Abstract
This introductory essay approaches the problem of form as a problem of value and, more precisely, of the aesthetics of valuation. Building on the scene of exchange outlined by Denise Ferreira da Silva's “modern ethical scene of value,” the essay approaches Hannah Palmer's installation Ghost Pools, which marks the location of two segregated pools in East Point, Georgia, reinterred in the early 1980s, by refusing to compare or equate them, and attending instead to their repressed informalities. Avoiding the equation of value that sustains most formalist readings, this essay instead “reads for informality.”
Exhibit A: This Is Not an Artwork
The tips of two red shoes peek from the lower frame of this photograph; they are standing on a diving board hovering over a blue asphalt surface.1 Flattened by the vertical angle, the photograph frames a moment of contemplation over the depth and water of a phantom pool that has been replaced by the cracked asphalt surface of a parking lot.
This stunning image (fig. 1), however, is not an artwork.2
This (fig. 2) is not an artwork either.
Both are photographs of Hannah Palmer's 2023 installation Ghost Pools, phantom appearances of the real locations of two segregated pools in East Point, Georgia, where past informalities may be recalled, reactivated, and reclaimed. Taken at the opening events for the installation—additionally documented by a generous number of group shots of energized folks of all ages and walks of life, mingling together—they picture the moment when the gathering is over or perhaps about to start; most people have left or have not yet arrived. They are the gatherings’ empty shells—or perhaps, empty forms.
The point, here, is not that they are not art, or that they cannot be, but rather that they too are ghostly remainders of the informality that followed or preceded them. Presenting them as the artwork would obscure the informal work of artmaking, the informality that sustains it, and the future informality it is hoping to reengender.
Ghost Pools
Up and running from Memorial Day to Labor Day weekend 2023—that is, the length of time public pools remain open in the South—Ghost Pools, designed by Hannah Palmer, marks the sites of two reinterred pools in East Point, Georgia, just north of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
Commissioned by Flux Projects as part of a multiyear water project titled FLOW, Ghost Pools was prompted by the realization that currently there are no public pools in East Point, where Palmer lives with her family.3 Palmer decided to reactivate the sites of the two separate and unequal pools “destroyed sometime between desegregation and air conditioning,” and to grapple with the legacy of an injunction against informality that has come at the expense of public health.4
Finding out when and who decided that these spaces should be closed, proved challenging.
What happened to the pools? I wondered. Were they ever integrated? Did the city fill them with dirt rather than deal with the prospect of “mixed bathing”? These questions were not addressed by the [East Point] Historical Society. A cloud of nostalgia, suspicion, and shame hung over conversations around the old [Spring Avenue] pool. The museum offered no mention of segregation or explanation for the pool's demise. The Black experience was missing; the grassy pool looked like a burial and a cover-up. . . .
What would happen if we shared an understanding of what happened to these ambitious public spaces? “Ghost Pools” attempts to lay the historical groundwork for this conversation.5
Eventually, Palmer discovered that, built around 1954, the pools remained in operation till 1982, when “East Point voters defeated a $770,000 referendum that would have funded repairs for both facilities and construction of a third pool at Sykes Park.”6 The decision to defund the third pool, which would have allowed a fresh start for the legally integrated but still effectively segregated community, struck Palmer as an indication that “none of this has been resolved.”7
■■
The Randall Street pool was built on the East Washington side of town, which was established in 1912 as a segregated neighborhood for black residents; the Spring Avenue pool, instead, three times the size of the Randall Street pool and funded with twice the budget, had been built on the white side of town, across the proverbial (and all too real) railroad tracks.
At Randall Street, the original site of the pool is now a parking lot located between a park, affordable housing, and small residential homes. Palmer marked the ghost pool's borders with white reflective tape, depth measurements, and white and blue flags, and she had the uneven asphalt surface, where leaves of grass still manage to grow through the cracks, painted blue (fig. 3).
Before schools are back in session, you may hear the sounds of children from a nearby playground first as you approach the Randall Street site. “Pool” sounds—that is, the soundscape of informalities that coalesces around these environments—instead may come from a loudspeaker installed at the base of the pool, which can be activated through a QR code. A similar one is also installed at the Spring Avenue location. Both feature the same soundtrack.8
Speakers and sound are deliberately anachronistic: the speakers may look “historical” (circa 1950s), but they are not; the sounds are contemporary anarchives of these informal environments’ sonic energy.9 They were recorded by Palmer's iPhone from 2020 to 2022 at several pools patronized by different demographics, as is still the case in greater Atlanta, where many public spaces remain racially distinct. Pool sounds tend to be boisterous and certainly informal: to begin with, pools lower one's inhibitions, Palmer told me, and people are broadcasting their voices. Pools might function not only as informal places of congregation but also as accidental amplifiers, both of which are accounted for before they are even designed. As Palmer puts it, “social spaces are designed based on the social interactions you want to have.”10
This pool was once loud with laughter, shouts, music, and splashing.
What if the pool walls could talk? Would it facilitate dialogue? Jog memories?
Could it inform how East Point reclaims and reactivates formerly segregated spaces in a way that acknowledges the past, while looking towards the future?11
On the far side of each pool, Palmer installed a diving board one can stand on to look down below and ponder on the jump they cannot take. Once acting as spotlights and places where one would show off their swimming suit, their prowess, their popularity—you name it—the diving boards are now acute reminders of a line of flight and fugitivity that is no longer there.12
“No Diving,” Palmer told me, was a title she considered for the work.
No Diving
For safety concerns, Palmer placed the diving boards at a lower height than the original ones, accepting to insufficiently mark the depth of the historical, and now imaginative, pool. Although, when in use, the Spring Avenue location featured several, Palmer installed only one. Local police were asked to keep an eye on both locations.13
When I visit the Spring Avenue ghost pool, located on the then designated white side of town, a police car is stationed in the parking lot.
The pool's borders are comparatively endless, stretching across a lush green that cuts through the lawn and community garden of a relocated home that belonged to an East Point mayor and is now part of the compound for the East Point Historical Society (fig. 4). On the other side, the pool's borders run alongside a memorial exhibit for the railroad that made Atlanta such a vital nodal point in the transition to the so-called New South.
This railroad car too has been relocated to the compound of the Historical Society (fig. 5). The exhibit forgoes indexicality or historical accuracy and confounds the racial divide that the railroad tracks continued to matter-of-factly enforce through the 1980s, although, by virtue of this very relocation, it does underscore the double phantom presence of the South's history and its economic structure's enduring atmospheric reach.14
Pinned to a fence, a billboard with what in formal art settings would be considered “wall text” features reproductions of archival materials illustrating the evolution of access and management of public waters and communal pools in East Point from the 1860s – 1890s era of “public baths,” to Jim Crow, to the passing of the Civil Rights Act, to the present, in the context of the history of the management of public waters in the United States.15 This way it subtly marks legal integration's de facto irrelevance in the everyday practices of segregated ways of living that continue to this day.
Here one can read and compare the dimensions of the two pools and size of populations served; follow the money invested and divested from these spaces of informal socialities; and read about the legal loopholes, the public health paranoias, and the entrepreneurship of black public figures who raised private funds to maintain them—and, eventually, their demise, under unclear pretenses, other than the decision to stop funding them. Here too, you can listen to pool sounds amplified through the speaker, and, although it's the same track, perhaps the overall environment—the heat, humidity, and lack of shade—now feels different.
There is no playground here—only the sound of cicadas. And the cops don't leave.
“Move on. Nothing to see here” is a ghostly injunction that, although unstated, still hovers over the visit.16 But then again, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten remind us, the police come out to curb an always-already ongoing insurgency.17
If so, form may be a violent response to an ongoing informality.18
Exhibit B: The Equation of Value
Published in a special issue of e-flux titled “As the World Falls Apart,” Denise Ferreira da Silva's series of equations shows how blackness appears and disappears as formality at what she describes as “the modern ethical scene of value” (fig. 6).19 This is the ur-scene of exchange that blackness enters as both determinant and determining, engendered and engendering of the very modernity in which it is also always-already exorbitant, even to itself, insofar as it does not exist as such before being violently entered into it.20
By definition and operation, an equation is a formal equivalence and formality is its entry requirement. Formal equivalence, in turn, is contingent on the legibility of its terms: X has to equal X or else the very terms of engagement won't carry through the exchange. And yet, Ferreira da Silva shows, in this scene blackness as form is also immediately illegible; it cannot compute within the same equation into which it has been so violently entered. It cannot register as formality. Figured as either nothingness or infinity, blackness enters the scene of exchange as un-formed matter in demand of being formed/ enformed/in-formed. By entering as matter—the matter of an ongoing insurgency the police come out to quell—black practices and praxes can only appear as already disappeared.
Form, therefore, is a problem of visibility, one that exposes visibility as a problem. To be more precise, form is implicated in the challenge of what Ferreira da Silva calls “visualizability”: an imposition of individuation that is brutally reignited at the moment of violent encounter with policy, police, politics, the state.21
Black matters as insurgency that is always already there, instead, smudge individualization, blur it and confound it.
Perhaps black matters are native informants at a scene of exchange where blackness can only appear as blur.22
Knowledge of Freedom / Knowledge of Segregation
At the closing event for the three-month-long Ghost Pools installation—a conversation between Palmer, oral history scholar Ann Hill Bond, and East Point Fire Department Chief Corey Deon Thornton—Palmer said that she “wanted the [ghost] pools to be equal. . . . They should be equal.”23 Obviously, there is no reparative work whereby they could finally be so. The Randall Street ghost pool, for example, had to be closed on August 3 before schools reopened, a fact that Palmer realized could feel as a shortchanging of the installation's desired goal but also as a “passing on” of its mandate: she discovered that the parking lot was needed for a locally organized “back to school” drive, where a truck full of school supplies is parked in the lot for distribution to the community. The East Point Historical Society, on the other hand, located in a side of town where these informal activities perhaps do not normally take place, has decided to retain some of the historical findings from Palmer's projects and keep the Spring Avenue installation up till the end of the year, even though it was only built to withstand the summer months.
The Ghost Pools project included oral history interviews that Hill Bond conducted on site to appeal to sense memory. Through them she was able to fill in some of the gaps in the public record. For example, interviews uncovered the fact that the Randall Street pool was integrated when a white girl entered the pool as a water safety instructor.24 As a result, Roy Grayson, who was the director of Parks and Recreation for the city of East Point when the pools were built in the fifties, was fired from his job and his family was run out of town by the KKK, although they eventually came back. Asked if they knew who the Klan members were, the family said they did but declined to reveal who they were. The oral history about the Spring Avenue pool, too, includes memory of integration when “some black folks came down from New York.”25
Grayson was fired in 1959 and the pools nominally integrated in 1964. Yet, born in 1975, Fire Chief Thornton says that he never managed to swim at the Spring Avenue location before it closed in 1982. His mom, calling him by his full name—and when that happens, you listen—forbade him from going to “that pool” during his bike rides. Yet he claims that he eventually “got to go” when his father tried for the fire department and had to climb to the top of a 110-foot ladder and clap in the air three times. For safety reasons this exercise was performed over the Spring Avenue pool. When repeatedly asked if he was ever able to go “inside,” Chief Thornton explains that he was in the parking lot with his mom, watching.
So, he never went “inside.” But in other ways, he did, by sharing the experience with his father, as an experience of “already being shared.”26 That is, he speaks from the disbursement of a shared condition of dispossession, but one whose wealth resides in this very sharing.
Although formally abolished for decades, segregation remained an intergenerational knowledge, but so did freedom: the black community “was a family,” and the Randall Street pool a “place of peace,” Chief Thornton insists.
Matters of Value
Ultimately, form comes down to a question of value, insofar as form is the precondition of value's legibility, its operations, its logistics.27 But there is more: Ferreira da Silva's equation shows how the appearance and disappearance of blackness as formality at the scene of exchange is also an aesthetic problem and a problem for aesthetics. That is, form may ultimately come down to the aesthetics of valuation and all its modes of value-production, including abstraction, extraction, and secretion.28
Accordingly, the decision to devote this journal issue to “informalisms” was prompted by questions about the aesthetics of valuation: what it is, how it gets reproduced, and how scholarship might or might not be complicit with this same scene of exchange, when formalism remains an unquestioned art historical methodology and black studies relies on black art to affirm its investment in informalities. That is, “informalisms”—where “isms” intended to signal attention to process and a plurality of approaches—may help us address how to navigate, on the one hand, art historical discourse's attachment to the analytical and political possibilities of formal readings, and, on the other, black studies’ embrace of the informality of black aesthetic practices.
The call for papers asked: What is at stake in formal readings of black art? What is at stake in aesthetic practices invested in formal interventions? What are black studies’ stakes in formalism? What are black studies’ stakes in informality? And what are informalisms’ possibilities for black studies? Can “form” operate apart from extractive processes of abstraction, the violences of universality, or the brutal equivalences that undergird processes of exchange? 29 More importantly, under what circumstances, if any, can form be a principle or a strategy of/for socialization? Black formalists might alert us that black aesthetics is not so much a formal matter but a matter of formal interventions; that is, black aesthetics is that which acts on form. In this case, formal readings may be deployed to attend to this very action.30
Black informalists, instead, might describe black aesthetics’ formal interventions, if that's still the correct nomenclature, as “poiēsis in black,” an insurgency that is always already happening more significantly at the confluence of everyday and aesthetic practices.31 As such, these same interventions on form are destined to go unrecognized precisely because this con-fluence is not a place—or a line, a color, a cut—but rather a communal flow.32 Ultimately, it seems to me, informalisms asks the question of how, if at all, to attend to that flow and, more importantly, how to care for it.
Overall, contributions to this journal issue have explored these questions by conjuring up blackness's relationship to informality both as a vanishing point—a fugitive sightline that cannot be fully formed, informed, or informing—and a comportment toward what I tend to describe as “reading for informality.”33 In addressing these provocations, all essays in this issue identify, without indulging in, a variety of scenes of exchange in order to develop reading modalities that do not reproduce their violence.
Mlondolozi Zondi's essay, “‘An Impossible Form’: The Absence That Keeps on Giving” takes on this challenge to ask: What is African dance's relationship to form? Underwritten by “Africa's position in Western aesthetics as a source of inspiration and extraction,” scholarly attachments to form—such as the fetishization of either choreography or technique—appear in his essay as impossible demands and therefore violent scenes of exchange. If “choreography and colonialism share a defining attribute of order and arrangement,” while the black doesn't even have access to a bodily figure insofar as “Black corporeal/figural form's equivalency to humanity or personhood can neither be presumed nor incontrovertibly substantiated,” then how might Western scholarship on dance, including its canonization of the avant-garde, make sense of African dance's relationship to choreography and technique?34
Moving from the position that the “ ‘black’ and the ‘aesthetic’ are fundamentally antagonistic dance partners,” Zondi's essay “highlight[s] contemporary African aesthetic contemplation on form and formlessness as contending with a ‘form of being’ whose absence and exorbitance equally gift Western modernity/modernism its form.” Western demands that choreography act as a principle of form unavoidably construe African dance as formless but, at the same time, as a convenient channel for accessing the aesthetic self-dissolution the Western subject longs for.35 Here form, just like in Ferreira da Silva's equation, is both determinant and determining, engendered and engendering—all the while setting up blackness as a gift that keeps on giving.
The practices Zondi focuses on—Germaine Acogny (Senegal) and Faustin Linyekula (DRC)—instead strive to perform an “anarrangement” of the choreographic apparatus “ ‘against’ the choreographic and its defining aspirational mastery of form.” These practices,” he concludes, “destroy form as a move away from the politics of reform.”36
Rebecca Kumar's essay, “ ‘You're in the Middle of the World’: Black and Asian Convergence in Moonlight,” also pivots around a perhaps unacknowledged scene of exchange: Afropessimism's position that non-black people of color hold a “junior partnership . . . with whiteness/humanness.”37 Focusing on Moonlight's multiple homages to Asian cinema and particularly Wong Kar-wai—including Wong's rendering of women as “ornaments” and deterritorialized figures for postcolonial condition—Kumar argues the question becomes whether “Asian aesthetics in Moonlight can be read as supplementing the structural racial antagonism outlined by Frank B. Wilderson III rather than disrupting it.”38 She concludes that the film addresses this ontological impasse by adopting some of the forms of ornamentalism to explore how “flesh and ornament come together to rupture humanist scripts.”39
Rejecting simple analogy, metaphorization, or translation, Kumar's essay leans instead on the transferability of ornamentalism, as elaborated by Anne Anlin Cheng, whereby a “feminized, animated, Asiatic object” can articulate “the human [as an] incidental alibi for, or an afterthought of, relishing this pure objectness.”40 Transferability is not equation or exchange. Perhaps a poetic flow, it is certainly a matter of the “intimacy of four continents,”41 akin to the tidalectic mode of the shoreline that features so prominently in Jenkins's film. As Kumar concludes, “Flesh and ornamentalism render a kind of willful illegibility,” a tidalectical stylistic relationship at the confluence of flesh and ornamentalism that can only appear as blurred.42
Two essays in our Accent Marks section are devoted to Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). Both focus on the film's engagement with technologies of visual capture and their role in both the spectacularization and the suppression of black creative labor in Hollywood's industrial structures and, more broadly, the signifying systems of film language and film form.
If, initially, Peele's work featured scenes of exchange front and center—as in Get Out (2017), which famously includes an “auction block” scene—since Us (2019) and then, again, with Nope, it has increasingly presented them as constantly multiplying folds of blurred reversibility. In this way, Peele's cinema challenges traditional reading protocols by luring readership to go deeper and deeper into its folds, sometimes at the risk of further entrenchment in the myriad scenes of exchange embedded within it, and the possibility of never coming out.43
William Brown's and Courtney Baker's essays explore Nope's engagement with film form, but, in their analyses, form itself appears as already disappeared, “much as the visible cinematic image is premised upon the black frames that appear invisibly on-screen in between each of the projected images that viewers do see.”44 Brown writes: “Nope offers up a complex meditation on the role of visual media, perhaps especially photography and film, in the construction of the relationship between Blackness and formlessness/ l'informe, suggesting that these media, as forms, are built upon the supposedly ‘formless’/informe other.”45
Brown's essay, “Nope: Blackness, the Informe, and Cinema,” focuses on the film's alignment of blackness with the formlessness of the animal and its reliance on the “plasticity” of blackness to evoke the “objective vertigo” of black nonbeing.46 Brown traces blackness's formal generativity for film history in the way the animal appears and disappears as blackness's possible (but not equal) equivalent—perhaps blackness's “junior partner.” Here too, however, the equation cannot work, and analogies turn into intimacies.47 Not only between the formless animal, black plasticity, and the informe, but also between the “ver” of “vertigo,” which shares etymological roots with both ver/worm—thus suggesting how the vertigo can also be a wormhole—and “ver” as the etymological root for “vernacular,” which, in turn, at least since Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates Jr., is simultaneously a theory, practice, and praxis of signification—perhaps a poiēsis in black, which is always already knowing about its own knowingness.48 Ultimately, as Brown shows, Nope's own engagement with the formal possibility of the black informe remains exorbitant to the scene of exchange a formalist reading might want to stage.
Baker's essay, “Reformulating Black Cinematic Labor,” focuses instead on black labor's role in engendering film form, showing how in Nope form acts as the black leader of an industrial structure and visual culture that either occludes the recording of black labor or fastens it to the spectacle of black suffering.49 Baker's engagement with the film is two-pronged: she attends, on the one hand, to the formal labor of signification that blackness performs, and on the other, to the figure of the black laborer and the figuring of black industrial labor's constant appearance as already disappeared.
Ultimately, Baker shows, there is no accounting for what blackness has done for the film industry, film language, and film form, and Nope expertly navigates myriad scenes of exchange by skirting around them, avoiding their expected conclusions, folding upon them, blurring their connections, while also offering the blueprint for a counter- (or ana-) history of cinema, and certainly of formalism, to come.
Brooklyn-based artist Amina Ross, introduced and interviewed in this issue by Kelly Chung in an essay titled “ ‘If Today Never Gives Up In Me’: Amina Ross's Spacious Black Present,” also appears interested in finding “wormholes” as strategies to “rectify” what's given. Her practice of “black work” invests in capaciously and erotically inhabiting the present with aesthetic experimentations whereby “multiple forms of blackness appear and emerge in the present moment.”50
Perhaps for Ross, the black work of “placing objects . . . and built structures [in unexpected positions]”—that is, the aesthetic work of an “everyday erotic practice . . . working to widen spectators’ sense of their own present and immediate environment”—is a practice of “informalization,” a rendering informal of what might be too quickly subsumed under form. “As such,” Chung observes, “the present is a space to be, not escaped from, but worked on and reenvisioned in an effort to make a black present possible, livable, and, to echo [Audre] Lorde, replenishable.”51
For Chung, Ross's holding space for the material reality of the thing resonates with Fred Moten's approach to Heidegger's jug as “‘informal (enformed/enforming, as opposed to formless)’ entity, or an orientation to the ever-forming content within the jug rather than the jug itself.”52 Taking the form of a (perhaps) re-formed figure/ground relation, in the way Ross approaches their everyday environments—such as a train ride or walk through New York City—by equally holding and disbursing dispossession, Chung argues, blackness appears bountiful and generative.
In all essays, informality remains fugitive—the insurgency that it always was. Redress is an impossibility in Zondi's defense of the choreographic anarrangements of African dance, even when coming face to face with the legacy of the “intramural.”53 In Kumar's essay, the ornamental moves through gender fluidity, queer identifications, and the black aquatic and becomes a trans-diasporic style of proximity with the object that seeks to dance with—rather than antagonize—the flesh.54
The abductions committed by Jean Jacket, the monster in Nope, evoke the hold but cannot equate with it. In Brown's essay, the informe animal activates black plasticity, but it is not equivalent to blackness. And just like the horse rider who dis-appears in Muybridge's famous photographic strip, the film's lead and the fictional descendant of the Muybridge rider, OJ, rides “out yonder”—that is, hors(e) champ, as Baker names it—so that Nope's refusal of a melodramatic closure functions as a reminder of blackness's chosen ties to unpayable debt.55 Finally, Amina Ross's commitment to black work rejects translation or transparency in favor of an investment on a constant multiplication of perspectives and simultaneity of moments to return to a now much richer present.
Ghost Tracks
A visit to the ghost pools is necessarily a move through space but also time. One has to go from one side of the tracks to the other, and therefore back to when this divide was definitive and strictly enforced, as well as back to the flow of politics and everyday commonsense practices that let this arrangement stand unchallenged.
One has to go not just around but through the police, policy, politics, the state.
Palmer has been both factual and strategically reticent about setting up comparative measures (such as dimensions or funding) for the pools as capable of rendering the obscenity of the scene of exchange that racial capital so overtly instituted in the time since nominal emancipation and formal segregation. Thus, in her design of Ghost Pools, the equation of value is nothing but a ghost, although also a specter of what continues to lie ahead. Indeed, reactivated as social spaces forty years later, the pool's ghosts are capable of conjuring up future informalities: for example, some attendees at the Randall Street pool's opening party showed up in swim trunks, because, they said, “it was gonna be a pool party” after all.
Notes
The title of this essay plays with Glenn Ligon's work by the same title to evoke what might be considered formalism's often taxidermic approach to close reading. Condition Report (2000) is a diptych print produced by Ligon based on the artist's first exclusively text painting from 1988, Untitled (I Am A Man), a reproduction of the protest placards carried by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, in the spring of 1968. The left panel is a straightforward print of the 1988 painting, while the right panel includes the overlay annotations of painting conservator Michael Duffy. Karl Rittenbach, Condition Report, 2000, iris print and screenprint, in two parts, each 811 × 576 mm, Tate, London, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ligon-condition-report-l02822.
I am modeling this statement after Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe.
“With Ghost Pools, Flux Projects continues FLOW, a multi-year series designed to explore Atlanta's history with water, how it has shaped [the] city and the potential it holds for [the] future. FLOW engages issues of conservation, equity, and urban design through installations and performances around the city” (Flux Projects, “Ghost Pools,” https://fluxprojects.org/productions/ghost-pools/ [accessed September 1, 2023]).
“Following a bond referendum in 1953, East Point constructed two separate but unequal swimming pools. The pool on Spring Avenue for White residents was 175' ×75' and cost $100,000. The Randall Street pool for the Black community was 75' ×35' and cost $50,000” (Palmer, “Ghost Pools Timeline”). Palmer indicates her research built on Wiltse, Contested Waters, which, however, does not cover the American South, which then became her focus.
This soundscape was designed by Santiago Páramo.
On the radical work of the prefix ana- in black studies, see Raengo, “Free Medicine.”
It's impossible not to recall the role of empty pools in Kahlil Joseph's work, particularly Until the Quiet Comes (2013) and Process (2017).
Trained as a writer, and author of Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport, Palmer's turn to public art has ignited a very different relationship to her own community where it is situated.
I use the term atmospheric as elaborated by Christina Sharpe in In The Wake.
Palmer, “Ghost Pool Timeline.”
I am following Nicholas Mirzoeff's engagement with Jacques Rancière's description of this injunction (i.e., “Move on, there is nothing to see here”) as the function of the police. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics”; Mirzoeff, Right to Look, 1 – 10.
Moten and Harney, “ ‘Wildcat the Totality.’ ”
“Antiblack violence depends on form to reproduce itself” (Warren, “Catastrophe,” 357; quoted in Zondi, “Impossible Form,” 29).
See also Marriott, “On Decadence.”
Harney, rephrasing Ferreira da Silva, in Moten and Harney, “ ‘Wildcat the Totality.’ ” As Moten puts it in the same podcast, “They will kill everyone of us, but they can't kill us all.”
“Native informant” is Spivak's formulation in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason; “blur” is Moten's formulation in Black and Blur.
Palmer, “Remembering East Point's Pools.” My main reference for this section's title is Moten's chapter “Knowledge of Freedom” from Stolen Life, which I have already discussed in Raengo, “View of a Landscape.”
Oral history interviews disclosed that water safety was a paramount concern for both black and white pool managers and lifeguards and how being responsible for someone's life in the water was an intergenerational mandate and a community project.
Paraphrasis by Hill Bond, in Palmer, “Remembering East Point's Pools.” Conducted throughout the summer 2023, the oral history interviews are not yet available to the public, so I am unable to identify the speaker at this time.
Harney, in Moten and Harney, “ ‘Wildcat the Totality.’ ” A question about empathy and solidarity (in the context of the George Floyd global protests) becomes an opportunity to focus on the practice (not the statement) of solidarity and the fact of sharing by virtue of already having been shared.
On logistics as a “white science,” see Harney and Moten, All Incomplete. See also Barrett as calling attention to the violence of value as form, in Blackness and Value.
And, more profoundly and consequentially: If “form” is a way in which art knows itself to be art, then how does black art know itself? And how does it know that it knows? See “liquid blackness Issue 8.1 CFP: ‘Informalisms,’ ” https://liquidblackness.com/news/call-for-papers-liquid-blackness-issue-81 (last updated August 15, 2022).
I am thinking about Darby English in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness and 1971: A Year in the Life of Color.
Judy, Sentient Flesh. See also liquid blackness, “Atonal Symphonies.”
In my current book project, “The Liquidity of the Black Arts,” I endeavor to further develop this comportment as the expression of an ethics of black study.
Warren, “Catastrophe,” 369, quoted in Zondi, “Impossible Form,” 30.
Kumar, “ ‘You're in the Middle of the World,’ ” 49.
Kumar, “ ‘You're in the Middle of the World,’ ” 51.
Kumar, “ ‘You're in the Middle of the World,’ ” 54.
Cheng, Ornamentalism, 435; quoted in Kumar, “ ‘You're in the Middle of the World,’ ” 53. Note that in Anne Anlin Cheng's understanding of “ornamentalism,” Spillers's flesh and Orientalist ornament are not antagonists but rather two different and dialogical modalities of relationship to objecthood and subjecthood. Cheng, Ornamentalism.
Kumar, “ ‘You're in the Middle of the World,’ ” 60.
See, for example, Brinkema, “Get Out, Race, and Formal Destiny.”
Brown references Jackson, Becoming Human, and Wilderson, “Vengeance of Vertigo.”
Brown writes: “The view that we get from Nope is a view of Blackness and animality not as captured by whiteness's rendering of Blackness as animal, as spectacle, as nonhuman. Rather, it is a view of formlessness, from Blackness, much as OJ and Em perform ‘seeing each other’ when they finally confront Jean Jacket” (Brown, “Nope,” 77).
On the black leader, see Mavor's discussion of Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983) in Black and Blue. Importantly, Kahlil Joseph's Fly Paper (2017) returns to this concept as well.
Chung, “ ‘If Today Never Gives Up In Me,’ ” 105.
Chung, “ ‘If Today Never Gives Up In Me,’ ” 106.
Chung, “‘If Today Never Gives Up In Me,’ ” 110.
Zondi calls attention to a salient moment in a documentary entitled Movement (R)evolution Africa: A Story of an Art Form in Four Acts (Joan Frosch and Alla Kovgan, 2007) when members of Germaine Acogny's now-disbanded Compagnie Jant-Bi tear up while watching Jawole Willa-Jo Zollar's Urban Bush Women's rehearsal (Zondi, “Impossible Form,” 33).
Baker coins this expression in “Reformulating Black Cinematic Labor,” 96. On blackness and “bad” or unpayable debt, see Harney and Moten, Undercommons.
