Blackness is
minimally a concept, a color, and a racial designation that determines access to art and life. Thus, the universal and even familiar ways the white participants in
artscanada’s historic issue describe blackness are surprising. Aldo Tambellini claims, “I know how it feels to be black and walking the streets in a white society.” The conversation centers whiteness by returning to racial and aesthetic binaries; thus, their earnest descriptions of blackness’s “quality of evoking...a fear that it might be permanent,” displays enough self-regard to overshadow the depths of chromatic blackness.
artscanada gathered three visual artists, two musicians, a sociologist, and an architect to discuss the process of layering, harmonizing, and building blackness, but what remains absent from the conversation (and is perhaps impossible because of the constant references to whiteness) is the effect of blackness covering and connecting with itself.
This presentation focuses on black chromatic saturation as an expression of black self-absorption, an audacious display of ego for those denied access to individuation or a social life. Using the intersection of aesthetics and black studies, this talk addresses chromatic blackness as a visualization of a formless, reflexive black sociality. As contemporary black visual culture gets darker (see the attention to skin tone in Queen and Slim (Matsoukas, 2019) or Bradford Young and Kahlil Joseph’s monochromatic references to Roy DeCarava), saturated blackness visualizes disinterest in whiteness, its aesthetic conventions or the legibility assumed by the artscanada discussants. Instead, these images express the irreducibility of blackness leaking into public space.
