Non-Synchronous Cartographies: Frank Bowling's Map Paintings (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
This essay describes two years that I spent in Jamaica, 1986-88, helping to set up a graduate school for the social sciences in the English-speaking Caribbean. Even at the time I knew this was a life-transforming experience and I now derive my mature perspective from that period. It was dominated by meeting C. L. R. James and his assistant, Anna Grimshaw, in London and continuing that relationship when I returned to Cambridge. The story sometimes draws on poetry of which the opening vignette is an example. Jamaica enabled me to place my movement through the North Atlantic quadrilateral responsible for the slave trade within a vision that I call “cubist”. As a result of an epiphany on a Jamaican beach, I wrote a long fan latter to James exploring some of the similarities, as well as the obvious differences, of our respective journeys through this networked space. This encounter set up collaboration between the three of us before James died in 1989, including the publication of American Civilization in 1993. I provide some anecdotes taken from my life in the Caribbean before turning to some reflections of James on revolution and the revolutionary principle of happiness exported from the US to Paris in the 1790s. This passage concludes with a comparison of what James and Tocqueville took from the United States, especially with regard to their political analysis of democracy.
Decolonising Love: Frank Bowling in the Early 1960s
Third Text, 2021
Abstract This article reconsiders Frank Bowling’s figurative paintings from the early 1960s, emphasising the recurrence of intimate affects in this body of works. It argues that the representation of romantic entanglements is cardinal rather than marginal in this artist’s negotiation of both personal and pictorial freedoms. This becomes especially clear when Bowling’s early work is set against the backdrop of nativist anxieties about the growing visibility of interracial unions in postwar Britain. With this in mind, and in a nod to the growing literature on love and anti-racist resistance, the article presents affective relationships and their visual manifestations as charged sites for the renegotiation of unequal power relations. Not only does this analysis restore political substance to a series of paintings that is rarely considered by scholars of Bowling’s work, but points toward new ways of reassessing the field of mid-twentieth century modernism in terms of diasporic and intersectional phenomenologies of desire.
“Representing Blackness,” Art Papers (March/April 2004), 34-39. (Kerry James Marshall)
g ~IPl&UWI f 0 Kerry James Marshall. Dailies (RHYTHM MASTR) (deta,1/, 2003, ,nk-jet prmrs on newsprmt, 16 pans, each: (frame): 23· Representing 318 by 29-118 inches, msra/lation d,mensions vanab/e (coortesy the anist, Jack Shainman Gallery. New York and Koplm de/ Rio Gallery. Los Angeles). Kerry James Marshall's recent work re-thinks the meaning of "black art" I BY MATTHEW BIRO 34 ARTPAPERS.ORG The timing couldn't be more opportune for "One True Thing: Meditations on Black Aesthetics:' the t raveling exhibition of Kerry James Marshall's recent work. To begin with, Marshall's show contributes richly to t he debate among curators and artists about the idea of a "post-black" aesthetics , which fo llowed from the Stud io Museum in Harlem's "Freestyle" exhibition of 200 1. 1 Moreover, how "One True Thing" develops its understanding of black art says much about t he contemporary situation.
Cartographic abstraction : mapping practices in contemporary art
2016
This thesis proposes a theory of cartographic abstraction as a framework for investigating cartographic viewing, and does so through engaging with a series of contemporary artworks concerned with cartographic ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger 1972). Cartographic abstraction is a material modality of thought and experience that is produced through cartographic techniques of depiction. It is the more-than-visual register that posits and produces the ‘cartographic world’, or what John Pickles has called the ‘geo-coded world’ (2006). By this I mean the naturalized apprehension of the earth as a homogeneous space that is naturally, even necessarily, understood as regular, consistent and objective. I argue for identifying cartographic techniques of depiction as themselves abstract, and cartographic abstraction as such as the modality of thought and experience that these techniques produce. Abstraction within capitalism comes to be socially real and material, taking place outside thought. I propose...
Black Geospatial Inquiry and Aesthetic Praxis Toward a Theory and Method
Studies in Art Education , 2023
A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar–creatives are choosing to think, theorize, aesthetically practice, and articulate blackness (Black being and living) in excess of a settled Western racial logic (nonbeing) that produced it. I set forth to advance a paradigm of Black study for thinking and theorizing the intersections of Black livingness and its inherent fugitivity within and beyond chattel enslavement. By expanding on the concepts of Black compositional thought and wake work, I illuminate an assembly of metaphors and materialities, working collectively to articulate the overall, ongoing condition and circumstance of Black life as a predictable and constitutive aspect of existing in the shadows of antiblack violence. Juxtaposing Torkwase Dyson’s aesthetic practice in concert with Christina Sharpe’s theorization of reading metaphors of Black life in diaspora (the wake, the ship, the hold, the weather), I expose how creative production and Black consciousness serve as tools for refusing “death” and offer possibilities for living.
African Art American Style (Chapter 2 from Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens)
Published in the exhibition catalogue "Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens," published in 2009. This chapter examines practices by photographers from the Stieglitz circle to the Harlem Renaissance that demonstrate the range of interest in African objects and the diversity of approaches taken in translating them into Modernist photographic expressions. These photographs illustrate what Roland Barthes calls the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way we read and understand photographs. Also demonstrated in these examples is the manner in which issues about race, gender, identity, and difference were inextricably interwoven into the many faces of American Modernism, ultimately contributing to perceptions of and shifting attitudes toward African art.
"Projections of Desire and Design in Early Modern Caribbean Maps"
Historical Journal, 2020
Iconic early European maps of the Caribbean depict neatly parcelled plantations, sugar mills, towns, and fortifications juxtaposed against untamed interiors sketched with runaway slaves and Indigenous toponyms. These extra-geographical symbols of racial and spatial meaning projected desire and design to powerful audiences. Abstractions about material life influenced colonial perceptions and actions upon a space, often to deleterious effects for the Indigenous and African people who were abused in tandem with the region's flora and fauna. The scientific revolution curbed these proscriptive and descriptive ‘thick-mapped’ features that offer historians an underexplored record of early colonial Caribbean life beyond the geographically descriptive. Before this shift from mystery to mastery, the early correlation of colonization and cartography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides a fascinating glimpse into the process of creating the Americas. This article offers ideas for deconstructing old maps as new sources for historians of the early Atlantic World. As digital readers may explore through the roughly fifty maps linked via the footnotes, their informative spectacle naturalized colonialism upon lived and imagined race and space, created an exoticized, commodified Caribbean, and facilitated wealth extraction projects of competing empires made profitable by African labour on Indigenous land.
Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture
2015
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.
artscanada's ''Black" Issue: 1960s Contemporary Art and African Liberation Movements
in August 1967, as the slogan Black Power burst the confines of African Ameri-can subcultures and global anti-colonial movements began to circulate prominently within mainstream mass media, seven men from two countries met via a transnational telephone connection to talk about the colour black. Their conversation, and its subsequent publication in the arts journal artscanada's October 1967 issue titled "Black," provides this article's focus. While the thematic issue indexes a rare intersection between eiite art and racial politics, and while it is unlikely that any of these representatives of innovative contemporary art practices intimate with the radical countercultures of Greenwich Village and Yorkville saw any cloying taint of bigotry compromise their views about art and art-making, the issue nonetheless enforces covert racism sustained by ideologies of W/iiteness. The result is that rather than embracing creative expression associated with black, Black-as-race is construed as alien to contemporary arts mise-en-scène. RÉSUMÉ En août 1967, quand le slogan « Black Power » se fait entendre au-deld des subcultures afro-américaines et les principaux médias commencent à couvrir les mouvements anti-impérialistes mondiaux, sept hommes vivant dans deux pays, par l'intermédiaire d'un lien téléphonique interurbain, ont eu une échange sur la couleur noire. Cet article porte sur cette conversation et sa publication ultérieure en octobre 1967 dans un numéro de la revue artscanada intitulé « Black ». Ce numéro thématique est l'occasion d'une rare intersection entre l'art d'élite et la politique raciale. R est peu probable que ces représentants de pratiques innovatrices d'art contemporaii}, avec leur connaissance intime des contrecultures radicales de Greenwich Village et de Yorkville, aient été conscients d'avoir exprimé des préjugés à l'égard de l'art et de la création artistique. Pourtant, le numéro comporte des exemples de racisme implicite soutenu par une idéologie favorisant la blancheur. En conséquence, plutôt que de reconnaître l'expression créative associée à ce qui est noir, les interlocuteurs traitent le noir en tant que race étrangère par rapport à l'art contemporain MOTS CLÉS Art et politique raciale; artscanada; Black Power; Périodiqes Krys Verrall is a fine arts and cultural scholar with an interest in the relationship hetween marginal populations and cultural production. She teaches in the