Anna May Wong and the Color Image

In Cinema 1, Deleuze proposes the “color-image,” a type of film image with an “absorbent characteristic” that does not refer to a particular object but seizes all that happens within its range. Like color-images, racial categories have an absorbent, seizing quality: they assert “color” at the expense of the object of representation. Deleuze does not address the potential applications of his concept to race, but they are especially illuminating when applied to early color-process cinema. This essay approaches The Toll of the Sea (dir. Chester M. Franklin, 1922), starring Anna May Wong and set in China, the first Technicolor film to be widely distributed in general release, as a feature-length “China Girl” and feature-length color-image, in Deleuze's sense. It further shows how Wong and her world are virtualized in this film under the rubric of a fictional orientalist palette.

Zu-Zu's Song

The essay explores how the invisibility and trauma of Black women are negotiated in Black sonic culture, utilizing Ricardo Cortez Cruz's experimental novel Five Days of Bleeding (1995), in which the primary female character, Zu-Zu, speaks (and sings) primarily using obscure song lyrics and titles, largely drawn from an archive of Black women's performance.

Basic Black

This brief essay addresses the quest for “the blackest black,” a totally absorptive, nonreflective surface—in science and engineering as much as in art and entertainment—as an occasion for conceiving difference differently. Here black is both a color and a color space in which other colors become themselves, in their specificity, through a disavowed dependency or derivation, processes whereby we can question the material and symbolic consequences of the meanings ascribed not only to the various colors of the spectrum but also to the very idea of a color spectrum itself.

Black One Shot and the Art of Blackness

This essay reflects on the impulses, aspirations, and process of an online art criticism series called Black One Shot, which ran in 2018 and 2020 on ASAP/J, the open access journal for the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP). Sourcing visual and epistolary materials from the series’ production, the coeditors revisit their collaborative effort to discern blackness and pursue object-forward art criticism without foreclosures and guarantees.

“There Is No Form in the Middle”

Across his vast body of multimedia art, Kevin Jerome Everson pursues sophisticated formal exercises that deploy representational devices with the aim of achieving “massive abstractions.” Focusing on the sculptural potential of film as a time-based medium, Everson crafts his films as sculptural objects. It is a process that works toward a point of critical density in which time's material effects on a space, a body, or the screen are rendered visible. In order to reach this point, Everson has developed a rigorous practice that includes casting his own solid rubber props, carefully choreographing films that repeat formal and bodily gestures, and making oblique references to cinematic history and its foundational relationship to factory labor. In this interview the liquid blackness editors speak with Everson about his “massive” creative project; its pursuit of layered self- referentiality; the work's sheer size (measured in labor hours, custom props molded, and film titles); his fine art training; artistry as the mastery of craft; the high art of Richard Pryor; his hesitant, delicate approach to blackness; and the possibility of a midwestern, or specifically Mansfield, Ohio, artistic sensibility.

How to See Like Hammons

“HAS ANYONE ELSE SEEN THESE.” Scribed on a wall in pencil, this fragment served as crude wall text for a vitrine in David Hammons's 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. The vitrine, filled with memorabilia, photocopies, and rare primary documents, was but one of many locations where Hammons displayed Hammons. To ask “Has anyone else seen these?” is to slyly pose a question that already has an answer: yes, or maybe, or no. Any answer to that question proves Hammons's point: that he himself is the subject who sees and the object to see. This methodological maneuver is part and parcel of Hammons's decades-long practice and serves to enact a Black aesthetic determination already sleeved in its own method. This article works to unpack how Hammons throws into methodological disarray the question of art's histories by his relentless invocation of Black aesthetic practices that deform, if not refuse, their own making.

Artists in Residence

Mixing criticism and memoir, “Artists in Residence” offers a rumination on improvisation and collaboration in visual art-making and contemporary jazz performance. The author meditates on the 2017 Unite the Right rally and Ryan Kelly's award-winning photographs of the event and considers how artists offer models for resisting anti-Black racism and white supremacy through collaborative practices. The author analyzes the documentary films Looks of a Lot and RFK in the Land of Apartheid and reviews exhibitions by Roy DeCarava and Jason Moran, highlighting the points of intersection between jazz musicianship and visual artistry. Finally, the essay argues that artists like Kara Walker, William Kentridge, and Yusef Komunyakaa create works that express the pleasure and pain of Black Diasporic experience through practices such as blues idiom improvisation and collage. The author presents criticism as a mode of personal writing.

Introduction

This introduction contextualizes the present issue within the question posed by its call for papers: “How does blackness index its own processes?” Following an immanent methodology that seeks formal principles at work within each contribution, it retrieves a variety of archival investments coupled with a shared ethos of critical vulnerability. While approaching blackness as process attempts to think about its ongoingness, it also reaffirms the aesthetic realm as a privileged processing site.

Within the Whirlwind of the Encounter

In this interview with Okwui Okpokwasili, Kristin Juarez and the artist discuss Okpokwasili's iterative practice Sitting On a Man's Head as it took shape during her exhibition Utterances from the Chorus at Danspace Project (New York, New York) in 2020. Inspired by a form of Igbo women's protest called “sitting on a man,” Okpokwasili elaborates on the ways she utilizes slowness to generate somatic experiments in sociality. As they discuss the impact of slowness on the voice and body, Okpokwasili and Juarez consider the possibilities within the tremble and Juarez's notion of the trembling archive. Thinking with Saidiya Hartman's elaboration of the chorus, Okpokwasili's practice offers consideration of the archive as tremulous, in which fragments of imagination and memory cannot be disentangled. As she draws on an unruly lineage of embodied protest practices, the artist discusses the relationship between aesthetic forms and social formation. The interview also offers insight into Okpokwasili's ongoing conversations with Ralph Lemon, Asiya Wadud, and Tina Campt.