| Unfinished Visuality is about artists, their artworks, and what is seeable and sayable about them. It is concerned more with specific pictures than it is with large theoretical constructs, and its interest is in how these images work as mediums of expression, as instruments of vision and visualization, and as means of communication. Put simply, this dissertation analyzes culture's relationship to the visual by looking at individual artists and individual artworks. Each chapter of Unfinished Visuality is a case study in producing knowledge through vision and discusses artworks that offer stunning, imaginative ways of understanding our bodies, histories, and world. At issue are the related activities of imaging and imagining, and the focus is on how these activities function to produce culture.Images provoke a wide range of emotions and responses, come in different forms, and maintain complex roles. The activities of images are particularly ambiguous, however, in relation to the work of contemporary artists who are also black people of the diaspora. For one thing, the black diaspora is itself a manifold concept. The term "diaspora" is nebulous: it simultaneously refers to a series of historical events, a group of people, and an ongoing experience in the present. It follows that the artwork of black artists of the diaspora is itself shifting, complex, and porous. Indeterminacy surrounds this work, and with this uncertainty comes moral and political anxiety that initiates conflicts that make meaningful seeing difficult, if not impossible. The artists discussed herein---Romare Bearden, Tavares Strachan, Kerry James Marshall, Saya Woolfalk and Rachael Lears, Bili Bidjocka---are not only affected by these ongoing struggles, they actively respond to them. These artists produce visual products that influence both what we see and how we see. They make their presence felt by questioning the terms of visual understanding, and the artworks articulate experiences of the visual world. Thus, the emphasis of Unfinished Visuality is not so much on how visual images describe cultural and political phenomena like blackness or diaspora, although that too is a cause for concern. Rather, the focus is on understanding how images produce culture and meaning, because through their artistic production, artists contribute to the global traffic of images and ideas. As they do so, their works travel, translate, and negotiate different ways of being and making. Most importantly, they chart new paths for intellectual and visual inquiry. |
