Frame Grab of Still by Rotimi Fani Kayode
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TWILIGHT CITY (DIRECTED BY REECE AUGUISTE, 1989, BLACK AUDIO FILM COLLECTIVE), FRAME GRAB OF STILL BY ROTIMI FANI K AYO D E. “When one of your hands touches self and the body as object in the to be present in the records, in creative production where absences the other, something peculiar world, and the site where desire the galleries, and in the media. can be generative and loss can happens: You become aware of the to move, and for artists to make, be exposed. The centrality of the Inside and Out: strange ambivalence that makes meets its external constraints. Artists It becomes possible to consider how body, both within the record and your body different from all other Donald Rodney and Keith Piper— these artists’ formal decisions of as a record, oscillates between the The Open Hand in things. Your hand is an object in the who along with Eddie Chambers scale, medium, and style worked with body experienced from within and world, but it is also something you and Claudette Johnson organized content to demand a hypervisible the exterior image of the body. Two experience from within. And the the Blk Art Group in Britain in the presence in order to critique the later works from Donald Rodney and the Work of Donald hand you touch is also both an object 1980s—created images that produced paradoxical conditions of social, Keith Piper, I will argue, articulate and a feeling, sensing part of your a tension with external constraints political, and artistic constraint that the unique position of the fold as embodied self. The touched thing of social and political discrimination was denied expression. As outlined articulated by Merleau-Ponty and Rodney and Keith Piper is also touching.” Daniel Birnbaum that dominated the public sphere, by Jean Fisher in her introduction elaborated by Domieta Torlasco. Both on the exhibition Lygia Clark: The including city streets, neighborhoods, to the Living Archive conference works manage to suspend a moment in Shades of Black, reimagining Abandonment of Art, 1948-19881 art schools, and the art world. The between hypervisiblity and invisibility, production of artwork, exhibitions, presence across temporal distinctions as well as the moment of touching and conferences such as the National has become a critical methodology and being the touched thing. for both artists and art historians Kristin Juarez The outstretched hand is a gesture Black Art Convention in 1982, and later the Living Archive in 1997, to account for the processes of For Donald Rodney and Keith that can be located in the everyday, erasure and loss. This, she argues, Piper, the body becomes a site the ritual, the performance, and the suggest that cultural production was for these artists not only a has resulted in a historiography that for archivization of—as Torlasco sculpture. As a gesture of exchange, is deeply invested in the voices of posits—memory and creation, agency, and arrest in the work of question of visibility in the art artists, diverging memories, and translation and invention.3 By 1997 art, it becomes a site of poetic world, but also about making visible conflicting trajectories.2 For many the two artists, who both began resonance. Evoking Merleau-Ponty, the processes by which images deny depth of black subjectivity, artists that began making work in the as painters, were working across Daniel Birnbaum describes the hand 1980s in Britain, the archive provided artistic mediums that resulted in as the threshold for the embodied allowing only shallow surfaces of blackness, as a signifier of difference, a site for critical examination and multimedia installations. Tracing the 30 liquid blackness : volume one, issue four liquid blackness : volume one, issue four 31 Inside and Out Inside and Out prevalence of art mediums across by Frida Kahlo’s ability to use her practice. This practice can be seen found, both Rodney and Piper’s the 1980s, Kobena Mercer notes that crippled body as a metaphor for a most vividly in the works of the hands are mediated through a a decade that began with painting broken political system. Piper’s early Black Audio Film Collective, Donald hybrid use of artistic mediums. soon saw the rise of independent paintings have been contextualized Rodney, and Keith Piper. As artists filmmakers working in film and video, by the aesthetic sensibilities of captivated by aesthetics as well There are several effects to be analyzed: how the artists use the as well as photography.4 Coming Robert Rauschenberg. Filmmakers of as the history of form and/as the out of art schools, artists were both the Black Audio Film Collective very political, the way in which content image to produce and record the addressing the formal specificity deliberately engaged in renegotiating is delivered cannot be overlooked. way the experiencing body gives of their selected medium and its the language of filmmaking, including way to being the art object; how history. In 3 Songs of Pain, Light and nonlinear narrative structures, In 1997, Donald Rodney produced the images subvert the paradoxical Time (1995)—a film made with the experimentation with sound, as the photograph In the House Of My position of the black hypervisibility Black Audio Film Collective—Rodney well as color. Photographers such Father and Keith Piper produced and invisibility through the use of the notes that in addition to his personal as Joy Gregory, Ingrid Pollard, Hand and Remains for his interactive fold; the significance of technology relationship with Keith Piper, his and Rotimi Fani-Kayode were as CD-Rom, Relocating the Remains. (art medium) as it mediates a radical artistic radicalization was inspired Mercer states—challenging the Both works feature the artist’s own disorientation of the body schema. norms of documentary realism. outstretched hand in a gesture of Rodney’s use of photography to offering. As an image of resistance, document a sculpture and his body By the 1990s, the boundaries the open hand counters the closed (but also a place and memory), between mediums were no longer fist of black power with a radical and Piper’s digital programming applicable. Prompted in large part openness. For Donald Rodney and that document his artwork and (RIGHT) FIGURE 1: by collaboration, conversations, Keith Piper, the images of their his body (and also bodies under Donald Rodney, In the House of My Father, and exposure taking place between open hands act as the investigative surveillance and enslaved bodies) 1996-7. Photograph, color, on paper black artists, a fluidity emerges by surfaces at the threshold of interiority illustrate a deliberate mediation in mounted onto aluminum, 1220 x 1530 mm, which media, archive, and historical and exteriority of the body. Utilizing which one artwork is understood Tate Britain, London (work © The Estate and contemporaneous art images the skin as the archive where visual through another. Their images, in of Donald Rodney), courtesy of the estate get incorporated into a multi-media and avisual impressions can be which their bodies are both centrally of Donald Rodney. 32 liquid blackness : volume one, issue four liquid blackness : volume one, issue four 33 Inside and Out Inside and Out present but distinctly absent, not honor the limits between process.6 As memories are hidden archiving technology, the photograph the event, there is within the image a destabilize the proprioception interiority and exteriority, but within and exposed as a house, the produces as much as it records the secret archive that is “…never located of the experiencing body as an rather radically folds them into unstable sculpture throws into crisis event.10 In the image, the sculpture entirely on the inside or outside, act of resistance, in which black one another. As Jennifer Barker Derrida’s emphasis on the archive as sits in Rodney’s hand, visualizing the never entirely visible or invisible.”13 subjects are not denied interiority explains, “As the edge between a permanent dwelling that shelters, moment where Rodney is both the Unspoken memory, as Lippit but rather are able to deliberately the body and the world, then, which is also the expression of a touching subject and the touched describes, belongs to the avisual, the withhold complete legibility. the skin functions always as principle of authority.7 Domietta thing. For Lippit, self-awareness anarchive that captures the unsayable “the sculpture both a covering and uncovering, Torlasco elaborates, “Lineage, of radical exteriority, in which his or unarchivable.14 Torlasco describes In Donald Rodney’s photograph In because of its simultaneous inheritance, transmission, according interiority has been brought to the avisuality, or the unrepresentable, the House of My Father, the artist’s proximity to the public world to family or state law—the site that surface, allows the looking subject as a rearrangement of perception outstretched hand holds the fragile transforms and to the secretive inner body.”5 the archive needs to realize itself to disappear.11 As such, the that maintains an obscurity even sculpture of a house made of his Here the secretive inner body as such is inextricably physical and photograph documents a suspended as images make visible. Borrowing own skin (Figure 1). The photograph the physical is the site of his memories as symbolic.”8 As an impermanent site state of disappearance, which from Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and was taken from his hospital bed, well as the sickle cell anemia. marking the passing of his father allows for what Torlasco identifies the Invisible, she explains, “the fold loss of his and is not itself the artwork, but is His skin becomes the threshold the year before, the current loss of as the possibility of “hybrid is yet another name for the chiasm documenting the sculpture titled where both become visible.