Undesirability and the value of blackness in contemporary art

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, 2017.Undesirability and the Value of Blackness in Contemporary Art centers on representations of nausea inducing, dismembered, perverse black female bodies in recent sculpture, collage, photography, and performance art by Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Xaviera Simmons, and Narcissister. In response to art establishment and lay public expectations that black artists address their work to slavery and its legacies in order to effect racial healing and empowerment, these artists instead force a distinction between black women’s creative labors and art’s capacity to mitigate historical trauma. Under slavery, Africans were uprooted and subjected to forms of terror that uniquely mark blackness as abject, from cultural dispossession and sexual violence to branding and maiming. Additionally, black bodies were considered nonhuman objects lacking cognitive and affective faculties, ideas reinforced by Jim Crow laws and arguably by present-day anti-black violence. Hence, recovering a lost, traumatic past—slavery—and turning it into something affirmative has preoccupied black artists and thinkers since Emancipation. This fidelity often resulted in innocuous yet well-meaning representations of blackness. Today, black artists and critics question this widely adopted interpretive paradigm, disclaiming a so-called “proper” relation between black artists and their art. Despite this shift, critics and art historians insist on assigning contemporary black artistic production a redemptive function. This is partly because of the affirmative ethics at the heart of black aesthetic discourse, spurred by restorative justice projects and struggles for freedom in the civil rights era. The post-civil rights, twenty-first century artworks I examine, however, defy long-held aesthetic philosophies and social norms about what constitutes “beauty,” “pleasure,” and the political value of blackness. Contrary to healing racial wounds, insisting on visibility and inclusion, or producing children, the procreative act in the hands of Walker, Mutu, Simmons, and Narcissister holds open the gaps - of the past, of identity, of difference - to revel in a certain lack of mastery, power, and knowing the way forward. Undesirability thus serves as a powerful lens onto blackness and its visualization with implications that go beyond the field of contemporary art. It occasions a radical engagement with art and social life equal to the challenges of our time