies and contradictions of all the various strands of modernism and such represented a more multivalent aesthetic and cultural phenomenon than earlier primitivist discourses.… However, within modernist primitivism the discoursive tropes around blackness began to acquire an exotic legitimacy” (Sweeney 2004, 4). Refer back to Paul Gilroy’s notion of imperialism and the visual commodity of race, it further seems clear to contextualize Goude’s mode of perception, as well as his ideas about “authorship” in the realm of whiteness—as Mercer suggests—in which Jones’ becomes his visual commodity.

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guides the spectator’s perspective, although I have to add that this information is not on display when he shows the photograph. His former desire becomes externalized as well as materialized, despite being contained within the hermetic temporality of the photograph. Furthermore, the violent denial of a Black presence is not just about the renunciation of beauty standards or gender identity, but is bound to the notion of un-belonging.

2.4

Visual and Temporal Polyphonies

Read as a biographic document, iwishiwas creates a link to Michelle Wright’s analysis of biographies by Black German authors. I am using these biographies as samples of the rich canon of biographies, instead of stylizing them as ultimate representations of Black German subject formation. Wright analyzes Hans Jürgen Massaquoi’s book, Destined to Witness, as an example of Black German subject formation during National Socialism, which is embedded in a nationalist discourse grounded in gender binaries. Massaquoi, who was born and raised in Hamburg, a northern harbor City, during National Socialism, builds and stabilizes his identity, as Wright argues through the predominant focus on gender. Wright highlights three encounters from his childhood and teenage years in which Blackness, “… is almost always synonymous with black masculinity and located as subordinate to whiteness, which is also masculinized…. Racism becomes the war between men, and the battleground is masculinity” (2004, 275). This reference echoes my earlier observation about Metz’s desire for white skin being connected to hegemonic masculinity. My reading cannot stop here because iwishiwas unifies yet another layer, one that is expressed in another postwar biography by Ika Hügel Marshall. In Daheim Unterwegs, the author defines her subject position, “as produced by temporal and geographic intersections that can never fully be stable as they cannot fully rest on their ultimate reference race and nation” (M. Wright 2010, 280–81). Her journey never relies on single categories, which as in Massaquoi’s case results in movement and search, but unlike Massaquoi, whose narrative ends with the reunion of his family in the US and the achievement of US citizenship, Marshall’s movement never really ends. It becomes the silent companion, as her (intellectual) family is in more than one place and creates a network that allows her to be her undeterminable ambiguous self. Her subject formation is also deeply inf luenced by the fact that her position is affirmed when she starts to engage with a Black German activist group; an experience Massaquoi was never able to have, because he did not know anybody of “his kind” in Germany.23 Consequently, my argument is that Metz 23  I think that this description by Massaquoi is particularly interesting, because it marginalizes the role and position of his father, who was a Black man in Germany. The non-communication between father and son creates a noxious friction. In some points father and son share similar experiences, which could have allowed Massaqoui to create a notion of unity on other grounds than national identity.

V. Paradox Synchronicities

unifies these two ideas of Black German subject formation in the piece, which challenges the notion of the embodied paradox and synchronically mirrors the actual paradox of fixed identity. As I have described earlier, the multiplicity of Black experience is embedded within temporal layers of Blackness that sometimes collapse or play against each other. Metz produces historical connections that transport desires into the contemporary and then dissolves those desires. Wanting to be a white boy becomes a tool for visual and temporal polyphonies that constantly contradict each other.24

3. From Leitkultur to Leightkultur As mentioned, the installation opposite iwishiwas was called Leightkultur (Fig. 39). In combination, the two created an interesting polyphonic dialogue about power, dominance, and its fragile elusiveness. I will start my reading at the material level, looking at the installation’s art historical connections and then draw attention to its title. The temporary installation consisted of chalk powder in a cone formation and measured 4 x 1.5x 0.8 m. It had to be protected by a small guardrail made of string. This powder agglomeration is first enveloped by a notion of fragility, one or two puffs and the form would be destroyed due to its ephemeral nature. Secondly, in Leightkultur, as in iwishiwas, Metz opens up associations with whiteness, not only because of the chalk’s color but because it has been a popular substance in cosmetic products since antiquity used to give facial skin and hair a fairer effect (Angeloglou 1970, 30). It is a material that is bound to the history of beauty ideals and fair skin; consequently it can be seen as part of the ideology of whiteness as it adheres to various social, physical, and visual traditions and techniques (Dyer 1997, 48).

24  T his polyphony is also reflected in other parts of the diaspora, which creates a diasporic visual interconnectivity. The interconnectivity or diasporic relationality (Campt 2009) becomes clearer through the example of Ebony G. Patterson, who was featured with her piece Untitled Species I in Caribbean Crossroads of the World at the Studio Museum Harlem. The Jamaican-born artist also addresses notions of Black masculinity, particularly within Jamaican dancehall culture. Patterson’s large-scale collage shows the portrait of an apparently Black man wearing sunglasses. His body consists of differently shaded patterns. I would like to highlight the contrast between the light face and the rest of the dark body as well as the figure’s red lips, which create the same effect of reverse blackface as mentioned earlier in Metz’s work. The eyes of the figure are equally masked (if we consider Metz’s contact lenses to be a mask), which de-individualizes the portrait. The similarity of the two images (even if one is a photograph and another is a collage) shows that desire for light skin and hegemonic views on beauty and desirability are more connected to the sphere of experience than to any strict definition of cultural topography, nation, or location, and have to be contextualized.

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Fig. 39: Installation View, Philip Metz, Leightkultur 2011, Mixed Media, approx. 157.4 x 59 x 31.5in. (4 x 1.5 x 0.8 m). When do we encounter white chalk powder? My first association is a “classroom scenario,” because the white chalk is intrinsically connected to the blackboard, writing, visualizations, and learning techniques at schools. Foucault looked at the school system in seventeenth-century France and framed school as part of the system that forms the “panoptic society,” in which examination, discipline, and control are the strongest features. This is a society that functions through social techniques in order to internalize ideological parameters, which produces “docile bodies,” and thus predominantly obedient citizens. The examples Foucault chose to study are all institutions that build a network of state-regulated power—military, hospitals, and prisons in addition to the schools. In my interpretation of Metz’s work, the chalk powder is the material witness to this powerful social tool we call education, and it represents the school system. To this day, one finds chalk powder on the slim shelf below the (dark green) blackboard. It sticks to our fingers after being called in front of the class to demonstrate a task, such as writing something on the blackboard. It desiccates one’s hands after writing or cleaning the board, and the irritating smell can become a reminder of a sweet victory having successfully managed the teacher’s task or of a painful failure, which causes shame and contumeliousness by schoolmates. Nevertheless, a cone of this material also implies labor, attrition, and movement, because it takes a lot of time to produce a cone of this magnitude out of powder (and likely to gather the powder too). The powder appears like the debris of the institution, fragile at its core and dependent on processing—but most of all, alienated from its nature. Thus in this context, chalk is read as a tool for knowledge production; we don’t know what kind of content it once transported, or may have been able to transgress, it is the trace of the disciplinary vehicle of the ideology that is produced in and through the institution.

V. Paradox Synchronicities

Further layers of institutional disciplinary techniques and indoctrination as part of the state apparatus can be extracted from the piece: for instance, the space of exhibitions, which is often referred to as the “white cube,” is addressed as a space of hegemonic knowledge production. This space—the white cube—is an exclusive space, as Brian O’ Doherty’s series of essays published in 1976 in Artforum proposes, and Thomas McEvilley emphasizes in his introduction to the book Art Power (Groĭs 2008, 2). In his first essay, O’Doherty highlights that the exhibition space fulfills—as expressed in its design—a symbolic space of worship deriving from ancient worshipping, courtrooms, or the laboratory. Although exhibition spaces are not exclusively organized by the state, I argue that the white cube is nevertheless part of the disciplinary system of institutions that perform power.25 Power is performed in various articulations of the white cube. It is a space of distinct habitus,26 class aspiration, and knowledge production, but it is also full if disciplinary gestures and symbolic violence. The important role that this space has come to occupy in contemporary art has been intrinsically inf luenced by ideas of modern art and architecture, as O’Doherty shows. The exhibition space in galleries and museums is supposed to have clean, non-distracting architecture. It should be as empty as possible and have white walls that are considered to transport invisibility (Wigley 1995, xiv) in order for the art to best display its timeless beauty.27 This notion of timelessness is connected to market value as McEvilley stresses: “The artworks, like religious verities, are to appear ‘untouched by time and its vicissitudes.’ The condition of appearing out of time, or beyond time, implies a claim that the work already belongs to posterity—that is, it is an assurance of good investment.” He further quotes O’Doherty: “Art exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is lots of ‘period’ (late modern) 25 I think it is important to mention that there is still a sort of cult around the idea of the white cube, in that exhibition spaces are conceptualized in their form and design of presentation to reproduce this very specific hegemony (Sheikh 2009). Wutdke and Lesange take up this point and highlight the bizarre fact that one of the most renowned British art galleries, owned by Jay Joplings, was named White Cube in 1993. From my conversations with artists I learned that to be shown there implied that you were on the one hand a kind of commercial „sellout”, but that you could earn high amounts of money. I am also interested in a discussion about the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, which was supposed to be called “white cube” in 2008. This example can be seen as a critical approach to the subject. 26  “ Habitus” is a term coined by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his canonical book Distinction, in which he examined the way differences in taste are socially performed and constructed. This classification and performance system is called habitus. Bourdieu writes: “… the habitus is necessity internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions; it is a general, transportable disposition which carries out systematic, universal application—beyond the limits of what has been directly learnt—of necessity inherent in the leaning conditions” (1986, 166). 27  A  vast body of scholarship has been written on the white cube, as well as on curatorial projects have taken place since O’Doherty’s publication. Also see: (Buren, Leo Castelli Gallery., and John Weber Gallery. 1976, i.e. see; Paul 2008; R. Ryan u. a. 2012; Rosen 2005; Steyerl 2005; Wudtke and Lesage 2010).

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there is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status; one has to have died already to be there” (1986, 7). Not only is chalk used to make cement,28 which is a distinctive material in modern architecture (Kinold and Jakubeit 1994, 9–10),29 but Metz’s white chalk is placed in front of a white wall, in a corner and on top of a gray f loor and can thusly be read as an aseptic metaphor for contemporary exhibition spaces. 30 His chalky cone functions within that specific frameset like Duchamp’s readymades, which play with the dominant hierarchical meaning of the space in which they are exhibited; this meaning and value intrinsically depends on the spectators and the space—it is the spectators who define the object’s value and status as art. The white cube is considered to be a neutral and impartial space. And yet, it is an aesthetic principle, because its very framing determines what is considered art and what is not. Duchamp’s ready-mades—e.g., the famous urinal—use that notion of space and framing, and thus call the gallery space and the power of the institution into question. The institution is such an integral part of the equation of the ready-made that Duchamp’s work has been retrospectively called the first generation of institutional critique, in the most literal sense, because what is at stake is the art institution itself (B. H. D. Buchloh 1990, Gad 2009). Later forms of institutional critique would beyond the space of art presentation to question institutions on a structural level. Metz’s entire installation can be read in connection to Duchamp’s Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? (1921), a ready-made that consists of a painted birdcage containing two wooden perches that is filled with 152 white marble cubes the same size as sugar cubes, a cuttlebone, a mercury thermometer, and a small porcelain dish. The name of the piece refers to Duchamp’s alter ego, the woman Rrose Sélavy—a pun, which is spoken as Eros, c’est la vie (Eros, that’s life)—a figure that he enacted in several photographs taken by Man Ray. Rrose Sélavy also appears as the face for “Belle Haleine,” an imaginary perfume advert on the cover of the premiere issue of New York Dada (c. 1920–1921) The art historian Amelia Jones pinpointed in her analysis of “women” in Dada that, Duchamp’s performance as a bourgeois female (New Woman? Garconne), object of male/female desires, flamboyantly transgresses masculine fears of the incursion of femininity. Pictured on the (imaginary) commercial product, “Belle Haleine” (beautiful breath) perfume and, in turn, on the premiere issue of New York Dada, she gives value (through her celebrity appeal) to both “products”. She is also multiply fetishized; photographic image as fetish; 28  For the historical use of chalk in the building trade, see: (Ziegelei Handisburg 2013). 29  P  articularly Le Corbusier, who will be in focus in the next pages of this chapter, is still hailed as the architect who resurrected the 2000-year-old material concrete and elevated it to new heights (Nerdinger 1994, 55). 30  A  s Thomas Mann noted in his novel Death in Venice, chalk is also used as an outdoor substance for disinfection. Contemporary Farmers use it, for example, in the cow and pig barns.

V. Paradox Synchronicities

perfume and magazine as commodity fetishes; Duchamp/author as fetish, New York Dada as art historical fetish. An endless exchange of values of the most mutable kind. The art-making/viewing system itself marked as an economically and erotically based system of exchange. We are made subjects of, drawn into, Duchamp’s engendering play of himself as subject and object of art. (A. Jones 1998, 154) Duchamp also uses this fetishized figure for the title of the ready-made Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? The title plays with the notion that one cannot sneeze on command and thus represents an unaccomplishable query. Although they are not exhibited together (as title and image are in Metz’s photograph), there is a connection between the performative aspects of Duchamp’s photograph and the deconstructiveness of Metz’s sculpture; the marble that Duchamp used for the supposed sugar cubes is now pulverized in Metz’s work. Not only did the extensive range of Duchamp’s work stress the institutionalization of art, he also emphasized the agency of the artist through his practice, because the arbitrary objects that he put on display became art because he said so. Furthermore, the role of the artist is questioned and transformed, when Duchamp becomes Rose Sélavy, a figure that was developed as many Dada artists (including Duchamp) moved from France New York, and as Jones puts it, “challenged bourgeois morality in the most aggressive way through the opening of art to the erotic exchange of interpretation, in particular via the sexualization or eroticization of the subjects and objects of art” (A. Jones 1998, 143 emphasis by author). Writing about transformative processes, which Duchamp’s practice elicits, Groys noted that, “Modern art operated not only as a machine of inclusion of everything that was not regarded as art before its emergence but also as a machine of exclusion of everything that imitated already existing art patterns in a naive, unref lective, unsophisticated—nonpolemical—manner, and also of everything that not somehow controversial, provocative, challenging” (Groĭs 2008, 2). Although Duchamp’s work was thus groundbreaking, it is still a part of the extreme patriarchalism and racial hierarchy that works as an exclusionary paradigm. Metz is commenting, as Duchamp did before him with the marble sugar cubes, on  standardized perceptions of art and its value system. Powerfully, his approach does not only focus on the definition of art by way of institutional exclusion, it also alludes to the standards of whiteness and power within the authoritative space of the gallery and the canon of art. White marble, which was so seemingly intrinsic to the crafting of ancient Greek and classical sculptures and which has come to represent the nude in the Western canon, is broken down into a mass of white particles unidentifiable in their purpose or aim.31

31  E ven the caged white supposed sugar cubes in Duchamp’s Why not sneeze, Rose Sélavy? can be read in connection to colonial exploitation, as sugar was a major plantation commodity, but there is no record of Duchamp addressing this issue. Rather, Duchamp used the seemingly lightweight sugar cubes to dupe visitors who were caught off guard by their

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In opposition to a marble sculpture, Metz’ chosen material and its sculpted form questions what is usually perceived as abject,32 as construction site or screen material, and is authorized to be symbolically transformed into “something else”. Particularly, the alliance between the performative character of the space and the piece calls attention to the connection of whiteness and modernity. As I have mentioned on several occasions, the idea of modernity is intrinsically connected to the birth of reason and the enlightenment (Gilroy 1993a; Piesche 2005; Bernasconi and Lott 2000), as well as to the relationship between Western and non-Western art traditions (Foster 1993). This connection is of great importance because it is related to the exploitation that took place through imperialism and slavery, which stands in relation to the ideological system of capitalism.33 I argue that the idea of modernity in the arts and architecture (as articulated by the white cube) is intrinsically bound to the ideology of whiteness and race, which is challenged by Metz’s installation as I will now discuss. Today’s art institutions exist beyond the space of the gallery; they allude to the socioracial and spatial divides that the white cube ideologically constructs.34 Hito Steyerl argues that the white wall in the white cube can be heavy weight when they lifted the cage (Seigel 1995, 168–69). For further reading, see: (Wood 2010, 274). 32  T he “abject” is the expression of a subject or object that breaks with order and has to be collectively abjected (Kristeva 1982) to re-establish or stabilize the imagined purity of cultures or identity. For example, pebble stones in a garden are culturally accepted and even considered as beautiful, whereas pebble stones in a bedroom have to be disposed. This example shows that the ideas of orders within culture are interrelated with locality and space. 33  For a more in-depth discussion of this connection see: (San Juan 2007, chap. 3). 34 It was one of the most famous representatives of modern architecture, who determined white through his influential article “L’art decorative d’aujourd’hui” (1925) as the color of modern architecture: Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known by his self-reinvented alias Le Corbusier (Wigley 1995, xvi). As everybody’s thinking is attached to social and cultural discourses, consequently Le Corbusier’s writing and practice is embedded in a highly ideological discourse of culture within the imperialist setup of France. The following example shows that his choice of monochrome white is entangled with Eurocentric white supremacy: “Just like colour, decoration is of sensory and primary order and belongs to simple people, to peasants and primitives. Harmony and proportion appeal to the intellect, and arrest cultivated beings. The peasant enjoys ornamentation and paint his walls. Civilized people wear English suits and own books and paintings. To peasants, decoration is a necessary luxury, just as proportion is to civilized people” (Le Corbusier 1921, 1147). It is not a coincidence that Le Corbusier takes count of the idea of the ornament, as Adolf Loos’ racist publication Ornament and Crime from 1908 was one of the most influential texts within the ideology of in modern architecture. In this publication, Loos argues that the more a culture’s aesthetics draws on ornamentation the more backward, sensual, and lower it is in the world order, whereas its removal promises progress and abstraction (Steyerl 2005, 136). Consequently anthropological discourses become apparent in the writing of Loos and Le Corbusier through the application of the idea of the hierarchies of development, civilization, and the idea of superiority. My argument that this ideology is linked with im-

V. Paradox Synchronicities

considered a “technology of truth,” because it purifies, sanitizes, and focuses, the gaze like an “x-ray machine,” and therefore produces notions of essence, cleanliness, and hygiene (Steyerl 2005, 137). It is thus a place where ideas of hygiene, control, and examination take place. So to bring a cone of chalk powder into this space—like Metz does with his installation Leightkultur—is already a provocation that stands in dialogue with the discussed notion of whiteness, its space (white cube), techniques (school, art-history), discursive and individual inf luences (Metz’s childhood desires), and invisible visibility (the performative character of the portrait that hypervisualizes whiteness). The corner is a distinctive location for the piece and suggests associative historical connectivities; I am referring to Adrian Piper’s inf luential video installation called Cornered (1988). The installation consists of a seventeen-minute tape, which is played on a monitor stationed in a white walled corner of the exhibition room, an overturned table facing the corner, ten chairs (facing the corner), and two framed birth certificates, identifying Piper’s father alternatively as black (“octoroon”35) and white. The video shows Piper wearing a blue blouse and a pearl necklace; her hair parted, layed and partly down in a rather conservative look. She sits in straight posture with folded hands on a table like a TV presenter. She speaks in a very soft, distinct and articulate perialism, and that colonial exploitation was justified through Le Corbusier’s understanding that the decorative and ornamental has to be eliminated in order to create purity, no distraction, and concentrate on essence. In other words, civilization is the absence of sensuality (sexuality), impulsiveness and playfulness which are all projected onto the aesthetics and bodies of the other (also see: Steyerl 2005, 137). Referring to the latter quote Jan de Heer writes, “According to Le Corbusier, the coloured wall belonged to the uncivilized domain and therefore to unwanted ornamentation. Apparently civilized people lived in houses without coloured walls at the time” (2009, 95). The ornament in Loos’s imagination, with reference to the discourse of evolutionism, emphasized the criminal energy of the ornament when he compared the traditional body tattooing from Papuan New Guineans and tattooed criminals—as Hito Steyerl eloquently argues (Steyerl 2005, 136). Civilization is not only the renunciation of the primitive, it is, according to Le Corbusier, also the move from the sensual to the intellectual. The aesthetics of buildings in modern architecture, and particularly their façades, is equated to skin as Wigley argues. These aesthetics therefore reproduce an ideological regime, which, on an aesthetic level, naturalizes white skin as synonymous with progress, development, civilization, reason, intellect, chastity, and virtue. This naturalization process becomes inscripted into a mythological aura as Le Corbusier writes: “Since the origins of mankind, calcimine has been linked to the dwelling places of humans; they burn the lime, rub it fine, dissolve it in water, spread it out, and the walls become purest white; a brilliant white. If a house is completely white, its forms become clear without possible violation; its volumes are delineated; the colour is lucid and categorical. The white lime is absolute, everything becomes clear, is superbly described, black on white; it is candid and sincere” (Le Corbusier in Heer 2009, 95). 35  “ Octoroon” is the US term for a person who is one-eighth of African ancestry, thus Piper’s father was designated as Black with a biracial great-grandparent. For the historical and political context of racial classification systems, see: (Hochschild and Weaver 2007). It is also a term that is intrinsically bound to the US concept of miscegenation (along with the fears and taboos that it produces)—which refers to interracial sexual contact. For more see: (Bergner 2005, p 43; Dietze 2013b, 204)

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manner. Her first sentence—“I am Black”—introduces race as the subject of her talk, in which she performs a rhetorical exercise addressing the audience to ref lect on the ambiguity of racial signification, by demanding them to question whether they are Black or white and what kind of sociopolitical consequences their determination comprises.36 As Judith Wilson has phrased it, Piper turned “the tables on America’s white majority” (Wilson 1991, 104). The reason I am so invested in the connection between Leightkultur and Cornered, is that one of the few art pieces that engages with the fear of miscegenation.37 I am reading the notion of mixing, which is included in both art pieces, in two ways. On the one hand, in connection to the people of mixed heritage, and on the other side, in connection to the title Leightkultur. Let me begin with the fear of interracial38 mixing, or miscegenation.39 The US antebellum and post-abolitionists fear of sexual interaction between a supposed white woman and Black man40 is echoed in the German context on many levels, because the fear of racial mixing is not only a US phenomenon. It was also an active part of the imperial imagination and legislature in and outside the colonies (Dietrich 2007, 333), and in the German context during National Socialism (Campt 2004, 66). Particularly the notions of hygiene and culture, which meet in the idea of Leightkultur, emphasize this. I always wondered why I only met other Black Germans around my age group, and it took more than fifteen years to learn that the majority of Black Germans, who were born in the Rhineland area, which is close to where I grew up, did not exist anymore. They were children of French soldiers of North and East African heritage (Askaris), who were stationed in the Rhineland as a result of Germany’s loss of WWI. These children were either sterilized during the Nazi Regime or were sent to concentration camps (al Samarai 2004, 51–52; Campt 2004, 73; Kevles 1995, 117; Campt 1996, 73). Due to the lim36  T here are several publications and discussions of this piece to which I cannot devote myself in the context of this discussion, as it leads too far away from my actual subject. 37  O  n the US context of the history of miscegenation and law and literature, see: (Sollors 2000). 38  I am italicizing the term interracial because I think that it reproduces a highly difficult idea of race as a biological fact. I am using it in the context of this text only a description of a person of white European heritage having a relationship with a person who is not categorized as white. 39  On the connection between incest and miscegenation, see: (Sollors 1997, 285). 40  I am highlighting the gendered identities of the white and Black individual, because as Gwen Bergner has argued, this is a very specific post-abolition fear of white men, that Black men might have relationships with white women. Not only is the white female body a ground for the discourse, before the end of slavery the Black female body was assumed to be available for any man, whether the white Master or the Black men working on the plantation. Bergner calls this dynamic “homosocial, heterosexual and colonial economy,” which has the function to establish racialized hierarchies between various groups of men. Also see in this context Gabriele Dietze’s analysis of the interconnectivity of miscegenation to the rape-lynching complex, and the use of these racialized hierarchies by white suffragists (Dietze 2013b, pp 204-2011).

V. Paradox Synchronicities

itations of and gaps in documentation, the numbers of Black victims during the Holocaust are insufficient to give accurate estimations (Bechhaus-Gerst 2004, 28). Historical accounts are thus predominantly narrated through individual biographies or a few preserved documents. So, why didn’t I learn about this in school, where we repeatedly discussed the era of National Socialism? This point leads me to an engagement with the Leightkultur—a fusion of Lightkultur and Leitkultur. Leitkultur is a term that was introduced by political scientist Bassam Tibi in his book, Europe without Identity: The Crisis of a Multicultural Society. The mere fact that Tibi introduced the term does not mean that how he described it is still the dominant meaning, because the debate, which the term led to, is filled with more negative associations than the original proposal. Let me explain: in his book from 1998, Tibi argued for a European Leitkultur, in contrast to the ongoing debates on multiculturalism and as a form of pluralism without any kind of commonalities in regards to content or values. To Tibi, the idea of Europe could only be successful if, despite cultural differences, it could be held together by common values and principles (1998, 49). Tibi tried to encourage a discussion about such parameters for societies that are facing migration and integration, by approaching the discourse through a migrant’s perspective. This perspective comes from two common migrant experiences: either the constant denial of rights or conditional acceptance into European collective identity through the reduction into an ethnic identity. Tibi opposes this reduction by highlighting the importance of a differentiated idea of belonging, which is not based upon a national identity that is exclusively for one ethnicity, like the German understanding of Kulturnation. This example does not offer migrants a possibility to adapt their identity, as they might do in the US or Canada where constructed identity is more common (2002). His emphasis on Leitkultur for a productive and formative European subjectivity should be based on values deriving from what he calls “cultural modernity” that include democracy, laicism, Auf klärung, human rights, and civil society (1998, 154). Despite the fact that many critical theorists would be quite hesitant to embrace the values of cultural modernity—particularly the Auf klärung—Tibi’s idea was driven by unification of differences within multiplicity rather than advocating assimilation into cultural hegemony.41 Quite the opposite was proclaimed when Friedrich Merz, the ultraconservative German politician and CDU Party whip at the German Bundestag, activated the term to describe a specific German Leitkultur into which migrants have to assimilate. Not only was Merz accused of speaking on behalf of the far right, his approach welcomed a comparison to the National Socialist ideology. Thus, when I introduced the term by saying its meaning shifted, I am referring to the right-wing appropriation of Tibi’s term, which is now its dominant reading in German political discourse. As a notion, Leitkultur therefore stands in

41  F or a debate on Tibi’s concept and the way in which it can be instrumentalized to subtly reimplement notions of cultural hegemony, see: (Göhler 2003). Also see: (Tibi 2002).

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strong connection to the debate on the failure of multicultural politics and is predominantly used in the context of xenophobia and marginalization. So why fuse Leitkultur and Lightkultur? Right-wing ideology is still a contemporary phenomenon in Germany as the neo nazi group National Socialist Underground (NSU) scarily exemplifies. The group murdered from 2000-2007 ten people of Turkish, Kurdish and Greek and one white German Police Officer. The Police who investigated those murders never declared them as racially motivated and rather tried to claim the victims criminal activities, which is motivated by racial bias.42 Certain areas—even in the state capital—are not safe for people of non-white German descent (or who appear deviant). However, one must not only focus on the specific location of a particular menace: just being in Germany can be dangerous, as I have already pointed out with the NSU example. When, in June 2000, a native of Mozambique named Alberto Adriano was brutally killed by a right-wing gang in the former east-German city of Dessau, a group of Black German hip-hop43 musicians decided to join forces as a group called Brothers Keepers44 in order to raise public awareness for the violence against people of color that had been continuously growing in numbers since unification in 1990.45 The first single “Adriano (Letzte Warnung)” (Adriano last warning) not only raises awareness about the failed abatement of right-wing activities and ideology by the law and state forces, it also brought a Black German presence and agency into the public discussion (Mazón et al. 2005,

42  A  lso see: (“NSU-Prozess - Taz.De” 2020; Köttig, Bitzan, and Petö 2016; Kruglanski et al. 2019). 43 The role of the sonic, popular culture, and music as a formative part of Diasporic identities can be frequently emphasized in scholarship. See: (Gilroy 1987, Weheliye 2005a, Henriques 2011).  rothers Keepers is not the first Black German band that rapped about racism and xeno44  B phobia in Germany. One of the first hip-hop groups was Advanced Chemistry, most known for their song “Fremd im eigenen Land” (Foreign in one’s own Country), which is also quoted in “Adriano (Letzte Warnung).” For an in-depth analysis of Afro-German subject formation in Black German hip-hop, see: (Weheliye 2005a, 165; Machold 2006; Templeton 2006, 127). On Afro-diasporic identities in German pop music, see: (Weheliye 2005b). 45  I t is not rare to hear about physical attacks against people of African descent in Germany—my father, was beaten and thrown out of a moving tram two years before I was born by a group of young male racists, and the Black mother of a friend was kissed by a white stranger on the street in the 1970s. The aggressor justified his action by saying: “I always wanted to kiss a N_in!” Of course times are changing, but Adriano’s death is still a social reality within a society that gloats about its humanist achievements. See, for instance, the Amadeo Antonio Foundation, which was founded in the name of Amadeu Antonio Kiowa, who was also killed by a right-wing gang in the city of Eberswalde (also former East Germany: http://www.amadeu-antonio-stiftung.de/).

V. Paradox Synchronicities

5).46, 47 The album, which unified the various heterogenic voices of Black German Rappers, was called Lightkultur; which can be read as a response to the debate that I have just outlined. The term Lightkultur plays with the notion of cultural hegemony as well as a discourse on belonging, which does not allow any kind of aberrations from the idea of German-ness and ridicules it indirectly. One can understand Lightkultur as a term which tries to take on the weight and practical consequences that are implied by the far-right interpretation of the term Leitkultur. Thus when Metz uses Leightkultur as a title for his installation, he questions terms’ symbolic heaviness and synchronically references the chalk material, whose lightness is symbolically charged with histories of institutional, discursive, and physical violence. Metz mixes and twists and composes hybrid meanings full of paradoxes that don’t allow clear signification while commenting on the urge for meaning fixation in contemporary German societies. The piece is thus less about being white or being a German of African descent. More urgently, it questions the construction of culture, its perception and reading. In the end, he shows us that what we consider to be the foundation of our idea of identity is as fragile and full of brutal (hidden) histories as a cone of chalk. Between Metz’s installation, his disturbing portrait-photograph, and undeterminable word puns, lies the paradox of our existence. His artworks open up uncomfortable questions about desired whiteness, which Black Studies virtually avoids asking. I argue that these questions and strategies are not only allowed in post-black art practice—they become a necessity.

46  S ee the following lyrics, which were sung by different rappers- some in English, the Refrain however is in German: 1st Verse: Seventh Sunday after Easter| A fellow brother was executed in his prime| Adriano’s crime: wrong place, wrong time| I can still hear the voice of anguish fading through the night, It was an unfair fight! | Three versus one, God they caught him by surprise| Xenophobia’s on the rise, victims get dehumanized| Producers standardized as the land’s Germanized| Names become numbers while death trivialized. […] Refrain: Dies ist so was wie eine letzte Warnung| Denn unser Rückschlag ist längst in Planung |Wir fall‘n dort ein, wo ihr auffallt| Gebieten eurer braunen Scheiße endlich Aufhalt| Denn was ihr sucht ist das Ende| And was wir reichen sind geballte |Fäuste and keine Hände| Euer Niedergang für immer. Und was wir hören werden, ist euer Weinen and euer Gewimmer. For more lyrics see (Brothers Keepers 2000). 47  T here is much to say about the gender dynamics that were performed by Brothers Keepers and the follow-up group Sisters Keepers regarding notions of empowerment, forms of emancipation, and masculinization. These have been critically discussed in expert forums that shed light on the gender politics in mainstream popular music and comprise a different discussion. Also see: (Mazón u. a. 2005, 5).

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VI. Abstract Facts1 1.

Enter and Exit the New Negro2 Being Negro is part of what I feel, but expressing all of what I am artistically, I often find myself in a visionary world. (Norman Lewis in Bernier 2008, 173)

Among the art pieces in the first post-black shows (Freestyle) that caught my attention was Mark Bradford’s Enter and Exit the New Negro (Fig. 40). One of the key reasons I am so interested in Bradford’s work is that it does not represent the Black body, but nevertheless engages with the representation of identities and space. I will predominantly focus on this piece, which might seem like an almost neglectful and radical decision in light of Bradford’s extensive and transgressed oeuvre, the evolved subjects he is engaged in, and the social relations that he explores. His work ranges from video to painting and sculpture, and is always embedded in a conversation with its subjects, as well as the environment it is inf luenced by and was created in (Copeland 2011b, Bedford 2010). Born 1961 and raised in Los Angeles, Mark Bradford, earned a BFA in 1995 and an MFA in 1997 from the California Institute of the Arts. Since his inclusion in Freestyle he has become one of the most inf luential Black artists in the US and represented the American Pavillion in 2018 at the Venice Biennale. As one of his earliest pieces Enter and Exit the New Negro set the ground for his practice and stands in direct relationship to the ideas that were proposed by the post-black art framing.3 As I have already explored, Golden’s theorization 1 This chapter is based on an article, that was published in Feministische Studien (Adusei-Poku 2012a). 2  T his title refers to the concept of the “New Negro” by Alain Locke, as well as to the title of the artwork under discussion. The term “New Negro” should not be equated with the N-word in English or German language. Rather, the concept of the New Negro, is a positive self-designation of Black intellectuals, at the beginning of the twentieth century. 3  T his notion was underscored by The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter: “It is also an instructive example of what ‘post-black’ art means: art that can choose to refer to racial identity—or to class, or gender, or aestheticism, or daily life—or choose not to. Mr. Bradford has

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of the term “post-black” leaves a lot of space for ambiguity. Many of the artpieces in the post-black shows deal with notions of sexuality and racialization and Bradford’s piece is an opportunity to deepen those discussions, specifically as they relate to theories about post-black. I argue that an important term in post-black discourse is “quareness”, since it highlights structural changes within the discussion of Blackness, critiquing any two-dimensional approaches that only focus on gender and race, leaving out sexuality.4

Fig. 40: Enter and Exit the New Negro, 2000,Mixed media on canvas 108 x 95 in. (274 x 244 cm), Photo: Bruce White, © Mark Bradford Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

opted to tackle the full spectrum of subjects, which is what makes his abstraction feel deep. And he does so to stay on the move, trying this, trying that, hands on, hands off, which keeps his art light and fleet” (Cotter 2010). 4  I don’t want to leave unmentioned the achievements by openly gay artists such as Glenn Ligon and Lyle Ashton Harris, but their work is almost always connected to notions of homosexuality and desire, whereas my point here is that post-black includes quare positions without highlighting it.

VI. Abstract Facts

My endeavor in this chapter is threefold; I will first engage with the question of whether post-black can also be read as structurally quare since it is an identity discourse that shares parallels with the post-identitarian approaches that can be found in queer theory. I will engage with the subject on a theoretical level and look at the unfolding potential of the artworks, in light of their subtle quareness and in dialogue with the concept of post-black. The second approach is connected to Bradford’s position on art history and abstract painting, which is summarized when he says, “the conventional Euro-American narrative of abstraction is not my struggle” (Bradford in Bedford 2010, 14). I am eager to see what his struggle is and in which ways it is connected to broader diasporic frameworks and discourses. Thirdly, I will look at earlier abstract painters, such as Norman Lewis, asking in what ways their approaches and strategies5 differ, since the post-black generation is supposed to be intrinsically different from their predecessors. So what is queer and quare in the context of this chapter? Since the focus is on art pieces that are non-figurative or non-representational, I am placing my inquiry in conversation with Judith Halberstam, who proposed that human bodies are not necessarily required in order to create a queer reading (Halberstam 2005). I am, however, less interested in conceptualizing queer art (Blake, Rinder, and Scholder 1995; Horne and Lewis 1996; Cvetkovich, Frantz, and Locks 2011; Lorenz 2012a), than in exploring the queerness of art, which is not labeled as such. Queer, in this context, is not exclusively understood as a critique of heteronormativity, but in connection to a way of perceiving, thinking, and acting. It also stresses the complexity of the gaze, which includes different readings and positions or, as the art-historians. Lorraine Gamman and Carolin Evans have framed it: “By importing some queer notions into the world of critical theory, it may be possible to begin to acknowledge many perverse but enjoyable relations of looking” (Gamman and Evans 1995, 14). The queer gaze is consequently important for the analysis of art pieces and specifically, in relation to this study, it offers approaches to deconstruct the historical tendency for Black subjects to be depicted as fetish objects and it addresses notions of heteronormativity, dynamics of power, as well as empowerment and abstraction. Queer theory is framed by Eve Sedgwick as a concept that refers to, “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can be made) to signify monolithi5  I have to apologize to Bradford as he points out in an interview that he rejects war terminology to be applied for his practice. He points out, that his work is embedded in intuition and isolation, he says “I don’t have any ‘strategies,’ I really came to all these decisions very organically and very honestly based on my own desires” (Bradford and Eliel 2010, 63). I am using the term in a de Certeau’s sense, which means within the framework of power ‘strategy’ is a conscious decision to work against the means of oppression or, as I would interpret in Bradford’s practice, as a conscious (though intuitive) decision to comment on social relations; whereas a tactic in de Certeau is only an impulsive reaction. I am thus using the term in a rather pacifistic way, because I consider certain practices as survival strategies.

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cally” (Sedgwick 1994, 18). It has to be mentioned that “queer” still represents a contested space of definition, as Isiling Mack-Nataf’s remarks on the term queer illustrates: “I am more inclined to use the words ‘black lesbian,’ because when I hear the word queer I think of white, gay men” (Nataf 1995, 62). The contrast between Sedgwick’s definition and Nataf’s statement clarify the difficulties within Queer theory and its various sociopolitical positions. Whereas Sedgwick theoretically conceptualizes the idea of queer in a one-dimensional way and stresses sexuality, Nataf points towards the sociopolitical problems the term inherits, and emphasizes the way in which dominant positions within the LGBTI movement reproduce hierarchies and hegemonic subject positions.6 Patrick Johnson addresses this conf lict when he says, “[B]ecause much of queer theory critically interrogates notions of self hood, agency, and experience, it is often unable to accommodate the issues faced by gays and lesbians of color who come from ‘raced’ communities” (Johnson 2005, 126–27). Roderick Ferguson’s approach to use the term, “Queer of Color Critique” is helpful for the analysis that I am about to undertake, because Ferguson also understands race and sexuality, “as interdependent categories”7 (Ferguson 2004). This interdependency is necessary if we are to think of power and critique its dynamics. I have argued for the queerness of the art piece that I am about to describe, but I realized during my research that Enter and Exit the New Negro has to be read from a slightly different perspective, because the interdependence of race, gender, sexuality, class and history is so intrinsic to the painting. Thus, I decided to use another vocabulary, which highlights this particular perspective.

1.1

Quare—“Built in History”8

Since one of the main entry points for my analysis is situated knowledge, I am proposing to use the term “quare” for this particular reading, which was introduced by the African American Studies and Performance Studies theorist Patrick Johnson.9 Quare includes Ferguson’s notion of interdependence and highlights it, following Johnson:

6  A  theorist whose work is invested in bringing the results of the mentioned dynamics of national-normativity within Queer communities is Jasbir Puahr who developed the term homonationalism. See: (Puar 2007). 7  F or an important analysis concerning the construction of categories, see: (Haschemi Yekani, Michaelis, and Dietze 2011, 81). 8  I am using this quote by Mark Bradford (Bradford in Bedford 2010, 11), which derives from talking about his work and its historically, socially, and politically charged material, because the term “quare” has the same quality. 9  B  y applying it in the visual arts, I am also opposing his view that “Quare” theory as a theory of the flesh (another term for situated knowledge) and resistance can predominantly be found in performance, folklore, literature, and verbal arts.

VI. Abstract Facts

Quare Etymology Quare (Kwár), n 1. Meaning queer; also, opp. of straight; odd or slightly of kilter; from the African American vernacular for queer; sometimes homophobic in usage, but always denotes excess incapable of being contained within conventional categories of being; curiously equivalent to the Anglo-Irish (and sometimes “Black” Irish) variant of queer, as in Brendan Behan’s famous play The Quare Fellow. - adj. 2. A lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered person of color who loves other men or women, sexually and/or nonsexually, and appreciates black culture and community. - n. 3. one who thinks and feels and acts (and, sometimes “acts up”); committed to struggle against all forms of oppression—racial, sexual, gender, class, religious, etc. - n. 4. One for whom sexual and gender identities always already intersect with racial subjectivity. 5. quare is to queer as “reading” is to “throwing shade” Not only does quare offer analytical access from a queer of color perspective, it is a term that includes notions that dominate our existence as Black subjects and highlights the origins of my thinking. Johnson is aware of the critiques of his proposition to use quare, which include the risks of essentialism and of reaffirming fixed identity categories (as opposed to the post-identitarian approach proclaimed by Queer Theory). He opposes these critiques using Cathy Cohen’s argument that for specific social identities, these categories can be a “necessity for survival” (Cohen in Johnson 2005, 130), and—as I highlighted in the chapter on Philip Metz—these categories can also determine whether a person will be chased to death or stay alive (Hall 1997). Johnson underlines that this is part of the inspiration for Quare Theory—it activates the knowledge that is produced in the vernacular or, in other words, outside of the canon in order to claim space and challenge dominant forms of knowledge production. Bradford’s work derives from such an embodied practice. His art, and also his music, address the tension between sexuality, race, space, and community. This is lucidly expressed when Bradford talks about his inspiration and approach: My art practice goes back to my childhood, but it’s not an art background. It’s a making background. I’ve always been a creator. My mother was a creator; my grandmother was a creator. They were seamstresses. There were always scraps of everything around. There were always two or three or four projects going on at the same time. We just never had an art word for it. But I would go to the museum as a child, and I was bored. They would tell me about art, and I would look around and say, “This is art.” Then I’d get on the bus and go home. It never touched me. But the projects at home touched me. (Bradford 2006) Bradford thus highlights the basis of his work, which is situated in the family and community he grew up in, where craftsmanship was a daily routine

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and economic necessity, and therefore art-making was an everyday practice, a part of life, or even life itself. This connectedness is intrinsic to Johnson’s conceptualization of quare, as it also derives from intra-family discussions and negotiation of identity.10 Although I am using quare, which can be used to identify subjects, and that I am implicitly highlighting Ferguson’s Queer of Color approach, I also embrace the idea that particularly quare identities have a post-identitarian desire, due to the affective ballast of the many fixed categories one inhabits. In light of this, however important and useful these categories may be, my proposition is also to take the intellectual freedom to embrace and approach the idea of the beyond. This idea and desire are part of being an organic intellectual, an individual of the f lesh and quare. The following reading of Bradford’s piece Enter and Exit the New Negro activates experiences that can be read from various diasporic angles.11 I am engaging with the transnational diasporic connections through a reading that highlights the way Black vernacular knowledge is inscribed in Enter and Exit the New Negro.

2. Enter and Exit the New Negro—From Invisible Visibilities12 From yellowish white to the delicate crème, it is a surface that attracts attention through its structure and size—a document, a request, and a question. The art piece Enter and Exit the New Negro (2000) can be read at first glance as a contemporary painting. Small boxes of colored squares are rhythmically lined up across the canvas and create a surface of color that ranges from white to yellow to cream. The spectator encounters a grid whose irregularity is mirrored by gradients. At times, the canvas seems to melt into shades of gray becoming an incoherent ensemble. The meditative character of the painting is enhanced by its large size of 274.3 x 243.8 cm and the fact that it is attached as a papyrus roll to the top edge of the wall by small metal loops, unfolding like an encoded parchment. In its fragility, the artwork seems to refers to the painting of Agnes Martin, Prabhavathi Meppayil, or Otto Piene. Martin, who was known for her lines and grids, is quoted in the composition of Bradford’s painting, but he softens the rigid linearity and repetition that characterizes Martin’s pictures. He also does not use graphite and paper, as I shall explain. Meppayil’s paintings are also echoed in Bradford’s work, in the sense that both artists modify symbolically charged material on canvas with a minimalistic rhythm and therefore engage in a dialogue with conceptual and formal aspects of mini10  I think that it is interesting that both Bradford and Johnson quote the influence of their mothers and grandmothers, which thus highlights the main source for intergenerational knowledge exchange. 11  J ohnson also introduces quare through transatlantic linguistic connections when he refers to the use of the term in Irish Dialects (2005, 126). 12  T he following section is based on a German article that has already been published under the same title (Adusei-Poku 2012a).

VI. Abstract Facts

malist expression from the 1960s and 1970s. Traces of Piene who is known for his light and fire art, can also be found in Bradford’s technique. Upon closer inspection, it quickly becomes clear that the previously mentioned grid consists of slightly transparent paper sheets. To make this painting, Bradford used a bed sheet because he could not afford professional canvas shortly after graduating from art school. Acrylic gel served to set the sheet, permanent wave endpaper, and “Cellophane”- hair colors were also part of his creative media (Bradford 2012). While creating the grid of wave endpapers, he digitally photographed the work in progress and included the printed images in the painting, which creates a deep layering effect and fuses these various media and materials into one. The permanent wave endpapers are the material that allows me to draw interdiasporic connections, because it is a context-specific medium. The importance of this specificity are central to the claims that Bradford makes for his art: I am connecting the history of abstract painting with the social conditions that are going on at the same time or the social space which exists synchronically—a dialogue that challenges conservative art-historical notions. (Bradford 2010) Thus, the choice to use permanent wave endpaper—a material that will reappear throughout his oeuvre in pieces like, The Devil is… (2003)—and other materials such as billboard paper, which he collects randomly from the streets of Los Angeles, have to be understood as a comment on the social space as well as the history of abstract painting. He writes (paints) himself into the history of abstract painting by using materials that have a contemporary socioeconomic and political dimension; I will return to this point again. There are two narratives about the wave endpaper, which I will include in this quare reading. Firstly, permanent wave endpapers, as the name suggests, are used in the hairdressing industry to protect hair against the chemicals used in a permanent waving.13 Through this paper, Bradford inscribes into the painting a physical level, which is charged with social connotations. Not only is the medium of wave endpaper part of the classical idea of the profane within the artistic space à la Duchamp, the material also radiates ideas of cultural practices of “body styling.” In African and African American contexts, permanent wave endpapers are still a frequently used product, whereas the tool/material was better known in a European context in the 1980s, when the hairstyles it helps create had great popularity.14 Today, the perm end papers remain part of Black hairdressing practice and it’s interesting to note that Bradford’s mother was the owner of a hair salon in South Central LA, as he 13  I f this paper isn’t used, the hair ends will most likely will break or split after the hair is styled a few times.  lthough I have to add, that many elderly white women with straight hair around the age 14  A of approximately seventy to eighty (thus born around 1934–1944) in Germany now have a perm as volume enhancer.

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has stated in several interviews.15 Growing up, he spent a lot of time in this salon—where he runs his studio today—helping his mother’s business. Thus, the artist turned to a familiar material and began to experiment with it in his artworks. The transparent paper inscribes the idea of racialized and gendered bodies, but it also refers to Black hair, which is not shown, but is metaphorically invoked through the material.

2.1

(Qu-)hair Politics and Material Connections

Black hair politics and practices have a historical background that is closely connected to the stigmatization of Black body features in general. But no other body part (apart from fe/male genitals) has been paid more attention in the history of racialization. As the target for the hegemonic discourse of domination, hair has been called—even after skin color—the second most important body feature in the critical discourse of racism. Black bodies have been dehumanized by aesthetic devaluation, based on visual differences that include European normative straight hair. Mercer describes it this way: “The pejorative precision of the salient expression, nigger hair, neatly spells out how, within racism’s bipolar codification of human worth, black people’s hair has been historically devalued as the most visible stigmata of blackness, second only to skin” (Mercer 2000, 113). The more curly, the more “black”—in other words, “ugly”—is the formula according to which Black hair (and people) have been read. The structure of hair was exploited, such as in apartheid South Africa, where the so-called pencil test was performed, in which a pencil was put into a person’s hair. If this pencil fell to the ground and found no support, the “examined” person’s body was classified as white or closer to the white ideal, but as soon as the pen lingered in the hair, the person was classified as Black (Posel 2001). Conclusively, one can state that Black hair has been the site for political discourses, but in two ways. Take, for example, the seemingly practical terms to “straighten” or “relax” Black hair. These are fixed by negative attributions such that when hair is “straightened” or “relaxed” it is considered more clean and tidy. I think both terms have multiple implications. That quare hair is straightened, because is tense and has to be relaxed, hints at the discourse in which these beauty practices are embedded. In other words, there is a straightening process, which requires chemicals that can, if not professionally executed, also cauterize and severely damage the scalp. The permanent wave endpapers are often used after the straightening process, for example to make Jheri Curls.16 15  H  e also recreated his mother’s salon at Art Basel Miami, which led to an overdetermination of his work in terms of the location in which it is produced and limited the interpretations of that specific site (Copeland 2011a, 156). 16  J heri Curls are glossy curls famously worn by Michael Jackson. It is a hairstyle that became very popular in the 1980s. It is basically straightened hair, which has been permed again, thus extremely chemically treated hair, which needs special care in order to show the desired texture (the shiny, small, but long curls) that require a lot of oily hair products. For

VI. Abstract Facts

The discourse of Black hair highlights a politically charged contested space. The Black liberation struggle recoded the negative associations ascribed to Black hair by activating its meaning and creating a countervoice to the constant devaluation of the black body. Thus, in the 1970s in the US, in the wake of the Black Power Movement, the slogan “Black is Beautiful” arose, and was the basis for the use of Black hair as a political model of resistance, similar to the hair culture of the Caribbean Rastafarians. To carry untreated and open hair as black person remains a significant symbol of Black consciousness and is visually connected with this time of active resistance, as iconified by revolutionaries like Angela Davis, whose hairstyle is often reproduced on T-shirts in popular culture. The variations that have emerged from the symbolic and literal release of Black hair are as varied as their textures. This diversity of hairstyles also clarified that hair is part of the political, but also creative expression—always understood as a response by Black Diaspora to ideologies of race and racism (Mercer 2000). The materials in Bradford’s painting, therefore, transports these cultural notions of hair into the work, including the acceptance as well as repudiation of Western beauty standards. One of the most famous Black artists, who uses Black hair in his works, inscribing a corporeal element that is constituted through the material, is David Hammons. For example, he collected the remains of cut hair from barbershops and hair salons in his Harlem neighborhood and used it to produce sculptures such as Untitled (1992). By using this organic material, he highlighted a tension between the experience of sociopolitical life and the exhibition space. Lorna Simpson’s artwork Wigs (1996–2006) stresses identities and gender while the younger artist, Lorna Williams, uses hair from people of African descent in her seemingly fragile wood sculptures. Hair can thus be understood as a symbolic organic material, which is strategically used by Blacks artists in order to refer to social ills and the specificity of Black embodiment. The absent presence of hair in Bradford’s painting thus offers a reading, which does not address a particular identity—because the spectator does not know what kind of hair the paper refers to—and instead highlights the labor and commodity culture that is attached to the material that protects hair ends. Nevertheless, I will connect the paper with very specific experiences of racialization, which spatially depart from the context in which Bradford’s work is usually read. Christopher Bedford comments on Bradford’s technique to invoke actual places and cultural practices by saying:

more historical and practical information see: Imani 2013. These products are very greasy, which can leave oily stains on clothes and furniture, making this hairstyle the object of ridicule by African American comedians, such as Eddie Murphy (who is considered an ambiguous figure in terms of his racial politics). For example of a caricature of Jheri Curl wearers see: (Landis 1988).

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… even if the artist’s materials are always representative, they can never add up to a recognizable form. What we are offered instead is many parts of a whole that remains absent: in other words, a representation of thinking about a place and about people. (2010, 24) [emphasis by author] So what I see as a spectator is thus a collage of meaning that stands in a dialogue with the indexical character of the material as well as the places that are, “the representation of a thinking about.” The dialogue that I will open is a transnational and diasporic one, because I used to help out in a hair salon in my hometown in Germany as a teenager. Many elderly women used to get permanent waves and I was extremely fascinated by the art with which the coiffeur wrapped the straight hair around the slim plastic curlers in pastel colors; I was responsible for taking the curlers out of the hair after they went through a procedure of soaking and fixing, bulbs of paper remained in the wet hair after I took out the curlers. The older ladies would sit in their chairs (sometimes men) with artificially curly hair, awaiting the next step in the process. These sessions took up to three hours and therefore gave space for some smaller chats in the breaks. Often during these pauses, the women felt obliged to comment on my body features and said things like, “You do not need that, yes, you’ve got frizzy curly hair.” I never really knew if I was supposed to take these comments as a compliment or insult? Why was it important, anyway? It was uncomfortable to feel examined by the customers of beauty. My personal experience was therefore less occupied with subversive expressions that arise from African American culture, but with a space in which I represented the Other and the exemption, the foreign body amidst the white norm. My hair was often touched in the space of the salon, as well as in public, without my permission. This is a common cultural narrative and experience for Black people who grew up in Germany (Beldan and Popoola 1999). My encounter with Bradford’s creative use of permanent wave endpapers, therefore, has another diasporic dimension, from a Black European perspective, which nevertheless highlights various discursive simultaneities. I emphasize these “material connections,” because it affirms the corporeal level, supported by both examples of different “hair spaces” deriving from the material. While it may appear logical to define the work solely within the framework of African American culture—as, for example, in Teka Selman’s approach (Selman 2001, 26)—but I am allowing myself to abstract from it. Selman focuses her text about Enter and Exit the New Negro on Black popular culture and the local context South Central LA. My reading denies this one-dimensional spatial interpretation, because neither the spaces in which the material is used, nor the actual varieties of hair are directly represented in Bradford’s work, which invites a broader range of associations. I understand this visualization of the invisible, as a quare element of the work, because it opens up space to question binaries, dualisms, and spatial subjectivities within the diaspora and as well as a space beyond, so that we can understand these aspects in their temporal and spatial complexity. The space of the abstract in this painting is thus also a space for situated embod-

VI. Abstract Facts

ied diasporic connections, which withdraw themselves from universal affective approaches. These relational connections are supported by the layering process, which also invites doubt about what you see in the painting, and enhances the deepness of the almost f lat appearing, partly crinkled, and yet smooth canvas.

3. Enter the New Negro Hardly any other concept is so strongly situated within a local historical discourse as the New Negro, alongside the subversive, creative and intellectual creativity of the protagonists of the Harlem Renaissance who gave it its expression. This term was coined in writing by the author and philosopher Alain Locke, who expressed it in 1925 in a special issue of the journal Survey Graphic, which became, among other media, the manifesto of this intellectual and artistic movement. In this issue of the magazine, which is titled Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, Locke defined the “New Negro” in contrast to the “Old Negro.”17 Locke makes two observations: firstly, that the term Negro must be understood as a formula, as an imposed myth, and not as a term for a human. Second, he shows that this idea has been passed down from generation to generation: … a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be “kept down,” or “in his place,” or “helped up,” to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. The thinking Negro even has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality. (Locke 1925, 631) Despite the fact that Locke does not mention the concept of the slave who has no human rights and is no person of age, it’s clear that the Old Negro is also perceived within the paradigm of the slave. Consequently, Locke’s argument is that the social problem, which is attached to this term, overshadows the thinking and personality of Black people. In contrast, the term “New Negro” is supposed to highlight the possibility to abandon these old restraints and to identify the opportunities that were available to the population who found themselves, through the migration from the southern US states, in metropolitan areas in the north. The concept of the New Negro is hence supported

17  G  abriele Dietze refers to the former use of the term by Booker T. Washington. See: (Dietze 2013b, 179 FN9). Similarly, Martha Jane Nadell recalls that only nineteen years before Washington or Du Bois came to represent the New Negroes, they were considered by Locke in a rather generational perspective under the category of “sentimental Old Negro.” See: (Nadell 2004, 11).

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by a set of positive emancipatory self-attributions that Locke summarizes as follows, The intelligent Negro of today is resolved not to make discrimination an extenuation for his shortcomings in performance, individual or collective; he is trying to hold himself at par, neither inflated by sentimental allowances nor depreciated by current social discounts. For this he must know himself and be known for precisely what he is, and for that reason he welcomes the new scientific rather than the old sentimental interest. (A. Locke 1925, 632) Not only are the intellectual capabilities of the New Negro emphasized, but also the turn towards the sciences, and the arts are proclaimed as an open space of expression. Positive self-representations replace previous coarse and offensive cartoons. When Locke describes a human, it is always within the idea of an androcentric Black man, who is aware of his humanity, his creative and intellectual creativity, and uses these capacities productively, in order to move out of former notions of Blackness. The quote also highlights that the emancipation of Black “men” is depicted as a male liberation struggle, from which the positions of Black women are marginalized and equated with the notion of sentiment and irrationality18. This practice has been heavily criticized especially by blacks and feminists (Collective 1986; hooks 1982; 1989; Collins 1990; Davis 1983). Recall how Wright summarizes this practice, when she writes about the construction of gendered agency and the ways in which it, “disabled the possibility of a Black female subject at the same time that it enabled the Black male subject” (M. M. Wright 2004, 132). Gabriele Dietze also focuses on this dilemma and considers these “narratives of re-masculinization” not only as a result of the “Rape-Lynching Complex,” but also highlights, using the example of Baraka’s writing, the explicit homophobia through which the emasculinization project took place.19 Although Locke’s text must be understood as part of a male hegemony (in the closet), it is used by Brad-

18 It is important to note that Bradford has a special concern for the representation of women in public media as well as the social milieu. This interest was expressed from early on with a painting called Strawberry 2002, a collage/painting in which he also used permanent wave end papers and also added magazine advertisements. The intersectional gender dimension of the piece is transported through the title, which is a particularly South Central LA name for a woman who becomes a sex worker who is a crack-addict. 19  D  ietze also highlights a debate among Black male activists on James Baldwin’s critique of Richard Wright’s figure of the emasculated Bigger Thomas in Native Son, in which Baldwin sees the inherent white fantasy of the aggressive Black man (“Black Beast”) and highlights that masculinity has nothing to do with violence. Eldridge Cleaver, who like Amiri Baraka followed an idea of masculinity that is intrinsically violent, assaulted Baldwin for this comment and called him a sick homosexual who is frightened by the heterosexual masculinity of Wright’s eponymous hero (Dietze 2013b, 275 &FN41). Masculinity in this context thus has to be equated with normative heterosexuality.

VI. Abstract Facts

ford as the basis of his considerations.20 I have argued in an earlier version of this chapter that, to a certain extent, through the title of the artwork, Bradford structurally joins the androcentric discourse of the Harlem Renaissance, but I have to correct this argument. Because as recent scholarship, as well as artistic explorations, have shown, the free-spiritedness and sexual freedom (though closeted) of the Harlem Renaissance offered a space for quareness.21 Isaac Julien’s film, Looking for Langston—in which Julien assembles a collage of text, image, and sound and creates a quare space and time (unfortunately in which female positions are reduced to yearning mother figures)—depicts the hidden histories of the Harlem Renaissance from Julien’s perspective. Since the role of the gay male artist was widely suppressed in Black life, Looking for Langston is the product of Julien’s fantasy and voices the question: what would it have looked like to be a quare artist during the Harlem Renaissance? His approach was less out of concern for a historical corrective, but rather to point at yet another one of the oppressive obstacles to Black life that outlasted the enslavement of Africans (English 2007, 189). It is the ambiguity of the common heteronormative narrative about the Harlem Renaissance, that I also see ref lected in Bradford’s title, as well as the corrective impulse to open up as space for fantasy and imagination. But if he is suggesting that we leave this space created in 1920s consciousness, then in which direction does Bradford lead his spectators, and why do I read this as quare?

3.1

Exit the New Negro

Bradford describes his motivation for the choice of the title in a short interview for his exhibition Pinocchio Is On Fire as follows: So I was thinking of the New Negro and I thought well ok the New Negro: I am a New Negro. So he has to enter and then exit for new possibilities, because if you just enter that means you are part of the status quo you are part of a set of conditions, but if you enter and then choose to exit you open up the possibilities for something else, that you don’t know. And the show was in Harlem and the history of Harlem and the Studio Museum so I suppose I was putting down some type of stake in the unknown. (Bradford, 2012) Bradford’s comment reveals a very specific double-bind, positioning himself as a New Negro and synchronically distancing himself from the same concept. Several layers that I have mentioned previously in this Chapter are articulated in this short quote. Bradford refers back to the Studio Museum in Harlem 20  W  ithout exclusively attributing the key protagonists of the Harlem Renaissance with quare identity politics, it is important to mention that some—e.g., Locke, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen—were quare. Their voices significantly named and shaped this movement. Also see: (Schwarz 2003; Herring 2007). 21  For white female fantasies about Black sexuality, also see: (Dietze 2013b, pp.151).

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and the introduction of the term “post-black,” because his work was shown in that infamous exhibition. He also highlights the cultural tradition and legacy of the Harlem Renaissance when he says, “I’m a New Negro”. He also opens up the space to explore the changes, shifts, and incongruities that have manifested since the term was popularized. Integral to Bradford’s thinking (as evidenced by the quote and by his artwork) is the necessity to further explore the meaning of the “New Negro” and also leave this position in order to turn to unknown opportunities. This duality—fixation by (historical) experience and the desire and potential to “feel out of it,”—is formulated the Queer of Color theorist José Esteban Muñoz. In his book Cruising Utopia, Muñoz writes: “Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.” And further: “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic” (Muñoz, 2009, 1). I think that Muñoz’s approach can also be translated into quare in this context, because it highlights the intersectional desire to abscond from the quagmire of race and gender fixation. These two aspects of feeling and the unknown clarify why I am emphasizing the quare dimension of Bradford’s piece, as well as the post-identitarian discourse it is a part of. A close study of Enter and Exit the New Negro should include the temporal aspects of Bradford’s chosen materials, because the permanent wave endpapers help to safely execute a very delicate form of physical metamorphosis; in other words to change the structure of hair. Interestingly, a permanent wave promises consistency, although it is bound to fail, because hair grows and with it the permanent wave treated hair grows “out.” Thus, like our thinking, identity categories, and experiences, the material is affiliated with notions of change—physical as well as ideological. The title of the piece highlights the process of “going into,” which I see as a form of becoming conscious or intellectual transformation, and connected to great uncertainties. I would also read these uncertainties with emphasis on what it means to open new conceptual spaces within societies that are afraid of any ambiguity, uncertainty, and f luidity. This stake into the unknown is a stake in the reality we might already live or, even, the futures we lived without being aware of it. “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” (Muñoz 2009, 1) This notion is ref lected in Bradford’s work, not only through the acknowledgment of race (by material choices, but not by showing it), but also an acknowledgment of the categories of gender and sexuality. Because the body becomes a metaphor: through the material that is dissolved into the space of abstraction, the body is underlined by the rhythm of the small papers that dominate the composition. The concept of the New Negro describes a process and at the same time the historical artifact, a status quo, or a set of conditions that have been abstracted and codified as male. By playing with these codes, the painting to open a space “beyond representation” (English, 2002, 18).

VI. Abstract Facts

It is this stake into the unknown that can be read as the quintessential interest that Bradford expresses, driven by quare desires transported through the material. If it is the epistemic double-bind of Black identities, to be fixed within the phenomenological realm of racialization and to attempt to leave this fixation, then an act that embraces the option of leaving the paradigm of the New Negro is an act of disobedience. As I have described with the example of Mickalene Thomas and Frantz Fanon, such an act allows different questions to be asked, exploring spaces of thought and affective experience that post-black poses to the present. The permanent wave endpapers capture both the devaluation of the black body as well as empowerment strategies while simultaneously blurring the boundaries of Black and white bodies. Bradford uses abstract painting, as a form of expression, to relay ambiguity in his works. Abstract painting has been extensively written about and there is a large body of academic work that has been produced on the subject. I will not attempt to cover it, or even all of Bradford’s references, in full. Rather, to open a specific dialogue between Bradford and an older generation of African American abstract painters to highlight distinctive generational differences that help frame Bradford as a post-black artist and, additionally, to offer to the concept of post-black, the notion of an inherent quare desire.

4. Ambiguity as Chance—Abstraction as Means of Identity A few sentences ago, I used the term “ambiguity” to describe the effect that abstraction produces in Bradford’s work. And yet, Bradford punctuates this ambiguous space with the very same materials he used to create it. It is precisely, because the permanent wave endpapers interrupt the proposed artistic freedom or “clean slate” that is at the core of abstract expressionism that they can be understood as subversive, even though they remain non-representational.22 This observation connects to the second question of this chapter, which concerns Bradford’s statement that, “the conventional Euro-American narrative of abstraction is not [his] struggle” (Bradford in Bedford 2010, 14). I argue that the material he uses highlights abstract expressionism’s failure, as it hinders an indulgence into the idea of “pure form” and instead points towards the interconnectedness of material discourses. There are many historical examples of this connectedness that are referenced in Bradford’s work. After Enter and Exit, Bradford uses cardboard, layering and sanding-machines, which place his work and technique between collage and decollage, as performed by European painters such as Raymond Haines, Mimmo Rotella, Jaques de la Villeglé, and Wolf Vostell. For exam22  I n an interview, Bradford states that the more his work evolves, the more it engages with abstract expressionism of the 1950s (Bradford and Eliel 2010, 61), which is quite interesting, because I argue that his early works like Enter and Exit the New Negro (2000), Smokey (2003) or Strawberry (2002), which Bedford calls less mature, have already been engaged with abstract expressionis. I would interpret his development as a return to his initial questions.

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ple, Rotella and Villeglé ripped layers of posters off of billboards and created new large-scale images, which they transported into their studios. This peeling-off process, which is also called decollage, relocates the artwork from the urban street and back into the studio (and finally the gallery and museum). Through it, not only is a specific form of collaboration produced but also a spatial social commentary (Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes. 1994; B. Buchloh 1991, 106). This is a notion that stresses the proximity of the discourses of the powerful and powerless subjects. Copeland points towards this as a decolonial aspect of Bradford’s work, based on Hanna Feldman’s analysis that the practices and particularly the outcome of decollage introduced a decolonial challenge for the temporal momentum of a “torn apart” colonial France in the 1960s; because Rotella’s and Villeglé’s paintings represented, following Feldman, those political aspects straight “from the street,” which remained invisible in the gallery space and nevertheless determined historico-political entanglements and frictions that European imperialism produced (Copeland 2011a, 193). Bradford’s inclusion of ephemeral everyday materials, like the permanent end wave endpaper or cardboard—he is often quoted calling himself a “paper chaser” (Bradford and Eliel 2010, 57)—which he collects in the streets of L.A., breaks through the illusion of the universal, which is key to conventional approaches and narratives of abstract painting. Christopher Bedford, the curator of Pinocchio Is On Fire—Bradford’s ten-year survey show at the Wexner Center for the Arts—underpins my observation when he writes: Bradford’s early formal investigations into the material properties of permanent-wave end papers and certain chemicals used to treat and straighten hair, seen in works like Enter and Exit the New Negro (2000) and Strawberry (2002), were a calculated way to center the deeply freighted historical conversation of abstract painting from a vantage point that was pointedly grounded in his social experience and that forced the hermeticism of abstraction to account for the unrelenting specificity of his materials. (Bedford 2010, 14) Bedford points at the, “freighted historical conversation about abstract painting,” because Bradford’s practice is embedded within a long history and tradition of painting, despite the fact that he does not really use classical materials such as (oil) paint and canvas when making his pieces. In other words, the fact that his images are non-figurative has played a more important role in how his work is placed within art discourse. Abstract expressionism derived from a Dutch painting movement known as de Stijl, which promoted the ideas of universal truths through abstraction (Jaffé 1965, 122–23), with key artists such as Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg23. This style was particularly important in the US context, inf luencing artists like Jackson Pollock 23  I am aware that this is a simplistic version of the developments of Abstract expressionism, but what I want to emphasize here is the notion of Universalism within these painting traditions.

VI. Abstract Facts

and Willem de Kooning. This era marked a major change in which power over the definition of art slowly shifted from Europe to the US.24 Now, since it is not my aim to repeat the first and second wave debates on abstract expressionism, I will focus on the dialogue that Bradford’s work—and subject position—opens up. Bradford intervenes in the narrative of American abstract expressionism, which proclaims that as a form, it allows for detachment from the material world and access to a reality that exists beyond representation, one in which sociohistoric relations are severed. Bradford is rather critical of such ideas: I don’t believe in this sort of the sublime, this something that’s the extension of my hand, that is connected to some altruistic thing outside of myself. If I do, if I believe in something like it has to do with the very earthy down here with us and so it is why I use material that are very tactile and very present and so it made sense to go to text and language from the streets or economic culture. Ideas of romanticism sublime and transcendence, all these things I don’t really believe in. (White Cube Gallery 2010) [emphasis by author] Bradford’s rejection of the sublime consequently situates his practice within the social environment he lives or works in. Through his work (and words) Bradford seems to implicitly challenge art historical approaches that try to claim universality. In this challenge, I see his, as well as many marginalized positions’s, struggle. The claim for the universal and the sublime is often upheld by “major” artists, as curator Robert Storr points out, which is marked by the fact that the artists who are counted as “major,” were all white heterosexual men (Gibson 1997, xi). The common art historical narrative is that the artist’s subjectivity is represented in what Foster and Kelly have described as the “expressive indexical,” or what Bradford calls “the sublime altruistic thing,” by the artist’s touch, movements, impulse, and strength or empathy. In other words, the way in which the artist fills the canvas with paint, through which they is able to inscribe their individual expression/personal spirit, which can be seen as a warrant for its commercial success as in Pollock’s example (Kelly 1981, Foster 1999).25 I would argue that however an artist tries to disconnect from the the material world, their work will always be connected to the physical, social, and economic groundedness of our existence, and herein lies the potential power of abstraction. To abstract this groundedness for quare identities is an opportunity to think beyond the thresholds of the skin.

24  For an analysis of this shift, see: (Belting 2003, 46). 25  I t is interesting that the language used in the first debate by Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg is very similar to the primitivist vocabulary, as the artist is represented through his primitive senses rather than his intellect and the rational; what is thus observable is a repetition of historically produced stereotypes.

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4.1

hidin’ like thieves in the night from life, Illusions of osasis makin’ you look twice 26 The strategies for individuality that I have adopted acknowledge the rules. (Bradford in Siegel 2010, 105)

What does it mean to be a contemporary painter, who happens to be Black, and in what kind of relationship does it place them to their predecessors? In a quote presented earlier, Bradford names himself a “New Negro,” which makes it possible to connect his artistic practice with older Black painters or, more precisely, with ideas and practices that resulted from the Harlem Renaissance. It also acknowledges an important history that has been marginalized by art historical approaches and the canon. In Bradford’s approach, one can note parallels and/or shared affinities and techniques with Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and Betye Saar, and Alma Thomas. Bearden used collage as a means of expression and it is an element that repeatedly appears in Bradford’s work. The abstract expressionist Lewis was invested in blurring the distinction between the figurative and non-figurative painting, as well as in contrasting color schemes, with which he artistically captured racial tensions and spatial relationships. Saar used found objects and materials in her collages and installations, with which she told hidden histories. Her works, “retraced old ground at the same time as they forge ahead into new terrain” (Bernier 2008, 160). This aspect of Saar’s work, which has some overlaps with the assemlages and painted collages of German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, is ref lected in Bradford’s “paper-chasing” practice. Meanwhile, Thomas’s work is echoed through both her use of blocks of paint and references to urban life (S. S. Lewis 1994, 103).27

26  T he title of this subsection is a borrowed line from Talib Kweli’s and Yasiin Bey’s (Mos Def ) song “Thieves in the Night” from the influential hip-hop album Back Star, in which the two talk about the way racism leads to a process of internalization, which I discussed in the previous chapter. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s lines in The Bluest Eye, the artists call for a raised awareness of these processes and a growth in consciousness: “And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good but well-behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life” (Morrison 1999, 163). I am using this phrase as a title, because as—I will later argue—I think that Bradford, as well as Lewis, are extremely aware of the complexities of internalization. Both worked within the realm of the visual and are very adamant about challenging their viewers to look twice. The title references the influences that a younger generation of artists were exposed to via hip-hop and literature. 27  T his comparison might appear contradictory as Thomas claims to paint from her “creative imagination and her own will,” a description that recalls the idea of the sublime through intrinsic creativity, whereas Bradford rejects the sublime. Nevertheless, the circles of color that she painted in Pinks of Sherry Blossoms 1974 are inspired by the circular gardens located

VI. Abstract Facts

One argument that critics put forward against the notion of post-black art was that the ideas being expressed by this younger generation of artists are not new and actually repeat some of the claims and critiques that have been raised for generations. Looking at these examples of artists and their work, and the elements they share with Bradford, in no way undermines the innovation and difference that younger artists were working through. Theirs was a conceptual and socio-political shift, one that cannot be summarized by a single aesthetic. I propose to rephrase this critique into a productive last question for this chapter: what kind of dialogue does Bradford open, via abstract painting, in connection to the social struggles his predecessors were engaged in? How does his approach differ, apart from the quareness that I have already elaborated on and which remains key? By embracing some of the aesthetics and streategies of his predecessors, Bradford’s work opens an additional investigation into the narratives of art history (which, in regards to abstract expressionism maintained the idea of art as the domain of white men) and the important Black artists whose works were marginalized within the mainstream but inf luenced younger Black artists nonetheless. In order to stress the differences as well as commonalities between these generations, I have chosen to focus my analysis on Lewis and Bradford, because I understand the ambiguity of Lewis’s position to be in conversation with Bradford’s approach and very enriching for the discussion of post-black.

4.2

Norman Lewis—the not quite “invisible man” of abstract expressionism 28 I am sure that if I do succeed in painting a black experience I won’t recognize it myself. (N. Lewis 1968, 23)

There are only a few African American painters mentioned in the common narrative about abstract expressionism, and they are rarely considered as part of the canon of this movement, which predominantly consists of white men.29

in Washington D.C., and are just one example of how Thomas brought the urban environment into abstraction. 28  T he title of this subsection is a reference to Storr’s text on Bradford, in which he frames Lewis in this way (2010, 40). 29  N  ot only that, the American abstract expressionism movement is ideologically and politically charged and has been the subject of a decade-long debate, most prominently between Greenberg and Rosenberg. Particularly of note is its role in the Cold War conflict. Many scholars have engaged in the subject (2010, 40); but since it’s of little relevance to my argument, I have not expanded on it. What is much more important for this chapter is the fact that abstract expressionism is a highly gendered, racialized, and sexualized canon, as Anne Eden Gibson has poignantly highlighted in her book Abstract Expressionism: Other

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Despite corrective attempts to recognize a Black American contribution30, it is still common to leave names out of the narrative, as did Grace Glueck in her review of the show Norman Lewis: Black Paintings, 1946–1977, at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Glueck claims that Lewis played a rather irrelevant part in shaping the movement, in contrast to his much more successful abstract expressionist peers, due to the lack of originality and expression in his work. She writes: “Was Lewis really in a league with the powerfully inventive major Abstract Expressionists, as his supporters suggest? Based on this presentation, with all the strengths and weaknesses it exposes, one would have to say no” (Glueck 1998). Anne Eden Gibson and Celeste Marie Bernier, in contrast, count his contributions to abstract expressionism and Robert Storr considers him as a “founding father of the New York School” (which I repeat despite its reproductive heteronormative language and symbolism). As the art historian Debra Balken explains, Lewis was part of the Studio 35 debates3132 that coined the term “abstract expressionism,” and he was also selected as one of the abstract expressionist artists to be presented in the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 1956 (Bernier 2008, 165; Gibson 1997, 122; Storr 2010, 40; Balken 2005, 67; Patton 1998, 174). As an American with Bermudian and African American background, Norman Lewis was at first invested in Social Realism like many of his Contemporaries but he moved towards abstraction in the 1940’s. Born and raised in Harlem New York in 1909 he was an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Michelle Dubois sees Lewis as part of the artist group that was represented by the New York City’s Willard Gallery. She argues that, “[U]nlike the Abstract Expressionists, their work ultimately conveyed a sense of control, through the use of meticulous, dense, precise and at times even patterned calligraphic lines, or the use of light lines and f loating, glowing orbs shrouded in mist” Politics. I do not otherwise feel obliged to repeat the usual theoretical debates, experts, and canon, and thus reproduce its dominant perception. 30  S ince I wrote the original version of this chapter there have been exhibitions that attempted to contribute to the correction eg: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of black Power and the new hanging at MoMA in 2019. 31  D  avid Craven also highlights Lewis’ participation in this 1950 founding session that took place at Studio 35 (Craven 1991, 57). 32 It is important to note that despite Lewis’s connection to and collaboration with other artists from the Abstract Expressionist Movement, he never benefited from the same advantages that white artists did, as the following interview exemplifies: “And the first place that I had was at 28th Street between—in fact I was up there just the other day—between Broadway and Fifth Avenue. I lived there for quite a while until I discovered—the place was something like—I think it was $15 a month—and I discovered that despite the fact that these were a bunch of left-wing artists that I was paying twice as much rent as they. And then the whole goddamn thing upset me because these were guys, white artists, who I enjoyed being with and we, at that time, were fighting for a lot of things that they materially benefitted from but I didn’t. We were trying to set up the unions, teaching unions. We had an artists’ union and yet many things that they benefitted from I am still fighting for today” (N. Lewis 1968).

VI. Abstract Facts

(Dubois 2011). Her position is particularly interesting because she shows how the revisionist inclusion of artists into the existing canon of abstract expressionism is a rather limiting approach that may preclude a more nuanced exploration of the variations in style, technique, and aesthetics that were being produced. According to Dubois, Willard Gallery worked with artists from various ethnic backgrounds and was inf luenced by Jungian psychoanalysis, which beliefs in a “universal collective unconscious.” Despite parallels to abstract expressionism regarding the notion of universality, Dubois argues that the Willard Gallery artists desired, “to express a sense of holism and universality bound by rules and a sense of order” (Dubois 2011). However one wants to position Lewis, the overall debate about whether he is an abstract expressionist or if he is specifically a “Willard Gallery” artist, overshadows the fact that the discussions about his work are connected to ethnicity and its inf luence on the subjects he engaged with. I am mentioning these conf licting positions because they are part of the debate that Bradford and other post-black artists passively reopen; it is the debate about whether art by Black artists is consequently and intrinsically Black. Interestingly, it is not primarily the work itself that helps to discuss these questions, rather, it is the way the artists positioned themselves through interviews and comments. It also helps to look at the sociopolitical and economic circumstances in which these younger artists produced their work, the opportunities they’ve had to include other topics in their work— including gender—and whether they found public acknowledgment, buyers, and dealers.33 Lewis believed that, ”artistic experimentation should contribute to a ‘universal knowledge of aesthetics’ so that ‘art comes to have a life of its own; to be evidence of the emotional, intellectual and aesthetic level of men’, which is ‘always changing and going towards greater understanding of human beings’” (Bernier 2008, 161). But given Lewis’s perspective on women artists, to whom does this notion of universalism apply? Lewis’ view on the sculptor Augusta Savage exemplifies his gendered notion of male superiority and devaluation. As the following example from an interview by Henri Ghent34 shows, Lewis believed the very same sexist ideas about women artists as his white contemporaries in the 1950s. Savage was an inf luential sculptor from the Harlem Renaissance, who allowed Lewis to practice in her basement studio. Although Lewis was shy about asking her for permission to study with her, he immediately highlights the fact that he had to bring her dirty workspace into a suit33  T his set of conditions again highlights the transfer that this dissertation has to achieve to look at art while connecting it with the broader set of social, economic, and political conditions for Black subjects. 34  I t is worth noting that the African American journalist, writer, and cultural consultant Henri Ghent became an assistant at the Brooklyn Institute in 1968 in order to help implement a community gallery at the Brooklyn Museum, which is still one of the most important for African American art in New York City. It played a vital role in my research as a place to meet artists and become part of their networks (N.N. The Afro American Newspaper 1968).

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able state. He thus establishes himself first as a rescuer, by introducing the person who gave him an opportunity to pursue his ambition as someone in need of help. Further, after being asked how Savage’s work and mentorship inf luenced his work, Lewis responds: “The meeting of a black artist who, incidentally, that was a woman was quite a challenge. She was a very impressive personality and very encouraging but as an artist, I mean the whole rudiments of trying to become a painter or sculptor, there was little that she did. It was just my observation, looking, seeing her work and feeling stimulated by a woman sculptor” (N. Lewis 1968).35 The woman in this narration is not only reduced to an affective mode (“feeling stimulated”) without artistic capacities or inf luence, she is reduced to the role of hostess when her space is cast as a social gathering place for male artists, who appear important to Lewis: Henri Genth: Whom did you meet at Augusta Savage’s place? Norman Lewis: At that time it was still—I met loads of people; Roland Hayes, Countee Cullins. I met Claude McCay. I met a painter who was very well known then, and many of the—the guy who wrote Nigger Heaven. (N. Lewis 1968) For Lewis, “it was ‘the excellence’ of the black artist’s art, rather than the political relevance of his or her content, which would offer the ‘most effective blow against stereotype and the most irrefutable proof of the artificiality of stereotype in general’” (Bernier 2008, 165). He thus operates within a framework that is similar to the idea of post-black, because it expresses an idea of aesthetics that is not merely identity based. Lewis’s paintings were very abstract, but nevertheless suggest political intention in their titles, e.g., Klu Klux (1963) and Processional (1964). The means through which Lewis tried to convey these notions is strictly bound to the aesthetic conventions of his time—oil paint and canvas. Although Lewis moved away from the figurative style that he had practiced in the 1940s, the complexity of the Black Experience is something he continued to pursue in his art during the Civil Rights Movement. As he stated in an interview, Lewis was uncertain whether he would succeed in materializing the frustration that accompanied such an effort. The sentence that is most intriguing comes after he states that Black artists are obliged to express the experience of the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis says: And I am sure that if I do succeed in painting a black experience I won’t recognize it myself. I have to live with it many years and not destroy it because it is unfamiliar to me, just do it and keep it. And see it around me and possible, eventually it will become a part of me as a person and something that I welcome to see. (N. Lewis 1968) 35  L ewis’s perception of Savage as an unimportant artist is further addressed in the interview when Lewis admits to her contribution, but indicates that it is the mere fact that she and her practice existed at a time when Black artists were neglected or marginalized that matters, and not the quality of her artistic work.

VI. Abstract Facts

The Black Experience is something external (“see it around me and possible”) and internal (“eventually it will become a part of me as a person”), which I think expresses the ambiguity and uniqueness that go along with the notion of representation and form. Although Lewis’s work tries to express something that is universally artistically unique, his language is part of the artistic language of his time. The ambiguous ways he comments on the Black Experience, essentialisms about Blackness, and the place beyond Blackness makes him, as Anne Gibson observed, a negotiator of his location in culture and politics nonetheless. She draws on Homi Bhabha, who underscores—like Spivak—the necessity to emphasize difference in order to maintain a political claim. But I have to disagree with Gibson’s endpoint analysis, because Lewis indulged in the idea of transcendence and the sublime. This is outlined in the afore mentioned interviews and highlighted by the following quote, which David Craven framed within the multiculturalism and internationalization of Lewis’s art, which the artist saw: … not as reproduction or as a convenient but entirely secondary medium for propaganda but as the production of experiences which combine intellectual and emotional activities in a way that may conceivably add … to a universal knowledge of aesthetics and the creative faculty which I feel exists for one form or another in all men. (Lewis in Craven 1991, 57) So, instead of pledging for the politics of art and Black artistic practice, Lewis argues for the transcendental potential of aesthetics, which allows every individual (man) to produce such aesthetics through the gift of being a genius. His definition seems like a reanimation of a set of myths that derive from a conception of society as totality, as proposed by Max Weber, who saw the artist as a mirror for a society’s cosmology; a change in art thus meant a change in society. The notion of the universal artist derives from the Renaissance idea of the artist as genius—as Emma Barker, Nick Webb, and Kim Woods argue. In this narrative, the artist is a very special person who is connected to god and is a channel for god’s beauty. It also calls on the ancient construction of the artist as a person living in solitude and melancholy—indispensably dedicated to the craft (Barker, Webb, and Woods 1999, 9). The melancholic, semi-depressed artist is the result of a romanticist idea that has found its way into a common, cultural Western narrative. I place Lewis’s definition of art, his reputation of being called a “loner” (by Bearden, for example) or his idea of “facing the challenge of being alone” (Lewis 1968) within this long-standing cultural narrative. Although the debate about what is art and its essence is not as heated as it used to be, such as in Manet’s time, for example, it is interesting that this discussion about universal meaning, the political potential of art, and the cultural framing of its producers continues to underpin new developments in the field. The debate about the universal truths of art was tellingly absent from the public reception of the post-black art show and I argue that this absence pinpoints the key question. What does it mean when you don’t

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want to be called a “Black artist” and only “artist”? Lewis stressed universal aesthetics and it becomes apparent through the selected quotes that he was attached to the idea of a beyond, and to dissolving differences through aesthetics and form. I argue that this is one of the key differences between Lewis’s generation and Bradford’s, and in order to continue this short comparison and to highlight the differences, I will engage with Bradford’s work again .

4.3 Playing by the Rules—Turn off the light! 36 I propose that to “acknowledge the rules,” as in Bradford’s previously cited quote, can be understood, in this case, to be a simultaneous acknowledgment and a rejection of said rules. Bradford indicates that he understands the terms, but chooses not to reinscribe himself into a tradition of painting, which is determined by a set of parameters that have symbolically and practically marginalized other artists.37 In other words, he rejects remaining within the material and thus ideological guidelines that painting would demand— such as a set of colors and materials sourced from “the infinite, artificial world of the art school and art store” (Siegel 2010, 105). Despite the large scale of his work, his palette and range of material are rather down-scale, but allow him a wide range of possibilities of expression. Bradford, as mentioned, frequently explores and experiments with a range of materials at hand, materials that are not typically designated for art and artists. These include the debris of public marketing tools, such as billboard paper waste and he is a regular customer at local hardware stores. I propose that a key aspect of Bradford’s approach is that he represents discourses that are prevalent in popular culture, and despite their vividly figurative connotations, expresses them on a non-representational level. In other words, as in Lewis’s work, he represents these discourses and spaces (I am not referring exclusively to bodies) without illustrating them. This aspect of his work is addressed during an interview at his studio with an Australian film team: You are from Australia, but even in Australia you know what South Central is. Drive-bys, Gangs, Hip Hop, Snoop Dog; it is figurative, it has been figurative over the last 25 years, no room for abstraction. South Centch Baby, but how does one represent that without representing it? (LA Laid Bare 2011)

36  T he second part of the title is a reference to the 1979 single Turn of f the light by Teddy Pendergrass and metaphorically connects to Bradford’s rejection of conventional styles of painting.  ith rejection of other artists, I mean the connotations of color in regards to race, the 37  W idea of painting as a way of making light visible or to convey transcendence and universal truths. With this rejection, Bradford also throws into question the verity of the claims that have been made about abstraction. See a video interview from his show at White Cube Gallery (White Cube Gallery 2010).

VI. Abstract Facts

Bradford consequently makes associations and connections between his work and its socio-political environment, using mapping techniques and spatially-specific materials that reference African American vernacular and which are encoded in a script that echoes the economy of Blackness.38 These associations and connections are quite deliberate. Take, for example, his solo show at the Wexner Museum called Pinocchio Is On Fire, in which he included different subjective reading positions in the conceptualization of his multimedia installation of the same title. The work broaches the issue of the famous Black balladeer and 1970s sex symbol Teddy Pendergrass, whose attraction to Tenika Jackson, a transgender person, was discovered after his Rolls Royce was involved in a car crash in which he lost his consciousness. He was unable to prevent the disclosure of the identity of the self-confessed Transgender sex worker in his company, who later told her side of the story to various newspapers. The incident was scandalous in Black media and community gossip both, for two reasons. First, his severe injuries left him paralyzed from the 38  T his leads me to a short excursion into Bradford’s video work, where he also pursues this question and approach in a video called Niagara 2005 (Mark Bradford, Niagara, 2005. DVD video loop, 3:17 minutes. Courtesy of the artist). In the video, Bradford shows a sidewalk in south central LA (apparent through the roughness of the trottoir, the fences, old cars, and trash on the sidewalk). There is a middle-aged man in black boots, marigold-colored shorts, a white race shirt, and pulled up white socks. The video loop starts with a close-up of the man’s back, who henceforth walks away from the camera, allowing the spectator to follow his walk down the street. But the man, a neighbor of Bradford’s who is named Melvin, as one learns through the description of the piece, does not really walk down the street. Instead, he swings and sways gently but determined, like the men in the famous Bossa Nova Song “The Girl from Ipanema,” by the iconic Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Jobim (a song that has a male and female version). His back is held straight, almost in a hollow-back position with his chest proudly pushed up towards the sky, which has the effect that his lower curves are strongly accentuated. Bradford follows Melvin in a motionless frame, which evokes, along with the title Niagara, a reference to the 1952 Hollywood film noir Niagara directed by Henry Hathaway (Niagara 1952). Hathaway’s film includes a famous, and for the time almost bawdily shot, Marilyn Monroe moves away from the camera and swings her hips lasciviously from side to side. The similarity is apparent—both figures are confident and create a great physical presence through their movements, but the difference in terms of sex and race couldn’t be blunter. What Bradford establishes with this shot is an awareness of the performance of gender. One may argue that Melvin’s walk is effeminate and thus can be read within the classical stereotypes about gay men, but whatever Melvin chooses to identify as, I argue that his performance is quare. The environment of South-Central LA in which he chooses to openly be quare; this urban environment with a Black community, which predominantly imagines Black masculinity in a straight way, would be considered as hostile to individuals like Melvin. This notion of a Black quare men in an urban environment in which is the protagonist’s body is read as a foreign has a parallel to the cultural abjection of the white blonde enfant terrible of the film noir genre to which Niagara belongs. The Feminist Film theorist Ann Kaplan has described this phenomenon through which the white female body becomes the symbol for demoralization and death through her sexual aggressiveness (Kaplan 1998). In an interview about the video, Bradford states that he considers Melvin’s refusal to assimilate into the expected patterns of the street to be an act of fearless resistance (Mark Bradford at Laxart 2008).

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chest down and made it impossible for him to perform in the same way as he had done previously. Second, Pendergrass, who had modeled himself after an image of heterosexual Black masculinity and was considered a “Ladies Man,” with a wife and three children, suddenly became a sexual ambiguous person, someone who is deviant in his desires, fractured in his perception, and cast out for his “failed” masculinity. Pendergrass became a quare person in the eyes of his fans and his career—like his body—never recovered from the accident. Bradford’s exhibition references the incident and its aftermath with the title Pinocchio Is On Fire, and questions Pendergrass’s exclusion from 1980s popular culture. Bradford’s room-sized installation at the Wexner Museum sets the spectator on an imaginary, affective journey through 1980s popular culture and its heteronormative restrictions. As the viewer moves among the installation, three songs by Bradford “Skinny Jeans,” “Astrology,” and “Interview” (Fig. 41) play in the background.

Fig. 41: Mark Bradford, Vinyl Artwork, Pinocchio is on Fire, 2010 The reference to Pinocchio in the title of the exhibition refers to the patriarchal structures through which Pinocchio comes in to being, and the ways he is rejected as soon as he disobeys the set rules. For Bradford “Pinocchio Is On Fire talks about a different male body moving through South Central at a time when that body that was not in fashion any more. When a different black male body was in fashion.” (Bradford and Bedford 2010) These rules of masculinity are bound to gender roles and heteronormativity, but if one adds the notion of race into this set of rules, the picture or reading of Bradford’s practice becomes more complicated. The discourse around Pendergrass and Bradford’s artistic examination of his story can be approached through numerous cultural and social positions that each enriches the reading of the piece. Thus, the work does not have a claim on the sublime or the universal;

VI. Abstract Facts

it is a contemplation about being in the world through the particular gaze that we as spectators inherit. This argument is key in order to understand the differences between Lewis’s and Bradford’s generations. Bradford retains African American vernacular as the source code for his work and does not feel obliged (perhaps due to the work of the generation that came before him) to speak to universal values in order to be a successful artist. The formal aspect that I have highlighted in Lewis’s approach is his adherence to the classical materials, something that Bradford’s work opposes and therefore challenges. Celeste Marie Bernier argues that Lewis’s ideas about art were driven by the notion that art has to exist as an ideal, outside of the reality of social experiences. This argument can be contrasted with Bradford who opens a dialogue between the medium and the history of abstract painting, by inquiring about its own terms: I think that historically—well—at University we talk about abstraction in art-historical terms and I think it is interesting to also talk about social abstraction. I think the 21st century in the way we can understand identity or how we put our lives together, is really something you kind of understand through abstraction it is a little bit of this and a little bit of that. (White Cube Gallery 2010) In Bradford’s perspective, abstraction is therefore a means of life, a way to push forward into the unknown, formative in its destabilizing power. It rejects the quest for universal totality and aims to make sense of what seems otherwise ungraspable.

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VII. Post-Post-black I simply do not believe that one aspect of myself can possibly profit from the oppression of any other part of my identity. (Audre Lorde, 1983) The Freestyle exhibition attempted to define a generation of artists but like any other project that tries to canonize and frame a specific group of artistic practices according to a new term, as in the concept of “institutional critique” for example, it can, at times, limit our understanding of the art and rarely does justice to the works produced (Graw 2005). In contrast to “institutional critique”, the term post-black is intrinsically connected to identity politics as well as the desire for Black art to achieve a new kind of recognition within broader art discourses and on the art market, which complicates its application, because although it argues against an ethnic gaze, it synchronically reproduces the very same limitations.1 Freestyle, therefore, sits in relation with a complex history of nineteenth-century exhibitions that were organized around racial or cultural signifiers rather than artistic practices (Martin 2016). Nevertheless, it has been argued that Freestyle set a new standard for how to exhibit Black art, pay attention to individual practices, and embrace the plethora of styles that are being produced rather than insisting on one form, style or theme and, not least of all, give a younger generation of artists a meaningful platform. The term post-black reprised a centuries-old desire to envision a multiplicitist, nuanced, and untethered Blackness freed from both the gratuitous violence and structural oppression that brought it into being. Post-black art acknowledged and created a hybrid space for being Black in the arts2. The works I have analyzed in this book by Marc Bradford, Leslie Hewitt, Philip Metz, Mickalene Thomas, and Hank Willis Thomas each open up a sensitivity for Blackness and a way of being in the world as a human being of African descent, which stresses that it is not a paradigm that exists on its own. What 1  T helma Golden was fully aware of this contradiction when she and Ligon coined the term (Golden 2001, 14). 2  Also see: (Hall 1996, 471).

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these artists achieve is a reminder of the fact that there is no ideal Blackness or Black essence and that one’s identity is constantly in f lux without an ultimate source code. The question remains whether this hybrid space was a political one or if it re-inscribed neoliberal ideas of individuality that make the potential of a different difference within a multiplicity of multiplicities only a trend or phenomenon without sustainable impact on a larger scale? A great danger that the vague framing of the term held is to undermine the achievements of Black artists by claiming to be beyond the problems of institutional racism and reproducing the very same structures. Post-black was described as a critical term, which tried to hold space for Black artists who did not want to be solely reduced to their skin color by critics, curators, gallerists, collectors, art historians, and museum curators. It did not mean that artists who exhibited under its umbrella were less interested in or inf luenced by the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, or that their pieces didn’t deal with matters of Blackness or racial inequality. Rather, it demands a shift in methodology for how to approach Black artists, their art and how to read it. Specifically, I have argued that post-black rejects the notion of art as universal and sublime as well as the idea that the choices artists make are always shaped by their unique and un-swayed individuality. Willis Thomas’s work Unbranded: Ref lections on Black Corporate America 1968-2008 emphasizes the deep entanglement of Capitalism with Blackness and the desire for a notion of Blackness that does not consider being Black as a static, single-track identity, nor one that is somehow “natural” rather than culturally produced. In both Hewitt’s Rif fs on Realtime and Bradford’s Enter and Exit the New Negro the interplay of positionalities of the person who analyses the piece is met by the artists’ unique use of materials which embed layers of meaning in the work, actively ref lecting on the many layers that give Blackness its significance. The chapter on Thomas’s Les dejeuner sur l’herbe: Trois Femmes Noir emphasizes the fact that all art is theory; the dialogic between the theoretical discourses that shape Blackness (as well as the intersection between gender and Blackness) and those that shape art are inter-related. Lastly, this lens of complicating Blackness is not limited to the United States. Artists working under completely different sets of socio-cultural parameters like Metz in Germany do not only contribute but also expand the ways in which Blackness is articulated, as we can see in his piece Iwhishiwas. Each of these examples consequentially means that the references for art analysis have to be broadened in order to pay justice to what Kobena Mercer calls the Dialogics of Diaspora.3 Despite the potential and prominence of the term when it first emerged, it is nineteen years after 2001 and post-black has disappeared from the discussion. The sparks that surrounded the first exhibition Freestyle are gone and the hope that accompanied Barack Obama’s 2007 Campaign has since turned

3  Also see: (Mercer 2012).

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into a sense of despair4 when, after Obama’s second term, Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Four years after the term post-black entered the discourse, performance theorist and artist Malik Gaines remarked in the catalogue to Frequency that the term was ambiguously perceived, either as a disrespectful dismissal of the political achievements of the civil rights movement or as a marketing strategy for a newly appointed curator.8 The “F” series of emerging artists, included the shows Freestyle (2001), Frequency (2005), Flow (2008) was followed by an exhibition called Fore (2012-2013) co-organized by Lauren Haynes, Naima J. Keith, and Thomas J. Lax that did not mention post-black art and instead highlighted the artists’ birthdates (between 1971–1987) as well as their various means of expression. In other words, the term post-black had already disappeared from the conversation, even within the context of the Studio Museum in Harlem where Golden remains at the helm. Instead, another profound shift swept over the United States triggered by the killing of unarmed, seventeen year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 by the civilian vigilante George Zimmerman who was part of a neighborhood watch program in Florida. Zimmerman was brought on murder charges and later, during the trial, acquitted when he claimed self-defense. Even though the US Department of Justice investigated civil rights violations, no further charges were filed due to, “insufficient evidence”. In response to Zimmerman’s acquittal three radical Black organizers—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—created a Black-centered political movement project called #BlackLivesMatter. The acquittal of George Zimmerman was paralleled by the murder of Rekia Boyd (Chicago, 2012) and shortly followed by the murders of Mike Brown (Ferguson, 2014), Eric Garner (New York, 2014), Tamir Rice (Cleveland, 2014), Tanisha Anderson (Cleveland, 2015), Sandra Bland (Texas, 2015), Mya Hall (Baltimore, 2015), and Walter Scott (North Charleston, 2015) and many more by white police officers (on and off duty), white vigilantes, and supremacists who weren’t charged with any crimes. The police involved in these murders were often brief ly suspended and later put back on duty or into the world. Increasingly, these crimes have been caught on cellphone cam4  I n 2008, the largest financial crisis in the US since the Great Depression of the 1930s coincided with Barack Obama’s election and inauguration as the first Black president in US history, marking a shift in the representation of power. The election that brought Obama into office opened up a debate about the notion of race and the meaning of blackness in, which was accompanied by a great disillusionment for many Black individuals within the US. It was under Obama’s leadership (and noted vocal absence) that so many murders of Black US citizens took place at the hands of the police and that movements like #BlackLivesMatter were started, in response to the consistent police violence and the killings of Black Children, Womxn, Gender-non-conforming people and (Trans-)Men. Obama’s campaign slogans, “Change we can believe in” and ”Yes we can,” sound unfathomable in the early 2020s because the systemic violence that people of color endure has reached an even greater dimension and the country is more split than ever. The detention camp at Guantanamo Bay is still active and although US troops withdrew from Afghanistan in June 2011, US intervention in the Middle East still hasn’t ended. The white liberal notion that the US had entered a post-racial era is cynically laughable now, but was seriously debated in 2008.

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eras creating a form of public witnessing that turned Black death into a spectacle. Meanwhile, the murders of Black Trans-men and Womxn have been marginalized. What started as a hashtag shared on social media platforms quickly turned into furious protests, as in the example of Ferguson, where protesters were battered by militarized police with teargas and rubber bullets. The murder of Brown and the subsequent uprising in Ferguson further propelled the conversation about police violence against Black people into the national conversation. Young Black activists and organizers on the ground in Ferguson, despite the vicious police backlash against the protests, built a strong resistance against police brutality, gaining national and international support. BlackLivesMatter developed into an ongoing, global project organizing protests in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, and the UK, to support the fight against systemic violence against (all) Black people. The organization now has 40 chapters in the US and beyond and are invested in awareness raising projects alongside public protest. 5 With the rising awareness of anti-black racism and violence, the arts did not remain untouched. In a climate in which Black people had to actively fight and organize in order to claim their worth and the importance of their existence, the notion of “post-black” became unthinkable if not even a folly from the past. The “F” series evolved into a different type of inquiry emphasizing that, “contemporary art is deeply tied to its location, time and historical context” (Studio Museum in Harlem 2012). In 2015, the museum opened the exhibition A Constellation, which ran from November 12, 2015 to March 6, 2016, organized by Amanda Hunt. Hunt brought works by eight artists from the Studio Museum’s permanent collection, who emerged in the mid to late twentieth century, together with a younger generation of artists who continue to be in conversation with the concerns around race, body, and class that the previous generation had explored. So, instead of proposing a profound and ground-breaking shift, as was possible in 2001, 2015 marked a much subtler intergenerational approach which aimed to address these themes. The impossibility to move beyond the themes of race, body, and class is highlighted in the second paragraph of Hunt’s statement. We are in the midst of a particularly fraught moment in the national conversation on these subjects both in the media and in private space. Some may imagine that many complex, centuries-old questions have been resolved since the birth of black nationalism and the civil rights movement – even though, in fact, we have only begun to unpack our collective history. This exhibition offers multivalent approaches to the profound complexity and nuance inherent in inquiries surrounding identity and existence. (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2015) Hunt only insinuates towards the debates around post-race by addressing people who “imagine that many complex centuries old questions have been 5  Also see: (“Black Lives Matter” 2020).

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resolved,” but puts forth a claim that collective history has to be consistently unpacked. Instead of calling for institutional, systemic change, her focus is directed towards a dialogue that aims to address art-historical parallels such as the ways in which contemporary artists draw inspiration from the past. The cultural history that led to the founding of the Studio Museum in Harlem is deeply entangled with the ongoing systemic and gratuitous violence that is once again being addressed in public discourse since the murder of Trayvon Martin, which leads me into a short excursion into the museum’s establishment. I argue that the founding of the museum in 1969 was the result of yet another wave of racial injustice in the US landscape, what President Lyndon B. Johnson called “racial disorders” in US cities. In 1967, The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders found that over 120 cities had reported disturbances in “minority” neighborhoods—predominantly African American districts—during the first nine months of the year. This unrest was mostly sparked by gratuitous police violence against Black citizens. This was also the case for the “Urban Crisis” in Harlem, which was a result of the persistent violence against Black Americans and sparked specifically by the murder of James Powell, an unarmed fifteen year-old Black teenager by a white police officer in 1964. The sociologist Kenneth B. Clark responded to the uprising and its criminalization in the media by highlighting that the incident had to be examined not purely as a crime problem, but as a social problem. This statement has not lost its urgency in 2020. Clark, who together with his wife Mamie Clark had gained national recognition through their contribution to the case of Brown vs. Board of Education at the Supreme Court which led to the desegregation of schools in 1954, pointed out that “the chronic day-to-day violence against the human spirit which exists and is accepted as normal,” is at the center of this social construct. In 1962 Clark founded the project Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU). The organization was committed to creating grassroots community infrastructures to support education and job opportunities for young people in Harlem through five subdivisions: Community Action, Education, Employment, Special Programs, and Arts and Culture (K. B. Clark 1964). The initial funding of 230,000 dollars for the creation of the study Youth in the Ghetto: A study of the consequences of powerlessness and a blueprint for change was followed up by 1 million dollars in federal funds, to which the City of New York contributed an additional 3.5 million dollars from the city’s antipoverty fund. The Department of Labor contributed another 500,000 dollars for the training and placement of staff (Cahan 2016, 17). From its beginning HARYOU was surveilled by the NYPD Intelligence Division pointing towards the deep suspicion and fear white officials had towards Black organizing and empowerment (Mendez 2018). Adam Clayton Powell, the member of the United States House of Representatives who represented Harlem from 1945 to 1971 had already pushed for political inf luence in government funded youth initiatives in 1962 by convincing his political allies to create the Associated Community Act (ACT). HARYOU and ACT merged in 1964 with the greatest reluctance by Clark who identified Powell as one of the key factors for the systemic violence against the Black

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Community in Harlem. Clark feared that Powell would use the organization to further his political inf luence and render the program ineffective. As a result of the merger, Clark resigned and started working on a project that investigated the effectiveness of youth projects (Matlin 2013, 102–7). The Art Historian Susan Cahan describes how the HARYOU-ACT’s Arts and Culture program catered to thousands of teenagers and facilitated life changing experiences. In her study on art museums in the 1960s called Mounting Frustration, she also emphasizes how deeply entangled political advocacy for the founding of the Studio Museum in Harlem was with white politicians jockeying to gain political inf luence among Latinx and Black constituencies in the neighborhood. Leading figures from the Harlem Arts community like Romare Bearden refused to join the board of the new museum due to exactly this reason (Cahan 2016, 19–21). The genealogical connection between the Harlem uprising in 1967 and the push into Harlem through government funded programs, including the founding of the Studio Museum in Harlem, by white politicians is unquestionable. Not only did these politicians seek to gain stronger control in the neighborhood, but they wanted to demonstrate “good will” in light of the increasingly mainstream Civil Rights Movement. Additionally, the establishment of the Studio Museum in Harlem meant that museums in New York City were able to continue with “business-as-usual,” largely excluding African American artists from their exhibitions and collections. The critique of what Cahan calls the two-tiered system has persisted ever since. In recent decades many artists of color have been given exhibition opportunities in major museums, and some have had their work collected. Many more commercial galleries feature artists of color[…]. But the most significant change since the 1970s has not been full integration or equality, but the development of a two-tiered system of cultural institutions, one ”mainstream,” the other ”culturally specific.” In this new equilibrium, many culturally grounded institutions have become feeders to the major museums, but patterns of differential treatment persist. With some notable exceptions, presentations of work by artists of color in the major museums have been subject to a series of curatorial trends: from ethnicity-and -identity-based shows to “other” art histories: from “artists ‘choice” curatorial interventions to public service projects. (Cahan 2016, 11) As a non-profit organization, the Studio Museum in Harlem has chosen to indirectly address systemic forms of exclusion through exhibitions and programming like the Radical Reading Room project (05.3.- 10. 27. 2019) which was initiated by associate curator Legacy Russel. The museum nurtures artistic and curatorial talent and serves as an incubator for art-historical pathways in Black Art History (for example, through the exhibition Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980 organized by Kellie Jones). These projects not only uplift important Black projects, but feeds them back into the wider spectrum of the art market and its institutions, which include

VII. Post-Post-black

museums, magazines, and schools, which are trying to diversify their staff and represented artists. The important role that the museum plays has been further cemented through the planned expansion of its main building, and therefore its program and standing. While the Studio Museum in Harlem has been growing in stature and inf luence, the critique against mainstream museums has only increased since 2012 after the rise of the BlackLivesMatter Movement. These critiques have to do with a growing general consciousness of the systemic forms of exclusion and violence against Black people that take place on an epistemic, structural and representational level.6 Several protests have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art alone and include the withdrawal of the Artist Collective Howdoyousayyaminafrican Collective from the 2014 Whitney Biennial7, the call for the removal of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmet Till called Open Casket in 2016 8 and the numerous protests staged by the activist group Decolonize this Place calling for the removal of Warren Kanders from the museums’ Board of Directors, to name just a few9. Whilst the activism in the 1960ss aimed for a form of inclusion for Black artists in the mainstream canon, the current activism has shifted its focus to exposing and calling for direct change within the systemic structures that underlie the museum as a system. (D’Souza 2018) In 2019 a report by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs on Workforce Demographics in the arts and culture sector showed that, With respect to race/Hispanic origin, the respondent arts workforce is less diverse than New York City’s population. Whites represent 66%, compared to their 32% share of the city’s population. In contrast, Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians are underrepresented – 10% of cultural workers identify as African American, compared to 22% of the city’s population; 11% identify as Hispanic, compared to 29% of city residents; and 6% identify as Asian, compared to 14% of city residents. Respondents selecting the role “Community Engagement” most closely match the racial makeup of New York City as a whole. Service personnel such as Security, Retail/Merchandise, and Facilities are predominantly people of color, while Boards and Executive Leadership are 70% and 68% White (non-Hispanic), respectively. (SMU DataArts 2019) These numbers were likely not much different when the term “post-black” was coined by Golden, which demonstrates the enormous disparity between the concept of post-black, the spaces it opened up, and the actual socio-political reality in the United States. The violence against Black people was as brutal as ever in the years shortly before the Freestyle exhibition was conceived as can 6  See: (D’Souza 2018, 5). 7  See: (Heddaya 2014; R. Lee 2014). 8  See: (D’Souza 2018). 9  See: (Decolonize this Place 2020).

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be seen in cases such as Abner Louima, who was sexually abused, raped, and beaten by white police officers in 1997 or Amadou Diallo who was murdered by four white police officers by forty gunshots in 1999. The question emerges then, how is it that those violent acts weren’t addressed in the context of that “F” series, at the beginning of the twenty-first century? I argue that the fight for inclusion into the wider art world (and art market) was, for emerging Black Artists, at the forefront. To imagine that art alone can change systems of power such as capitalism and white supremacy, which are deeply rooted in antiblackness is bluntly naïve, but that it can rupture, open up, interrupt, disturb, push forward, and expand our perception and imaginary is without a doubt. Whilst post-black was a deep provocation for people who were invested in or working as activists for the end of systemic violence, it was not a threatening term for the (white) art world that would become interested in this young and energetic cohort of artists. Further, and perhaps most importantly, I argue that post-black art expanded the politics of representation, highlighting the multiple perspectives within the Black Diaspora that haven’t had a platform or were neglected because they did not conform to the set aesthetic approach that the politics of representation embraced in the 1990’s. This represented an important freedom for Black artists who wanted to speak to the specificities of their experience but not on “othered” terms within the world of art. In other words, not wanting to be seen as Black artists but still being invested in making work about the Black experience. Despite the great importance of the discourse on visual representation, such discourses can also lead to static ideas, the result of which is that a variety of styles and forms of expression may fall out of favor because they do not accord with the priorities of a specific aesthetic moment.10 Among the key aspects of Black aesthetics that have fallen in and out of favor over time are abstraction, attitudes towards the gaze, and the visual representation of the Black body. Post-black was an inclusive term, in the sense that it didn’t attempt to define artists according to a particular style. Instead, it endeavored to include different styles, media, and forms of expression, allowing numerous discussions to take place, even if they were perceived as not black enough or read to be too white. What is so distinctive about the early 2000s is that the discussion became much more internal than external, and as such, these artworks have much more to do with negotiating Blackness from a place of experience as opposed to one of identification. I see here a great shift in discussions about representation, because to step into the idea of the “New Negro” and at the same time withdraw oneself by taking a stake into the unknown, as Bradford does, is both the exciting possibility and also hallmark confusion of our time. While the socio-political reality of being a Black person in the World hasn’t changed, I argue that we, as Black people, need this space of negotiation in order to enter an imaginary, so as to envision different futures together. 10  On this subject, also see: (Bey 2014).

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When I write about temporal disjunctures in the context of heterotemporality, I see another temporal disjuncture occur: it is the distinction between the external and internal discussions that are activated by these artworks. Scholarly approaches like critical race theory, postcolonial theory and Queer theory have advanced so much in their aim to challenge established enlightenment epistemologies that there is an actual gap between institutional practices and ideas as evidenced by the way museums and academies of art history hold on to century-old curricula or content that perpetuates white supremacy as the social realities of our societies. The same applies to the arts, which is why, for example, the Museum of Modern Art needed to hire a consultant on contemporary Black art11 and why so few courses exist at universities that cover very rich and resourceful Diasporic histories. The centuries-long outsourcing of marginalized knowledges, which I have embraced in this project, has produced a gap that is hard to close and maybe even harder to acknowledge for many practitioners in the field who consider themselves on “the good” side of history. I see it as every society’s post (settler-)colonial and post-slavery responsibility to ref lect upon the ways in which multiple facets of racism are reproduced in every strand of our lives. There are far too few institutional attempts to decolonize institutions, whether through changing university curricula, diversifying staff, acknowledging discrimination, equalizing wages, and creating equitable opportunities for black cultural workers. Many institutions, and societies, uphold stereotypical thinking rather than open up a space for thought in which the diverse varieties of being in the world can take up space and perhaps think beyond or take a stake in the unknown. This book started with Bearden’s quote: “I believe there
is an aesthetic that informs the art works of black peoples [...] since aesthetic formulations derive from cultural responses, not from inherent racial endowments.” (Bearden 1974, 189) Being Black means constantly being confronted with questions about one’s identity. The works gathered in this book are aesthetic formulations from the early 2000’s. The conditions of being Black in those years challenged these artists to expand the repertoires of representations. Thus, if we consider art as a form of knowledge, with theory and expression as a way of being in the world (with all its complexities, impurity, and f lux), it becomes essential to create more space for the questions and histories that these artists pose and it is of even greater importance that students ref lect on their own positions in the world. Together, this will contribute to a discourse of aesthetics that is not so much interested in its own affirmation and continuity, but in the creation of different futurities. What I encounter in seminars is an openness and eagerness to read texts, which still don’t find their place in the classical canon of art history. These texts, whether they are feminist, Queer, postcolonial, or from critical race theory capture the students’ desire to deconstruct, reconsider, and critically ref lect upon what they have learned thus far in their education. When 11  See: (Solomon 2014).

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students start to think about the connections between their self-conception, the legacy of colonialism, and the brutal racial stereotypes that persist today, they are more equipped and ready to intervene with the visuals that produce violence; they have already begun to change their practice. Without these readings, exhibitions, and artworks as reference, it’s all too easy to rest in the luxury of withdrawing oneself from the notion of difference, reproducing hegemonic perspectives and therefore epistemic violence. These are small steps, because to reach that point of ref lection is just the beginning. How to talk about a concept like post-black when anti-blackness is so deeply ingrained in our societies, within a system that sufficiently excluded Black intellectual thinkers and artists from the mainstream curriculum and canon for centuries? How to bridge this temporal disjuncture and start talking on an equal level, when there has never been an equal process of knowledge exchange and production? I think the questions about post-black have to start here and thus are less about identity but rather what kind of politics—political content and discourse—we as teachers, artistic practitioners, curators, and students want to establish in the class room, the gallery space, the museum, and beyond. It is time to pay close attention to artworks and the questions they raise because much too often they are lost once they are branded with a term. The artworks exhibited in Freestyle and the other “F” shows outlived the platform that the exhibition provided, which is the aim of every exhibition. The questions that Bradford, Hewitt, Metz, Thomas, and Willis Thomas pose are as profound as the multilayered history their positions derive from, and these questions need to be processed, recognized, and discussed. What I have learned from these artists and artworks is that nothing will ever be total or static, no matter how much those in power may wish it to be, which is why it is essential that we implement knowledge and aesthetic insight into our everyday political practice, particularly when racial injustices are continuously performed, opening wounds from the past, marking our trauma in the present. Post-black art was a rupture and it will not be the last.

VIII. Bibliography

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Cultural Studies Gabriele Klein

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Border Wall Aesthetics Artworks in Border Spaces 2019, 250 p., hardcover, ill. 79,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4777-8 E-Book: PDF: 79,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4777-2

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Moving Images Mediating Migration as Crisis May 2020, 320 p., pb., col. ill. 40,00 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4827-0 E-Book: available as free open access publication PDF: ISBN 978-3-8394-4827-4

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The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms 2019, 334 p., pb., col. ill. 49,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4719-8 E-Book: available as free open access publication PDF: ISBN 978-3-8394-4719-2

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Animal Labor A New Perspective on Human-Animal Relations 2019, 182 p., hardcover 99,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4364-0 E-Book: PDF: 99,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4364-4

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All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-publishing.com