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CONVERSATION
Visiting Fellow: Tina Campt
In conversation with Rolando Vázquez Melken
Visiting Fellow Tina Campt during her lecture at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, June 5, 2024. Photo: Maarten Nauw.
Tina Campt (TC): I’m glad you pointed to that because in my seminar I’ve been talking with my students about the durational nature of an afterlife versus the idea of an afterlife as a haunting. Put another way, I’m interested in the idea of an afterlife as something that can be activated and not just a shadowy presence. How does that compare with Hartman’s idea of the afterlife of slavery as durational and structuring? I think that if we take up this idea as a structuring architecture of Black being, then what we gain is a clearer understanding of the implications of something like slavery or the Middle Passage [the forced and violent displacement of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic] in relation to something like colonization and imperialism. The Middle Passage is certainly distinctive to the history of the African diaspora, but it is also in conversation with the history of colonization and imperialism. A recognition of the durational structure [of colonization and imperialism] is not an invitation to despair. It is not the same as understanding this structure to mean that we are in an inevitable cycle of dispossession. Rather, it is also the space from which we can recognize this structuring architecture and, in doing so, consider how to intervene in that structure as well.
To your question about the role of art—for me, the reason that I shifted from writing about vernacular photography to contemporary art was to be able to write about the alternative political imaginaries that artists offer us through visual art and sound. Art is, for me, an immensely powerful site that challenges us to confront these structuring logics, but also to think our way through them into another place.
RVM: Indeed, when we talk about decolonial aesthesis, we are speaking precisely about that transformation that can overcome the conditions set by durational conditions of the modern, colonial order. Given these structural conditions, as we know, the prevailing history of contemporary art has been mostly the history of the white gaze. Here lies the importance of speaking about the afterimage of darkness as a possibility of seeing otherwise. The task of seeing otherwise appears twofold: On the one hand it reveals the white gaze, and on the other it goes beyond it to present those possibilities that it cannot host.
Visiting Fellow Tina Campt and Rolando Vázquez Melken in conversation at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, June 5, 2024. Photo: Maarten Nauw.
TC: I’ve recently been in conversation with an amazing photographer named Keisha Scarville. We curated a photography guest room for the online forum Der Greif, where we asked artists to submit images in response to a series of prompts that speak to this question in interesting ways. The prompts we gave were: How would you visualize darkness in a way that understands it as emitting its own forms of light? How might we image darkness as its own form of illumination? We were asking folks to move beyond associating light only with whiteness. For when we focus on light as white, the effect is to blend out finer details, especially the subtlety and sophistication of shadow and darker hues.
This is one of the things I find so compelling about the work of Carrie Mae Weems, which I discussed in my lecture. Similarly, somebody like Roy DeCarava uses shadow to evoke intricate details and forms of intimacy that aren’t revealed when we think about throwing light on a scene. The relationship between Black communities and darkness is deeply intimate and I’m really drawn to artists who are exploring this. Weems does this quite powerfully in her series All the Boys (2017). It goes well beyond what she is trying to get us to understand about the state of serial Black loss; she is trying to bring us into a world of shadow that is uncomfortable for many but is also a site of survival for others.
RVM: The world of shadow, the space of Blackness, the “light of darkness” has possibilities that cannot be reduced to the throwing off light, to the spectacle of the contemporary. The thinking of light as that which belongs to the white space of representation cannot be separated from the logic of the fungibility of life, from the reduction of life to the commodity. It is in the darkness or in the shadow where the possibilities of emergence lie. Hence these aestheses are completely other, in their movement, from the aesthetics of the contemporary in its Western tradition, which indeed are about the throwing off light, about the power of representation, and not the logic of mourning, remembering, and dignifying what has been under erasure.
TC: What you’re saying goes directly to the poetics of relation that Édouard Glissant wants us to think about on a fundamental level—specifically, that the requirement to be in relation to another person is not transparency. To be in relation to another does not require knowing everything about them. The poetics of relations is about accepting the opacity of the other as that which you don’t know about them, and that neither they nor you can be reduced to one thing. We must thus move away from illumination as knowledge, and when we do that then you have a completely different set of circumstances.
Here we can go back to Weems’s work. She’s working with the same idea. She’s trying to get us to understand, on the one hand, that a lack of distinction has endangered too many Black folks on the street, yet to identify us is still a process of endangerment. How does one conjure that in a nondidactic way within an art project? I was absolutely honest when I said that I have for many years been hesitant to write about Weems’s work because it is such a formidable body of work. She is a formidable mind and her capacity to challenge us at multiple levels is daunting. Her work issues us an invitation. It is an invitation that she is perpetually offering us: to participate in a critical reflection on the power of art that not only shows us something, it also make us feel something.
And even though this body of work was created before the pandemic, she continues to produce work that creates spaces for grief, mourning, and lament in a way that is not about redemption, but is a call and an appeal. It is an appeal for redress and humanity within that redress. It’s something I’ve also been discussing in our seminar: the moments when grief becomes grievance and the mode of transitioning between the two. Judith Butler encourages us to think about the moment when the person you are grieving isn’t recognized and won’t be recognized, because they are refused recognition. It’s the moment when one is denied the acknowledgment of their grief and what they have lost. It transforms into grievance and becomes a demand for recognition, restitution, and redress. It’s in that pivotal moment between grieving and appealing, insisting on a complaint that holds someone accountable, that one can catalyze grief toward other ends. For me, that’s one of the most compelling dimensions of Weems’s work: how, through its delicate beauty, it’s able to push us through grief—not to get to another place, though, but instead in ways that allow us to mobilize it while allowing those we have lost to remain present.
Presentation of Visiting Fellow Tina at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, June 5, 2024. Photo: Maarten Nauw.
RVM: Looking at her work through you, I find this powerful beauty in the balance between a very strong denunciation of violence (revealing the structures of violence, such as architecture and police photography), while safeguarding this opacity and the possibility of dignity and mourning—in the way she effectuates this transformation from viewing to witnessing. What does it mean when an artwork can transform a viewer into a witness? Instead of assuming a passive viewer that is just consuming a representation to acquire cultural capital, she calls on us. We are suddenly called to bear witness and to acknowledge the opacity that safeguards the life and the dignity of the other person. I think it’s a compelling work that manages to fight against the white gaze’s demand for transparency, the demand that everything should be legible and consumable for the viewer. It is a work that safeguards the singularity, the dignity, and the history of the person, to safeguard an afterlife that has been denied by this dominant structure.
TC: To me, one of the ways she does that is with her ability to render Black interiority. Even in a body of work like the Kitchen Table Series (1990), where she is facing us much of the time—the deep interiority, the thoughtfulness, the fragility, and the vulnerability that she’s able to display. In Weems’s work the difference between witnessing and observing is that to be a witness you have to do some form of labor. Observing is effortless. To witness is to be confronted. You are not necessarily being required to do something, but you have the option to decide. Here you open yourself up to the consequences of that decision because you are implicated or complicit in the scene that you are witnessing.
By exposing us to the depths of Black interiority there is already an investment in the depth of this subject that requires us to position ourselves in relation to them. She does that sometimes by way of the camera angle or by way of the gaze being directed at us or a gaze that she’s soliciting of us. She is constantly positioning viewers in relationship to the work through the multiple narratives that are unfolding within them.
RVM: I think this possibility of becoming a witness and knowing one is implicated is crucial. It is a way to overcome the indifference of the consumer, the viewer. . . The public that just consumes is in a “safe place”—[they are] in a position of abstraction, indolence[; they are] even able to enjoy the spectacle of the other. That is another important element of the history of the white gaze: turning the life of others into a spectacle. Weems’s and your work help us put in brackets that position of entitlement and calls on all of us to become witnesses; it requires that we acknowledge that, as María Lugones would put it, we are all implicated. We are all [positioned] somewhere along the colonial difference; the detached position of abstraction has become untenable. This is, for me, one of the fundamental contributions of Black feminist methodologies: the demand that we stop assuming that we can be detached observers [so that we can] acknowledge our distinct positionality. Only when we are positioned can we become witnesses.
Q&A with Audience
Audience member 1: Thanks for the amazing lecture. It’s been really transformative. I’ve been following your work, but I’ve also recently been reading [Campt’s book] A Black Gaze[; it] is interesting reading it within the context of the Netherlands. Most of the BIPOC photographers working on the scene are still in the phase of representation that is really thinking about even putting the Black body in the frame without violence. What is interesting to me about the Black gaze—you are arguing that it is beyond the lens of representation. You don’t only represent Black people to encounter themselves in the image, but you represent Black people to be transformed, armed by their own encounter in a given image. It reminds me of issues of identity politics, and how artistic practices are organized within a European context. It’s a very pivotal moment to have this conversation here, because it feels like an invitation for BIPOC practitioners, artists, photographers, and researchers to start to move beyond representation and get to a place where there is a call to action.
TC: It’s both an invitation and a provocation, and to me it’s a beautiful provocation because there is a moment when one feels called to make something visible, and that is representation. But there’s a moment when the hegemony of a particular kind of representation needs to be challenged and needs to be extended. This is Rolando’s point about co-optation and commercialization. It’s not a representation anymore. It becomes a stereotype, a commodity. The challenge of moving beyond representation is, however, to think about the stakes of your intervention, and the implications of it, because it won’t always be accepted. [There is a need] to be able to embrace the discomfort that people might experience, including for Black folks. I always think it’s really important in any such intervention not to make it simply because we think it’s time, but rather because we have thought through what the stakes and the implications are and [whether] we think it’s worth it. Are you ready to have the conversation that you are provoking? Because that’s the other thing—you will be called upon to have a conversation. Again, that’s not always comfortable, and the labor of witnessing and challenging representation will have to happen on both ends. That is one of the reasons why I have the deepest respect for artists who are making these kinds of interventions, because they are simultaneously saying, “Okay, I will have the conversation as well.”
Audience member 2: Thank you so much for this wonderful talk. I was very moved by this continuum that you evoked between darkness and Blackness semantically, politically, chromatically—in many different senses. I wondered what happens if we think about darkness, not in visual terms, but in haptic terms. Darkness that is not something that can be seen, but something that can be felt. I’m thinking mostly about the work by Roger Caillois, but maybe also André Lepecki. I’m wondering what happens if we think about darkness as something related to space, something that lands on our skin that is material and can be felt. What, then, becomes the relationship between darkness and Blackness?
TC: That’s a beautiful question. Thank you for that. You’re leading me into my other obsession, which is sound. When we think about darkness, I think that one of the ways in which we make contact is sonically: What do we feel in and through darkness? What does darkness feel like? Put differently, it’s a question about how darkness resonates. Does it resonate softly or loudly? Everyone knows that in the absence of sight [you rely] upon other sensory registers to orient you, and very often that is sound. It’s an unspoken moment when you orient yourself in space by way of how close or far away even the snap of your finger resonates. You can reach out to touch, but there’s a lot you can’t grasp. Instead, just by raising your voice, you know how big or how small a room is. In trying to answer your question about shifting our thinking about darkness away from the visual and into other sensory realms, to me, the haptic overlaps with the aural, because we orient ourselves and our sense of space not only by what we are in contact with, but the resonance of what we hear actually gives us a sense of the contours of a space.
Audience member 3: Hi. In the last couple of days, I was rereading a book by Guy Cools from 2021 called Performing Mourning: Laments in Contemporary Art. There he differentiates very specifically between grieving and morning. Mourning being the process of moving through grief, which you also alluded to. I’m curious whether you see it in the same way because you talk about grief, loss, and mourning. I’m wondering if Weems’s work would be a performance of mourning, a performance also of collective mourning, of bringing a community along or inviting a community along in the process.
TC: That’s a great point. My answer is that I don’t talk about mourning, because I feel like I’ve been denied the possibility of mourning, and indeed many Black communities are denied the possibility of mourning. We are confronted with an extraordinary set of serial moments of grief that cannot be turned into mourning, often by virtue of their seriality and the fact of the rapidity with which they are happening. Which was certainly the case for me personally and why I used it as the starting point for my new project—specifically, the fact that I wrote five eulogies in three years. To me, the place that mourning was supposed to manifest for me ended up being raw and unadulterated fury. And I think that is also something we witnessed during the pandemic and that we continue to experience: both catastrophic losses and, alongside them, catastrophic levels of grief.
The mourning practice that I was not able to access, and which was withheld from me and others, came from the fact that we couldn’t participate in the ritual practices of mourning. It was crucial to reclaim the practice of mourning, and this was existentially necessary. That is part of what I’m trying to figure out in this book—specifically, how contemporary art enables us to process grief and mourning.
Audience member 4: I was thinking about how Blackness cannot be incorporated in the racial regime of aesthetics and how I should then think about this position of the “aesthetics of darkness.” I’ve recently been schooled by Rizvana Bradley.
TC: I was just going to say you’re referencing Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva, who are explicitly engaging the idea of anteaesthetics. But you also put two things on the table that I don’t think are necessarily coterminous: the relationship between race and aesthetics, and the relationship between darkness and aesthetics. I think that Rizvana and Ferreira da Silva have masterfully deconstructed the possibilities and the impossibilities of a Black aesthetic. What I find so brilliant about that analysis is that it’s not about what would have to happen for aesthetics to be able to contend with Blackness, but how aesthetics would have to be fundamentally reconfigured in order to be capacious enough to embrace Black life. Darkness is something else. Darkness is, to me, about a spatial relationship to light. Or a spatial relationship to the absence of light. How do we orient ourselves in relation to this? Again, that’s one of the reasons I’m attracted to people’s work, like this particular series by Weems. I teach DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life every year in order to have students and have myself think about what it means to live in shadow—and how shadow can illuminate and force us to see differently. Again, it’s about a different relationship to light and space. I’m challenged by that, but I’m also thrilled by it because I’m trying to think about our relation to one another as not being determined by direct illumination, which goes back to the question about opacity. What can I withhold, and how is my withholding an attempt to connect with you? How does that which you withhold require me to do the work of compassion and connection that ultimately creates a sense of relation?
About the Authors
Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She holds a joint appointment between the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts. Campt is lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She began her career as a historian of modern Germany, earning a PhD in history from Cornell University. She is the author of Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), Listening to Images (2017), and A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2021).
Rolando Vázquez Melken is professor of Post/Decolonial Theories and Literatures, with a focus on the Global South, at the department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. He is a teacher, decolonial thinker, and a regularly invited keynote speaker on decoloniality at academic and cultural institutions. He is the author of Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary (2020).
