UC Berkeley

How the Black Body Bends: Sensorial Distortions in Black Contemporary Art, 1970s to 2016 foregrounds the predominant use of distortion within the work of and much scholarship on black contemporary artists from the late 1970s to 2016. I inquire what non-visual representations of blackness surface in the work of black female artists when refracted through the lens of distortion and how these non-visual representations allude to alternative epistemologies of “seeing” both blackness and the visual realm. I contend that the black feminist artists of my project enact material, formal, and figurative distortions to expose the relationship between the visual realm and other senses; and by so doing, they reveal, and often subvert, important non-visual tactics of racial and gendered objectification. In other words, my theoretical explication of distortion inaugurates new approaches for evincing themes, forms, and artistic strategies otherwise overshadowed by ocularcentric paradigms of the visual realm. Over the course of my five chapters, I imbricate the rigorous, object-based analysis of art historical research with the methods of black studies, which centers an alertness to the social and cultural histories that underline creative production, viewership, and display.

In my first chapter, I theoretically situate the historical juncture of blackness, the sensorial, and distortion within foundational texts in black studies and art history. Chapter two turns to video installations by Simone Leigh (b. 1967) and Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972) to explore prominent moments of sonic occlusion within their work. Veiling aural resonances of the black womxn on screen, Leigh and Mutu draw attention to how racialized and gendered soundscapes—such as the breath and scream—are deployed as objects for the production of other human subjects. I argue both artists distort the boundaries between the visual and the sonic to inquire how black womxn index themselves in dominant visual culture. In chapter three, I turn to proprioception and argue that this unanticipated sensory modality—responsible for understanding the body in space—structures the visual realm despite its reduced consideration in scholarship on visuality. Examining the ink drawings of Senam Okudzeto (b. 1972) and the sculptural installations of Maren Hassinger (b. 1947) I name specific signifiers of proprioception—(im)balance, a localization of bodily parts, and an attentiveness to embodied sensation— to demonstrate how visual-spatial distortions double as embodied experiences of place-making, recontextualizing themes of placelessness in black diasporic art. In my final chapter I turn to the interoceptive system, the second unanticipated sensory register of my dissertation, which discerns the state of internal organs. In this chapter, I look at the paintings of Christina Quarles (b. 1985) and Tschabalala Self (b. 1990) to explore how both artists use acrylic paint to erase the internal bodies of their figures and distort the perspectival planes of their paintings, thereby producing a unique figurative abstraction that recast restrictive historical and social politics of the body.