Review- Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life

Book By: Sarah J. Cervenak

Published in the Journal of Visual Culture

In her second book Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life, Sarah Jane Cervenak continues in her meditation on modes of thought and creative practices that imagine relationality as exceeding anti-Black logics. In her conceptual offering of the term gathering, she engages the work of Black visual and literary artists who do not prescribe to the confines of form, rationality, or circumstance. Firmly grounded in Black and Performance Studies scholarship, this text foregrounds Cervenak’s investment in Black Feminist Theory. It is also part of the compelling turn these fields continue to make towards geography as well as animal and environmental studies. As such, Cervenak does not limit her understanding of text to the written word, but presents the reader with creative and insightful interconnections across sculpture, installation, painting, poetry, and prose. Approached broadly, ‘gathering’, recognized as both a noun and verb, signifies ‘another relation to fleshly and earthly togetherness’, which explains the book’s two enfolded sections ‘Gathering’s Art’ and ‘The Art of Gathering’ (p. 10).

Building on her arguments in Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (2014), Cervenak asserts that Enlightenment theories of the human were constructed on the exclusion of the Black subject and so the act of living freely cannot be assumed for Black people. [1] She cites philosopher Thomas Locke, both to question this limited conception of ‘freedom’ and dispute the idea that the world is available or ‘given’ to those who seek to inhabit it. Lockean philosophy also lays out systems of property ownership, which Cervenak connects to the commodification of Black people under transatlantic slavery, the settler colonial project of the US, and the continued state violence against Black life. Though providing critical insight into the pillars of her discussion on gathering, the dive into Enlightenment philosophy at times weighs down the buoyancy of her thinking.

There is a fluidity and openness to Cervenak’s conception of gathering that at times makes it difficult to grasp, for there are no explicit parameters on what constitutes the ecologies of this bringing together. However, it is precisely this indeterminacy of the term gathering that allows for an array of generative readings. Rather than invent a new term, Cervenak attends closely to gathering and expands on its theoretical possibility.

Beginning with artist Xaviera Simmons’ installation Harvest, an amalgamation of wooden planks displaying words and phrases that carry a myriad of interpretations, Cervenak brings the reader into the potentialities of uncertainty. Simmons makes no clear indication of what the words mean, and this move away from the demands of reason resonates throughout the book. This transitions into the first chapter, where we encounter a reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved alongside Nikki Wallschlaeger’s poetry collection Houses. Drawing parallels between both authors’ use of stream of consciousness writing, e.g. without punctuation that separates words, Cervenak identifies an ‘ecoaesthetic’ that does not differentiate in the value between forms of life, whether plant, animal, or human and the intertwined relations across them. The second chapter brings together the poetry of Samiya Bashir and Gabrielle Ralambo-Rajerison. The open-ended quality of the spacing in their work is described as a ‘cosmoaesthetic’, an ‘undeniable unenclosable relationality between this planet and the universe with which it’s connected’ (p. 33). Although these theoretical concepts are at times challenging to follow, they are poetic explorations of what Cervenak suggests are a disaggregation from ‘only earthy, empirical measure’.

The second section ‘The Art of Gathering’ brings together Gayl Jones, the writer to whom Cervenak dedicates Black Gathering, with Leonardo Drew’s large-scale sculptural installations. Their work exemplifies gathering as a process that disrupts cohesion, whether as words in prose or the materials of artwork. Jones’ experiments in arranging words and distorting ‘standards’ of syntax or spelling present an opacity that embodies her characters as ‘refusals to be opened up, explored, and examined’ (p. 104). In a different context, Drew employs a wide array of materials in each sculpture, which yield no singular perception or privileged point of view. Moreover, Drew withholds any specific use value for the objects he is drawn to; instead, he gathers disparate materials and signifying economies to distort the bounds of what is considered valuable and disposable. As Cervenak notes of both artists, ‘what their gatherings do is activate the energetics of a togetherness that exceeds category and, in some ways, a logic of social and economic value’ (p. 92). Thus, the richness of their work lies in this unresolved togetherness.

Cervenak continues this move away from resolution as she ends the text, noting that even the act of concluding is neither simple nor definite. Through an analysis of painter Clementine Hunter’s work, specifically in the context of her life growing up as a laborer on the Melrose plantation in Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Cervenak considers Black gathering in the wake of slavery. She dwells on Hunter’s use of scale, which does notdistinguish in size among people, animals, and plants in her paintings. Here we have another iteration of the ‘ecoaesthetic’ presented in the first chapter, where scale signals a ‘figural in-betweeness’ that suggests an intimacy of relation across different living entities. It also interrogates any hierarchy of importance that lifts the human above all else. As Cervenak writes, ‘the painting might be said to harbor Black gathering only insofar as the forms of such gatherings blur against their frames’ (p. 157). By closing with Hunter, who lived in the seams of anti-Black logics that kept Black people unfree on plantations after emancipation, Cervenak recognizes that Black life, even amidst capture and gratuitous violence, envisions ways of being together beyond these limited realities, and recognizes inherent value in all life forms.

As a scholar deeply committed to the liberative potential of Black artists, writers, and scholars, Cervenak’s Black Gathering is a reminder that societal structures of oppression are not all encompassing, and there are ways of being otherwise that have always eluded capture.

Notes

[1] Cervenak SJ (2014) Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.