18. My Black Death sy ARTHUR Jara THERE WERE TWO MAJOR INSTANCES IN which black aesthet- redirected Western art practice in the twentieth century. The in Europe, Europeans were confronted i.e, they were the products of ies radi first is the advent of African “ar s that were essent ically different assumptions about how ane apprehends and responds to the le understanding of the cultural c nerated ow their forms were arrived at or how their structures of meaning operated, what they might mean to their makers “The second instance occurred with the emergence of jazz, yet a her ut one decidedly more familiar (due to its domestic o In the first instance—the arrival of African sculptural artifacts in Burope— tow. But with the arrival of jazz, fact in this instance, you get the artifuct wi P the consensual articulations of the aesthetic and generative processes of the ruisic, The repercussions of these two instances of cultural insurgency are le, but a few things seem clear. is the direct re- mavention of Cubism into the spacial implications of these artifacts. 1e. To be more precise, Cubism isthe direct | implications onto the practice of Western ‘near unquantifiable in ma Pi Demoiselles d'Avigon (and hence moder sult of hig, confro Affican artifacts, His ‘was provoked by his inqui ion This is a commonly accepted transposition of these spa painting. At the time Western painting (despite Cézanne’s violent cage rat~ ling) had become trapped by the Renaissance perspective (single “fixe er than the singl sd com- “fixed” vantage of Western Renaissance perspective, betrays li prehension of the logic of multiple “dynamic” vantages apparent in the steinian views of forms of African artifacts, a logic shared by post space/time, Robert Partis Thompson has described in African Art in Motion how many of the artifacts in the possession of European artists like Picasso Were never intended to be (ie, were not designed to be) seen on a pedestal, in a fixed position. These sculptural artifacts moved around the iF not more than, the viewer moved around the artifact Iterative to the Westem paradigm in which the subject “People are always talking about the influence the Negroes had on me. What about it? We all loved the fetishes. Van Gogh said his generat had Japanese art—we have the Negroes. Theie forms have no mot fluence on me than on Matisse, or on Derain, But for Matisse and De- rain, the masks were sculpture—no more than that. When Matisse showed me his first Negro head, he talked about Egyptian art. But when I went to the Musée dé Homme, the masks were sculpture. They were magical objects... understand wha sculptures did for the Negroes. ... They were weapons—to keep peo- ple from being ruled by spirits, to help them free themselves, Tools Les Demoiselles d'Avignon must have come that day, not because of the forms, buit because it was my fist canvas of exorcism!” ‘Another crucial aspect of Picasso's confrontation with black aesthetics has only recently come to light. Ostensibly an investigation of Picasso'sus EVERYTHING BUT THE BURDEN utilization of photography, one can only smile in wonder at the publication of Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror (Baldasari, 1998). The book that Picasso possessed some forty photographs taken by Edmond Fortier, a Dakar-based photographer who was the most prolific publisher of postcards from French West Africa beginning in 1900-01. The photo- graphs, supposedly “studies,” are of African women, generally bare-breasted and often with arms raised over the head or folded behind the back. (I sus- pect the appearance of these appressed materials is a result of the Picasso Museum's desperate need to feed its publishing wing.) how Picasso This book reveals, in rather explicit comparative used these photographs as the basis for the development of Les Dew Avignon. The standard argument is that Demoiselle represented "the vention of colored forms that na longer intended to imitate the external world but only to signify it. The canvas ceased to be a mirror—however de- forming—of the visible, in order to become a plastic language (écrture),” In the very bodies, by way of Fortier’s “objective” representations, from these embodiments of black being were derived. Picasso's combined access to African artifacts Fortier’s photographs made explicit the presence of the highly c formal system employed by these artifacts. The implications of this wo seem t lemand some major reconsiderations of the conceptual origins parameters of modernism: how black bodies tic intensity of black bodies, of modernism as a substrand of black aesthetics; the black body as the pre rier anticentropic figure of the twentieth century: ‘The trauma provoked by and the attraction of the entropic; the introduction of the black body into white space is profound) ‘Our notion of the “abstract” arises from a simple refusal of, or resistance to, the ontological fact of black being (and its material dimension, the black body), what I've described as "the inconceivability of the black body to the white imagination.” Simply put, representations of the black body, as ren dered by traditional African artifacts, were rejected (by whites) as instances of verisimilitude and instead received as “highly stylized” or “abstract.” Eu MY BLACK DEATH 247 ropeans preferred to understand these artifacts as creative distortions rather than accept the existence of human beings that looked so radically different in appearance from them. This radical difference of appearance functions, in the Western mind-set, as the sign of a radically different (alien) ontology, which of course threatened the Eurocentric belief fas the defining ‘model of humanity. This, in turn, has provoked the ongoing struggle against the acceptance of the “other.” and its full humanity. Duchamp was initially as content as Picasso, and others, to explore the space/time implications of African artifacts. But inevitably, Duchamp, smarter than anyone else around, became deeply interested in how African artifacts behaved rather than simply how they looked (their gaze). Duchamp these artifacts were, in fact, not art but instruments whose peeped th functio lity had been arrested, and that much of their power was derived from their radically alienated, and de facto transgressive, relationship to the ‘context in which they found themselves. Gonsequer champs ‘was engendered by his desire to model a work after the contextual disso- nance provoked by the placement of these (black) artifacts in (white) m seums. And it's no accident that Duchamp chose the urinal, a white artifact the stuff of black being can be understood as an investigation of the psychic frisson pra- which contains and channels dark matter, or Surr duced yy the juxtaposition of incongruent objects (a cow and an ironing board), the paradigmat ‘example being “the black body in white space.” In similar fashion, Jackson inevitably, because he didn't know what he was doing. His ink it was genius, resided in his ability to transpose jazz’ Western uy had been primarily mim« .ce of the physical universe, realized with Pol- the practice of pai implemented, paradigm, This new paradigm privileged the performance of processional formations, and constituent sig- nifications, at the expense of the mimetic impulse.26 EVERYTHING 8UT THE BURDEN Pollock’ method, often spoken of in terms of gesture and choreography, consists largely of improvised dance as a means of getting paint down onto the canvas. Lee Krasner has related that Pollock would listen to jazz con- while he painte given the absence of a mimetic subject in Pol tinually, and obsessivel ‘This is particularly significant k's work. (The works to which I am referring, clearly those on which his reput s, are those which dispense with even the vestiges of, generally psychoanalytically read, iconographies.) Were Pollock p which he painted would be of questionable relevance or si \n, the music which animated his movements while simi taneously providing the aesthetic model for his action becomes extremely significant, Why black musi tributed to the development and power of black American music, and other musics of the Diafra (the black Diaspo leap of the speci 's clear that one of the defining factors which con was a sort of contextual displace- barrier. By this Tm suggesting existed for some time in a species of monkey found in Central Africa), found itself freed from its natal ecology—with its attendant checks and balances, natural predation—and thus freed, expanded exponentially, in the process In the 1930s the USDA, in an effort to combat soil erosion, introduced ida planting, kudzu had becom Japanese vine, t0 Mississippi. By 1955, having escaped its original the vine that ate the South.” Today, it infests ver 250,000 acres of land in Mississippi, costing over $20 million a year to ly, “Plague of Europeans” David Killingray 73) Its somewhat paradoxical that in a contest which radically circum- scribed the mobility of the black body, black musical expressivity found self both formally unbound and pressed into service in a mannet which, ‘combat, Si ‘classically, it would not have had to serve. Black musi only survived the Middle Passage but, free of the clas MY BLACK DEATH 24 context (which had limited its avenues of articulation and calcified tent) and unconstrained by a need to speak the experiences of a nul class, evolved new forms with which to embody new experiences, A black 0 the unprecedented existential drama and complex ity ofthe circumstance in which black people (Africans) found thernselves music evolved equa Is it an accident that Mondrian was the first major European artis t recognize Pollock’s work as some new shit recordings became black in subl of the black voice from the black body, a separation which solved the co nundrum of how to bring black music into white spaces minus the blach bodies ited response to the separation black beings, which, by their very nature as musically product Pollock's ersis was prec in inherent in the methodology (jazz improvisational flow and trajeetion he had so powerfully appropriated and impleme cally, jazz improvisation is first and foremost signified self-determination This ac to stand before an audience, often white, and to publicly demonstrate he deci other's agency, ie, the composers, was a profoundly radical and dissonan his work, Classi precedes its Function as musical gesture. For the black art making capacity, her agency, rather than the replication of an gesture (akin in contemporary terms to the catalytic effect of hip-hop sam pling andlor Shertie Levine's practice in their respective discourses). Thi signification of one's “self-determina m premised on one’s “self There is no “self-determination’ without “self-possession, And, “self-possession’ is the existential issue for black Americans. For Pollock—a white man and as such assumed to be self-determinec jossessed—the demonstration of such reads as. thar 1us white masculinist privilege (jacking off, the primary eritique 0 the following generations of abstract expressists). Pollock, unable to acces his work’ signification, its structures of meaning, found himself vulneral to critiques that the work was essentially without meaning, It significan that Pollock’s last productive period, and certainly his healthiest, end, s the story goes, with the frst viewing of Hens Namuth’s famous film 0a0. EVERYTHING BUT THE BURDEN Pollock painting, projected in the kitchen for Pollock and his Friends. Ap: parently Pollock got up when the film ended, walked over to the liquor cab- inet, and proceeded to drink himself two years of sobriety, a sobriety whi "When I am painting, 'm not aware of wh to a violent stupor, thus ending over he never recovered. doing.” Pollock saw ike a thus destroying the fragile state of grace, of dis- himself dancing around, a white being behaving, embarrassing) black being (like a nigger embodied (white) being, under which he'd created his most powerful works. (The classic cartoons shot 1g monkeys making abstract paintings spoke on that Pollock's practice was in large measure , feeling like a cha works. This pathetic attempt 1 feintroduces figuration in hi neaning collapse. So tragi- inject the work with meaning, having failed at legitimately investing the work with meaning, Pollock alls himself. Was Jackson Pollock wh ble precisely because of his a rash? Pollock's particular genius was possi- jon. In that his alienation allowed him an atypical relationship to the culture of black America. This is similar to the relationship which Elvis had to black American music, and which Picasso, in a much more covert fashion, had to African art. (Elvis's black saturation and white trash is is mirrored by Picasso status as a Spaniard, each of these instances, and despite the seemingly inevitable denial that occurred once influence became an issue, the break- through nature of the work achieved was made possible by an initially hum ble, and thus by definition nonsupremacist, relationship to the catalytic antifact at hand. Just as Beethoven was humble in the face of the body of work that had preceded him, these artists were each students of the work under whose influence they had fallen, students in a fashion which white supremacy would typically make unlikely. MY BLACK DEATH 25 (John Cage spent his entire career avoiding the term “improvisation,” saturated as it was with black meaning.) ‘This isa story I've told a number of times. I worked on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut as second unit ditector of photography for approximately a from Stanley while we were shooting. Lisa, the second unit director, would relay his instructions and add, typically, that Stanley said to “keep up the good work.” A couple of times Lisa tried to hand me the phone so that Stanley could speak to me. Each time I waved her away, saying I'd speak to him later, ostensibly be- shooting c before the film was set for release, t'm hanging out in Germany and I get a call from Lisa. She asks if 'm available to shoot in New York the following week. We agree on a date and 1 make arrangements to return to New York. A few days later, I'm boarding a plane for New York, I look over and see the cover of USA Today: “Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick dead at 70.” Td spoken to Lis I get to New York and it’s confirmed: Stanley had passed suddenly and the shoot cause I was too involved A not five hours earlier. I figure it to be a hoax, b was canceled. Over the next several days, I got ext to Kubrick. I wondered why, in over a year of working on the fi depressed. I'd never spoken . Td never been a 10 speak to him, I realized that there'd been too much that Td wanted to say. in the hope that I'd be able to have a real conversation with him. td wanted to tell him that he'd changed my life, and that fd surely been, as a black, preadolescent inhabitant of the Mi the farthest thing, imag ined when he'd envisioned who the audience for 2001: A Space Odyssey mnsciously, been waiting for the film's completion I release in '68, the film finally reached my hometown, Clarksdal ippi. It played a drive-in theater on the out- skirts of town, three nights only, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. | barely slept that week. My father had promised to take me but by Sunday something had come up. So, a year later, I'm ten, the film finally plays at « movieaa EVERY No Bur BURDEN theater proper. Recently opened, the West End Cinema is located in a part of town that’s exclusively white, Clarksdale was essentially segregated at this poit ‘That Saturday my ts dropped me off at the twelve-thinyy matinee. ‘There's clearly no big demand, over two years after its release, for 2001; A Space Odyssey in Clarksdale, Mississippi. The theater's empty except for me and two couple ‘The lights go down, the movie begins, and it’s like being buried alive. 'd never experienced anything like it befor literally blew my mind. And to say that I couldn't make heads or movie is an understatement ‘And even now, Im simultaneously alienate and ravish. And i vided me with a model for how powerful art There's no dialogue for the frst twenty-five mi speak, they speak in hypnotic, sedated tones. And dramatically speaking, very little seems to first two thirds of the movie. The disembodied computer, cidedly more em than any of the flesh-and-blood charact dispassionate exchanges between inctuated by extended sequences containing By the time the film reaches the other moviegoers having abandoned n alone in the theater, at some earlier point After the intermission, the film becomes, relatively speaking, more nar- natively compelling, in that things happen, yet the characters display the th the dire circumstances in which they find themselves. (Anyone familiar with same narcotized, somnambi psychoanalysis w analyst.) By the Jupiter, only single crew member has survived. He proceeds to launch himself down t0 the planet's surface in pursuit of the origin of the enigmatic black monolith uncovered on the moon's surface ealier: From this point onward, the film ceases to be narrative in any conventional Hollywood sense. Whereas the preceding parts of the film are characterized by various lacks—lack of [seems to dispense wit | sense, cinema's [ultimately seduet p, only with respect to the elegance of its construc MY BLACK DE Jack of action, lack of apparent emotional consequenc ful end)—and whereas before we were stuck in a universe of arrested iddict’s nod, the film's finale, the descent and its aftermat causal ygether, except in the most primal com: ion, The descent is @ headlong ru posed of a ed, and unprecedented, barrage of chromatically over- saturated, spaci ed, and elliptically sequenced imagery, all terspersed with shots of the astronaut’s increasingly hysterical and emo- overwrought grimaces (2 bad trip, the result of some nightmarishly potent, and unexpected, combination of LSD and speed). This is all hotel room in which Bowman, the point of death (atten: in spaces nly by the black monoli ‘There's of course an inescapably troubling, parti id in the early seventies, racial dimension of the fi solute whiteness of the context (both figuratively and characters are Caucasian and they are, in their demeanor, both archetypi: white, This is a whiteness that’s sterile, creepy, a Td guess Kubricks background, a Bronx Jew, vant here). ‘The interiors they occupy seem devoid of any artifacts that rele- might be read as anything other than the products of an extremely Euro centric worldview: And second, there ince of both black people and/or any mately, I came to recognize the film’s highly repressed and anxiety-ridden Preoccupation with blackness. And given the times, how could it have been nt sign of blackness. This absence is misleading. Ulti- otherwise? 2001's obsession with/suppression of blacknes of the genre 10 could possi- ic science fiction and its r 4s about fear of genetic annihilation, fear of blackness, (Black rage, Black +, Black Panthers, black planet, black dick, ete.) White phallic objects254 EVERYTHING BUT THE BURDEN (starships) move through all-encompassing blackness (space) from one white point (stars) to another. This Fear of space, this hortor vacui, is a fear of contamination, a contamination of white being by black being which, by the very nature of the self-imposed fragile ontological construction of white being, equals the annihi 2001 begins in Africa. The black monolith functions as a catalytic arti- in the provokes man’s evolutionary leap forward from primitive (apelike) state. (The of a black pyramid, a clear sign of black civilization.) There's the imp! ial design of the monolith was in the form tion that the monolith generates man’s increased capacity rather than simpl stimulates some latent abi is evolutionary leap sets in motion devel th fon the moon's surface. 2001's astronauts travel through space in pursuit of {in fact at the directive of) a signal which issues forth from this advanced and clearly more evolved black (Have you noticed that 2001 and H.R. Giger’s 2001's white/star nally, and desperately, positing the possibility of pure white being issuing ‘opments which culminate with man’s discovery of a second black mon: fear of forth from all-encompassing dark matter. A manifestation of whi genetic annihilation by the (black) other. This anxiety is played out over and ‘over in numerous science fiction films. For example, in Alien all the char- the white-blooded science officer), m assaulted by the alien and impregnat alien is in fact « sixfoot-eight Sudanese, “Bol given a last name), wearing H. R. Giger's Esu-Elegba-dlerived jet-black monster suit with penis-tipped head. Yaphet Kotto (ur-Negro signifier if there ever were one) plays the only black member of the doomed crew. And uring the initial confeo i (never, to my knowledge, -e with the alien, he rec- ‘ognizes it as the bad nigger it clearly is. His pragmatism suggests that he , but predictably, he meets his end attempting to prevent the alien from ravaging the helpless stands the best chance of surviving this encoun ‘white woman, Coming to her rescue, he tells her to move away, but she's MY BLACK DEATH 255 frozen (by the alien's magnificence), so, his pragmatism (one coulld say his having abandoned him, he moves to get between them. The alien swats him away with his big black tal, grabs him (bringing him face-to- ind pokes a hole in his head with his chops aside, the alien shifts its attention back to his vietim of choice. She stands, eth). Casting him breathing heavily, transfixed as the alien In Star Wars, Darth Vader/Dark Invader (black body/black voice, in fact arly a blood despite subse- rce's “Darkside” (black body en- the ‘quent revisions) is transformed by th genders a white child, 3 skywalker n down the Death Stars corridors, to destroy the engendering black womb, ice of Jack Johnson, James Earl Jones, Vader's crib, is a diminished and more overt Jupiter fall down the corridors of light, a rush to Death, Star. Chil Why had I been so attracted to 2001? Apollo gene landing had just gone down a few years prior, and I was aitly obsessed with ic replay of Bowman's he frst moon spaceships. Id followed the progress of the film in magazines like Popular Mechanics. 2001 was the first novel I'd ever bought, though 1 confess not t . That got me in the theater sed the altarboy in me, exposing I'd identify now as a minimalist sensibility, a sensibility to 1c, | was predisposed by the flatness and austerity of the by the landscape’s beauty and trance dimens with a number of other things. ‘Theze was my then nascent melancholy and the beginning reco ns. This exposure of a certain sort of categorical constraint, dictated by my blackness, and yet the boundless possi 1n, and (2) the emancipatory fallout of the Black Power movement. My family’s move from the moderately progressive Ta- completely at odds wit conveyed to those 0 ry generation by tel ly segregated Clarksdale, pelo to the ess tuated at the Delta's epicen- ter, had a cat with the extreme deprivations of the region and. ic impact, as did a continual and enmeshing confrontation abject pleasures. An ex- posure to the transfixing, and for me unprecedented, blackness of its286 EVERYTHING BUT THE BURDEN inhabitants, 1 escapable dual nascent black man, of a certain temperamental cool (a flattened affect), simply put, the dark matter of black being, These all begged certain ques- tions, atthe time inarticulate and unformed, to which years later my intro- duction to Miles Davis provided an answer. Where do live to these discourses on beauty and being (the answer of course being wherever and ir arresting beauty and dense corporeal being, the in- of absence and presence, the inevitable embrace, as a however we choose to) now, thirty years Tabby looked like, ering overhead, the drag of the carpet. I looked over and saw the manager, white and older, quietly reading his paper in the otherwise empty lobby. ‘And the thing actions with wi just come out of the movie, could you tell me what it was about?” He looked down at me over his paper, paused a moment, and said, “Son, Ive been looking at it all week and haven't got a clue.” And that’s the last thing I remember. I don't remember how I got home, what other conversations 1 brief interaction I've never forgotten. The film had completely leveled our differences, race, class, age. So that for that ‘moment, in the presence of this monumental work, we were equal. a black hagakure ‘a dream of death and the continual dissipation of di and consciousness) osiris dismembered (dia gether (can't remember) though the parts no Tonger fit, and this not fitting this growth after dismemberment, keeps us (men and women) harder com {ng strong (anti entropic beasts) f ing together even as we Fall apart MY BLACK DEATH 257 would bitch two a th ye number of blacks that can gather, a boon for Christ, one a three an insurrection, no getting together coming together no drums ing up so churches, funerals, simple gatherings and places become reunions become rememberance be luciferian (fit be revo- lution. to the central conundrum of black being (the double bind of our ontolog ceal existence) lie in the fact that common misery both defines and who we are. such that our efforts to eliminate those forces which constrain also functions to dissipate much of which gives us our specificity, our tt by destroying the binds that define we will ccease to he, but this is the good death (cachoeira) and to be embraced. uniqueness, our flavor and