Human beings tend to collection. I have a theory that this desire to hang on to things is more true in times of crisis, but lately, I started to believe that we also have a tendency to the crisis itself. This is to resolve the impulse to collect and the challenges of the time a fairly impossible task. In his new book, Black in blues: how a color tells the story of my people (2024), the scientist Imani Perry sets up the intertwined history of two changing and impossible collections: blue color and the nature of darkness. For Perry, Blue is at the heart of a fundamental understanding of human stories: in his words, “there was a time before black, but not before the blues.”
Blue projects have captivated writers over time. Some notable examples: Maggie Nelson 2009 Bluets1975 by William H. Gass On being blue: a philosophical surveyand Toni Morrison's novel in 1970 The most blue eye. Fred Moten wrote a contemplation on blue and black for the The 2017 Pulitzer Art Foundation exhibition BlackOrganized by Glenn Ligon, who also offered meditations on colors and their associations. (The exhibition has drawn its title from the Ellsworth Kelly monumental work of the same nameWho hangs in perpetuity in the Tadao Ando building from Pulitzer to St. Louis.) Musicians like Duke Ellington and Nina Simone play the blues. Picasso has gone through a blue period.
I went through my own blue period As an artist in 2016 and 2017, during which I both suffered from a difficult case of agoraphobia with political motivation and I collected more than 190 images of different shades of blue, captured by photographing squares of sky without clouds. This project, which I titled #Sky #Nofilterends up progressing far beyond photography. He finally appeared in such varied forms as a silent work of video art which moves through my blues for just over 34 minutes; A performance conference on the nature of hardening during uncertain political times which were then published as a chapter to chapter; A series of studies exploring different ways to translate digital blues into physical materials; And the final version of the project: a public sculpture in the form of an analmatic sundial, Commissioned by and installed permanently at California African American Museum in Los Angeles. The sundial uses the human body as the gnomon, or the shadow casting object at that time, requiring two participants for a complete reading: one to stand up and mark the shadow, and the other to read the text of the panel on which the shadow closest. The sundial as a marker of time was my attempt to exploit color and emotion, two ephemeral realities.
For Perry, as for me, the blues collection process is a step towards assembly of memory. This collection impulse allows us to go beyond the crises interconnected in the past and the present, providing us with the materials we need to build a different future. “One of the remedies that we are studying black life has continued is the restoration of diligence in the face of being forgotten, obscured or overwhelmed. We reconstruct clues 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 of asserting the value of what remembers and which remembers it.
I appreciate the recognition of complexity in its declaration: that the construction of memory is also imbued with at least a certain consciousness of all that has been forgotten. CommerawA black ceramist formerly influenced known in sandstone, remembers his persistent objects, but not necessarily for the details of his life. In my own project, the expression “forgetting is essential to survival” appears both on a sundial panel and in the chapbook, anchoring a work which fundamentally concerned the collection of two of the most ephemeral things of all: the color of the sky in a specific moment of a specific day and emotions. Fragile and significant elements linked to time and subject to interpretation, often passed before they even caught them. Perry's memories throughout Black in blues Constantly allow more complex realities. At each phase, there is an essential split that occurs: two poles between memories and forgotten. Two others between the forgotten by accidentel and the oblivion on the point. Still two more between forgetting it useful as protection, and intentional forgetting as violence. In these more and smaller breakdowns, the categories of black and blue are more and less monolithic and yet more interconnected.
My favorite moments of Black in blues Come when Perry illuminates certain truths on the value. In the field of color, the term “value” refers to the lightness or relative darkness, the position of the color between “pure white” and “pure black”. For a visual artist, understanding and reproduction of value are in a sense a means of designating depth. Perry upsets this metaphor of value, leaving us stories of blue as linked to the violence of the property: the sale of blue in the transformed Yoruba markets when blue sellers can become sold themselves. Elsewhere, it details how the blue color passes from Rarity (Indigo, Lapis Lazuli) to common use according to the practical need (Denim production during the days of slavery in the United States and uniforms of the reused union as a police uniform during the reconstruction period). She returns to the posts: blue eyes with blue-black. The height of the sky and the depth of the ocean. Triumph and tragedy. Blue as possibility and limitation.
Volume largely documented, certain parts of the text feel speculative, with regard to style and economy. For the expanses of history which cannot be known – in part because of their deliberate erasure – Perry uses acts of speculative fiction to weave a story that puts us empathetically to the experiences of blacks whose future was, because they to various degrees continue to be, negotiated for white economic speculation. Traveling from the Nigerian market to the American slave market market, Perry presents a series of questions and descriptions that put us in the mindset of a Tei Textile merchant with Indigo now being sold, the shocking transformation of the seller to the object. Cancel or complicate an idea of property, Perry uses this description as a means of ordering history. But the nature of writing, unlike other forms of use (trade, consumption, etc.), is that it offers control that does not decrease the described resource. Perry writes to exploit a complex story of changing blues, offering us an open gift.
Black in blues is not a trip with resolution. The state of darkness – or from all that is out of color to normativity – has become heavier in the last days of Dei-backtrackingThe dreaded cancellation of the month of black history (or any “month of diversity”) and threats linked to public health and the climate crisis. However, we must persist. Towards the end of the book, Perry writes: “I think – and I'm not sure that it is true, but it seems right to me – that the most important preservation may not be a particular place or thing, but a sensitivity that resides in the blues, that of life as a protest.
The state moves. The language changes its meaning based on use or by necessity. The sky is recolving through sunrise, time, ashes or twilight. The work, both for chronicles and repairing, 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 via independent booksellers.
