Opacity as Possibility: Only When it’s Dark Enough Can You See the Stars

(Originally published by Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art)

What would it mean to think about blackness as that which experimentalizes being….as unfettered ur-matter, unthinkable exorbitance, and deregulated transubstantiation?...What might it mean to think about blackness as enacting an un/making, as enacting amid regimes of settlement an unsettling that is also an un/holding, a release of self from its entrapment within property into an alternate intimacy?

—J. Cameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak quoted in “Black Ether,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 2016

In the opening quote, Carter and Cervenak describe Blackness as that which cannot be defined, positioned as a site of disruption. It is an undoing, and it is this quality that teems with potential. There is a pressure placed on Blackness to “do something” even as it is located outside of the logics of that which is conceived as possible. In line with Carter and Cervenak, what would it mean for Blackness to remain opaque, not asked to do anything, and be accepted as such? As Édouard Glissant so astutely says, “The opaque is not obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced.”[1] It is and will remain.

I reflect on these questions in relation to the work of Jamaican artist Leasho Johnson, focusing on his first solo exhibition in the U.S., “Only When it’s Dark Enough Can You See the Stars.” In the show, hosted by the Chicago gallery FLXST Contemporary, Johnson presents fifteen of his most recent paintings accompanied by his first public performance piece Mother makes man. As he has done in previous shows, Johnson introduces his audience to different characters such as Banjee, Sweet Boy, Deloris, and Loosie. Each portrait has a narrative of its own with a cohesion to the characters that lends itself to a collective story. Johnson’s painting practice uses charcoal and a mixture of watercolor, acrylic, oil and gesso on paper before mounting the pieces onto canvas. Several of the paintings are overlaid on top of previous works with the older pieces peeking through cut-outs. They are done primarily in different gradations of black, though he incorporates other colors. In this exhibition, Blackness, both as material reality and conceiving ways of thinking and being, feels expansive; it engulfs and resists capture as it enacts an “un/making” of that which has been fixed as truth, exceeding the demands for transparency. I delve into the depths of opacity as I approach Johnson’s work, letting it speak and remain quiet.[2]

Mother makes man

Johnson steps slowly into the room, with a black facemask covering his mouth and nose. He is barefoot with a white linen skirt gathering air as it balloons around his lower body and a gold bowl filled with charcoal in his hands. “Mother makes man” is embroidered onto the back of the skirt in black lettering and sequins. Standing in front of an eight by eight foot canvas, he picks up pieces of charcoal, rubbing them onto the surface while extending his arms in large circular and vertical movements. The sound created from the friction of charcoal on canvas fills the gallery as dust falls to the floor, coating his feet and sprinkling onto the skirt. It is a ritual. Back turned to the audience, he is not wholly accessible to our gaze. The performance lasts for five minutes until the charcoal has completely disintegrated, then he unties the skirt from the back, removing and pinning it to the center of the canvas. Now in his underwear, Johnson slowly leaves the room. His footprints remain in the residue.

Leasho Johnson’s performance invokes questions on gendered labor, queer desire, and intimacy. His skirt references those worn by Black working-class Jamaican women, particularly in rural areas, and is an homage to his grandmother. It is sturdy enough to handle a busy workday, yet airy in the Caribbean humidity. The title, Mother makes man signals the crucial connection of the maternal figure to male subjectivity. Perhaps it is also a recognition of the unique relationship that mothers have with their queer sons, intuitive yet often rife with intimate tensions. In her foundational text “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Hortense Spillers discusses the relationship between African-American men and their mothers, rooted in the law partus sequitur ventrem, in which a child’s enslaved status followed that of the mother—a strategy to ensure that the children of white men and enslaved Black women were not freed.[3] Spillers writes, “The African-American male has been touched, therefore, by the mother, handed by her in ways that he cannot escape…It is the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood- the ‘power’ of yes to the female within.”[4] In embracing the yes of the feminine, I consider Johnson’s performance as recognition that Black male subjectivity is intimately intertwined and predicated on the lives and wellbeing of Black womxn.[5]

Black consumes white as Johnson smears charcoal across the surface. The streaks exceed the canvas, invoking possibilities beyond confinement. Johnson’s bodily exertion is evident in the sections of the canvas that are darker than others. He describes the piece as a meditation on the experience of queer desire in institutional spaces, and it is deeply felt. After the performance, Johnson mentions that his grandmother worked cutting sugar cane in Jamaica. The charcoal residue reminds me of the practice of burning cane fields as part of the harvest and the residual soot that coats the area when the fires subside. These ashes hold memories of labor and the violent inequities of neo-colonialism.

Gazing at Johnson’s painting Those without whom the earth would not be the earth, my eyes follow the undulations, tracing the concave and moving upwards. A curved strand extends out, the tip pinned with one of the few pieces of material besides paint and charcoal present in the exhibit. I recognize the red plastic ribbon as a hair clip often worn by young Black girls. The black is deep and rich in texture. As if coming undone from the inside out, the interior of the figure is shaded with yellows blending into red, blue and green. The stance is one ready to take flight.

The title of the image is taken from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land and situates this figure as central to the very existence of the earth.[6] Commenting on the writings of Césaire and Léopold Senghor, in Black Skins, White Masks, Frantz Fanon recounts a scene in which a friend tells him, “The Blacks represent a kind of insurance for humanity in the eyes of the Whites. When the Whites feel they have become too mechanized, they turn to the Coloreds and request a little human sustenance.”[7] Fanon reckons with Black people simultaneously being positioned outside conceptions of the human, while also representing confirmation that the human “soul,” or that which makes one human, does indeed exist. Reading Johnson’s figure through Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s writing on sociopoetics and relationality, I understand it as a formation of Black subjectivity, the non-being other upon whose labor Western modernity emerges.[8] If modernity is a direct consequence of the enslaved labor of Black Africans, then, in fact, the world as we know it would not exist without Black life.

Johnson is a Black queer Jamaican man, and these identities and experiences are explored throughout his oeuvre. His work sits with the specificity of queerness within a Black Caribbean context, interwoven into histories of British colonial legacies. He is part of a visual conversation amongst artists who use the color black as central to their image making while exploring experiences of Black subjectivity, including Kerry James Marshall, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Belkis Ayón. Blackness shapes the lens through which his characters manifest, unsettling the myth of the human while “enacting an un/making” of a world that perhaps has become what it never should have been.[9] I imagine the characters emerging within that space Wynter terms the demonic grounds, that which falls outside Western philosophical thought.[10] Interrogating the belief that the human is a “natural” concept, she writes:

Human life is not, as it is believed to be in our present system of knowledge, that of a natural organism which exists in a relation of pure continuity with organic modes of life. Rather, ‘human forms of life’ are a third level of existence, which constitutes itself in a dual relation of continuity and discontinuity with that of organic life. It is, therefore, hybridly organic and meta-organic (i.e. discursive symbolic).­­[11]

Wynter disputes the belief that the human is a natural concept and understands it as a social construction created in relation to other forms of “organic life.” The human exists as a discursive product of Western thought and thus is not a stable category. By adopting opacity as a primary mode of conceiving these figures, Johnson’s paintings construct subjectivities that do not prescribe to the “present system of knowledge” and instead “experimentalize being,” referencing Carter and Cervenak’s opening quote. Gender is not explicit in his work, and there are no distinct indications that the figures are racialized as Black beyond his use of the color, though his exhibition text refers to them as such.

In another painting titled The thing to fear was the thing that made her beautiful, and not us, a black amorphous mass fills the canvas.[12]  Little wisps emerge from the sides. The center is a distortion of colors, with glimpses of something else. Some of the edges of the shapes created inside are sharp, like a leaf blade, while others curve. Blue droplets are scattered throughout the figure, and there is a small silver ring adorning its center. Spilling over the edges of the canvas, the figure gestures beyond the physical boundaries of the painting. What lies inside this black mass? Perhaps that depth is unavailable. It is precisely the inability to be identified that constitutes its beauty.

I am hesitant to apply human descriptors or body parts to the figures in Johnson’s exhibition, recognizing the limitations of these configurations. If, as Wynter purports, the very idea of “human” was invented, then Johnson’s images present an opportunity to think of other (non)beings that exceed the natural towards what Carter and Cervenak term “unfettered ur-matter,” an unrestrained state of being. In their opacity, his characters suggest possibilities without claiming representation. Unraveling the discursive through abstraction, they create an “alternative intimacy” with the viewer rooted in one’s own emotional resonance.[13] Each figure’s indeterminacy can conjure a range of projections. Leasho Johnson’s work jars the mind to extend beyond the representative, towards envisioning what is yet to come.

Notes

[1] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 191.

[2] Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

[3] The offspring follows the mother.

[4] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64-81.

[5] I use womxn as a more expansive term than women to include non-cisgender women.

[6] Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land.  Éditions Bordas, 1947. (INSERT PUBLISHING LOCATION: PUBLISHER, 1939). I DON’T KNOW WHAT VERSION OF THIS BOOK YOU ARE CITING SINCE IT HAS BEEN REPRINTED A FEW TIMES

[7] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, ed. 2008), 108.

[8] Sylvia Wynter, “ETHNO, OR SOCIOPOETICS?” Alcheringa, vol.2, no.2, 1976: 78-94.

[9] Carter and Cervenak, “Black Ether” 204. IS THERE A PAGE NUMBER? IF SO, ADD AFTER TITLE

[10] Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’” in Out of Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1990), 356.

[11] Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking Aesthetics: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice,” in Exiles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1992), 242.

[12] The painting title is taken from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, 1970.

[13] Carter and Cervenak, “Black Ether,” 204.