The curator of Unit’s group exhibition In Praise of Black Errantry, Indie A. Choudhury (The Courtauld Institute of Art, London), lays out the wayward themes that underpin the exhibition, presented at the 60th Venice Biennale.
The Errant Imaginary
Indie A. Choudhury, April 2024
“The question is how more fully to merge that errant magic with our own most human desires. Addressing this question is our improvisational, revolutionary task.”
– Fred Moten
“What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?”
– Toni Morrison
“So, I have labored to create the kind of narrative able to excavate the beauty of a wrong turn and regard the forms of social life opened by refusal.”
– Saidiya Hartman
The Black radical imagination is an errant one. The Martinique-born French writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant proposed errantry as a mode of freedom and resistance, evoking a spiritual or purposeful wandering beyond national borders or the limits of exile. In refashioning a language for a poetics of Relation with the world, errantry became a key constituent of Glissant’s own imaginary. Taken from two roots – errer (to wander) and errrur (error) – a deliberate misalliance between them engenders Glissant’s conception of errance but, as he reminds us, “the root is not important. Movement is.” Language itself must become errant; countering firstly, monolingual, and more widely, monocultural ways of conceiving the world. Errant thought begets multiplicity, dissolving subject-object divisions and the boundaries imposed by conquest. If Relation equates to perpetual exchange, “in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other”, errantry erodes the hierarchies that negate this potential kinship and, further, affords an extended formation of a self that constitutes a worldling or “totality of the world”.
Errantry defines the collective formation of the Black diaspora and the possible conditions for its imaginary:
this is because, in the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (which is no longer traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this – and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides.
As much as Relation is “not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge”, there is a recognition that the world in totalite can never be fully known or shared, as this could lapse into totalitarianism. In ascribing errantry as a poetics, it becomes both the method of knowing the world and the process of creating it. For Glissant, this is a productive resistance between striving for understanding and the acceptance of a greater totality which holds the world in Relation. This productive resistance also affords Glissant’s slippage between words and meaning to engage and perceive the world in new ways. In taking the very terms through which the Black diaspora have been made errant through transatlantic enslavement and recasting it as a trope of possibility, errantry becomes a creative, generative force.
Glissant was cognisant of errantry’s archaic connotations as a classical trope, and this fed into his thinking about the literary epic as a form of transformative quest – as well as where one may be waylaid and driven off course. Glissant cites the Odyssey, the Iliad, African epics, and the Old Testament, plus his mentor Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), which may be extended to the epic wanderings of Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) or Romare Bearden’s series Black Odyssey (1977). Yet, for Glissant, he distinguishes that errantry is not aimless wandering, perpetual exile, or losing oneself in the world: “black reality is the truth of multiplicity, the truth of the step toward each other.” Glissant begins with the imaginary. Errantry opens up alternative ways of thinking and perceiving, affording creative disorder and the reordering of narratives, histories, and temporalities. All roots (routes) lead to the imaginary – but to do so, one must be errant. As a mode of survival, errantry infers fugitivity as well as improvisation. Underlying the emergence of Black modernity, errantry has engendered the dissonance of jazz, the politics of refusal, and ultimately, revolution. The terms of errantry may be reinscribed as waywardness, disobedience, or refusal but there is also a liberatory potential in the wrong turn and radical wandering to imagine otherwise, to err.
The Afro-diasporic artists presented in this exhibition take up errantry as a radical strategy that defies boundaries and advocates spontaneity and experimentation beyond cultural fixity or political containment. Spanning different themes, the exhibition considers how artists have refuted conventional codes of representation or pushed against the constraints of formal rules of style, colour, medium, or genre towards technical innovation, artistic evolution, and liberation. The poetics of errantry affords a counter-discourse about Black cultural production, raising critical questions. How has errantry been employed as an aesthetic and political strategy? How do incidental encounters of the itinerant, or the arbitrary inform technical and formal innovation, as well as other freedoms? How do the terms of disobedience and waywardness figure in the art of the Black diaspora?
Winston Branch’s errancy resides in his abstraction. While colour is his subject matter, even in earlier works such as Dancers (1968), painted while a student at the Slade School of Art, figuration gives way to abstraction. In The Coming (2024), colour must give way to light. This is a constant refrain in Branch’s practice but, as the title invokes and the work performs, colour here billows, clashes, contests, and finally, arrives in almost atomic, explosive fashion. One is accustomed in Branch’s work to measured considerations of colour, but in this work the use of black and electric pinks against the life colours of, green, ultramarine, and luminescent yellow feels like a battle between two domains of epic proportions. Branch’s dramatic scale and use of light is reminiscent of the Hudson Valley School or John Martin, in whose works light breaks through landscape, often vying against each other with spiritual or prelapsarian overtones. Layered against the vivid pinks moving vertically from light salmon to coral and hot magenta, the coal black is less cloud than cosmic; reverberating with a density like a black hole, referring to Branch’s title; suggesting that this is life in formation.
Branch’s life has been defined by comings and goings as a requisite for discovery and innovation in his work, and he acknowledges that physical stasis can equate to creative stagnation: “if you stand still, you get your feet webbed up. If you keep moving, you keep living and invigorating yourself because you’re pressing new horizons.” Branch is the quintessential artist-journeyman. This is not unusual for an artist of the Black diaspora from his generation, yet his movements are markedly global and unconstrained by divisions between the West and the rest of the world, and he has been “remarkably peripatetic”. “The Caribbean gave me an opportunity to show my work, because it’s important for an artist to show. [International travel] gave me an opportunity to show in Ecuador, Argentina, [other countries in] Latin America, [and] Santo Domingo [capital of the Dominican Republic].” This is Branch addressing his work primarily in the Global South, although he has lived and worked in the United States and Europe. Moving into full abstraction since 1982, his practice has been marked by colour that is palpable, yet resistant to being defined by any single cultural tradition. For Branch, colour too must resist stagnation by remaining equally peripatetic.
Hank Willis Thomas, The Telescope of Eternity (2023)
A different type and scale of worldmaking is manifest in Hank Willis Thomas’s The Telescope of Eternity (2023). The title cites James Weldon Johnson’s prayer poem, “Listen, Lord – A Prayer” from his collection God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) composed in the Black sermon tradition:
Put his eye to the telescope of eternity,
And let him look upon the paper walls of time.
Lord, turpentine his imagination,
Put perpetual motion in his arms,
Fill him full of the dynamite of thy power,
Anoint him all over with the oil of thy salvation.
And set his tongue on fire.
The power of Johnson’s invocation to the creative force is clear (“Lord, turpentine his imagination”) and, as with Glissant, all things are forged in the imagination. Working across sculpture, screenprinting, photography, mixed media, and installation, Thomas has called himself a “visual cultural archeologist”, and his practice has always been heavily focused on the production, materiality, and circulation of images. Similarly, The Telescope of Eternity deploys his interest in retroreflective material so that, under a flashlight, myriad collaged Black faces make up his composition which, under natural light, depicts the earth as viewed through a telescope by a Black silhouetted figure. The figure gazes at a view of the world showing the African continent, his right arm raised above him. This figure is also a quotation from the 1927 edition of God’s Trombones, which included illustrations by Aaron Douglas. While the Douglas citation is a single figure, the capaciousness of the retroreflective medium reveals a multitude that references Romare Bearden’s collages. This continues Bearden’s influence on Thomas in his companion series I’ve Known Rivers (2023) inspired by Langston Hughes’ 1921 poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. For Thomas, this multiplicity challenges linear narratives: “we are taught history in a very linear way but the reality is that people have been moving around for millennia, and each person has their own story. So, there’s never a grand narrative about what happened.” Here is Glissant’s productive resistance between an errant figure who seeks to know the world yet intrinsically understands that its totality may remain hidden.
Like Thomas, Phoebe Boswell’s Transit Terminal (2014/2020) moves between viewing the singular figure against the multitude and the interchange of seeing each through alternate perspectives. In Boswell’s case, this is spatial rather than light-based, requiring the viewer to move around and interact with her installation. Her interdisciplinary practice makes her something of a visual anthropologist also, ranging across “upheavals, dualities, geographies, kinships, and silences” of migration, moving between a lack and a yearning for home out of an errant necessity. Transit Terminal is a grouping of single charcoal black figures drawn on a white background upon totems cast in the exact dimensions of an adult coffin. The figures are turned away from the viewer, as if in transit and in refusal of our gaze. A single bird is caught in flight on the black reverse of each totem; viewed together, they portray a flock in a transitory moment of flight, just before they migrate out of view by leaving the physical caskets binding them to the earth – alluding to both a material and spiritual reincarnation. As the title cleverly elides, the viewer is placed in the position of considering who and what are terminal or in transit, underscored by the stark either/or positions of the black or white designations. Whether as singular pieces or collectively, this matrix of possibility enables us to consider each through a form of physical transmigration that signals release for Boswell’s human figures.
Boswell’s portraits are rendered in acutely detailed observation, almost negating the fugitive nature of charcoal and solidifying their presence. As a group, the figures have a shared commonality in their turned backs, representing a solidarity of refusal in their dissent to be viewed. As much as they constitute a solid presence, there is an absence in their blank horizon. One figure carries a mobile phone, signalling the hope of communication in a larger context, but his lower limbs are left undrawn in a moment of erasure. A female child stands politely, feet together, yet the large expanse of white space around her suggests she is not being fully seen or heard by the viewer. As much as these turned figures negotiate between visibility and refusal, absence and erasure, Boswell mediates our own viewership of both – not fully seeing the body frontally while, nonetheless, metaphorically looking through the body to a possibility of transformation. This mediation between the physical and spiritual life asks for a reassessment of how we see these transient figures that is both poignant and hopeful.
How the spirit moves and endures is portrayed in Romare Bearden’s Seance (1984–86) and the mas gathering in Paul Dash’s Revellers Celebrate at Dusk (2023), offering a sense of the collective and, significantly, joyful assembly of human figures both physically and spiritually. The mas (masquerade) tradition originated in the eighteenth century in Trinidad and Tobago, as a creolized and vernacular form that spread through the Caribbean as a form of covert but often open cultural resistance through carnival. As Dash has explained, the rationale for his depictions of mas is that “we celebrate ourselves through dance,” and his aim is to portray “shared participation, or in this case a shared social gathering where a group of people come together in fellowship or harmony through a collective action. It’s the way we have survived enslavement and the barbarities through sharing and giving to each other.” Revelry and gatherings are a consistent theme in Dash’s oeuvre, including Revellers Whine at Mas’ (2023), Night Revellers Gather for the Parade (2016) and Revellers Gather for Mas’ (1998). Like errantry, revelry is an almost outmoded word dating back to the fifteenth century, yet in Dash’s works, it conveys the exuberant liberation of mass movement, dance, music, and human expression born out of errantry and the zeal to emancipate oneself in unity. As with Glissant, Dash reclaims a term with negative undertones of unruliness that signals his own spirit of resistance.
Revellers Celebrate at Dusk signals a moment in time. From a bird’s eye perspective, Dash creates a sense of the throng of people as one body and yet, despite the haziness of his colours and paint application, we can still identify the rhythms of individual lives. A man in a pale blue shirt and darker trousers in the foreground has his hands in his pockets; to his right a smaller figure, perhaps a child, is seated with hands on his ears; behind him a couple are just about to embrace. Dash flattens perspective but the figure-ground relationship provides enough space to express the rise and fall of the gathering, conveying its heat, colour, noise, and freedom. Dash’s style is striking; even from afar we recognise the human forms, but the seemingly hazy mass is deceptive. Like mas itself, the abstract quality of Dash’s revellers masks their power as individuals coming together to celebrate in the dusk.
Romare Bearden’s Seance and Obeah Woman (both 1984–86) are late works produced by the artist two years before his death in 1988, inspired in part by sojourns to his wife Nanette’s home in St Martin. Bearden’s work in these years were marked by a more free-flowing style, aided by his interest in watercolour as a primary medium during his residence in the Caribbean. They ostensibly continue his interest in the Black spirit world, also evident in his Conjur or baptism works and in his collages embedded with spiritual motifs such as African masks. Indeed, his collages may be viewed as composite worlds that are suffused with spirituality. The power of women to embody and transmit a spiritual force is also a recurrent theme; for Ralph Ellison, Bearden could “evoke the abiding mystery of the enigmatic women who people the blues. And here, too, are renderings of those rituals of rebirth and dying, of baptism and sorcery.” In Seance, three brightly garbed women are linked by a pale halo of white that surrounds and permeates them in an eerie light. The spills and drips of watercolour add to the feeling of an errant force that is immanent from the artist’s hand to the work, which cannot quite be captured by its representation. Even if Bearden’s title did not indicate a spiritual gathering, the bright light around them suggests that they are connected by a force that is not merely physical. For Bearden, the idea of connectivity was important to unite and pass between the visible, physical world and the invisible, spiritual world; “in my work, if anything I see connections, so that my paintings can’t be only what they appear to represent.”
Stacey Gillian Abe’s The Farmer’s Daughter 2 (2024) is a portrait of a spirit woman; mostly human but also more than human, simultaneously slightly fey and almost feral. Its companion piece, The Farmer’s Daughter (2022) is a provocative image in which a female nude dominates, albeit softened by the indigo skin emblematic of Abe’s practice, and the silver-grey satin folds of a sheet underneath her. This is a portrait of stark female physicality and soft feminine sensuality. In contrast, although The Farmer’s Daughter 2 is also a Black female nude, she holds her body to herself, cradling her interiority. She holds her left breast in a gesture that is self-comforting and maternal, yet strange and discordant – as if she is still in the process of discovering herself, her humanness, her woman-ness. She is seated partly on grass and on an embroidered sheet, signifying her transitory state between the human and the other-world. Her ear is an animal’s, partially furred and elongated horizontally along her face, but in all other visual respects aside from the indigo hue of her skin Abe’s woman is human. Gold leaves encircle her hand and arm; in one sense, a feminine adornment that reads against the portrayal of Abe’s subject as part-animal but, in another sense, adds to her surreal otherworldliness. She is an errant being.
While Abe’s practice is multidisciplinary, her paintings focus on Black female figuration in which indigo skin has become her signature motif. Drawing upon the dye’s history as a colonial commodity and its purportedly mystical qualities, Abe’s rendering of indigo skin becomes a way to reference and embrace otherness, extending the possibilities of its signification, whether historically, aesthetically, or narratively. Abe’s title, The Farmer’s Daughter 2, lends itself to storytelling in which the symbolism of her ears or adornment signify the creation of a persona within the artist’s constructed world:
“The sheep ears… are visual materialisations of her personal and shared memories. They are distorted memories of animals, farms, feasts, or metaphors to mean something else. I like the direction the compositions are taking, and this is an element in my work I’d like to explore further.”
The indigo skin not only extends Abe’s interest in “an alternative form of looking at the Black body” but becomes redolent with indigo’s mystical possibilities that are now informed by these “distorted memories”. Her subtle embroidery augments the work’s unfolding as a mythic narrative, lending texture to her canvas but also lyrically imbuing the work with added enchantment; her figure’s story is placed a chain of signification between the gold thread, sheep’s ears, indigo skin, and her own subjectivity. Abe’s distortion of personal memory and cultural tradition – whether through indigo dye or embroidery – is a recharging of her artistic imaginary made visible and consciously aberrant.
The title of Rachel Jones’s !!!!! (2024) denotes an artist who also lets her imagination run errant: “I love the idea that you can make artwork from a place of feeling, and that’s enough of a reason to make something because I think that’s the truth of it.” The title confounds and yet intensifies the importance of expressive language and the intrinsic polyvocality of abstraction as a visual language that is fundamental in Jones’s practice. The range of her work – whether performance, installation or, primarily, painting – is firmly entrenched in Black cultural expression. Abstracting “specific parts of the body” such as the eyes, Jones then shifted her attention to the mouth. Even as a visual cipher, !!!!! is an exclamation that necessitates a sharp inhalation of breath or a shout, but even without this can signify many different emotions. Perhaps more than an expression, it is the feeling of an expression. Either way, Jones understands that not all expression needs to be spoken to be read or understood and that not everything spoken is universally understood, as communities express and read differently:
“Familial language is used to reflect Black communities, and I use colloquialisms to address a specific group of people. Certain things might not be understood by everyone, so it depends on the position of the person who’s looking at the work, or reading the title, what they gain from it.”
The interplay between the visual, verbal, and oral is situated in Jones’s titles, which clearly reference the mouth but often in colloquial form: lick your teeth, they so clutch (2020), SMIIILLLLEEEE (2021), or say cheeeeese (2022). The onomatopoeic valence that privileges the oral and visual over the written or textual form rebounds into her abstract practice, relaying the expressive register in which she works. The directive to smile or say cheese requires a call and response, and Jones’s abstract practice functions in a similar manner. Mouths are abstracted and extracted in her works yet, as with her other motifs, they can be both figurative and abstract. This is less about defying genre than extending the metonymic possibilities of both text and image in which meaning is both constantly deferred and continually extended and enriched. This incremental quality, coupled with a form of colloquial shorthand through metonymy or other allusive inferences in Jones’s practice, is drawn from Black expressive traditions such as jazz and blues, as well as literary and colloquial forms including patois.
!!!!! holds the different possibilities of and mood in a single phrase, preparing us for varied registers in the work. The large, dominant mouth is part of an abstracted landscape, heavy and bulbous. Landscape is inferred in the bricked wall in a wry nod to Guston on which the mouth sits, in which clam-like teeth or mini-mouths resemble cloaked figures. The truly Guston-like triangular hooded shape sits in verdant yellow and outlined in black in the right corner – menacing but reduced from the work’s centrality. Jones only allows us to read in glimpses; forms return to colour and line, in which the shape of the upper lip is reiterated, or the line of bricks is picked out upon the lower right tooth. This transfigurative quality recalls Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s abstract works, but Jones’s use of oil stick and pastel is tighter, while the discrepant notes are more overt and fierce. Colour is compacted but not compressed, the vertical pastel shading in blue across the canvas is immediate, almost frenzied, again negating a landscape or horizontal reading and enforced by the jagged bottom of the unstretched canvas. This is a mouth not to be messed with.
In Praise of Black Errantry runs at Palazzo Pisani S. Marina, Venice, until 29 June 2024
