Week 13- Race

 This week we read an Introduction: How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness by Darby English. I found this week’s reading to be both interesting and difficult. How does one see art in darkness? What does darkness mean and how does its meaning vary? These questions at the core of my analysis helped me understand what Darby English was writing about. The critics' internal biases, black art, and black representational space were all discussed throughout this reading and I hope to break them down into digestible information. 

Concerto in Black and Blue by David Hammons

The artwork that Darby English was analyzing in his writing was Concerto in Black and Blue by David Hammons. Hammons is an American artist that works in a variety of media. His artwork, Concerto in Black and Blue, was a performance type piece where the viewers became a part of the artwork. The viewers were given blue pen lights and released into a series of dark rooms. Their interactions with the environment and with other guests shaped their experience with the artwork. Personally, when I learned about Concerto in Black and Blue, I was very intrigued about how ingenious this method is of incorporating the viewer. 

However, many critics interpreted this work in a biased fashion. Since the artist Hammons is African American, many critics started relating the Concerto in Black and Blue to a societal message about inequalities in the U.S. However, Hammons never specified this message for this artwork which offers the question, “How does a dark room with blue lights relate to racial injustice? The author of this week's reading stated, “How to See a Work of Art  in  Total Darkness aims  to  diminish somewhat  an  encumbrance that  dominates too  many  of our  ideas about  the  kinds  of knowledge  black artists'  work is permitted to  reflect and  generate.” This resonated with me because it calls out the internal biases of those critics. Many people in the art world seem to have this opinion that all black artists must create work within the consideration of their skin color, that every work of a black person is somehow connected within an encompassing veil of purpose within their art. However, every artist is an individual and expresses their creativity in a variety of ways that can never be related to other artist simply because of skin color. 

Black art has somehow become its own genre of art. Internal biases of the art world have grouped artists together based solely on skin color. Rather than incorporating black artists into galleries relating to their art style, they are grouped into token-type black artist gallery shows every so often. However, black artists do not operate or create under one style, black art is diverse and begs to be showcased alongside art of its own stylistic category. This leads me into my next discussion of English's term black representational space.

This term refers to how black art is treated with more tokenism than integration. As we spoke about in class, artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, made a comment that relates to the tokenism present in the art world. O tanner was an American artist who created many images of religious art. However, during his span of his art career, the two most famous paintings of his are his two only paintings that relate to black culture. Were his religious paintings not considered black art because it didn't fit the narrative? O Tanner also speaks about the differences between the U.S and France, where he studied. In the U.S, O Tanner was considered a black artist, whereas in France, he was known as an American artist. Microaggressions like these lend to the issues within the art world. Overall, this week's reading was eye opening and influential.

Sources:

Darby English, “Introduction,” in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (2007)

https://www.moma.org/artists/2486

https://contemporaryand.com/exhibition/raw-academie-session-9-infrastructure-directed-by-linda-goode-bryant/