Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez’s “Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social” for ASAP/Journal
The authors discuss alternative ways of thinking about form and aesthetics, specifically touching on the limitations of the visual and trying to navigate ways of thinking about form that approach a broader sensorial experience, especially for artists of color.
“Many contributors to this issue make this fundamental point in response to an interpretative violence too often visited upon artists of colors and indigenous artists in particular. These artists are often assigned the role of testifying to the sociological conditions of their own disempowerment. They are the ‘native informants’ of the art world, tasked with producing art that transmits information rather than pushing aesthetic boundaries. Such a colonial tasking undermines or even silences analysis of their aesthetic aims. Aesthetic innovation and formal manipulation are, however, the very substance of many of these artists’ engagement with legacies of social violence. Aesthetic form offers resources of resistance to the violences of interpretation that prematurely fix the meaning of minority artistic production within prefabricated narratives.” (227)
“Critics and audiences alike tend to receive work by indigenous artists and artists of color as being all content and no form—overdetermined by the artist’s biography and isomorphic with the sociopolitical. This overwhelming focus on ethnic or sociopolitical ‘content’ is very much of a piece with the history of the visual objectification, hierarchization, and categorization of racialized peoples that functioned as a signal method of colonial modernity.” (234-235)
Amin, Kadji, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez. “Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social.” ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (2017): 227-239. doi:10.1353/asa.2017.0031.
