Chromatic Blackness and Expression + Project Proposal

 The metaphor of chromatic blackness with African-American perspective is one I find deeply compelling both aesthetically as well as a sense through which to read work. It reads to me in some ways an emphasis of the way that darker pigmented eyes let in less light/are less light sensitive than lighter coloured eyes and therefore a way to culturally and subjectively situate an African-American perspective in these contexts.

For this post I would like to expand upon my discussion of Roy DeCarava's Graduation, 1949.

The clear binary of light concentrated in perhaps a third of the image where the subject is positioned whilst the rest of the image is mainly darker hues of grey and black is poignant from many perspectives with regard to reading American culture. The first being the subject bathed in light in her Graduation gown, whereby this tradition of a white graduation gown is aligned with EuroAmerican whiteness in many ways. White often associated with purity and wisdom and new beginnings as well as being associated in some way with lineages of the suffragettes and debutantes. All of these are legitimisations of citizenship, personhood and belonging in American culture - a validating gaze on the subject as she participates in American culture through graduating. Pertinently however, the subject herself gazes into he darker portion of the photograph, poised, prepared for the incoming change post-graduation and seemingly mid-stride toward the "darkness" that awaits in the rest of the portion of the photograph. in this way, the light composition of the photograph highlights not only the difference of the viewers positionally upon the subject in contrast to the subject portrayed's centre of attention, but allows for a capture of transition, and change, beyond the portrayal of a single moment.

We as the viewer are forced to consider, what the subject might be concerned with in the "darkness", and are confronted with a Chevrolet car advert. But more generally, the subjects position and viewership as perhaps forcibly and necessarily in the darkness at this particular life juncture of graduation. At face value, we are focussed on her graduation, a celebration of her Americanness quite literally spotlighted, but her concern is of another position entirely. We are forced into this two-sightedness and entangled with understanding both perspectives.

Project Proposal

I am keen to interrogate Black aesthetics between music (sonic) and art (visual). I would explore the possibility of theorising across a Black artistic aesthetic across music and visual art that is rooted within a shared African philosophical perspective. This is especially with regard to the ideas of the aesthetics in dance and sculpture as outlined by Robert Farris Thompson in “African Art in Motion” and musicologist Olly Wilson’s conception of the “heterogenous sound ideal” in music as being similarly based on an African epistemological outlook rooted in a philosophical outlook of transcendental balance from the “aesthetics of cool”. 

 

I would like to do this in order to help create a framework born out of a black epistemological subjectivity through which to theorise across the arts. I plan to centre this exploration in a close analysis of an object which I have not yet decided on but that demonstrates both musical and visual art aspects as well as having a diasporic audience or engagement. Some examples might be Romare Bearden's Guitar Magic or an item from the Art of Jazz  exhibition, or album art from the Sun Ra Arkestra.