My Junior Paper in Harvard Art History
HAA 98CR: Junior Tutorial in Race & Aesthetics, Prof. Jennifer Roberts, Instructor Natasha Coleman.
As promised in my recent roundup, I’m sharing my final paper from Harvard’s History of Art & Architecture Junior Tutorial in Race & Aesthetics for Quiet Patrons. This paper explores Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being and builds on Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism, in its argument for reading the Mythic Being as offering an “aesthetic theory of personified abstraction,” that prefigured “abstract personhood” in scholarship.
“This conceptual inheritance carries forward into the present moment, where black woman performance continues to draw on modes of abstraction and avatar logic.
Consider Nara Smith’s viral performances of a typified black femininity and domesticity or Nicki Minaj’s outspoken and vengeful alter ego, Roman Zolanski, a ‘homosexual male from London, England.’” (Gaines, 24)
I am arguing for a particular theory of black abstraction in performance by attending to Piper’s I am the Locus series as a self-consciously abstract series whose documents underscore the abstraction inherent to Piper’s performance itself.
I situate this work as a philosophical innovation to be built upon in later theories of “abstract personhood,” and highlight the potential relationship between her work and the theories of Hortense Spillers in particular.
“Against the innovations of the Mythic Being, these avatars might be read as black performance abstractions through which a particular kind of intersectional agency might be located not in the end of identity or in a clear articulation of its overlap, but in its clearly artificial interruption, scrambling, and performance into abstraction.” (Gaines, 24)
I am uploading with the comments of my brilliant instructor, Natasha Coleman, such that you might understand my learning process and all the ways I am still growing in my academic writing and art historical study.
Live from nerd city,
LG.
