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Description: To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror
~I designed this book to culminate in a present that has since faded away. It originated with an extraordinarily kindhearted invitation from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to deliver the Richard D. Cohen Lectures at Harvard University. When Skip’s invitation reached me, I was thinking about the scarily regressive situation of black citizens in the United States...
PublisherYale University Press
PublisherHutchins Center for African & African American Research
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00170.002
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Preface
When it’s like Here we go again, it’s work to stave off easy images. You might need help. From another perspective, from a fellow citizen wary of easy images but intent on gaining insight. That’s what I’d found in the art I organized this book around: representation engaged and thoughtful, equally vivid and pensive, hewing closer to reflection than pronouncement. It helped me to see violent policing as an acute expression of the American order of separation in its death throes. Classic in its clarity, trying for a renaissance. Hysterical and untenable. Doomed.
Darby English, June 2020
 
{Original Preface}
I designed this book to culminate in a present that has since faded away. It originated with an extraordinarily kindhearted invitation from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to deliver the Richard D. Cohen Lectures at Harvard University. When Skip’s invitation reached me, I was thinking about the scarily regressive situation of black citizens in the United States today, and about the process and entailments of being a black man who practices art history and cultural studies. In 2015 and 2016 I undertook the research and writing of the lectures, which I delivered over the first three days of November 2016. Although retrospective commemorations of Barack Obama’s presidency were under way, I was not alone in feeling it reasonable to hold out hope that matters stemming from fresh spectacles of antiblack racism might improve. Because there was a conversation: amid and alongside the mobilization of Black Lives Matter, robust debates about its activities took hold everywhere. However neatly or messily we aligned, parties to these arguments shared a sense of traction. It made good sense to be optimistic about working through what is reparable in our broken culture, rather than concede it to breakage. The most influential person on the planet was himself a black man who stated fervidly his willingness to entertain proposals for reparative strategies. You could argue all day about whether he was right to be waiting. To my view, he wasn’t. Neither he nor his successor saw fit to put police violence on the domestic agenda. But there was a conversation.
A great deal more felt possible then. That’s why I considered this to be an Obama-era book rather than a Trump-era book. It appeared that catalysts were in place for what would someday, perhaps, become a state-sponsored movement for fair play, humanity, and peace. Conversations about reparability—the protagonists, the agendas, their line items—changed fundamentally on November 9, 2016. Today, we know the reality all too well. We know what we’re up against. A vast machinery pitched against justice and accountability, at every level from patrols to courts, has proved remarkably resilient thus far, containing myriad acts of resistance. We haven’t given up and won’t give up. But I, for one, am haunted by despair and occasional pangs of futility—more than I imagined in November 2016 it would be possible to feel. Further spiting the multitude that fancied him a piffling gadfly, President Donald Trump became a fixed point of historical reference. So did the feverish paranoia about difference that had enabled his rise to power—in speeches to rallied supporters, he railed about the criminality of undocumented immigrants and killings of police by black people, but never the other way around—only to mushroom into a myriad of other pessimisms that, as I write, renovate and expand historical hate schemes. In American conversations about difference, all that was reprobate and anti-intellectual is new again.
Drifting suspended throughout these pages is a “we” that troubled several readers of this manuscript in draft. That we is already at work. Let me be as clear as I can about it. As clear as I can be, that is, as a living person whose ideas about which group I belong to, who accepts me, what people will think when I say “we” never presented a shimmering lucidity. That we names those of us who are talking together about brutality and belonging, knowledge and representation. That we names those who would use their competence or platform to continue to bring attention to these themes. We are those who would press for a true critical discussion. Those who would commit actions showing that, in a polis, it is toxic to ignore or conceal the struggles and contradictions among a people. We possess the capacity to respect, even to revere, any attempt to think deeply about the moment, regardless of how that attempt proceeds. We understand that race complicates discussions of culture; what we have given ourselves less permission to explore is the way that art complicates discussions of difference when it does not comply with the givens from which such discussions often proceed, even when they aim at “change.” Change being precisely what momentous art continually proposes.
Yet today the prevalence of bad news moves toward the core of the ways we acquire experience and act. It’s easy to be angry, even to orchestrate everyday life around anger. Skip the news. If some banter slides Trumpward, grab a pinch and then state exasperatedly that you just can’t talk about it. Spend the hope you save longing that they’ll get him with the next thing. Get a countdown calendar. Tear a sheet from it daily. That’s the easy part. The hard part is the despair. It nags incessantly. The Trumpitstica looses a swath of roiling hate that’s no less terrifying than law enforcement’s massacre of innocents, a nationalist battlecrying. Since I wrote the lectures, futility has permeated many quarters.
The proposal of this book is that some art—particularly the possibilities certain art rehearses by presenting concepts, images, actions, and ways of being not yet expressed in instituted culture—points to a way forward. Already on display in this art are the difficulty and danger, the test of benevolence, the opportunity of care entailed in describing a life. But art like this exercises its critical function at a distance from the everyday and the real. At the end of the encounter, it’s we who must return and face the day, enriched by how we have been made to look and to think. Such guides do not steer by pointing. They place before us new units of thought, which invite fresh reflection and inquiry. In this way, I need it, especially now; it doesn’t need me. The art helped me to keep things present, to stay in the problem, precisely by forcing me to deal with their instability.
The word “new” has added significance here. The themes I track are the most contemporary I have ever taken on. They are the most involved with me. And this project is the first that I undertook while straddling the academic and museum worlds (after eleven years spent solely as an academician, in spring 2014 I became a part-time curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York). So converged, these circumstances generate a pressure with the paradoxical effect of clarifying the question—How do you make writing about contemporary social issues and new art work?—while indefinitely protracting the interval between the question’s emergence and that of an adequate response. The present studies do not pretend to fill the gap. They propose merely to outline a view—my own—of the problem of confronting it. They are necessarily casual and incomplete, but they are serious.
I owe special thanks to Skip Gates for inviting me to deliver the lectures out of which this book grew. Over the time spent having these experiences and trying to learn from them through speaking and writing, I received help that both improved them and lavished me with the warmth of human generosity. For making my time in Cambridge an immense pleasure, I am indebted to the staff at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, particularly Matt Weinberg, Abby Wolf, and Vera Grant. Special thanks to Amy Canonico, Heidi Downey, and Sarah Henry at Yale University Press for their enthusiasm about my project and excellent work in its behalf. David Frankel greatly improved the manuscript with his finely tuned ear for the crucial. For considerable practical assistance in preparing the book for publication, I thank Cole Gruber. A poor multi-tasker, I researched and composed this book’s chapters one at a time. That habit here finds its reflection in my thanks to those who traveled this path with me, chapter by chapter and problem by problem. For conversations about the subjects of “The Painter and the Police,” I am grateful to AC Hudgins, David Joselit, Sébastien Pluot, David Schutter, Amy Sillman, Jackie Terrassa, Jenny Tobias, and Hamza Walker. On several occasions related and unrelated to the writing here, Kerry James Marshall welcomed me in his studio to discuss painting, process, perspective, and the police. A great deal else came up besides. My vast gratitude to Kerry for his vision and commitment is equaled by my appreciation of his respect for our differences. For conversations about the subjects of “Differing, Drawn,” I thank Kim Conaty, Rachel Haidu, Mignon Nixon, Nick Raffel, Jenny Trinitapoli, and participants in the 2017 Five-College Art History Faculty Seminar, which convened around a prefatory version of this text at the instigation of Anna Lee and Alex Seggerman. For help securing access to Pope.L’s work and pertinent images and information, I thank Sandy Davis at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Isabelle Hogenkamp and Courtney Willis Blair at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Lorenzo Conte and Danny Volk at the Pope.L Studio; Karen Reimer and Anna Searle Jones at the Renaissance Society; and Zalika Azim, Gina Guddemi, and Doris Zhao at The Studio Museum in Harlem. In his characteristically generous way, Pope.L added to the gift of his work a willingness to talk to me about it and other subjects on several occasions during summer and fall 2016 and winter 2017. For conversations about the subjects of “The King’s Two Bodies,” I thank Sean Anderson, Barry Bergdoll, Robert Bird, Constantin Boym, David Breslin, Vincent Clark, Jaś Elsner, Richard Fletcher, Aram Goudsouzian, Irena Haiduk, Charlie Jenné, Sean Keller, Danny Marcus, Solveig Nelson, Pope.L, Amy Thomas, Mabel O. Wilson, and participants in both the “Encounters, Collisions, and Blindspots” conference at Tate Liverpool and the “Reproduction of Race and Racial Ideologies Workshop” at the University of Chicago, with which I shared earlier versions of this chapter at the gracious invitations of Sonya Dyer and Isobel Whitelegg at Tate and Jacqueline Stewart at Chicago. For rich and freely shared accounts of life spent in the town where Martin Luther King’s life ended, I thank three taxi drivers in Memphis, Tennessee, who wished to remain anonymous.
For forbearing conversation and readings of the manuscript, I thank Susan Bielstein, Gregg Bordowitz, Julia Bryan Wilson, Hazel Carby, James Duesterberg, David Hartt, Melissa Horn, Matthew Jackson, Anna Lee, Zoe Leonard, Anne Lindsey, Patchen Markell, Carmen Merport, Mark Reinhardt, Dr. James Schluger, Adam Sonderberg, Ken Warren, and two anonymous readers for Yale University Press.
I am grateful to be in conversation with many individuals deeply committed to critical reflection on culture—its historicity, its vitality, its possible effects. During the process culminated here, especially decisive were discussions with Lauren Berlant, Irena Haiduk, Cara Manes, and Hamza Walker. In these dialogues about the pleasures and problems of art and what it is to inhabit and inquire about them now, the stakes never escape consideration. Always the attempt is to attend as fully as possible to the matter at hand, always it is a shared one. This book would not exist without them. I can only hope that it offers some suitable reward for all the aforementioned individuals’ extraordinary efforts in service of a work whose errors and shortcomings are wholly my own.
This book is dedicated to Douglas Crimp, who, as the first of many gifts bestowed over twenty-three years of friendship, taught me how to project distress constructively.