Black Light: On the Origin and Materiality of the Image

Abstract

Aesthesis is a political matter, such that black folk have often sought to challenge a mode of representation that mythologizes blackness as mere absence or lack. There is artmaking that seeks to transfigure both the void blackness is thought to represent and a known world whose “facts” depend on a fiction of black vacancy. These are works that, in the words of curator Adrienne Edwards, “are philosophically charged, culturally compounded abstractions” and figurations “that point to discourse beyond medium and art movements,” alternately affirming nothing or attuning to the indeterminacy and incalculability of blackness, whether blackness be attributed to person, place, or thing. Perception and its organization are meaningful and necessarily remain a ground of contestation. This essay concerns the refractive potentialities of blackness as well as its density or fullness that exceed the capture of mimetic representation. It highlights works that critically explore the received terms and limits of representation in the interest of the dissolution of given categories and conceptual forms. Focusing particular attention on Faith Ringgold’s Black Light and American People series, this essay both demonstrates that the aporia and paradoxical power that “black womanhood” has come to represent is pivotal in mediating the relation between abstraction and figuration in modern art and our social worlds as well as considers related works that reposition blackness as incalculable density and a light source in its own right.