the Black esoteric
Some thoughts about art (mine and others) and who gets to make what.
Leaving the movie theater after a viewing of Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, my filmic boyfriend asked, enthusiastically, did you like it? I felt the machinations of my creative mind tousle around, turn and begin to pump full of new ideas like a machine as I imagined well, my own grotesque film about art and the body; I imagined its score, its message, the bodies that would be isolated and devoured— more importantly , the color of those bodies. When I answered in the affirmative, giving the movie five stars, my boyfriend began to press into me, questioning my blossoming thoughts on the role of visionary and auteur-ship in film. He baited me with questions like what would your Cronenberg movie be? The question struck me hard, in a good and bad way, and immediately out of my mouth was a diatribe I had practiced before; one that I’m sure included the statistics of the racial disparity in art spaces with a specificity on how many Black artists are in any given medium, the leverage of wealth, and most importantly, the limited range of possibilities in what themes Black artists are allowed to explore.
Thinking of the incredible success of Jordan Peele and what people wanted from a film like Nope— Black creators are bound to their subjectivity on race, and often oppression and their relation to white supremacy. This is not to say that Black creators haven’t ventured from their appointed stations. Sorry To Bother You, Chameleon Street, every Octavia Butler novel, the photography of Deena Lawson, Adrienne Kennedy’s plays — all use their Blackness as a lens to observe, compare and dissect the world they live in but also move away from the wounded expectations of what a Black story must be or include or say to its audience.
After seeing Wolfgang Tillmans’ retrospective at the MOMA (first time!), to look without fear, I was struck by a lot of the images but thought wow I’ve wonder what this would look like from a Black perspective. Or moreso, would these photos be stuck to the walls, the naked queer bodies displayed on repeat, if the artist was Black. Are Black artists allowed to give low-fi as a conceptual and radical act of subverting the standard that usually is mostly set by whiteness?
There are people that want Black stories to be certain things. There are people that won’t engage in Black work, art, films, books. There are people that use formalism and craft to judge works by Black artists never fit into in the first place. There are people that still define good work, writing, art by the classics, by the cannon only riddled with one or two Black folks. There are people that might tell me that I’m being to senstive or that I can make any kind of work, that it just has to be good.
Can I be weird? Or subversive? Or provacative? But also truthful? And meaningful? And sentimental?
Well, the answer is yes. Of course. I think I want to explore and evolve as an artist that looks at different genres, forms, mediums to express the stories I want to tell. This multi-hypenate desire, this abstraction or satrical movement towards storytelling is something I should just go for— but I’m met with some of my own inner voices and, mostly, the voices of others, of the gatekeepers, the institutions, the history of what stories are consumed by an audience of the white people who sit at the gates. What can I do if I am met with so many barriers? I want to think more about my artistic evolution than what white supremacist mechanism might try and me falter.
I will try to make things, work and art that meets me where I am— which might be weird and odd and new and sexy and tough— and then hope that it meets you (and all those others) where you are. Be patience with me as I go forth.