Abstract
This introduction contextualizes the present issue within the question posed by its call for papers: “How does blackness index its own processes?” Following an immanent methodology that seeks formal principles at work within each contribution, it retrieves a variety of archival investments coupled with a shared ethos of critical vulnerability. While approaching blackness as process attempts to think about its ongoingness, it also reaffirms the aesthetic realm as a privileged processing site.
Processing
To devote an issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies to “blackness” might seem misguided or superfluous. Why this redundancy? If this was a special issue, traditionally conceived, then blackness would be its object, but it cannot be in any strict sense. As the journal's name indicates, blackness is rather an ongoing question. And, therefore, a process.1
For us, thinking about blackness as process means approaching it through the realm of aesthetics insofar as the aesthetic has always been a processing site, an ongoing locus of elaboration and knowingness.2 Contributions to this journal issue address both the churning of the aesthetic and the labor required to attend to it properly.
For this issue, the editors specifically asked how we might think about blackness as process, that is, as ongoing, active, and knowing. In particular we focused on how blackness indexes its own processes. We proposed indexing—as a verb, safe from semiotic fixations that have been historically confining for blackness—to spotlight alternative forms of record keeping, measuring, and/or assigning value and nonproprietary modes of gathering.3 We deployed the idea of “indexing” in its jurisgenerative function, as a wayfinding tool, a mark of self-reflexivity, a way to acknowledge knowingness and the folding upon itself of that knowledge. Ultimately, we asked: When and how do black processes and practices index themselves, and how do black aesthetic practices mark their archival knowingness?
The contributors’ submissions have given us a variety of idiosyncratic, errant, and unruly indices to which they respond by adopting improvisatory methods, which often prompt a measure of critical vulnerability: a willingness to be guided by the objects of study and to learn from their rich complexity how to unspool a variety of archival practices. Each contributor approaches their aesthetic objects as archives in and of themselves: collective, layered, sedimented, dense.
Although the “archive” is a constantly expanding concept, which this issue does not directly theorize, the immanent approaches gathered here still contribute to its understanding.4 What counts as archive, how it comes to visibility and through what labor, are questions shared by all contributions. In different ways, all of the authors and artists included here fashion, activate, hold on to, and usher in archives that may be at risk of dissipating before our very eyes yet display knowledge of their own precarity.
Carrying
Sitting on a Man's Head (2020), the practice discussed in Kristin Juarez's essay, “Within the Whirlwind of the Encounter: An Interview with Okwui Okpokwasili,” highlights this knowingness through the following question: What do you carry that also carries you?
In her collaborations with Okpokwasili, Juarez has been developing the concept of the trembling archive to describe an ongoing research-based practice willing to forego permanence and closure to attune instead to the aesthetic production inherent in forms of emergent social aggregation. As Juarez explains, Okpokwasili follows Édouard Glissant's call to “think trembling thoughts” as a way to harmonize with a world under aggression that is already plural and defies closure. The trembling archive becomes itself a pliable framework for a practice focused on intimate and expansive sociality coming together “in the whirlwind of the encounter.”5 Within this porous process, in which the archive acts rather than records, Okpokwasili and Juarez build on Saidiya Hartman's work and Igbo women's precolonial practice of “sitting on a man's head” to home in on the formation of the “chorus” as the moment in which incipient political action might yield aesthetic form.6 The emphasis is on black sociality, dynamism, sustainability and, I will argue, labor: the “practice” of blackness as ongoing process.7
In its structure and ethos, Juarez's account of the research questions, collaborations, practices, and various “records” that coalesced around the exhibition Utterances from the Chorus (2020) at Danspace in New York City attends to its very own choral archival principle, framed appropriately through the question of carrying and being carried. It thus encourages a different way to think not only about archival practices, with “scaffolding” that depends on collaborators and “activators,” which are deliberately “trembling” across modes (movement, song, breathing, architecture, painting, video, photography, and poetry), but also about citational and publishing practices.8
Juarez's essay also inspires me to pose this same question to the other contributors in this issue. If the archive comprises the things we carry that also carry us, then what are their archives? I approach it as a formal question about previousness and futurity, reciprocity and self-knowing.
Work in Progress
Walton Muyumba's “Artists in Residence: Jason Moran and the Bandwagon Improvising Freedom (After Walker, Kelly, Kentridge, and Komunyakaa)” is a work in progress. In other words, it is a constitutively unfinished piece. It is carefully collaged, chiseled even, but also improvised over the span of four years, since Muyumba received news of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville while attending a lecture by visual artist William Kentridge at the Castle of Good Hope in South Africa in August 2017. Muyumba's mental juxtaposition of Kentridge's inquiry into the relationship between “thinking, writing, drawing, collaging, and collaborating: the agon among our various selves in the action of artistic creation”; Ryan Kelly's Pulitzer Prize–winning news photo from Charlottesville; and the sound of Jason Moran's composition “RFK in the Land of Apartheid” crystallizes this proposal: “Possibly the process of attuning these selves is both the chemistry of improvisation and the wellspring of freedom—political, physical, aesthetic, and existential.”9
Muyumba's piece is very much about process, one that follows both visual and sonic grooves. He attends to musical reverbs as analogous to historical collages and to the generative encounter of one with the other.10 Explicit about the difficulty of making an idiosyncratic archive coalesce in aesthetic form, Muyumba continuously looks for “immanent” objects as purveyors of formal principles: Romare Bearden's tilted rectangles, the skateboard Jason Moran uses in Radiclani Clytus's documentary Looks of a Lot to show “blues-idiom music's formal operation” on a melodic cycle, the crashing car in Ryan Kelly's photograph, and the numerous figures in Kara Walker's collage Christ's Entry into Journalism, 2017, among others. Through this process, he shows how the black experimental musical tradition offers a specific language of expression of the archival relationships that accrue between individuals, socialities, and parts of the self: versioning, storying, comping, and so forth.
Muyumba's writing models a posture of critical vulnerability that offers up the conflicted writerly self as the receptacle for an archive of the liquidity of the black arts.11 All of his objects are susceptible to dissipation under his critical view: his piece would not exist in this form without his predisposition to attend to the way blackness indexes its own processes and his copious notes.12 Thus the work required to make objects and archives register as such is often slippery and, in itself, resistant to archiving. Sometimes, as Sampada Aranke's contribution shows, black art objects might be committed to their own undoing.13 Other times, black archives or objects might only appear when placed under erasure. But only to the attentive observer.
How to see like Hammons? asks Aranke in her essay on the elusive artist. How to carry out his project? That is, how to align the “collaged self” Muyumba talks about with the same redirection David Hammons has practiced throughout his career, whose impact in art discourse and the art world Aranke calls “the Hammons effect”?
By focusing on the Hammons effect, Aranke details the ultimate instability of the “Hammons archive” (in very scary quotes), that is, Hammons's “relentless invocation of Black aesthetic practices that deform, if not refuse, their own making.”14 Aranke's essay begins by attending to a characteristic act of both framing and unframing that destabilizes what counts as observer and observed, subject and object of display, specifically, wall text that “asks”: “HAS ANYONE ELSE SEEN THESE.” The project of seeing like Hammons, then, is to fashion a wholly different critical object comprising not so much Hammons's work but rather networks of whispers about the artist, the (deliberately) scattered and precarious documentation of his work, and his own gestures of deflection, in other words, “a whole world made by, about, and for Hammons, activated by the way he does art in the first place.”15 Here the archive is Hammons's capacity to radically confuse and redirect the art world's epistemes and demand recasting of the question “Who is the proper subject and object of black art?”16
Mark Anthony Neal's archive, instead, is the Black women's songbook, a noncanonical, not formally “indexed,” diasporic collection of women's blues songs, whose existence and content hinges upon knowledge of the history of the recording industry. His essay, “Zu-Zu's Song: Trauma, Citation, and the Black Women's Songbook,” attends to the way the main character, Zu-Zu, in Ricardo Cortez Cruz's novel Five Days of Bleeding (1995) activates this informal archive through a series of citations of song lyrics, some of which were later more successfully “borrowed” by male artists. Neal argues that Zu-Zu deploys them as an aesthetic shield against the abuse she suffers in the novel.
Multiple mediations are at play in Neal's essay, because Zu-Zu's shield is just as layered as the recovery work required to attend to it. The novel precedes Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998), so it cannot rely on that archive. As narrator Cruz casts himself as a turntablist, who speculates about his characters while presenting Zu-Zu as the activator of a dormant set of references. Neal, in turn, regards Zu-Zu as a shape-shifting analog sampling archive set in motion by Cruz's critical fabulation. Thus, on the one hand, the songbook is what “allows the character to tell her story, arguably in ways that Cruz himself might not have had the language to more fully explore.”17 On the other hand, Neal's reading of the novel requires him to attune to the “sounds” speculatively evoked by a fictional character's citations in order to participate in Zu-Zu's activation. I would suggest that Neal would not have read the novel this way unless he could “hear” Zu-Zu's song(s).
Importantly, Neal shows how the Black women's songbook is aware of its own precarity. Although passed down through records, the women's voices would often be somewhat “erased” by later recording. And although Victoria Spivey's song “Black Snake Blues” (1926) was more successfully rerecorded by Blind Lemon Jefferson as “Black Snake Moan,” Neal explains Spivey still knew the “snakes” were ultimately hers despite Jefferson's “borrowing”: she knew nobody could duplicate her distinctive moan. By following the vicissitude of Spivey's unreproducible “moan,” Neal locates Zu-Zu's evocation of the song within the radical possibilities of what Fred Moten has described as the fugitivity of “black mo'nin’.”18 (Listen to both Spivey's and Jefferson's moans included in the HTML version of Neal's essay.)
Tending
In “Black One Shot and the Art of Blackness,” Lisa Uddin and Michael Boyce Gillespie explain how the series of art criticism they created for ASAP/J was prompted by a desire to abandon prescriptive attachments to determined outcomes or allegiance to the “diagnostic imperative” of art criticism and establish greater intimacy with the object. Their commitment to process and its unpredictability, “an ongoing experiment without a hypothesis,” allowed them to give “sharp and agitated love to the speculative, ambivalent, and irreconcilable ways of black form as cultural production.” They describe this shift as “tending toward blackness.”19
Huey Copeland's short essay “Tending-toward-Blackness” was, indeed, on my mind as I was drafting the call for papers for this issue. Copeland describes this “tending” as “a leaning into and caring for,” a recalibration “toward the mattering of blackness itself,” a “different horizon from which to take our bearings.”20 This very tension, or leaning, is the gesture that opens Uddin and Gillespie's piece: “Black One Shot began as a phone call between post-tenure friends left to their own scholarly devices at their respective institutions.”21 The process of tending toward the art of blackness is both previous and futural insofar as it leans into a community of scholars with “a shared frequency for blackness and the arts” it also helps to bring together.
I am equally compelled by the formal description they offer: “Our physics of black study sought to amplify the resonance of objects (centripetal) over the insistence on what objects must do (centrifugal).”22 Two other essays in our “Accent Marks” section tend toward blackness with similar physics, by exploring the absorbing and expansive possibilities of what Darby English might describe as the artifactuality of color.23
In “Anna May Wong and the Color Image,” Homay King reads The Toll of the Sea (1922), a Hollywood adaptation of the Madame Butterfly story, as a feature-length China girl, a technological problem “resolved” with a (Techni)color solution that matched a specific racial imagination and its chromatic range.24 The ostensible archive in King's essay is sensitometry itself in the context of Hollywood's industrial practices and orientalist attitudes. Yet she shows how Wong ushers in a color image in the two senses envisioned by Gilles Deleuze: first, by making color itself the image's primary (and absorbing) referent (in The Toll of the Sea, the Godardian dictum “It's not blood, it's red” becomes “It's not water, it's green”); and second, in a way that, she says, resonates with Darby English's argument in 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, by liquifying preexisting boundaries and outlines.25
For Jared Sexton's reflection on the generativity and polysemy of “black,” the liquidity of color emerges in black's unbound capacity for internal differentiation. “The experience of black,” he writes, “is as much a feat of engineering as it is one of imagination; at once scientific and philosophical, it is a matter of aesthetics and ethics, knowledge and belief, fact and fantasy.”26 In “Basic Black” he continues his investigation of the ontological possibilities of the aesthetic already undertaken in his essay “All Black Everything,” where he argues for the “generative, inclusive and encompassing” qualities of black. Black, he wrote, “lacks for nothing.”27 Here he follows a specific conjunction of scientific research, art world practices, color theory, phenomenology, and intellectual property disputes surrounding the release of Vantablack; Anish Kapoor's securing of the world's rights to its artistic use; and the subsequent manufacturing of an even blacker pigment at MIT. This pursuit of “the blackest black” as coveted object of property is also implicated with processes of valuation and directly contradicts the nonrelationality implied in the idea of black as a noncolor. Rather it shows how “black” functions as an endless destabilizer of categorial distinctions. But if that is so, Sexton concludes, “recasting the known universe as black per se presents the challenge of addressing all difference—in the visual field as much as anywhere else—as the internal differentiation of blackness.”28 He sees this as “a redoubling of the richness of being, precisely because it is derived from, in relation to, and in the name of that which is so often taken to be antithetical or anathema to being as such.”29 The generative internal differentiation of blackness—its aesthetic work—Sexton suggests, can and should be considered also as ontological work.
Read together, King's and Sexton's essays underscore each other's tendency toward blackness. In The Toll of the Sea Anna May Wong tends toward blackness, because she becomes entangled in the same processes that have yoked racialization to filmic technologies and chromatic signification: when the actress is described as a “jade,” racial chromaticism's fuzzy logic addressed by Sexton is on full display. Wong's appearance causes a semiotic disarray. Yet, echoing Sexton's conclusion, King reveals how she is internally differentiated. When Wong poses for an Edward Steichen photograph, with her face “next to a white chrysanthemum, mirrored below in a reflective surface, as if they had both bloomed or developed out of its glassy water,” this same internal differentiation is rendered as a seductive liquid blackness that both frames her and seemingly engenders her.30
Laboring
Juarez's account of Okpokwasili's practice shows how approaching blackness as process entails a lot of work. While refusing the closure inherent in the idea of a “work” (Okpokwasili insists that hers is a practice and not a performance), being in the process is exceptionally laborious. What does it take to hold the archive? To hold its ongoingness in a dynamic relation? Process, that is, implies continuous practice: the trembling archive exists through the labor of attending to its tenuous coming together.
With more than 170 films over the span of thirty years, Kevin Jerome Everson's body of work cannot not index practice as labor. Not only because a great number of his films are concerned with labor issues and even mimic the duration of the (Marxian) workday, but also because the pace of the artist's own practice matches that of its subjects: for him, artistry is ultimately mastery of craft, which, in turn, comes with repetition.31 Additionally, his approach to filmmaking as a time-based medium tethers aesthetic work to labor, because time for him is never abstract but rather a sculptural resource concretely tied to the rhythms of the laboring body. As Lauren McLeod Cramer and I write in the introduction to our interview with the artist, “‘There Is No Form in the Middle’: Kevin Jerome Everson's Massive Abstractions,” Everson has committed to a process that functions both en masse and in media res: it gains critical mass through repetitions and constant practice while it eschews narrative “setups” to throw viewers into the “second act” of black processes that are always already ongoing.32
Grounded in studio art—and “corrupted” by the canon, as he puts it—and the conviction that there is artistry in the tasks Black people perform every day (“Black people who make things are interesting,” he says), Everson builds upon their craftmanship to experiment with formal devices in order to achieve “massive abstractions.”33 When pressed about the meaning and function of abstraction in his work, Everson describes it as self-containment and self-referentiality within the film frame. Yet these very abstractions become fully visible once they achieve a critical mass within his own body of work (a concept whose double valence we also explore in the interview), a fact that in turn requires massive exposure to it. In other words, Everson's own formalist commitment to abstraction has produced a body of work that has, in turn, engendered a self-referential and constantly self-indexing ongoing archive.
Somewhat overwhelmed by this realization, as we were generously granted access to his entire oeuvre, Cramer and I decided to seek some immanent “indexing” principle and resolved to focus on the props Everson has begun casting from rubber since his series of Westinghouse films (One, Two, and Three, 2019; Four, 2020). In the films’ diegesis, they are usually tools employed to perform particular tasks (ironing, in this case), but Everson approaches them instead as sculptural objects with specific material and visual properties. He began casting them from black rubber so that they would “silhouette with the high contrast film,” to approach the saturation of Kerry James Marshall's blacks. At the same time, sculpting props, as opposed to relying on found objects, gives him control over the formal devices that make or unmake an art object.
If Black people doing things are interesting, crafting some of the key materials in the frame, and particularly props such as rubber traffic cones, tires, and even binoculars—none of which work, but some of which are currently on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York City—makes that “doing” (and the artist's own doing) even more formally interesting and self-contained.34 When Everson explains this self-referentiality according to the conventions of narrative screenwriting—with the situational sentence “The cat is sleeping on the blanket,” rather than “The cat is sleeping on the dog's blanket,” which would introduce the possibility of conflict—he is also suggesting that one of the goals of this self-containment might also be self-contentment. Indeed, the smiling child “looking through” Brown Trasher's rubber binoculars keeps the image very happily within the edge of the frame (fig. 2).35
Everson might not at first agree that his work tends toward blackness and will insist that he is interested instead in the work of form. “Form,” he says, “gets me up in the morning.”36 But in his work, blackness is already the world, the ground within which everything else happens.37 As we begin to tease out in our interview with the artist in this issue, his research-based practice compels questions about the relationship between black object-making and black art-making and, in turn, about the connection between processes of black art-making and processes of blackness-making.
Thinking alongside Everson's work, and all the contributions in this issue, further crystalizes how approaching blackness as process might be also an attempt to think about its ongoingness, where it lands in both art-making and art discourse, and the conditions for that landing. It is through attention and attuning to blackness's reflective folds that the aesthetic affirms itself as a processing site.38 It is through these questions that indices become archival, objects demand to be approached in media res, and critical vulnerability becomes a necessary ethos.
Notes
Against the recent remedial tendency that has spawned a flurry of late-night television specials on blackness, Black people, black culture, or black art, this themed issue aligns with 2020 publications that share a similar orientation toward blackness as an ongoing question: Art Journal's “The Black Issue”; Black Scholar's “What Was Black Studies?”; ASAP/J's Black One Shot; and ASAP Journal's “Afro-pessimist Aesthetic.”
In the aesthetic realm, to paraphrase Moten, blackness is present at its own making. Moten, Universal Machine, 184, 185. See also Taylor, Black Is Beautiful, and Lloyd, Under Representation.
While I am looking forward to reading Sarah Jane Cervenak's Black Gathering, I still implicitly rely on the framework she laid out in her essay on Leonardo Drew's work, “Black Gathering.”
In this issue the primary references for ways of understanding the archive are Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives; Lepecki, “Body as Archive” and Singularities ; and Torlasco, Heretical Archive.
Glissant and Glissant, “La pensée du tremblement,” 526, cited in Juarez, “Within the Whirlwind,” 97.
Hartman, Wayward Lives. Juarez channels André Lepecki, “Body as Archive,” to develop the concept of the trembling archive and guide the formation of “a responsive methodology to acknowledge the intricate collective lineage being woven through the ongoing exchanges taking place over the course of the exhibition” (“Within the Whirlwind,” 97).
Building on Hartman's work and her own choral practice, Okpokwasili mobilizes the chorus as a space without observers, a framework for multidirectional movements and experiments of freedom, ultimately perhaps as an embodied and living organism for a “vulnerable mode of sociality at the nexus of movement and sound.” Juarez, “Within the Whirlwind,” 99.
As Juarez explains, scaffolding is an important operative concept in Okpokwasili's Sitting on a Man's Head. Note the number of collaborators and activators listed in Juarez's essay in this issue and Okpokwasili's position about collaboration: “What would it be to try to create a practice or a piece where the author is invisible, or the authorship is shared?” Juarez, “Within the Whirlwind,” 111. For more on similar archival tensions, see Raengo, “Black Study @ GSU.”
Bearden's collages, for example, were inspired by jazz, but in the introduction to The Romare Bearden Reader, Robert O'Meally presents collaging as a much broader characterization of black subjectivity.
See Morrison, “Abrupt Stops,” discussed in liquid blackness 5, no. 1, in Raengo, “Black Study @ GSU” and Raengo, “Jurisgenerativity of Liquid Praxis.”
See Okpokwasili's discussion of her collaboration with Ralph Lemon, Scaffold Room (2014), at the Walker Museum, as part of which they considered “selling” the memory of the performance to create an ongoing practice “that what's actually held is not the thing that remains. [What remains] is just simply a container for the shifting memory.” Juarez, “Within the Whirlwind,” 110.
Copeland, “Tending-toward-Blackness,” 143, 144. In turn, this is a rephrasing and building upon work done in Copeland's Bound to Appear and then discussed again in his “Flow and Arrest” in conversation with Stephen Best and Hortense Spillers.
Uddin and Gillespie, “Black One Shot,” 86. On “leaning,” see Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°.”
King writes, “On the one hand, this is a Cinema 1–style color-image, asserting jade-green at the expense of Anna May and absorbing her into its field. On the other, the image asserts her inextricability from her surroundings and the potential for this green tint to wash onto other shores or seep beyond any given stratified outline, thereby deterritorializing the frame.” King, “Anna May Wong,” 64.
Sexton, “All Black Everything,” 6. I am particularly fond of this essay, which helped me in my research on proprietary attachments to “black,” which I understand similarly to Sexton. See Raengo, “Black Matters,” and “Abstraction, Extraction, Secretion.”
For example, Park Lane (2015), which is eight hours long, and Company Line (2009).
“Folks sitting on the blanket, chilling and stuff. That's what, basically, blackness is like. Don't bother me! . . . That's why I try not to get in people's way, because it's constantly moving, you know? I want to move with it. I don't want it to stop for me.” Raengo and Cramer, “‘There Is No Form,’ ” 147.
Raengo and Cramer, “‘There Is No Form,’ ” 137.
“Blackness has this capacity to hold everyone, right? So, as it tries to draw attention to the fundamental sickness of anti-blackness, it also manages to be incredibly generous.” Juarez, “Within the Whirlwind,” 107.
