Black Abstraction: Racial Counter-Interpellation through the New Epistemology of Light

Leo Deng 10/7/2022 Critical Theory in Art III Paper I

In “The Politics of Abstraction” chapter of Margo Natalie Crawford’s Black Post-Blackness, she focuses on analyzing the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s-70s, specifically on how they strategically used abstraction as a means to present the inextricable ties between ideology and aesthetics. The tool of aesthetic abstraction, formerly limited to the use of white, male artists, seems contradictory to be used by oppressed peoples as their socio-historic positions do not allow them to indulge in such practices that emerge from socio-economic privilege. I say this cautiously in the intent to acknowledge that the oppressed masses in the rest of the world facing colonialist and imperialist rule necessitated (in a historical materialist sense) art with clear, direct revolutionary fervor as to incite motion for change (just think revolutionary propaganda, USSR art, cultural revolution art, etc.) and to present the US as the strangest, most complex agglomeration of political and cultural contradictions in human history. This precise context posits BAM’s ability to speak “abstraction into existence, and their speech acts partially [transform] abstraction into concreteness” as their very essence that is constituted by and emerges from within the contradictions of capitalism (which is completely tied to the white supremacy of the US).[1] Thus, artists like Faith Ringgold and David Hammons counter-interpellate their imposed categories through the abstraction in their art as black Americans.

Interpellation as the Althusserian concept of a certain hailing or addressal of a person as a subject, internalizing the categorization of themselves within a certain symbolic order[2]; he states, “Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’”[3] This concept is specifically used in Crawford’s text to create a counter-concept that describes the social context of BAM that necessitated a certain type of action through black abstraction: “the movement called for “Negroes” to become “black,” a process of counter-interpellation relied on the power of counter-aesthetics.”[4] So, the centuries of slavery, exploitation, and oppression (in the US) embodied in the semiotics of interpellation and derogatory terms black people faced in the 60s-70s necessitated the counter-interpellation of black abstraction.

Faith Ringgold counter-interpellates the utter neglect of “blackness” in art through her Black Light paintings. These paintings had an ethereal effect on audiences that made the shades of black skin shine to spectators alike. This shining effect was an effective counter-interpellation embodied by the very circumstance that motivated Ringgold to do such a series— “In art school no one could ever teach me how to paint black skin.”[5] Such a simple experience spoke multitudes about the fundamentally racist categorization of black bodies and blackness (the shade/color itself) contained in the cultural logic of the western world. That cultural logic was best epitomized by Adorno’s interpretation of blackness as the negation of light that white abstractionists aimed for. Ringgold absolutely rejected this; she essentially flipped this entire idea on its head to create a new “epistemology of light.” A certain system of reality, as James Baldwin would say,[6] where blackness illuminates just as whiteness does in a white-supremacist system of reality (or epistemology). The fact that Ringgold was able to make such a reversal redistributes the possibility[7] of exploring the dialectic between whiteness and blackness, or more specifically their aesthetic and artistic counterparts that those concepts parallel, lightness and darkness.

David Hammons counter-interpellates the white-supremacist system of reality that presupposes whiteness/lightness as good or angelic and thus, blackness/darkness as bad or evil through his groundbreaking Concerto in Black and Blue. This move by Hammons employs a dialectical approach to the concept of darkness and lightness, that is, that you need one concept in order to conceive of the other (and vice versa); otherwise, neither dark or light would exist. Such an outlook has been noticed as far back as the Taoists, who saw such concepts or phenomena as complementary rather than opposite (which the latter opposing nature easily plays into the US conception of bad and good). Translating this into his piece, Hammons “interprets this installation art as the performance of people as they shine their tiny flashlights into the dark room, experiencing blackness as what we construct (what we bring) as opposed to a blackness that is always already there.”[8] Thus, Hammons reimagines blackness as default in the world of his installation, directly counter-interpellating the “defaultness” of whiteness the Western world assumes.

Ringgold and Hammons are prime examples of how oppressed groups of society can draw upon bourgeois tools, in a sense, subvert them, and then maneuver through the contradictions and crises within capitalism. Viewing Black Abstraction as a product of postmodernity (in Frederic Jameson’s conception) shows the utterly unpredictable yet creative manifestations when the necessary interaction occurs between capitalism’s regressive and progressive elements, since this economic system is the most progressive yet regressive force in human history. For now, in late capitalism, we should view such art as necessary and productive acts of counterculture that reflect the certain epoch the art is interacting with.

[1] Margo Natalie Crawford, “The Politics of Abstraction,” in Black Post-Blackness, 2017, 63, http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1q31s64.6. [2] Lacanian definition as the world of dominant social (ideological) conventions, relations, and law. [3] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (Monthly Review Press, 1971), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm. [4] Crawford, “The Politics of Abstraction,” 61. [5] Crawford, “The Politics of Abstraction,” 61. [6] I am referencing his famous debate against Buckley here. [7] Here, I am referencing the vocabulary of Jacques Ranciere’s conception of art as the entity that “redistributes the sensible.” [8] Crawford, “The Politics of Abstraction,” 64.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.

Crawford, Margo Natalie. “The Politics of Abstraction.” In Black Post-Blackness, 2017. http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1q31s64.6.