A LANGUAGE FOR QUIETNESS (or, when words are not enough)
Art is where and how we speak to each other in tongues audible when âofficialâ language fails, it is not where we escape the worlds ills but rather one place where we go to make sense of them.â â Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior (2001)
âThe inner life is not apolitical or without social value, but neither is it determined entirely by publicness. In fact, the interior â dynamic and ravishing â is a stay against the dominance of the social world; it has its own sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent in its ineffability. Quiet.â â Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012)
These days I often find myself lacking the right words, or even trusting that when I find them they will even be heard. Iâm also too concerned with the world and distracted by mind chatter to feel fully satisfied with the signs on the page, or the echo left in the room. As a natural introvert my instinctive response to such dissonance is to retreat: back to the drawing board, to basics, to the primacy of a heartbeat. I find myself wanting to be stubbornly and unapologetically mute, and at the very moments when itâs inconvenient: before a lecture, in conversation, preparing for teaching, writing this blog post. This is not a confidence issue. Iâve given away a lot of words. From my experience they are a bit like Love, you sort of have to give them freely to get any back. No, it is an emergent symptom of our time. A potent mixture of exasperation and breathlessness, and that pain in the throat, which comes from trying to find a quiet spot just above the cacophonic din. The din that is ahistorical modern politics, and socioeconomics, and all those unresolved conditions of coloniality: separatism, prejudice, amnesia, chauvinism, poverty, materialism, insensitivity. The din that is intolerance as it meets representation, and the traumatic news, and the daily barrage of emails accompanied by everyone broadcasting in tweets and status updates and messages, just trying to be heard. Incessant noise.
I just want some quiet, and I want to be quiet and let that state of be-ing have its own incisive quality of expression, of knowledge production.
So when I am asked to respond to the inquiry of why we need art now, I am contradictorily overwhelmed but also resolute that there is language I can share. A language I have been exposed to my entire life that can speak to and through my absences of words. The language of the visual artist: those intrepid souls who ânotice thingsâ;[1] who crawl behind and in-between; who absorb and radiate concurrently; who dare to make marks. These are the folk who have made challenging but expansive company, and whose works have also been the vehicles through which I attempt to speak about the constellation of themes comprising Black/African subjectivity. History, identity, home. Absence, presence, sentience. The archive. Afro-futures - which is to say creative imaginings about what lies before us, and the experience beyond this earthly realm.
Therefore I offer to this dialogue three artworks for meditation, in no particular order. They reflect the space/time/atmosphere with which I am preoccupied. And each artwork is a response to anonymised and imagined subjects, whose quietness foments agency. They are grace-full. People of and suspended from history, with whom we can be doubly familiar and alienated. It is not necessarily our right to know them, but in the gift of each presence lays an opportunity for reflection. Facing them, facing ourselves, facing the past, facing the present:
1) Lorna Simpson. Corridor, 2003. Double-projection video installation. 13 minutes, 45 seconds.
Curatorial Note: What is shared and transformed when we witness the lives of two Black women separated by a century? Lorna Simpson constructs a portal of memory set in two iconic Massachusetts historic houses: Coffin House in Newbury and the Walter Gropius House in Lincoln. Here we encounter the ordinary activities of imagined women at critical moments in the American modernist project. Both are performed by the artist Wangechi Mutu, who provides an uncanny continuity. They do not speak neither do they acknowledge our presence. Simpson seeks to explore (in her own words) âthe agency in not communicatingâ. We can only watch their gestures across the delicate bonds of time. The soundtrack also fuses the music of two impresarios similarly speaking across a hundred years: Â piano prodigy âBlindâ Tom Wiggins (1849-1908), and the abstract jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler (1936-1970).
2) Whitfield Lovell. In Silence, 2003. Charcoal on Wood, and doll bed. 26.5 x 26.5 x 8 inches.
Curatorial Note: There are so many possibilities provided by Whitfield Lovellâs revisioning of anonymous African-American people from 19th and early 20th century photographs. He is an artist that tends to their orphaned images and lives, taking care to draw their faces again on new surfaces and producing installations that combine their portraits with resonant artefacts. Thus for the young woman with a top bun and flower in her hair, there is a dolls bed. We might imagine several biographies flavoured with innocence, loss, even pleasure. Perhaps she is a teacher or suffering from melancholy or both. It is necessarily ambiguous. But the bed signals life beyond the image. Speaking of his work, Lovell says: âI want to evoke a sense of place, to be able to feel the spirit of the past for a moment, to feel the presence of these people.â
3) Carrie Mae Weems. A Broad and Expansive Sky - Ancient Rome from the Roaming Series, 2006. Digital chromogenic print, 73 x 61 in. Charles Guice Contemporary.
Curatorial Note: A Black woman in a black dress roams through historic spaces and landscapes in Europe. She is statuesque and her back invites us to participate in witnessing, since she will not show her face. A spectre and a guide, a body of reference who is unmoored from context, she confronts architectural expressions of power. Here, however, in the tenth photograph from the series, she faces the sky and the sea in ancient Rome. The shoreline is a continuous host for departures and arrivals; its watery memories riddled with losses of life from so many transatlantic sagas we still do not have enough words to convey. So, are we to remember or forget with her? Reflecting on the making of this series of photographs, Weems has said: âI thought, then, perhaps I could use my own skin in a sort of series of performances. That I could use my own body as a way of leading the viewer into those spacesâhighly awareâand challenging those spaces.â
Dr Temi Odumosu - Denmark
[1] Listen to Grayson Perryâs 2013 Reith Lecture âI Found Myself in the Art worldâ: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03g9mn1
















