{"id":18813,"date":"2024-03-21T16:06:30","date_gmt":"2024-03-21T16:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=18813"},"modified":"2024-03-21T16:08:16","modified_gmt":"2024-03-21T16:08:16","slug":"black-op-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=18813","title":{"rendered":"Black Op Art"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article appears in <\/em>Art Journal, vol. 82, no. 4 (Winter 2023).<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The unmistakable countenance of James Baldwin appears in dissonant tone, as clay, pigment and light ruse pictorial formation. The matte white background collocates with the glint of hundreds of black pigmented hemispheres, each faithfully but intermittently forming the constellation of a grid. From afar, material emerges portraiture: the distinct face of a black queer literary figure, whose eyes look left, missing the viewer\u2019s gaze completely and settling on something else entirely, his smirk perhaps evidencing the pleasure of what he holds in view.1<\/a><\/sup> Up close, however, image stagnates and recontours into nothing more than three-dimensional dots, whose obscured asymmetrical facets reflect the movement of light. This cryptic movement is further emphasized when viewed through the lens of a camera, which compresses the polymer clay mounds into exacting lines that sharpen the features of the figure. DC-based artist Nekisha Durrett (b. 1976) designed this installation, aptly entitled James Baldwin<\/em> (2018), to take on a third surface when visualized up close through a digital aperture. At the opening of the National Portrait Gallery\u2019s fifth triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Exhibition American Portraiture Today<\/em> (2019), the artist stands in front of her installation encouraging viewers to hold their phones up to the image and wait for something unexpected to happen. The unexpected is subtle, divergent from technology\u2019s presumed exaggerating effects. Instead, the camera warps space and troubles tactility, mimicking what viewers would see from a distance. This speculative play with texture, space, and optical effects beckons the question, if only a subquestion: Is the installation James Baldwin<\/em> vicinal to the perceptional experience of the art world\u2019s sidelined and forgotten framework Op art?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Nekisha Durrett, And the Ancestors Say. . .<\/em>, 2018, close-up, polymer clay, 8\u00bd \u00d7 45\u2009ft. (2.6\u2009\u00d7\u200913.7.2 m), Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Washington, DC (artwork \u00a9 Nekisha Durrett; photograph by Luke Walter Photography, provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In this article, I take up this question as a polemic rather than an examination and position black op art as an aesthetic lens and method that reckons with what black contemporary artists are doing in the face of institutional dispossessions. For both Durrett and Berkeley, California\u2013based, multimedia artist Lava Thomas (b. 1958), dispossession is far more faceted than the binary edges of inclusion or exclusion from art institutions. Instead, their presence within the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, respectively, further saturates the knotty politics of dispossession in the art world. As Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Collective remind, while dispossession \u201cattends to how human lives and bodies matter and don\u2019t matter\u2014through settler colonialism, chattel slavery, apartheid, making extra-legal, immoral, alienated.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> In the multifaceted spaces and dynamics of art institutions, dispossession also attends to erasure, neglect, forgetting or failing to archive, and misinterpreting or misreading a work of art due to botched attempts to consider intersectional axes of oppression, such as racism, sexism, transphobia, fatphobia, xenophobia, ableism, and queerphobia. Thinking with dispossession, in other words, brings to attention modes of mattering for black artists within systems that insist otherwise.3<\/a><\/sup> Broadly, I argue the term black op art reveals how artists are centralizing speculative sensory effects as both object and subject within their work and therefore as dynamic interventions within the political, hyperracialized, and dispossessing field of visuality. Black op art is neither about what is knowable nor enigmatic through the visual field, but rather about what lengths artists must go to in order to work within it, as well as the ciphered language of mattering and meanings embedded within works of art. Specifically, I consider dispossession through a studied meditation of two works that similarly play and push on the edges of optical effects: James Baldwin<\/em> by Nekisha Durrett and Requiem for Charleston<\/em> (2016) by Lava Thomas, which both foreground black op art as a soft murmur of aesthetic \u201cundertones\u201d that refuse optical coherence and determinacy.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Lava Thomas, Requiem for Charleston<\/em>, 2016, tambourines, pyrographic calligraphy on lambskin, acrylic discs, and braided trim, dimensions variable. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Nion McEvoy, 2017.4A\u2013Y (artwork \u00a9 2016 Lava Thomas; photograph by John Janca, provided by Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lava Thomas\u2019s Requiem for Charleston<\/em> confuses space, as the interplay of wall and tambourines refuse the clarity of periphery.5<\/a><\/sup> Instead, the limits of this multipiece installation recede rather than end at material\u2019s edge, where wall weaves in-between circular forms without closure. From a distance, the installation reveals twenty-five unframed tambourines forming a \u201csquare turned on its side so the axis of the piece form a cross\u201d in the former contemporary wing of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. At the center, a large tambourine covered in black lambskin appears gray-toned and matte; the indentations of burnt calligraphic letters gleam into recognition a name: the Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney. Around it, four smaller tambourines anchor inches away on the wall, forming the points of a simple diamond formation\u2014covered in black acrylic discs, their heads sharply reflect anything within proximity, representing faces, objects, and space alike. The next layer comprises nine large tambourines arranged in a three-by-three diamond formation. Both the size and material match the light-absorbing surface of the central tambourine, differing only in the names tenderly inscribed: the Reverend Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, the Reverend Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, the Reverend Daniel Simmons Sr., and Myra Thompson. The final rung of tambourines is made up of contrasting sizes but repeats the reflective acrylic of interior pieces, further mirroring light and space and holding each transcribed name in a structure of deliberate reflection: a requiem for the Charleston Nine.6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to state early that these two works matter to me.7<\/a><\/sup> I was struck by the traditional Op art effects evident in both installations and curious why art critics did not prioritize the language of this movement. While a visual analysis that singularly prioritized traditional Op art would have also failed in thinking with these installations, I questioned whether it was better or worse than a censored and vague autobiographical account of Baldwin, for example, and a short but thoughtful statement on the nine black people murdered in 2015 at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In both installations, the dispossession is clear. The circulation of both works of art have been dispossessed from their performances of Op art as a traditional art historical movement\u2014and therefore from the social and economic power obtained by such aesthetic legibility; and second, from black aesthetic forms, side-glanced for the more obvious but otherwise delimited tropes of figuration and abstraction produced by the representation of Baldwin and black death, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, I look to better understand the layers of dispossession that the pairing of Op art and black aesthetic forms reveals. Dispossession in both Durrett\u2019s and Thomas\u2019s installations renders a new set of terms and questions about the role of optics and blackness in the art world. I engage traditional Op art as a peripheral reference and archive the movement as a footnote or ephemeral question to the methods, visual proclivities, and sensory landscapes positioned by the artists of this new aesthetic frame. This theoretical intervention aligns with scholars such as Michelle Wallace, Thelma Golden, and Huey Copeland, who elsewhere caution of the quick erasure of the \u201cmessy entanglements of blackness\u201d when bidding to \u201cpreserve the sanctity of hegemonic aesthetic categories\u201d within the art world.8<\/a><\/sup> My aim is not to preserve or enliven the forgotten contours of Op art but to take seriously what it means when artists coalesce multiple modes of dispossessed materiality. In other words, this pairing is of particular interest because of the optical and social negation already wrapped into the history of Op art. Something specific happens at this intersection that is not activated when black artists work within traditional art movements that are celebrated, remembered, and hyperlegible. This article resists and in fact refuses lineal relations between Op art and black op art. Instead, I foreground optically potent modes, methods, and possibilities within dispossession as fortold by Durrett and Thomas as organizing concepts of black op art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contemporary reevaluations of Op art frequently attempt to rescue the lost movement from obscurity by carefully intellectualizing the sensationalism originally attributed to the aesthetic approach. The 2019 exhibition Vertigo: Op Art and A History of Deception, 1520\u20131970<\/em> initiated by the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien in Vienna, Austria, for example, opens its more than 200-page catalog with such a statement of presumed deliverance. \u201cLong devalued as a superficially sensational phenomenon lacking in intellectual depth,\u201d curator Eva Badura-Triska writes, \u201cOp Art, on closer inspection, proves to be an extremely complex movement that occupies an essential position in the history of twentieth century art.\u201d9<\/a><\/sup> Further, in her recovery text, she takes extreme lyrical care to foreground what critics and viewers alike found fascinating about the movement, calling attention to sensation and the way artists used formal arrangements to impact space and by extension viewers. She writes, “The dizzying maelstrom of spirals, super-imposed and distorted grids, which create moir\u00e9s and other vibrating patterns, and sensations of toppling, vexation, or flickering are just some of the formal means that this particular abstract art deploys in its painting (kinetic) objects, experiential spaces, and films. They produce strong stimuli that affect the entire body of each recipient, extending far beyond the sense of sight, and function as strategies of sensory irritation, overload, and deception. In the immediate reception of these works, reflection is initially held back in order to then generate an awareness of the shortcomings and constrained scope of perception and cognition rooted in the senses. Radical significant insights are thus triggered in a direct sensory mode.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, rather than bidding for hierarchical power and placement in the art world, I am far more fascinated by the way Op art has been devalued in the history of contemporary art movements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Op art came into the public consciousness in October 1964 through a Time<\/em> magazine preview article entitled \u201cOp Art: Pictures That Attack the Eye,\u201d written to prepare and enliven museum goers for the soon to open exhibition The Responsive Eye<\/em>, curated by William C. Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art.10<\/a><\/sup> \u201cPreying and playing on the fallibility in vision,\u201d critic Jon Borgzinner principles, \u201cis the new movement of \u2018optical art\u2019 that has sprung up across the Western world. No less a break from abstract expressionism than pop art, op art is made tantalizing, eye-teasing, even eye-smarting by visual researchers using all the ingredients of an optometrist\u2019s nightmare.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup> Even as Borgzinner historicized the new aesthetic frame in the 1960s, highlighting its \u201clegitimate ancestry\u201d in \u201cCezanne, Seurat and Monet,\u201d as well as its contemporary influences found from Italy to Venezuela, he concurrently foreshadowed its inevitable disinheritance by the art world. For example, Carl J. Weinhardt Jr., director of Manhattan\u2019s Gallery of Modern Art, is quoted using sexist and femmephobic language to underscore his refusal to invest in the movement: \u201cOptical art is this year\u2019s dress length and I will not show any.\u201d12<\/a><\/sup> However, regardless of the varied reception of the new art form, what is clear is that Op art would shift attention to the dynamic play between viewer, space, and art object by emphasizing spatial and embodied effects. As M\u00e1rton Orosz explains, \u201cThe discursive space generated between the work and the viewer became the theme of the show.\u201d13<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reflecting on the influence of William C. Seitz and the 1965 exhibition, Dan Cameron, curator of contemporary art, recalls, \u201cOp Art became somewhat of a household word in the U.S., but almost invariably employed in the pejorative as an example of an art movement that wasn\u2019t really a movement at all but merely an eccentric symptom of a befuddled era.\u201d14<\/a><\/sup> In the referenced era, the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would soon be exposed for the sustained and aggressive tactics of infiltration, psychological warfare, harassment, and extralegal violence toward black radical groups and leftist organizing efforts systematically mandated through the state intelligence-gathering agenda known as the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The purpose of COINTELPRO, according to Hoover, was to \u201cexpose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize\u201d groups and individuals that threatened the stasis of the preceding decades\u2019 revivals of white supremacy. In addition to being an era of collective uprising from the anticapitalist, antiracist, and antiimperialist work of the Black Panther Party to the occupation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), also known as the 504 sit-ins, it also further exposed the fused relationship between antiblack violence and the optical field. \u201cIt is my contention,\u201d demarks Leigh Raiford in her 2011 book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare<\/em>, \u201cthat black visuality is inextricable from African American movements\u2019 effort to change the condition of black people\u2019s lives.\u201d15<\/a><\/sup> Or as visual culture scholar Sampada Aranke reasons, \u201cRacialized violence undoubtedly is organized (pan)optically, as the nexus of surveillance and subjection are foundational in everyday Black life. Because of this ubiquity of sight and surveillance in modes of anti-Black violence, the aesthetic practices undertaken by Black artists are born out of an antagonism with such realities.\u201d16<\/a><\/sup> While COINTELPRO was publicly exposed in 1971 when the \u201cCitizens Committee To Investigate the FBI\u201d removed secret files from an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and released them to the press, the illegal state sanctions program did not end that year, despite many claims otherwise. Instead, the Reagan Administration in the 1980s actively endorsed, sponsored, and legalized many other secret and illegal policies of previous generation. Put another way, while \u201cOp artists (of the 1960s) resist interpretation . . . by making paintings that resist being seen at all and that, by resisting our efforts to see them, literally move us around the room in the hope of seeing what we cannot,\u201d black op art knows it cannot go unseen.17<\/a><\/sup> Black op art is about the visual language of distortion as a testimony of erasure, surveillance, and hypervisibility.18<\/a><\/sup> The concurrent political moments of COINTELPRO and traditional Op art paint it as a form steeped in whiteness because it insists not only that art can be seen but that this impenetrable norm can be resisted through visual distortions. When we look at artists like Durrett and Thomas, we see optical technologies that insist on something other than the thwarting of vision; instead, through black op each artist plays with the visibility of dispossession appropriated toward fugitivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialogues of Dispossession<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

My aim in considering dialogues of dispossession is to call attention to and further question the entailments of social, political, and relational power dynamics entrapped at the crossroads of black aesthetic practices and traditional art historical movements. The lens of black op art is made possible by questions posed by visual culture scholars. For example, in her third book Listening to Images<\/em>, Tina Campt offers, \u201cMy own space-making gesture ruminates on two central questions: how do we build a radical visual archive of the African Diaspora that grapples with the recalcitrant and the disaffected, the unruly and the dispossessed<\/em>? Through what modalities of perception, encounter and engagement do we constiutute it?\u201d19<\/a><\/sup> Alexandra Schulteheis Moore defines the dispossessed as \u201cthose who lack the right to claim rights . . . and whose existence at once illuminates paradoxes at the core of human rights and challenges concepts of their universality.\u201d20<\/a><\/sup> In other words, dispossession confronts concepts of the universal by highlighting and archiving histories of social and material disposability. However, as Morrill, Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Collective lyrically insist, \u201cThe opposite of dispossession is not possession. It is not accumulation. It is unforgetting. It is mattering.\u201d21<\/a><\/sup> I turn to dispossession as a throughline in black op art in order to foreground the layered and relational power dynamics at play when exhibiting works by black artists. In this way, dispossession acts not just as a noun, naming forced histories of denial and deprivation, but foregrounds the performance of dispossessing, specifically the dispossessing work of institutions, in the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp center another paradox of dispossession for black artists in mainstream art institutions in the introduction of Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value<\/em>. Primary of concern in their analysis is the stakes of legibility: \u201cMuseums attempt to increase diversity by exhibiting work by and hiring those who have been historically excluded, but we must ask what expectations surround these individuals when they enter an institution. In particular, these subjects often are required to perform and interact in legible ways that are institutionally sanctioned and deemed appropriate.\u201d22<\/a><\/sup> What is particular about the installations James Baldwin<\/em> and Requiem for Charleston<\/em> is how both obscured even an obvious association with the art world\u2019s own framework of Op art. Even as they perform aesthetic legibility by way of Op art, their legibility is dispossessed.23<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Multidisciplinary sculptor Simone Leigh highlights another aspect of dispossession for black artists within art institutions in an interview with visual culture scholar Uri McMillan and friend and collaborator Chitra Ganesh. \u201cWhile our exhibitions are not always welcome,\u201d she begins, \u201cthe black performing body always is. And the spectacle of it is used to mask the structural racism of art institutions that have repeatedly excluded black artists and their exhibitions.\u201d24<\/a><\/sup> Cheryl Dunye, director, actor, and writer known for evading the limits of aesthetic labels in black and queer documentaries, such as The Watermelon Woman<\/em> (1996) and Mommy Is Coming<\/em> (2012), emphasizes another aspect of dispossession for black artists within art institutions. When asked in an interview with art historian and queer and feminist scholar Julia Bryan-Wilson, \u201cDo . . . labels have any meaning to you?,\u201d she responds with an emphatic \u201cyes\u201d: \u201cLabels . . . send signals to audiences and critics that the maker has somehow been deemed worthy of commercial success and visibility. But if that artist continues to create work that challenges commercial sensibilities or challenges what is normative in story or content, they generally end up broke. So yes, labels mean a lot.\u201d25<\/a><\/sup> In other words, labels are about survival, too. However, mattering is not synonymous with visibility. Instead, black op art mediates mattering as politicized attention and care. Visual culture theorist Nicole Fleetwood mirrors the complexities of art criticism for black artists in her 2019 reflection on the reception of John Edmonds\u2019s photography. She writes, \u201cWhile black artists and other artist of color have had more representation in international biennials and museum shows in recent years, the reception of their art is still often framed by a narrow and rarified cultural perspective.\u201d26<\/a><\/sup> Black op art foregrounds the politics of labels and histories of dispossession that pursue in the art world for black artists. It asks how to create material and political frameworks of mattering in mainstream art institutions without centering white aesthetics and production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2008, the philosopher Fred Moten published an article entitled \u201cBlack Op,\u201d where he positions the term \u201cBlack Op\u201d alongside theories of dispossession. While his use of the phrase appears only in the title of the article and does not specifically address the role of the artist or histories of art, he does continue the legacy of visual culture theorists who position visuality as a center of the study of blackness. I reference Moten\u2019s tangential use of the term \u201cBlack Op\u201d to set a new precedent in the theoretical lineages of black op art as an aesthetic framework. Rather than returning to the history of Op art, theoretical intersections are ascribed within the field of black studies. For Moten, \u201cBlack Op\u201d is a cipher for the interrelation of black optics, black object, black optimism, black operation, and the black open, all of which encircle concepts of dispossession. He writes, “What is often overlooked in blackness [read: black object<\/em> (see p. 1746)] is bound up with what has often been overseen. Certain experiences of being tracked, managed, cornered in seemingly open space are inextricably bound to an aesthetically and politically dangerous supplementarity, and internal exteriority waiting to get out, as if the prodigal\u2019s return were to leaving itself. Black studies\u2019 concern with what it is to own one\u2019s dispossession<\/em>, to mine what is held in having been possessed, makes it more possible to embrace the underprivilege of being sentenced to the gift on constant escape [read: black open<\/em> (see p. 1743)] . . . . In contradistinction to the skepticism, one might plan, like Curtis Mayfield, to stay a believer and therefore to avow what might be called a kind of metacritical optimism. Such optimism, black optimism<\/em> (see pp. 1745\u201347), is bound up with what it is to claim blackness and the appositional, run-away, phonoptic blackness operation<\/em> [read: black optics<\/em>, \u201can auditory affair\u201d (see p. 1743) and black operation<\/em> (see p. 1745)]\u2014expressive in the autopoetric organization in which flight and inhabitation modify each other\u2014that have been thrust upon them.\u201d27<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moten positions dispossession as an animacy of black studies, our open secret archiving and further preparing multidirectional escape (\u201cescape in and the possibility of escape from\u201d).28<\/a><\/sup> This black operation is political, bound to racialized discourses of visibility and optical imaginaries activated as tools of oppression. In the next section I will examine how the work of Thomas explores and synthesizes such imaginaries. The gift of black objects, however, is to signify multiple and find such signification outside of the visual realm. Black optics therefore becomes more than dominant looking relations but opens to the multisensorial: \u201cThis black optics is an auditory affair: night vision given in and through voices that shadow legitimate discourse from below, breaking its ground up into broken air; scenes rendered otherwise by undertones that are overheard, but barely.\u201d29<\/a><\/sup> In other words, this phonoptic blackness operation is what materializes the sustenance of black optimism that \u201clives (which is to say, escapes) in the . . . assertion of a right to refuse.\u201d30<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I reference Moten to emphasize the resistance to determinacy, which I argue, rests both at the core of black op art and alongside the barely overheard undertones of the work. Thinking with black op is at once speculative, as what the artists are refusing is surely not singular. I argue that a primary tenet of black op art is a subtle undercurrent that repositions attention to systems of dispossession while preserving remnants of what survives despite, through, and because of it. As Moten rallies, \u201cEverything I love is an effect of an already given dispossession and of another dispossession to come. Everything I love survives dispossession, is therefore before dispossession.\u201d31<\/a><\/sup> Following the soft murmur of aesthetic undertones in the work of Durrett and Thomas is a calling toward alternative testimonies of being with the work. In the balance of this article, I follow the flickering methods of black op art to arrive at statements of black mattering(s) scripted within the material and conceptual subtext of each installation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part One: Lava Thomas<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen the news broke of the massacre at Mother Emanuel Church,\u201d Thomas shares, \u201cI was working in my studio on another tambourine piece and a series of portraits of my southern ancestors.\u201d32<\/a><\/sup> The day is June 17, 2015. The news cycles that followed would recount the slow intentionality of murders that would take the lives of nine black humans, later to be known as the Charleston Nine. Reverend Sharon Risher, whose mother, two cousins, and a childhood friend were killed at Mother Emanuel Church that day, recounts the moments directly preceding the first shot: \u201cThey welcomed him in, Risher says. He sat there and listened to this whole Bible study.\u201d33<\/a><\/sup> As a self-proclaimed white supremacist, the killer strained the media to account for systems and histories of racial terror. Reports of the massacre were identified as an irregular effect<\/em> of extreme white supremacy\u2014white supremacy made him do it\u2014leveling his actions as a consequence of scarce extremist thinking. However, the repetitive forms in Requiem for Charleston<\/em> grounds these deaths in an alternative telling: the extralegal murders of the Charleston Nine rehearse systems of racial terror and black death as the substance of white supremacy rather than its consequence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n