Infinite Essence: Black Aesthetics as Methodological Otherwise (Poster 7)

• In Event: Artful Inquiry in Qualitative Research: Philosophies and Enactments

Abstract

To encounter artistic production by Black artists is to step into Black worlds, art that talks back to power, "talks around and in between its silences and absences" (Campt, 2021, p. 5). Whereas anti-Blackness as a socio-political matrix cannot assume Black humanness (McKittrick, 2021; Quashie, 2021), those who desire to attend to something called Black ‘living’ must do so in excess of traditional representational modalities and frames. In this way, Black aesthetics enter as artful inquiry–a capacity to inspire and curate change, to be, explore, and imagine something else and elsewhere, to live expansively, and fully–militating against the normative world by first stepping outside of it in the figurative sense, and beginning from Blackness in the literal. The tradition of talking back to power is consistent with a longer genealogy of Black art and Black artists, stretching from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, wherein Black poets, writers, and musicians were involved in making art that affirmed the fullness of Black life and living. Precisely, Black artists force the public to grapple with the question, what does it mean to see through the complex positionality of Blackness and to work through the implications of Black being therein? Artist and engineer, Mikael Owunna exemplifies this tradition as he works at the nexus of visual media and engineering, optics, Blackness and African cosmologies. In the Infinite Essence project, he sees in the dark, which is to say, he turns off the lights

With this series, I’ve set about on a quest to recast the Black body as the cosmos and eternal. I hand paint the models' bodies with fluorescent paints and using my engineering background I have augmented a standard flash with an ultraviolet bandpass filter, to only pass ultraviolet light. Using this method, in total darkness, I click down on the shutter. (Nicole, 2021, para. 5)

By setting Blackness as the condition for viewing (i.e., total darkness), for a fraction of a second or otherwise, dark bodies are iridescent, as Owunna introduces a method for thinking and being Black in excess of the violent domination of no-thingness. This conceptual exploration is concerned with that fraction of a second as a question of how. From the space of Blackness as invention, worlds are made/constructed and possible, over and against the colonial violence that intended to strip Blackness of meaning-making potentialities. I observe in Owunna’s approach how the essence of Black methodology (McKittrick, 2017), or methodology that begins in, and dreams in Black, in that “the dynamism between our biological selves (our flesh, our blood, our hearts, our muscles, and neurons) and the stories we tell about ourselves about our identities and our sense of place” (Prescod-Weinstein, 2021, para. 12) becomes praxis for living and doing freedom. And so, as Black aesthetics, as artful inquiry, shift how we see, I sit with Owunna’s art process to consider the ways Black aesthetics might invite researchers to differently orient, encounter, and move in their inquiry processes.


[See submission document for references.]

Author

• Wilson Kwamogi Okello, Pennsylvania State University