Re: [-empyre-] (no subject) aesthetics

[Thomas F. DeFrantz]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
right, thanks friends.  this is all very helpful to think about possibilities 
and potential outcomes of any sort of work, and intellectual work in 
particular.  

I remain insistent on securing ideologies in experience, even in this context 
of imagining immanence that seems to want to be outside of experience, 
relationship, identity.  

as an artist, I think of aesthetics as practical strategies, rather than 
speculative renderings.  so for me, an 'aesthetics of reading' confuses;  
aesthetics might create relationship through craft, but for me they are not 
engaged primarily  by a 'receiver' who reads a performance or an object or a 
circumstance; they are created and engaged in concert with the artists who 
labor to create the social possibilities in their art.  

[maybe reading, in this context, becomes appreciation; as we might appreciate a 
performance rather than reduce it to the subject-object of being read by a 
theorist presumably outside of it.]

I want to trouble the waters where we encourage each other to work outside of 
narratives of family, relationship, shared skin and sweat, or boots on the 
ground, if you will.  it's fun work to imagine at a distance, but I find that 
the language that allows for the figure of the slave or that supports only 
interpretive strategies is also the language that objectifies us and makes us 
strange in the world.  of course I am strange to my nephews and colleagues, but 
I share creative projects that answer those relationships, on some level, 
directly.  my liquid blackness is experiential and rooted in my working through 
black aesthetics as practice.  if I want anything for you and your liquid 
blackness, it might be that you find ways to shift possibilities and resist 
fixing knowledges.  

I also want to trouble the waters in which creative output is treated with 
limited acknowledgment of the types of labor that produce it.  I am suspicious 
of writing about art as though varied media, approaches, or outcomes are 
equivalent.  film, sculpture, music, dance, theater, spoken word, or preaching 
are very different sorts of propositions in practice; I always find it odd to 
treat creative craft as a singularity.  for me, this approach tends to reify 
and stabilize the theorist, and diminish the creative impulse.  I continue to 
think that the hierarchical systems of citationality and universalizing 
ambitions of theorizing play weirdly into a re-racializing and subjugation of 
black aesthetics and black artistry.  

[don't explain it to me; help me understand how it incites you to feel...]

my hope as an educator in these conversations would be to recenter black people 
in theoretical discussions of blackness.  we've had centuries of philosophical 
tracts created to stabilize black abjection - and we might think about how 
immanence could be one of many.  how can we actually demonstrate our belief of 
black people creating possibility in the world through aesthetic practice, and 
if we wrote from among we people, rather than outside of them, what sorts of 
theoretical inventions would we create?  I imagine that these would be 
renderings available to more than the few hundred phds we already know.  for 
that to be true, we may have to stop relying on other people's labor in order 
to prove 'our' points.  

the academy has been built on a certain scaffolding that points toward an elite 
rendering accessible to a certain few.  but black performance and black 
aesthetics are available to all, in some ways.  how could we construct theory 
that actually answers black aesthetics in an availability? 

thanks for engaging these questions, and another time we will enjoy more 
conversation!

in motion, tommy



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[-empyre-] FW: Liquid Blackness- Week II: Aesthetics

[Thomas F. DeFrantz]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
-Original Message-
From: Thomas F. DeFrantz 
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2016 11:43 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] Liquid Blackness- Week II: Aesthetics

i'm not sure what to think about liberation or transcendence as goals.  what if 
we aren't trying to *not* be on the planet with others, but trying to find ways 
to shift possibilities so that the spaces can allow for temporary diversities?  
we all come and go;  maybe this is like the liquid that seeps and stalls; 
freezes then bubbles.  liberation and transcendence seem unlikely to me, and 
imply a 'not being-ness.' my skepticism here feeds into a distrust of 
afro-pessimism, even as I surely find the ground where it grows to be familiar. 
being black is somehow related to the tension of holding an ontological 
possibility for black presence; to hold that tension productively, freedom will 
be an unattainable, momentary goal.  is that okay?  black aesthetics suggest, 
well, yes, it's okay; of course it is all temporary and contingent. 

i also wonder that there could ever be an 'outside to the West.' how could 
anyone on the planet be outside direct relationship to structures of capital, 
empire, and white domination?  this is the ground that produces afro-pessimism, 
but I wonder that we aren't all afro-pessimists if this is true, and what 
distinctively comes from a designation of resistance to the modern.

in my own body, as I reflect on my various identities and relationships, I 
don't feel overdetermined so much as overwhelmed by life in the twenty-first 
century.  
others might think too much of me; but that is their predilection; can we talk 
about how to have access to materials that will allow for the enhancement of 
black lives in various locations?  for my cousins in the virgin islands; my 
nephews in hayward, ca; my brother in indianapolis, in? for my play-family in 
south carolina?  

i think of the aesthetics of blackness as methods to produce contingencies that 
enhance possibilities.  as in the free jazz/passing through project.  making 
black art is making black relationships palpable, and making these 
relationships dynamic and unstable.  so we can learn in the making.  

then what if we all took time to make black art?  to invent 
performances/installations/writing that resist, that speak of family and 
spirit, that engage rhythm and unexpected arrivals of group communion.  that 
subvert hegemony. black performance pretty much always arrives queer; our 
common concerns with adornment and elaboration ensure this.  

so, what shall we make together?  

in motion, tommy



-Original Message-
From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
[mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Derek Murray
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2016 12:59 AM
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Liquid Blackness- Week II: Aesthetics

--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Greetings!

Much of the discussion thus far has been wrestling with the problem of 
blackness in the Western context that, as Alessandra has articulated, is 
expressive of “affects that are modulated by race in order to express radical 
difference.” This fact is a persistent barrier to imagining a black 
expressiveness—particularly in the West—that is somehow liberated from 
histories and present-day realities of racial trauma, insult, and violence. 
African-American artistic traditions (which is my current research focus), 
across genres, are deeply communicative of these realities. The visual artists 
I write about are engaged in critical and aesthetic projects that attempt to 
rewrite and ultimately transcend the racialized barriers that restrict their 
creative potential.

Much of this work has taken the form of an engagement with the black body as an 
ideologically over-determined imago of mythic resplendence:
one that is deeply burdened, not as a kind of humanness, but rather as social 
symbolism—something that bears the weight of societal scorn, guilt, and 
politically correct sentiment. Because so much black American art has been 
concerned with pain, visual producers associated with post-blackness have 
attempted to construct a visual politics of pleasure that rejects “lack” as the 
defining characteristic of black representation and experience. Saidiya Hartman 
did great work that I’m sure we’re all familiar with around the denial of black 
sentience, which is very much at the root of (and justifies) subjection.

Recently, however, there is a turn towards formalism, the abstract, and medium 
specificity as an escape from the limitations imposed by the body. In a sense, 
this movement has been influenced by intellectuals like Hartman, whose 
innovative work has meaningfully foregrounded the importance of affect. African 
scholar Olu Oguibe has done this as well, attempting to lift blackness out o