META+PHYSICS OF BLACK ARTMAKING

Inspired by ongoing research on a cohort of black filmmakers and installation artists shaped by the 1970s politics of aesthetics, and an upcoming issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies, this session is devoted to what liquid blackness founding member Michele Prettyman has described as the “metaphysical” impulse embedded in the practice and praxis of contemporary black artmakers, that is, spiritual dimensions of black creative life that traditional disciplinary formations are seldom equipped to consider. Offering an anagrammatical approach to the intersection between “physics” (but also materiality and technics) and what lies beyond, in this session “meta+physical” describes un-encodable aesthetic sensibilities passed on across generations and the charting of self-determined paths to survive alienating industrial and institutional demands. Sometimes these sensibilities manifest as an investment in one’s legacy and an effort to magnify the spiritual “DNA” inherited from previous creative practices; sometimes they describe familial and ancestral energies creatives call upon or investments in radical insights from the past that need to be heard again; or a commitment to living within extra-institutional and extra-industrial networks of care, while acting as if that lifeworld was the whole world. Accordingly, this session seeks grounded engagements with modes of transcending material constraints to understand the inspirations, motivations, knowledge, and life practices that sustain them and re-activate, alongside them, the radicalism that they carry forward.