The Clark – Joan Kee, ‘Black and White, Reconsidered’
Among the most prominent collaborative works involving both an African American and Asian American artist, Black & White (1993) by Glenn Ligon and Byron Kim occupies something of exemplary space in an art history particularly attuned to multiculturalism and its analogues. Joan Kee, professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan, argues that its urgency lies in how deftly it revealed humanist efforts at reifying minoritarian personhood as part of a larger and more insidious counter-humanist enterprise where the individual was simply another byte to be identified, collected, and harvested. Perhaps clearer now than it was in 1993, Black & White emerges most forcefully as an argument for a view of abstraction embedded in habits, routines, and rituals sustaining multiple structures of regulation as perpetuated through discourse, technology and politics.
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