The Red Earth Project (2019-)
Beyond the “Black” Corpus
(This work is in development) The question
What would a ‘black’ work of art look like without the black body?
The body plays a key role in contemporary ‘black’ art, arguably to its detriment.
Given the many historic, cultural and economic forces that shape the infinite experiences of ‘blackness’, ’Black art’ should be difficult to define. Yet, from contemporary art and photography to various avenues of popular culture, a closer look reveals a heavy reliance on the figurative, specifically the black body.
The Western canon of art traditionally reproduced the status mythology of the ruling class. The landscape painting, which birthed the landscape photograph, which in turn birthed the language of cinema, was initially the coding for what land or property is considered ‘private’ and was usually commissioned by the land owner as a way to communicate this dominion.
Often invisible in works of art, the role of the black figure, encompassing personhood, material, economic (labour), or metaphysical presence, is evident throughout the Western art canon. On occasion, the figure will appear in the margins of a Rembrandt, for example, or exist as a ghostly presence as material, in the notable wealth accumulated through the slave trade by the protagonists of a Jane Austen novel. Or the figure may play more prominent roles of servitude and counsel for the wealthy in the early modern period, as seen in Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Beyond the desire for visibility and recognition, which has recently been at the forefront of necessary discourse, the figurative in contemporary black art stems from a myriad of long-standing, culturally indigenous lineages of tradition, practice, and philosophy.
AI opens up a conversation about representations and in fact, manifestations of the self, through abstractions and embedding. We can consider the self from the European Enlightenment point of view, where selfhood is autonomy and liberal capitalist productivity, where, at some point, the modernist material severance from other lifeforms happens for the purpose of capital. We can also consider the self through the Black Atlantic tradition, crucial to today’s culture, and even beyond and before that, in West African knowledge systems, where the self is more integrated with all forms of life.
The work
- This project proposes a dynamic installation, which attempts to reconsider the figurative body in black art through AI embeddings: representations of value or objects, by identifying and reimagining the negative space as a manifestation of the black body in Western art and photography histories. It will be a work moving beyond critique, and provide an example of future manifestations of provenance, representing “negative space" as a multidimensional vector — a latent signature of present-absence of he notion of blackness as it is both commodified and reclaimed.