Carving Space by Transcending into the Alternative
Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy (1924-2024), UT Art Galleries at Black Studies
“With the possible exception of early race movies, black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence, that denies the “body” of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is “white”. – bell hooks, The Oppositional Gaze
In Western society, ecstasy has been commonly associated with whiteness, sex, drug use and/or physical and mind-altering states; but never Black queer bodies. Rather, historical representations typically objectify, fetishize, demonize, dehumanize, and/or erase Black queer bodies. Although bell hooks discusses Black female spectatorship in the statement above, like Black women, the denial of presence, white supremacy, and phallocentrism assaults Black queer bodies. Like Black women, Black queer bodies occupy intersectionalities, their identities interconnected and inseparable from one another. These intersections create unique, more complex patterns of discrimination; often involving negotiations between codes and norms, prejudice and violence within their own communities, negation of identity or identities, lack of representation, and social denial of ecstasy. Regardless of whether Black queer bodies have been artistically represented experiencing ecstasy, Black queer ecstasy exists, has always existed, is sacred, and is not going anywhere.
Phillip Townsend, curator at UT-Austin’s Art Galleries for Black Studies, uncovered works of art representative of Black queer ecstasy’s suppressed historical breadth within the UT archives. Using these works, Townsend is rendering Black queerness visible, beautiful, raw, and powerful in the current multi-venue exhibition Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy. In this exhibition, he acknowledges the opposition and extremes of ecstasy that Black Queer bodies have faced in the last century of human existence; overlapping the emergence of new technologies amidst modernism, industrialization, heightened global tensions, and the struggle for Black and queer visibility.
Although situated within the last century, from 1924-2024, the exhibition is not organized chronologically. The exhibition is separated into seven categories flowing in the order of: Portraiture, Beyond Figuration, Dance and Movement, Sex and Sensuality, Black Queer Futures, and Altered States. These categories are connected by threads that depict radical self-acceptance and raw intimacies. By deliberately avoiding chronology, ecstasy is presented as not something historically built upon on. Rather, Black queer ecstasy disallows the need for anything other than presence; it is bound to identity and history for political and social resistance and tied to humanity in its collective experience. In this exhibition, Black queer ecstasy is central and inseparable from the paradoxes of pleasure and pain, excess and lack, autonomy and dependence.
Today, Black artists struggle with expectations within themselves and their community of “representing the race”, often pressured into the mainstream, acceptable mode of representing Black suffering through mimetic realisms. Queer artists identities’, on the other hand, have been historically absent, dismissed, or otherwise assumed to be cisgender and heterosexual. Paradoxically, as queer artists and people continue to face prejudice, violence, and erasure today, queer culture is increasingly commodified and recuperated as a lifestyle brand or niche market in popular media. Furthermore, both Black and/or queer people are subject to relentless peer sociological analysis, censorship, and a lack of access to a comprehensive repertoire of tools and references in Eurocentric art education systems.
Initially moving through the exhibition, I recognized the 1926 publication FIRE!!, an apolitical African literary journal poignant to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early 1930s despite its demise after its first publication. Founders Langston Hughes, Richard Nugent, Wallace Thurman, and Zorne Neale Hurston, sought to counter delusionally optimistic political narratives by instigating and carving space for discourse treated as taboo such as sex work, racism, and homosexuality. The editorial featured essays, short stories, poems, plays, and illustrations by young Black artists and writers that advocated for more radical, inclusive, and self-transcendent agendas. I stumbled upon this publication initially while doing personal research on Marlon Riggs’ 1989 seminal documentary Tongues Untied. In Tongues Untied Marlon Riggs’ collaborated with Black queer male poets, artists, and writers, such as Essex Hemphill, to construct an individualized experience of Black queer men during the AIDS crisis. Like FIRE!!, Marlon Riggs sought poets and writers that subverted writing conventions of Eurocentric academia and didn’t negate their queerness in their work. Riggs deliberately rejected Black queer poets and writers that kept their queerness as a subtext in their writing as to cease the perpetuation of silence.
“Each joke levels us a little more and we sit, silently. Sometimes join in the laughter as if deep down we too believe we are the lowest among the low. No one will redeem your name, your love, your life, your manhood. No one will save you but you. Your silence is costing. Your silence is suicide.” – Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied (1989)
When Black queer artists abandon their own artistic practice or even part of their identity to conform and appeal the public, they consequently indulge in silence. Silence retires their own authenticity, perpetuating the figuration, subsumption, and acculturation of the Black queer body through consensual subordination. There is no non-conformance without some sort of deliberate subversion of the Self, in this case, the marginalized self that is virtually silenced, systemically manipulated to devalue individuality, and socially excluded from experiencing ecstasy. Though, I do not say this insensitively. This is not to say that all Black queer artists that employ realism are inherently perpetuating racially oppressive structures, or that non-conformity and artistic authenticity for Black queer artists is a serene, easygoing, or obligatory act. Rather, it is a statement that acknowledges actions resulting from and simultaneously contributing to existing oppressive structures, and the ways in which representations of Black queer ecstasy, like Transcendence, is essential.
Also in the portraiture section, and near FIRE!!, lies Mickalene Thomas’s Afro Muse #5 in Black and White (2005). In this photograph, Thomas highlights the poignancy of subverting historical representations of Black queer bodies. In the photograph, Thomas is calling back to and reclaiming the autonomy, gaze, and nude exposure of the Black body. The black and white film quality, exposed breasts, and direct, withheld gaze calls back to J.T Zealy’s dehumanizing and racist “slave daguerreotypes”. Thomas reclaims these past representations of Black bodies by inserting the subject’s individual presence. The title of the work itself, Afro Muse #5 in Black and White, characterizes the subject as a muse. The muse renders the Black female body as sensual, beautiful, and autonomous. The subject’s stoic, reserved gaze takes up space unabashedly, irrevocably, and comfortably. it gives only so much to withhold acculturation of and subjective access to the Black female body. Additionally, the subject’s body is not fully nude but partially covered by a robe, perhaps in their own home. Afro Muse #5 renders the Black body as a site of ecstasy, beauty, and privacy. Though, this ecstasy is not rendered as normative but as ambiguous, private, and undeniable.
Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy invokes an alternative ecstasy, a neo-ecstasy; an ecstasy that is disinterested in and transcends conventional representations of ecstasy. Black Queer ecstasy transcends convention’s confinements by being forced to seek alternatives in exile. Jumping to the end of the exhibition under the category Altered States in the Christain Green Gallery, two photographs by Lyle Ashton Harris, Ecstasy #1 and Ecstasy #2 foregrounds alternative ecstasy theatrically. In his college dorm room, Harris created photographs that conflate the accoutrement of white face and a blonde wig with expressive gestures emanating the release of a pent-up desire that is perverse and almost primal. Harris essentially sticks out his tongue and blows a raspberry to social conditioning and the sexual objectification and conventions of the white, blonde, and female body. This subversion and breaking through represents the rupture and detachment from conventions with the realization of the alternative. The alternative, in this sense, acknowledges the ridiculous facade of conventions, but also the need to carve out a space for oneself within the social realm that complies with these conventions.
“Being queer saved my life. Often, we see queerness as a deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes; it made me curious; it made me ask, ‘Is this enough for me?’” -Ocean Vuong.
It’s important to note that while these “forced alternatives” were due to social and political alienation, it is not to be considered inherently negative or non-consensual. Queerness itself, as Ocean Vuong states, is an opportunity for the alternative; the opportunity for transcendence. Representations of transcendence, of Black queer ecstasy, are essential in shifting the conversation of marginalized bodies away from pain, deprivation, and lack. The victimization of marginalized bodies has become redundant and cannot breach a revolution past the collective apathy, desensitization, and disassociation to systemic violence. Perhaps, everyone is realizing that they’re also the victims but cannot properly articulate what they’re victims of.
“Our lives tremble between pathos and seduction. Our inhibitions force us to be equal. We swallow hard Black love potions from a golden glass. New language beckons us. Its dialect present, intimate. Focus this pure naked light fixed on you like magic, clarity. I see risks, regrets. There will be none. Let some wonder, some worry, some accuse. Let you and I know the tenderness only we can bear. So, we can’t buy flowers for our table. Our kisses are petals. Our tongues caress the bloom. Who dares to tell us that we are poor and powerless. We keep treasure that any king would count as dear.” -Essex Hemphill
Although Black queer bodies are victim to systemic oppression, continually representing Black queer bodies as victimized only reaffirms and perpetuates their subordination. It’s time to shift the representation of Black queer bodies to visualize and normalize the alternatives to cisgender-heterosexual conventions that have remain unseen. Focusing on representations of Black queer ecstasy will not only aid in carving out spaces for Black queer people but will provide the opportunity for alternative realities amongst broader society.
Amidst our current heightened political climate and society faces, or reveals, a daunting moral regress, the uplifting, representation, and acknowledgement of marginalized bodies is vital. Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy is a blueprint to which representations of marginalized bodies should follow. Now more than ever, society needs to have access to or be confronted with reminders and visualizations that the alternative exists and is possible.