Black Arts of Erasure

Abstract

Black Arts of Erasure Kinohi Nishikawa (bio) In 2018, Black artist Hank Willis Thomas created a cover for New York Magazine’s fiftieth anniversary. His submission stood out from among the fifty commissioned. Against a black background, the following words are printed in white: ALLLI ES MATTER1 The slogan “All Lives Matter” sprung up as a reaction to the political messaging of the Black Lives Matter movement. Its use sidestepped the explicit antagonism of the pro-police phrase “Blue Lives Matter” and instead sought to cast the idea of Black lives mattering as a kind of chauvinism, the opposite of an inclusive understanding of the issues at hand. Willis turns this use of the phrase on its head. In his work, “All Lives Matter” is shown broadcasting racist sentiment through an appeal to universal humanity. By ignoring actually existing inequalities, the phrase misconstrues advocating for Black life as a special interest rather than as a strategy for survival. This “lie,” or evasion, sits at the crux of “All Lives Matter,” which is what makes Thomas’s act of erasure so brilliant: the removed “V” exposes the racism that would deny the validity of Black Lives Matter in the language of enlightened inclusion. The way Thomas achieves this aesthetic effect bears further comment. It is not that the “V” is removed and the typography rearranged to read “LIES.” Crucial to the design is the blank space left by the removed “V.” Appearing as it does against the black background of New York’s cover, this space might be thought of as filled in with and by blackness. The visual priority we usually assign to white text appearing against a black background is overturned in Thomas’s work, such that the focal point of the piece looks as if it were written over by blackness. In this way, what appears to be an act of erasure could be equally characterized as an act of inscription: the subtraction of one element from the visual field is at one and the same time an addition of another element to the visual field. Thomas makes this point more apparent in the 2019 limited edition screenprint All Li es Matter.2 In this piece, the background of black wove paper is lighter than the digitally enhanced background of the magazine cover. As such, the “V” can be seen in an even darker shade of black, creating a three-way contrast between canvas, white text, and the “V.” Here, the letter is notably void and presence at the same time. Thomas’s art is one example of recent work by Black artists who have explored erasure as a resource for writing. Writing not in the usual way we think of it: an inscription on a blank page, new lines of text in a blank document. That is, writing as the transmission of thoughts or feelings to a medium that would faithfully record them. Thomas and other artists approach writing differently. They do [End Page 296] not take for granted the blankness of the surface or the fit of the medium to record their words. Instead, they reckon with the racism structured into our very writing technologies, epitomized by the associations we bring to the whiteness of the page. For these artists, the right to inscribe is unevenly distributed among people and populations. To address this disparity, erasure becomes a mode of media reflexivity in their art, where writing emerges not as inscription of our mental processes and affective states but as deconstruction of our socialized habits of reading. In this way, erasure becomes erasureture, or mode of Black writing (écriture) whose expression is the constitutive difference of all expression and thus can only be read in adjustments or supplements to the text itself.3 These minor subtractions serve a critical function vis-à-vis whiteness, but they also create space for Black plenitude, an overflow of meaning that comes with being able to see language differently. For instance, Thomas’s reversal of the usual optics of print—black ink on white paper—affords a situation where the iterability of Black lives is protected from the lies of a false universalism. To be sure, elements of erasureture...