Walter Benjamin famously wrote about art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Martin Heidegger famously wrote about the origins, the beginning, of art as a concept, as a work, as labor. In this seminar, we will discuss what art in the age of crisis does for us. This age of crisis has been with us since 1441, since 1492, since 1513, since 1619. We will discuss art in and as blackness, blackness as the foundation for art practice. Adrian Piper will be our guide. Fred Moten, another. Rizvana Bradley too. And we will consider the question: what can art do for us, how can we think with it, what can it allow? Art in its audiovisual performative capacity.
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Why Art?
Tue, Jun 1, 20216:30 pm to 8:30 pm -
Wed, Jun 2, 20216:30 pm to 8:30 pm
Ashon Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imagination and The Lonely Letters, an exploration of the interrelation of blackness, mysticism, quantum mechanics and love published by Duke University Press in 2020. He is currently working on a third book, tentatively titled “Made Instrument,” about the role of the Hammond Organ in the institutional and historic Black Church, in Black sacred practice and social life more broadly. All his work is about otherwise possibility.