Abstractionist Aesthetics

Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture

Phillip Brian Harper

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479867981
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive culture In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge, Harper contends that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. Arguing against the need for “positive” representations, Abstractionist Aesthetics displaces realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, re-centers literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and elevates experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. Drawing on examples across a variety of artistic production, including the visual work of Fred Wilson and Kara Walker, the music of Billie Holiday and Cecil Taylor, and the prose and verse writings of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and John Keene, this book poses urgent questions about how racial blackness is made to assume certain social meanings. In the process, African American aesthetics are upended, rendering abstractionism as the most powerful modality for Black representation.

1 Black Personhood in the Maw of Abstraction

It may be hard to imagine at this point, but there was a time, during the late 1990s, when the acclaimed visual artist Kara Walker was the target of intense criticism from fellow members of the African American creative community.¹ The problem, according to her antagonists—chief among them the prominent assemblage artist Betye Saar, who registered her opinion in a widely circulated condemnatory letter—was that Walker routinely presented “negative images” of black people; the evidence was scenarios such as we have in figure 3, in which, as one critic declared in 1997, “a bearded white man puts his head between the legs of a naked girl so young that her breasts have not begun to swell”—a characterization meant to substantiate the author’s charge that Walker’s work overall depicts an inordinate number of “prepubescent black girls being sexually abused or hypersexed.”² That similar accusations of “negative” portrayal have been made against other African American artists in the ensuing years indicates the ongoing relevance of the issues taken up in this volume.³ The now relatively distant Walker controversy remains exemplary for my purposes, however, because it renders explicit not only the mode of audience reception that informs all such disapproving responses (and whose cogency I would like to query) but also the mode of representational aesthetics that I wish to promote, for the sake of its distinctive social-critical potential.

3Kara Walker, Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn upon My Passage through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, by Myself, Missus K. E. B. Walker, Colored, 1997, detail. Cut paper on wall, installation dimensions variable; approximately 144 × 1,860 in. (365.8 × 4,724.4 cm). Copyright © 1997 Kara Walker. Reproduced courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

The reception protocols to which I allude are epitomized in the previously cited observation regarding the depicted female figure’s as-yet-undeveloped breasts. On the one hand, this remark registers a commitment to representational realism that appears wholly appropriate insofar as Walker’s rendering itself evidently deploys certain visual cues familiar to us from “real life” (i.e., the relative smallness of the figure’s breasts) to signal certain facts likewise made conceivable by our knowledge of said life (i.e., the figure’s comparative youthfulness), in a manner whose intelligibility similarly derives from our real-world experience. On the other hand, though, the very grammar of the assertion suggests that its apparently reasonable interpretive realism is being made to further a literalist understanding that is much more problematic: specifically, by positing through a negative past-participle formulation that the depicted figure’s breasts “have not begun to swell,” this account somewhat oddly implies that, eventually, they will begin to do so, as though what the artwork presented were not a representational paper cut-out (comprising as it does Walker’s signature mode of the excised silhouette) but rather a live human being whose progress through puberty we would be able to discern in her bodily development if only we were at liberty to observe her in the gallery over several years’ duration.⁴

The actual infeasibility of this latter proposition attests to the limits of the realist reception protocol that this instance of Walker’s work otherwise seems to demand, for it shows up the limits of the pictorial verisimilitude on which the validity of that protocol depends. However closely it might approximate the appearance—and hence conjure the notion—of a preexistent lived reality to which it is thus understood to refer, pictorial depiction nevertheless cannot figure the change over time that is itself a defining feature of that lived reality, and so to that extent is precluded from ever manifesting as fully true to life. Neither a failing to be condemned nor a fault to be corrected, this fact is rather the local instantiation of a general truth about all representational depiction—namely, that it necessarily exists at a remove from even those real-world phenomena its resemblance to which is its most notable trait. To put the matter in the terms that I believe are centrally—if tacitly—at issue in such debates about “negative images” as the one under discussion here, let us conceive of this removal as a mode of abstraction, understanding the word in its most basic etymological sense to mean simply a state of withdrawal from some originary point.⁵ One consequence of our thus allowing that every instance of representation is characterized by such a broadly defined condition of abstraction is that we immediately recognize that all art is in this most general sense “abstract,” whether it officially circulates under that rubric or not; and to recognize this is merely to remind ourselves that an aesthetic representation is by no means the same thing as the “reality” to which it may seem to refer.⁶

It is of course the characterizations of Walker’s work previously cited that suggest to me that we do in fact need to be reminded of this admittedly elementary point, the implication of which is not just that the breasts of Walker’s female figure never will develop further but, more important, that the criteria by which Walker’s depictions are judged to be “negative” are invalid for the modality the work assumes. In other words, it isn’t simply that these determinations of negativity are at best highly contingent and at worst wholly subjective, although this is in fact the case. (Couldn’t the depiction of “sexual abuse,” which anyone who believes in the concept would concur is irredeemably negative, actually encourage viewers to combat the offense within the societies they inhabit, and thus be understood as an effectively “positive” event? Doesn’t the very idea of “hypersexuality” presuppose an absolute maximum acceptable level of human sexual interest and activity on which there is in reality no societal agreement, and even the mere existence of which many individuals would dispute?) Rather, it is that the phenomena on which these determinations rest are themselves scarcely manifest in the pictorial domain.

“Sexual abuse,” for example, depends by definition on factors of consent that can be clarified only through a review of the circumstances under which it is alleged to occur. It thus must inevitably be a function of context, and context must comprise a state of affairs that to some extent preexists and, in any case, evolves in relation to the allegedly abusive activity. Its previously cited incapacity to figure development over time, however—or, for that matter, even to register temporal sequence—renders pictorial depiction incapable of indicating what factors inform the “actions” it represents; and the consequent impossibility of properly assessing context within the pictorial realm disallows any claim that Walker’s installations portray what can be unproblematically termed “sexual abuse.”⁷ “Hypersexuality” is similarly dubious insofar as it entails a putative excess that is apprehended primarily in terms of iterative frequency. Even if a picture might circumvent its basic inability to represent repetitive action and otherwise establish its depicted subject as prodigiously carnal (by presenting her as sexually engaged with multiple persons simultaneously? by portraying her consorting with the first in a queue of individuals, each evidently awaiting a turn?), its recourse to these stratagems would itself register the representational limits that it thereby managed to evade.⁸ For its part, the Walker piece under consideration here does not even attempt such maneuvers, forgoing any effort to convey either the factors in or the implications of the activities it depicts. It thereby acquiesces both to the standard limits on pictorial representation noted earlier and to its own status as precisely an instance of such representation, as distinct from the lived reality within which such phenomena as “sexual abuse” actually occur.

Of course, Walker’s tableau most certainly bears a relation to that lived reality, telegraphing such real-world matters as racial and gender identity through the naturalistic precision of its graphic outline. Indeed, not only does that precision enable the critic cited earlier to charge that Walker has presented a “prepubescent black girl” (fronted, moreover, by “a bearded white man”)—and me, conversely and paradoxically, to suggest that she has in fact portrayed a pregnant young black woman whose breast rests lightly on her protruding belly; it also establishes Walker’s work in general as an engagement with antebellum southern-U.S. plantation life and, by extension, as a commentary on the continuing melodrama of national black-white race relations.⁹ By thus clinching not just the depiction’s referential purchase but also its historical import, the exactness of Walker’s delineation evidently authorizes a wholly realist account of the work’s significance; and if any such account verges into the sort of literalist understanding that I call into question here, this is arguably due simply to the undeniable accomplishment of Walker’s representational craft.

While the rendering is distinguished by Walker’s characteristic lineal accuracy, however, that precision also informs elements in the scene that actually mitigate the latter’s evident realism. Slightly toward the foreground of the composition and just to the left of where the two previously discussed figures appear, there sits a large, brimful washtub, a toy sailboat floating on the rightward portion of the bath surface, and the top half of a black child’s head—telltale hair plaits and all—emerging through that surface to the left. And beyond the mere incongruity of this image and the seeming cunnilingus scenario, there is the complete abeyance of realist effect, whereby, for instance, the items that the woman is hanging are not clipped to a line at all but simply festooned in midair, with nothing even to suggest a clothesline except for the placement of the pins themselves. More strikingly still, the farthermost portion of this only-hinted-at wire bears not a standard laundry article but a full-size man, pinned up in a prone position just by the shoulder blades and at the back of the knee, his head aimed rightward and his feet to the left, arms seemingly tied behind his back with a rope or a strip of cloth. He looks to be gazing down at the decrepit fence, random floorboards, and stray vegetation clustered to the left and slightly back of the washtub. His hair hangs off his forehead as lank as that of the other male figure, and this, along with his facial profile, makes him appear white as well. Additionally, he seems to be dressed like the other white figure, in a full suit of clothes, and these latter may account for the anoma...