People have a tendency to collection. I have a theory that this desire to stick to things is more true in times of crisis, but lately I have started to believe that we also have a tendency to a crisis itself. This makes disconnecting the impulse to collect and the challenges of time a fairly impossible task. In her new book, Black in blues: how a color tells the story of my people (2024), Scholar Imani Perry draws up the intertwined story of two shifting and impossible collections: The Color Blue and The Nature of Blackness. For Perry, Blue is the core of a fundamental understanding of human stories: in her words: “There was a time for black, but not for blues.”
Blue projects have fascinated writers over time. A few remarkable examples: Maggie Nelson’s 2009 BluetsWilliam H. Gass’s 1975 On Being Blue: a philosophical examinationand the novel by Toni Morrison from 1970 The blueest eye. Fred Moten wrote a contemplation about blue and black for the exhibition of the Pulitzer Art Foundation 2017 Black BlackCompiled by Glenn Ligon, who also offered meditations about the colors and their associations. (The exhibition attracted his title of Ellsworth Kelly’s monumental work with the same nameThe one forever hangs in the Pulitzer’s Tadao Ando building in St. Louis.) Musicians such as Duke Ellington and Nina Simone play The Blues. Picasso went through a blue period.
I went through my own blue period As an artist in 2016 and 2017, in which I both suffered from an uncomfortable case of politically motivated agoraphobia and collected more than 190 images of different shades of blue, recorded by photographing uninterrupted squares of Sky on cloudy days. This project, which I have entitled #Sky #nofilterFinished far beyond the photographic. It eventually appeared in varied forms such as a quiet work of video art that shifts through my blues for a little more than 34 minutes; a performance secture about the nature of sustainable during uncertain political times that was later published as a capital letter; A series of studies that investigate different ways to translate digital blues into physical materials; and the final version of the project: a public sculpture in the form of an analematic sundial, Commissioned by and permanently installed in the California African American Museum In Los Angeles. The sundial uses the human body as the gnomon, or the shadow -casting object that tells, where two participants are needed for a complete reading: one to leave the shade and the other, and the other to the text From the panel to be read to which the shadow floats closest. The sundial as a marker of time was my attempt to use color and emotion, two volatile realities.
For Perry, as far as I’m concerned, the process of collecting blues is a step in the direction of compiling memory. This collection impulse enables us to go beyond interconnected crises in the past and present, so that we need the materials we need to build a different future. “One of the remedies that we study that Black Life is diligent recovery in the light of forgotten, hidden or immersed. We make instructions together and discover hidden stories, “she writes in one of the interconnected vignettes of the book. “This work is important because the work of remembering is also the work to make value apply to what and who is reminded. It is important to know [Thomas] Commeraw’s name and cherish his work. And yet it is also important to remember his personal adversity, even in a life of performance. And all shattered stories and names that will never be restored. ‘
I appreciate the recognition of complexity within its explanation: that the construction of the memory is also soaked with at least any consciousness of everything that has been forgotten. Commeraw, a once -loud black ceramist who is known for making stoneware, is reminded by his persistent objects, but not necessarily for the details of his life. In my own project, the expression “Forgotten is essential to survive” both on a panel of the sundial and within the Chapbook, a work anchored that was fundamentally about the collection of two of the most short -lived things of all of them: the color of the Sky at a specific moment of a specific day and emotions. Business and meaningful items tied to time and subject to interpretation, often over before we even caught them. Perry’s memories everywhere Black in blues All more complex realities. In every phase there is an essential split that occurs: two poles between the remembered and forgotten. Two more between the forgotten-by-access and the forgotten-on-purphose. Two more between targeted forgotten as protection, and forgotten in a targeted way as violence. In these increasingly smaller disruptions, the categories of black and blue are less and less monolithic and even more interconnected.
My favorite moments of Black in blues Come when Perry illuminates certain truths about value. In the color area, the term “value” refers to relative lightness or darkness, the position of the color between “pure white” and “pure black”. For a visual artist, the concept and reproduction of value in a certain sense is a way to indicate depth. Perry increases this value metaphor and lets us with stories about blue as connected to the violence of ownership: the sale of blue in Yoruba Marketplaces transformed when the sellers of Blue can be sold themselves. Elsewhere she describes how the color blue of rarity goes (indigo, lapis lazuli) to common use on the basis of practical necessity (denim production during the days of slavery in the United States and Union Army uniforms reused as politicaluniforms during the reconstruction period). She returns to Poland: blue -eyed to blue -black. The height of the air and the depth of the ocean. Triumph and tragedy. Blue and both possibility and limitation.
An extensive well -investigated volume, some parts of the text feel speculative, with regard to both style and economy. For the history of history that cannot be known – partly because of their deliberate erases – Perry deeds of speculative fiction uses to weave a story that empathically connects us with the experiences of black people whose future, like they are to varying degrees Stay, traded for white economic speculation. Perry travels from the Nigerian market to the American slave market and introduces a series of questions and descriptions that have now brought us into the mindset of an indigo-rejected textile trader in the process of process sold, the shocking transformation from seller to object. Perry makes or complicate an idea of ownership and uses this description as a way to recommend the history. But the nature of writing, in contrast to other forms of use (trade, consumption, etc.), is that it offers control that does not reduce the described source. Perry writes to use a complex story about shifting blues and offers us an open gift.
Black in blues Is not a trip with a resolution. The state of blackness or of something of the normativity is in the past days of dei-back tracking, the dreaded cancellation of the black history month (or a “diversity month”), became more and more loaded, and constantly interconnected threats for both public health And the climate crisis. Yet we must continue to exist. Towards the end of the book Perry writes: ‘I think – and I am not sure if this is true, but it seems good to me – that the most important preservation may not be a certain place or thing, but a sensitivity that lies in blues, That of life as a protest. It can even stay when the recordings relegate and build buildings. Spiritual sustainability is a natural condition for people at the bottom of the empire. ”
The state is shifting. Language changes meaning based on use or out of necessity. Heaven gets back through sunrise, weather, ash or twilight. The work, both to describe and to repair, continues.
Black in blues: how a color tells the story of my people (2024) By Imani Perry is published by ECCO and is available online and through independent booksellers.
