PALIMPSESTIC BLACKNESS: MEMES, AESTHETICS AND RELATION

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the relational aesthetics of the meme to consider more broadly the history of blackness and relation. A meme can represent a sentiment or an idea, often through mechanizing humor, play, and irony. In considering the meme, I am interested in how black visual and sonic performances attend to the “feltness” or relatability of blackness. I argue that the meme, its forms, and its movements can be understood within a larger genealogy of black cultural forms. Like many genres in black musical productions, ranging from jazz, blues, Motown, gospel, R&B, and hip-hop, the meme is a practice of call-and-response. Virality is dependent upon the popularity of the image being used. The idea and emotionality of the image is predicated on the image being used. I look to contemporary black art and its expressions of abstractions and surreal articulations to situate the meme as an aesthetic form central to how we communicate and relate. To this end, I examine the performance art of Adrian Piper and the video works of Arthur Jafa. Arthur Jafa’s work in Love is the Message, The Message is Death(2016) and The White Album(2018) calls attention to affective attachments around the project of racialization and considers the logic of enjoyment and empathy through how blackness exists as a public feeling. Piper’s works–Calling Cards 1 & 2(1986-1990), Funk Lessons(1982-1984) and Thwarted Projects, Dashed Hopes, A Moment of Embarrassment(2012)– underscore the various assumptions of the project of racialization and gendering and how ultimately, these assumptions inhibit relationality. Furthermore, her works attend to the affective dimension of race through mechanizing irony, play, discomfort, shock, shame, and absurdity in embodied and relational performance. In Piper and Jafa’s works, I am especially interested in how they privilege the experiential instead of just the ontological. I contend that by studying the aforementioned artist’s works through memetic aesthetics, we can analyze the performativity and contingency of identity.