Abstract In the essays that comprise this dossier, abstraction emerges as an artistic strategy for living in a world that is not conducive to one's being in it. As a strategy, abstraction can operate as refusal, as displacement, as reverberation, as decomposition, as drawing away, as drag, as transmutation, as a prying open, and in many other ways. In this sense, abstraction is not one thing but rather encompasses a multiplicity of approaches that pull on the web of discourse that seeks to order the unruly materialities of bodies.
Abstract Rather than reading An Ecstatic Experience (dir. Ja'Tovia Gary, US, 2015) as presenting the reality of the history of Black people in the United States, as some critics have claimed, this essay examines the film's formal qualities as repeatedly articulating a disjunctive cut between invisible experience and visible manifestation. Over and over, An Ecstatic Experience argues for the impossibility of adequately visualizing complex internal forms of experience: the religious ecstasy of baptism in the Holy Spirit; the contradictory and sometimes fleeting feeling of freedom under the restrictions of slavery; and the mixture of despair, rage, and hope that often underlies embodied forms of political resistance in the age of #BlackLivesMatter, with which the film closes. Gary figures all of these as unrepresentable. Throughout the film, Gary manipulates the emulsion of filmic excerpts, including found black-and-white 16mm footage of people in church, a black-and-white extract of actress Ruby Dee performing a monologue in a 1965 kinescoped television presentation, a video clip from the 1980s featuring Assata Shakur talking about her escape from a US prison to Cuba in 1979, and recent color digital video footage of street-level political resistance in the face of anti-Black police violence in the 2010s. Neither do Gary's painting, drawing, and scratching over her carefully assembled collection of contemporary and historical images elicit the one-to-one correspondence between form and image sometimes called “mickey mousing” in the animation world. Instead, An Ecstatic Experience's abstract animated shapes and patterns emphasize the difficulty of translating the complexity of internal transformation into legible form outside the self.
Abstract Korean artist Jeamin Cha's video Nameless Syndrome (2022) is based on the stories of Korean women who couldn't receive proper diagnoses for their symptoms. Rather than presenting these stories as a striking exposé, the video work shows a disjunctive aesthetics, assembling seemingly unrelated stories and visual footage, highlighting a double sense of failure—of the patients’ experience and of medicine's lack of self-critique regarding its neoliberal ideals, racism, and sexism. Nameless Syndrome juxtaposes visual footage of Korean women undergoing medical procedures with narration based predominantly on Western and white references. Wary of the fact that black-and-white judgment-making can entail the risk of reinforcing medically abstracted body image and discourse, this video doesn't so much grant an easy conclusion as it excites its audience's curiosity and doubts. Undercurrent to the endeavor is the idea that the more abstract the perception of medicine becomes, the less light is shed on its persevering sexism and racism, the inequitable power dynamic between doctors and patients, and the effort to make accessible representations of the problems. The article reads the cognitive challenge that Nameless Syndrome poses as a unique form of resistance aligned with the aesthetic and discursive strategy of escape central to queer-of-color critique and postcolonial scholars’ caution against the often-uncontested Euro-American centrism in critical thought.
Abstract Leveraging the idiosyncrasies of color, architect and artist Amanda Williams's Color(ed) Theory (2014–16) experiments with form to express the kind of domestic intimacy that exists when nothing around looks like home. Over the span of three years, Williams enlisted locals to paint eight vacant homes on the South Side of Chicago a different shade inspired by the vivid and cloying colors of consumer products Williams recalls being marketed to Black Americans in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This short reflection on Williams's artwork considers the “theory” it enacts as a study of the Black sensorium: the dynamic lateral relations that form amid displacement. In likening the tastes, textures, smells, and sounds of Black home life to echoes, what reverberates in empty space, this essay explores the resonances of Black kinship, the echo chambers that surround it, and the possibility of finding family in art and theory.
Abstract This essay examines writer and AIDS activist Douglas Crimp and the optimism embedded in his weekly planners in the early years of the AIDS crisis. It focuses on Crimp's handwritten plans—for ACT UP meetings, study groups, social gatherings, hospital visits, and the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights—to explore how he imagined queer futures during an obliterative epidemic. The losses of the AIDS crisis led some to claim that no future was available to queer people. In response, others positioned queerness in a distant utopia. But Crimp's planning engages, the author argues, a queer future that is both physically and temporally proximate, insisting on a temporality of possibility amid mass death. The paper planner's handwritten plans document the movements of queer bodies and record Crimp's aspirations for futurity and relationality alongside a generation of queer activists.
