A talk presented at the Southeastern College Art Conference as part of the panel “Physical Trace and Conceptual Strategy,” organized by Hallie Scott, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Chad Allison. This session explored the persistence of the physical in global conceptual artistic practice from Marcel Duchamp to the international Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s and 70s to global contemporary conceptual and social practices.
My talk focused on a lesser known narrative of Conceptual art: its relevance for African American artists. My paper examines the work of David Hammons and Charles Gaines, two black artists who, from the late 1960s onward, sought to decouple blackness and visuality, resisting the cultural tenor in the wake of the black arts movement that placed a premium on the representation of black bodies and the black experience. They reinvigorated strategies of Conceptual art, as its criticality waned in the mid-1970s, in order to subtly interrogate the concepts and psychology of race. Gaines’ numerical systems, which situate the sublime within cognition and perception, and Hammons’ body prints and Duchampian objects worked against the “the black aesthetic” to reveal fractures in Conceptualist orthodoxy and to assert blackness itself as a conceptual practice. For Gaines, drawing by hand was a way of abstracting the role of the body while preserving its physical trace; for Hammons, imprinting his own body onto paper embraced the same method to affectively different ends. In both cases, the body becomes a kind of technology rather than an aestheticized object to be looked at, identified, and thus subject to racialization.
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