Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial
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Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial by Rizvana Bradley Program in Literature Duke University Date: ________________________________ Approved ____________________________ Fred Moten, Supervisor ____________________________ Maurice Wallace ____________________________ Michael Hardt ____________________________ Antonio Viego ____________________________ Thomas DeFrantz ____________________________ Kenneth Surin A dissertation to be submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2013 ABSTRACT Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial by Rizvana Bradley Program in Literature Duke University Date: ________________________________ Approved ____________________________ Fred Moten, Supervisor ____________________________ Maurice Wallace ____________________________ Michael Hardt ____________________________ Antonio Viego ____________________________ Thomas DeFrantz ____________________________ Kenneth Surin An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2013 Copyright by Rizvana Bradley 2013 ABSTRACT “Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial,” examines art and performance works by three contemporary black artists. My dissertation is opened by the analytic of black female flesh provided by Hortense Spillers in her monumental essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Drawing on Spillers, I argue that it is not the black female body but the material persistence and force of that body, expressed through the specificity of black female flesh, that needs to be theorized and resituated directly with respect to current discourses that take up black ontology, black subjectivity and black aesthetics. I expand Spillers’ conclusions to an analysis of how the materiality of this flesh continues to structure, organize and inflect contemporary aesthetic interventions and performances of blackness in the present. The five chapters that comprise the dissertation map a specific set of problems that emerge from a tangled web of gender, race and performance. I argue that black female flesh, forged through desire and violence, objection and subjectivity, becomes the ground for and the space through which black masculinity is fashioned and articulated as open, variable, and contested within diverse artistic practices. Examining the work of these artists, I identify the ways in which they channel this neglected flesh as a site of aesthetic reclamation and recovery. Focusing on the art of assemblage and its techniques of cutting, pasting, quoting and tearing I demonstrate how black identity is always assembled identity. Moreover, I demonstrate how artistic assemblage makes visible the dense and immeasurable compressions of race, gender and iv. sexuality that have accumulated over time. These practices offer us unique opportunities to inhabit this flesh. The dissertation expands upon connections between visibility, solidarity, materiality and femininity, bringing them to light for a critical discussion of the unique expressions and co-productions of blackness and sexuality in the fields of visual art and performance. The project aligns itself with current scholarly work that treats not simply black subjectivity but blackness itself as central to understanding a history of devaluation that subtends the historical construction of modern subjectivity. I demonstrate how the degraded materiality of blackness, linked to the violent rupturing of black flesh, indexes a deeper history of devaluation that becomes the very condition for and means of qualifying and substantiating our definitions of subjectivity and personhood. I conclude by tracing an aesthetic community or aesthetic sociality grounded in the recovered, lost materiality of Spillers’ ungendered black female flesh, a community that I argue, may be glimpsed through particular instantiations of the flesh in art and performance. v. CONTENTS Abstract ………………………………………………………………………….…….. iv Contents………………………………………………………………………………... vi Introduction……………………………………………………………………………... 1 Chapter 1: Faustin Linyekula: Fleshly Performance and the Limits of Bodily Finitude……………………………………………………………………..….………. 42 I. The Limits of Gendered Performance…………………………………….. 42 II. Decolonizing the Gendered Body ………………………………………. 47 III. Living with Music, Living Through Noise ..………………………………. 49 IV. Dancing the Diaspora…………………………………………………….…. 56 V. Dancing as Anti-Colonial Praxis…..………………………………………... 59 VI. Biopolitical Inversion……………………………………………………….. 67 VII. Maternity/Futurity: Toward a Future Anterior..…………………………… 84 VIII. Community, Finitude, Flesh…..…………………………………………. 91 Chapter 2: Nick Cave: The Art of Mattering….………………………….............…... 103 I. From Livery to Flesh..……………………………………………………….. 103 II. Redemptive Reification……………………………………………………... 109 III. The Art of Mattering……………………………………………………….. 115 IV. The Art of Figuration………………………………………………………. 120 V. The Art of Queer Sound…………………………………………………….. 124 VI. Refiguring the Black Body………………………………………………….129 VII. The Art of Effacement…………………………………………………….. 141 VIII. Nick Cave's Fold…………………………………………………………. 146 IX. Ungendering Queerness……………………………………………………. 152 vi. X. Black Queer Feminine Assemblages………………………………………158 XI. Desire, Sexuality and Race in Art ………………………………….……..166 Chapter 3: The Art of Thornton Dial and the Fleshy Vernacular…...………….……170 I. Thornton Dial's Radical Vernacular……..………………………………...171 II. The Yard Show…………………………..…………………………..…. 187 III. The Realist Ontology of the South...…………………………………….191 IV. Black Life and Labor……………...…………………………………… 199 V. Thornton Dial's Fleshy Assemblage…..……………………………..….. 203 VI. The Aesthetics of Fabrication and Reproduction..……………………... 209 Coda: Flesh Held in Common ……………...………………………………………. 215 Bibliography……………………...…………………………………………………. 227 Biography…………………………………………………………………………… 234 vii. INTRODUCTION This project is opened by the analytic of black female flesh provided by Hortense Spillers in her monumental essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”1 Drawing from Spillers, I mark the specific moment at which the ungendered complexity of black female flesh emerges as both a problem for thought and a problem for materiality. I argue that it is not the black female body but the material persistence and force of that body, expressed through the flesh, that needs to be theorized and resituated directly with respect to current discourses that take up black ontology, black subjectivity and black aesthetics. I expand Spillers’ conclusions to an analysis of how the materiality of this flesh continues to structure, organize and inflect performances of blackness in the present. “Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave, and Thornton Dial,” examines art and performance works by three contemporary black artists. The five chapters that comprise the dissertation map a specific set of problems that emerge from a tangled web of gender, race and performance. I argue that black female flesh, forged through desire and violence, objection and subjectivity, becomes the ground for and the space through which black masculinity is fashioned and articulated as open, variable, and contested. I demonstrate how the artistic preparations and performances of black artists are actively constructed and conditioned by the neglected and unforeseeable substance of black femininity. 1 Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar. Book," Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 65-81. 1 Because my claim is that these performances and artworks express a formidable tangle and arrangement of sexual energies and forces, the project does not explicitly take up black feminism as a direct object of inquiry, though the reproductive agency and line of the black feminine is unmistakably its theme and unarguably guides not only this project but the irreducible quality, form, and materiality of the artistic productions I explore. Examining the work of black feminist theorists including Saidiya Hartman, Angela Davis, June Jordan, Elizabeth Alexander, Sylvia Wynter, and others, I argue that the problems of collectivity, solidarity and visibility these theorists raise are framed by concerns over the material and affective status of blackness. I also draw from a black literary tradition that includes writers such as Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Harryette Mullen, in order to fully grasp the representational stakes of these problems that figure as central to the social and political formation of black life. I maintain that in these black feminist literary and theoretical traditions, these concerns do not go unaddressed, but the connections between visibility and materiality, solidarity and affectivity are made explicit in their work from the outset. My project explores the critical linkages and continuities between these concepts in order to think at once about the interdiction and the disclosure of black subjectivity, as movements of identity that may take place and occur in excess of social constructions of race and racial difference. This project expands upon the connections made by these black feminist theorists and writers between visibility, solidarity, materiality and femininity, bringing them to light for a critical discussion of the