Post post-black: some politically incorrect thoughts on the reception and contemplation of African-American art

Darby English. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 384 pp., 22 color ills., 31 b/w. $30.

The art historian Darby English's How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness is a compelling and polemically daring reassessment of blackness as an artistic genre and set of visual expressions. English questions the necessity (or intracultural obligation) for black artists to take up the fight against racial oppression within the realm of their artistic production. By extension, he interrogates the purported usefulness of art as a tool for social transformation--especially in regard to so-called black artists. English's premise contests the ideological thematization of cultural production that requires "positive images"--and ultimately "transforms the artworks into racial objects, in the form of black art" (236). To undo the various impositions that identity politics exerts on artistic production, the text presents persuasive counter-readings of well-known (and in some instances, canonical) artworks.

How to See a Work of Art is certainly for art historians, which is significant considering that treatises on black art often either become part of the haze of cultural criticism, or are undertheorized and dismissed as overly romanticized preservations of African-American heritage. English here presents a serious, well-researched academic text that attempts to position black art outside its usual frameworks. In spirit, the premise for this collection of essays is grounded in a reassessment of black-queer and feminist critiques of racial blackness as it was constructed during the civil rights and Black Power eras. These criticisms posited blackness as a reclamation and assertion of masculinity that was ultimately heterosexist and intolerant of sexual difference. The acknowledgement of these important arguments is a strength. However, it may also be the book's major flaw if blackness (particularly within the realm of visual art) is to be understood only in terms of these cultural critiques. Is blackness as knowable and foreseeable as English suggests that it is? Does it codify to the point of opacity or offer an open chain of signification? These questions may be presented as worthy challenges to the book's premise.

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In chapter 1, the author makes a pointed argument against the claimed and often-policed independence of black art--opting, instead to ground his analysis in what artists actually do. This entails a problematizing of what the author defines as the over-determined ideological figure of the "black artist" (or "artists whose skins happen to be black") and an elevating of the aesthetic dimension of their output (26). English spends considerable time engaged in a diagnostic critique and reassessment of the seminal Harlem Renaissance intellectual figures W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Casting their aesthetic dictums as the essentialist origins of black representational space, English lays out a critical framework designed to methodically expose how their tendency toward group belongingness grated against the apparent openness of other prominent figures of the New Negro Movement--namely James A. Porter and Ralph Ellison. English has intentionally set out to be controversial in this chapter, almost to the point of effacement--particularly as it concerns the beloved figures Du Bois and Locke. The biting tenor of his critique extends to the African-American artist collective Spiral (founded in 1963 by the artist Romare Bearden), which is charged with creating a brand of aestheticized nationalism that was self-segregating and creatively stilting. In this chapter, the author's claim is that the hawkish nature of politicized blackness--with its attendant imperatives and demands on creativity--caused mainstream institutional art discourse and its historiography to abandon black art production.

The much-discussed and seldom-understood artwork of Kara Walker is the subject of chapter 2. English's deblacking of Walker's work produces mixed results, due to the odd pairing of the artist's sweeping cutout silhouettes with the history of American landscape painting. Skilled at object-based analysis, the author unravels the artist's most notable installations and argues that Walker does not visualize "truths" about the antebellum plantation, but rather creates a fantastical landscape (an "inner plantation") that evades the knowable. While English makes a noble attempt to complicate the reductive racialized readings so often inflicted on Walker's oeuvre, the result is less successful than in chapter 3, to which I will return. The closing chapters are similar in their approach, as each takes on an artist whose production is self-consciously engaged in a critical assessment of racial blackness. In this book, the author carefully presents readers with a new visual reading--one that will hopefully encourage a more imaginative engagement with black cultural production.