Kara, Adrian and Me

• Black Music/Improvisational Music/Jazz

• Music/Culture this is about an essential set of shared experiences and histories (being the descendent of slaves) and having that very experience making it virtually impossible to have access to those shared experiences and histories: As a result, you end up with a culture that is all about the tension between innovation and tradition.

"Many people make the mistake of thinking that improvisational music is just about being a black man with a sense of history and some rhythm. It's that too, but mostly it's about knowing how to read your changes and trusting that everyone around you will know there's as well." - Bill Lowe

Post Modern N**ger Wench: Scratches on Kara Walker's Body

• One of Naima Lowe's Graduate School Comprehensive Exams from 2007

“…the nigger is the quintessential American both because she knows no other home and because she is intent upon making do with the realities (intellectual, cultural, political, economic, familial, communal) in which she finds herself” – Robert F. Reid-Pharr, paraphrasing Ralph Ellison’s “What would America Be Like without Blacks"

Slavery! Slavery! presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or “Life at ‘Ol’ Virginny’s Hole’ (sketches from Plantation Life)” See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause, 1997

“There is a kind of “nothing ever changes, the system always wins” attitude, which I read as the cynical protective shell that , I’m sorry to say, American cultural critics frequently wear, a shell that sometimes prevents them from developing cultural strategies that can make a difference. It is as if, in order to protect themselves against the occasional defeat, they have to pretend they can see right through everything-and it’s just the same as it always was.” - Stuart Hall

I have a creative and cultural lineage that is deeply rooted in black artists (in particular) who articulate themselves as post-modern subjects through their work.

Burning African Villiage Play Set, 2006

“The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” –Michel Foucault: Nietzsche, Genealogy and History

Still from "Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale" 2011

Big House, 2001

Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times, 1997

Stone Mountain Georgia, 2001

Darkytown Rebellion, 2001

Stills From: Testimony, 2004

Stills from "8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker, 2005

Growing up in an aesthetic of

ambivalence.

Freidrich Kittler

on “Modernity”

• Communication technologies
• Colonial Expansion
• Reproduction of Images
• Optics as a means to the end of extending the reach western ideologies

Naima Lowe is an African-American Artist

Adrian Piper

• Conceptual Art: Art that creates social relations and experiences for the viewer.
• Art that confronts identity.
• Art that is not always recognizable as "art".
• Art by an artist who critiques her own early desire to escape into abstraction.

Modernism/Post-Modernism

http://www.naimalowe.com/index.php?/project/richard-simmons-til-you-die/

Lyotard and Baudrillard on

“Post-Modernity/Late Modernity”

Jameson on "Post-Modernity/Late Modernity"

• Post modern art is characterized by "pastiche" - And act of parody that has become a "dead language" that is "devoid of laughter" because it doesn't have any concept of history or investment in the original text

• This, for Jameson, is a move away from "parody" that actually offers up a critique of the original and its place in history.

• He argues that this has occured because various culture industries and academic discourses have become colonized and are thus unable to offer up real critique.

• The death of metaphysics and/or a quest for objective truth
• An idea that there’s no “reality” only representations of reality
• Simulacra: Representations become more important than “the thing itself.”
• Instantaneous transmission of Simulacra/Representations

http://blip.tv/video-and-performance-work-by-naima-lowe/birthmarks-2932943

15:44-End