Grief Aesthetics

Abstract

Abstract An excerpt from an experimental series, “Grief Aesthetics” is a lyrical essay on intimacy and writing. The essay participates in the double black study of eroding and composing a new sentence, a new sentence sounded in refusal (of the social pact of writing, of grammar), a new sentence forged in friendship (of thinking with, of writing with). On one level, “Grief Aesthetics” is concerned with inherited grief, the remains of stolen life, the residual desire for romance in contemporary black art. The essay considers the loss of romantic love in conversation with Terence Nance's feature and short films An Oversimplification of Her Beauty and Swimming in Your Skin Again, in conversation with a single recurring line from a poem in Taylor Johnson's Inheritance. At another level, “Grief Aesthetics” is a sort of ars poetica on the process of writing and at this level is preoccupied with the poetic line, the sentence (thinking about sentences), the space in writing, the mundane moments in between the emergence of a line or series of lines and declension as it occurs in the gaps. At every turn “Grief Aesthetics” practices creating in “commonsense” (a shared feeling, a shared aesthetics) among contemporary artists whose works evoke a sense of grief, (dis)placement, loss, loneliness, homelessness, desire, tenderness, friendship, bliss.