A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See by Tina M. Campt

Author:Tina M. Campt [Campt, Tina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: American, Art & Politics, African American & Black, The gaze; Black artists; Black Lives Matter; BLM; Arthur Jafa; Deanna Lawson; Simone Leigh; Dawoud Bey; Black contemporary art; Black cultural criticism; Black feminist theory; critical race, history, art, Contemporary (1945-)
ISBN: 9780262045872
Google: IiY6EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-08-24T00:26:02.580551+00:00

Hapticity is, in this sense, the labor of feeling beyond the security of one's own situation. It involves cultivating an ability to confront the precarity of less valued or actively devalued individuals without guarantees, and working to sustain a relationship to those imperiled and precarious bodies nonetheless. Arthur Jafa's Black gaze shows us Black virtuosity, struggle, and pain, in ways that require the labor of love called hapticity. It is the labor of love required to feel across difference, precarity, implication, and suffering.

As a practice of caring for, looking after, and looking out for others, hapticity is the labor of feeling beyond the forms of alienation produced by a negating gaze of white supremacy, which can only imagine blackness as abjection or supplication. Jafa's Black gaze embraces this negating gaze, turns it inside out, and uses it against itself. In ways that are at times uncomfortable, and even border on unbearable, Love Is the Message reclaims a Black visual archive some would see as caricature or evidence of pathology. In doing so, Jafa forces us to commit to the labor of positioning ourselves in relations of proximity, implication, and vulnerability to the full spectrum of Black joy, trauma, and precarity.

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I began this chapter by recounting my entry into an ongoing dialogue on visual frequency with Arthur Jafa and his extraordinary body of work. I must end with a confession about the ways in which the visual frequencies of a Black gaze entangle me as a Black feminist in the complex work of hapticity and discomfort. For hapticity is not just a question of racial sensitivity or sincerity, and not confined to the labors of racial difference. It is the discomfort I too must grapple and reckon with when confronted with the litany of images of precarious Black women and Black femininity that Jafa traces throughout this ensemble of works.

That discomfort begins with Siegfried's powerful stare and Sharifa's aloof carriage. It is magnified by a stream of looks from other women who prod and pummel me in the dialogue between their dueling appearance in still images in Apex, and their resuscitation as moving images in Love Is the Message. Their doubled appearance links the resolute looks of historical matriarchs past (Harriet, Bessie, Sojourner, and Ella B) to the equally penetrating looks of their more contemporary sisters in struggle (Nina and Billie, Angela and Mahalia, Beyoncé and Aretha, Ella F and Lauryn). But the hapticity of these images triggers in me the discomfort of knowing that the labors of these women—their brilliant yet frequently overlooked or dismissed intellectual, artistic, political, and cultural work—was never valued equally or fully in their own time, either by their white colleagues or by many of their Black male compatriots.

It is a discomfort amplified by the visual and affective linking of stunning images of Black female artistry, intellect, and sheer fierceness with equally stunning images of Black motherhood under assault. Mothers assaulted or disrespected; mothers watching children ripped from their homes and arrested; mothers pleading with police

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