Beyond Real(ism)--Review of Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form & Social Critique in African American Culture

Beyond Real(ism): Review of Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture by Phillip Brian Harper Reviewed by Sasha Panaram | @SashaPanaram | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
During the 1950s and 1960s, after World War II, the United States found themselves enmeshed in an extended conflict with the Soviet Union in what became known as the Cold War. As tensions between the two groups increased, the United States employed a variety of tactics to solidify their position as a global superpower. It was at this time that the CIA covertly put their money behind a most unexpected “weapon” to promote U.S. creativity: Abstract Expressionism. For more than 20 years, the CIA helped foster American Abstract Expressionist artwork – like that of Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko – to provide evidence of U.S. intellectual innovation, cultural capital, and artistic freedom. The Socialist Realist art and propaganda of the Soviet Union could hardly compete with the new wave art taking shape in the U.S.
While Phillip Brian Harper, the author of Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture (New York University Press, 2015; 256), doesn’t refer to the CIA sponsored support of Abstract Expressionism directly, it is difficult not to think of this moment and what it meant for U.S. cultural production in light of Harper’s own work in his text to reclaim an aesthetic mode that privileges abstractionist` methods over realism in African American culture. As Harper explains in his Introduction, an “…abstractionist aesthetics crucially recognizes that any artwork whatsoever is definitionally abstract in relation to the world in which it emerges, regardless of whether or not it features the nonreferentiality typically understood to constitute aesthetic abstraction per se” (2). Harper maintains that abstractionist art calls attention to a constructed artificiality that prompts those who encounter it to not only speculate about the “naturalness” of the artwork itself, but also the social world to which it gestures (2).
Written in a self-consciously essayist form, Harper’s theoretical text achieves an unparalleled fluidity whereby he rigorously assess how different art forms – visual culture, music, and literature – engage with abstractionist aesthetics. The question that undergirds his entire study is: “how can a work clearly enough ground itself in the real-world racial order to register as black while at the same time clearly enough disassociating itself from lived reality as to register as productively abstractionist” (9)? As Harper highlights the limitations particular art forms face while engaging with abstractionism, he reveals that nonconventional literary works – like experimental poetry or prose – that productively defamiliarize or denounce narrative realism are oftentimes sidelined in African American literary canons (12). In a move similar to Kenneth W. Warren in What Was African American Literature?, Harper pushes for a more expansive definition of African American literature while also advocating for a different aesthetic mode that he firmly believes will give way to new forms of critical productivity.
Chapter One, “Black Personhood in the Maw of Abstraction”, considers how preoccupations in visual art over proper or “proper realist” black representation thwarts productive engagements with abstractionist art (9). By examining criticisms launched at Kara Walker’s famed silhouette cutouts and performances directed by Vanessa Beecroft, Harper emphasizes the strained relationship between African American culture and abstractionism that manifests most clearly in repeated concerns about appropriate racial portrayal.
Abstraction, which Harper acknowledges has historically posed problems for black people insofar as it rendered them inhuman and excluded them from national conceptions of personhood, is an art form understandably viewed with apprehension and even resistance in African American circles. Consequently, there is a tendency to align or assert the realist features in even the most blatantly abstractionist works as a measure of self-preservation. However, Harper posits that this inclination to problematize that which compromises the real or tends toward the fantastic – even when identity politics are at stake – denies abstractionist art the elements that allow for its very existence.
While Harper shows through his own reading of Walker and meditations on Lorna Simpson and Ellen Gallagher’s artwork how contemporary art can achieve abstractionist effects, he is wary of this medium particularly because it is subject, as he says, to too many uncontrollable elements including “the predilections of the individual viewer” (63). Visual cultures failure to fully engage abstractionist aesthetics compels Harper to turn to another art form that might take up this challenge more successfully: music.  
Taking us through the rhythms and rhymes of everyone from Billie Holiday to Louis Armstrong to Joseph “King” Oliver to Cecil Taylor and more, Harper reminds us that to really listen to black music we must first learn how to read it; how to trace complex genealogies that sway, split, sample, and shake up ever-expansive musical archives. As Harper interrogates how black music became the quintessence of black culture or “the blackest of all the arts” in Chapter Two, “Historical Cadence and the Nitty-Gritty Effect”, he turns to the work of Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka to unearth how jazz manifests in and inspires black literature (114). The more he contemplates the relationship between music and narrative, the more Harper realizes that black music isn’t always as abstract as it initially appears. The more we try to determine the abstractionist qualities in black music, the more we rely on narrative to explain the subjectivity that registers to our ears as black.
Chapter Three then fittingly considers how narrative functions as the optimal site where an abstractionist aesthetics may flourish. Entitled “Telling It Slant”, Chapter Three engages with print prose – both conventional and nonconventional – to see how writers including Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and others subvert literary realism. Ultimately Harper turns to experimental literature like that of Nathaniel Mackey and Claudia Rankine to show that “the real itself should be vigorously countered, in the interest of a future that is better than the present” (160).
When Harper expands what we understand as African American literature by embracing innovative forms of storytelling that actively subvert that classified as “real,” he asserts that his critical work does more than alter reading practices, but fundamentally change how we operate in the world on a day-to-day basis; how we conceive of possible futures.
“The Literary Advantage”, which serves as the book’s Coda, both reinforces how experimental prose and poetry can achieve the abstractionist aesthetics Harper chases after and reminds readers by way of analyzing the film, Precious, that movies, too, can function as useful sites of abstraction.
As I finished Abstractionist Aesthetics, I began to think about what its intended implications might look like if I took Harper’s call to vigorously counter the real with the utmost seriousness. My mind didn’t turn to literature initially but to the very real events that marked the 2015 calendar year: Sandra Bland’s death in prison, the non-indictment of the officers who killed Tamir Rice, the bullets shot in the historic AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, the last breaths that marked the final moments of Tanisha Anderson’s life in Cleveland, Ohio, and the young black girl assaulted in a classroom at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina.
As I learned about each of these attacks on black life, I found myself completing the same task albeit with a different object every time: reading. The texts I encountered did not necessarily address death explicitly nor did they always deal with the realism Harper actively subverts yet they were mediated by the instances of loss that surrounded me. While these “real” events are not discussed in Harper’s book they do intimately concern his project.
Often in moments of persistent black death, it seems near impossible to think about futurity when life is so abruptly surveilled and destroyed. But if we embrace Harper’s abstractionist aesthetics, while we cannot (nor should not) lose sight of anti-black violence, we can begin to think beyond the scope of what is possible; we can begin to read (and write) new worlds that reflect the futures we hope to one day inhabit. We can begin to live again.
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Sasha Panaram is Ph.D. student in English at Duke University.  A Georgetown University alumna, her scholarly interests are in black diasporic literature, black feminisms, and visual cultures.