Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture (original) (raw)

If art reflects life it does so with special mirrors.-Bertolt Brecht Abstractionist Aesthetics is a theoretical polemic concerned with the critical potential of African American expressive culture. It is premised on the widely accepted (if debatable) notion that such culture consists in works and practices that both originate among and in some way represent the experiences of African American people while also illuminating and appraising the racial-political context in which those experiences occur.1 Conceived in this way, African American culture effectively compels polemic, in that it forces the perennially contestable question of how best to make a racial-political stand; and indeed, this book is preceded by a succession of similarly argumentative tracts issued over the past century or so. For the most part, these call for a socially engaged black art whose manifestation as such, they contend, necessitates an organic connection between the individual artist and the "community." Alternatively-sometimes simultaneously-they repudiate such prescriptions, enjoining black artists to pursue whatever aesthetic paths they choose, heedless of "pleas[ing] either white people or black, " itself a political move.2 The urgency of these competing directives has of course varied with the historical winds, but their mere existence indicates the peculiar effects of African American DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE culture's having been conceived at all as a political project, a primary one of which is that any given work-not to mention the artist who produced it-is always liable to be deemed not properly black. Such judgment lies far afield of my interests here, and I am by the same token much less concerned with dictating modes of aesthetic practice (though I do indeed champion one that I believe has gone underappreciated) than with influencing current norms of aesthetic reception. For all that these norms presuppose the social-critical function of African American culture just sketched, as I believe they unquestionably do, they also generally assume that that function is best served by a type of realist aesthetics that casts racial blackness in overridingly "positive" terms.3 Superficially connoting modes of depiction that are properly race-proud and-affirmative, such positivity more fundamentally entails an empiricist demand that racialized representations perceptibly mirror real-world phenomena, however favorable-or not-any particular portrayal may seem.4 While there are arguably good historical reasons for its prevalence, to the extent that this positivist ethic restricts the scope of artistic practice, the realism that it underwrites emerges as a central problem within African American aesthetics. This book accordingly argues for the displacement of realism as a primary stake in African American cultural engagement, and asserts the critical utility of an alternative aesthetic mode that it characterizes as abstractionism. Abstractionism as theorized in this volume entails the resolute awareness that even the most realistic representation is precisely a representation, and that as such it necessarily exists at a distance from the social reality it is conventionally understood to reflect. In other words, abstractionist aesthetics crucially recognizes that any artwork whatsoever is definitionally abstract in relation to the world in which it emerges, regardless of whether or not it features the nonreferentiality typically understood to constitute aesthetic abstraction per se. An abstractionist artwork, by extension, is one that emphasizes its own distance from reality by calling attention to its constructed or artificial character-even if it also enacts real-world reference-rather than striving to dissemble that constructedness in the service of the maximum verisimilitude so highly prized within the real-DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE Notes Unless otherwise indicated, all web pages were last retrieved on February 4, 2015.