Home

Theaster Gates' Afro 2018: Incarnations/Intention

Theaster Gates' Afro appears as sculptural mark-making [1] underlining the tacit intentionality of what it "represents,": the 1960s/70s Afro hairstyle donned by members of the Afro-diaspora. Afro represents a social-ornament. Mark-making in the literal sense of Gates having essentially drawn (marked) an outline "representing" intention tacitly and at once directly - signifying the social, political, and aesthetic of Afro-American life at that time. An intentionality that would (at that moment) render it "more than" a popularized cultural tendency shining a light on "something" political, metaphysical, animistic, sonic, and at once auratic. Gates' purple neon sculptural marking/drawing incarnates an Afro's technologies- its literal and metaphoric frequencies and techniques akin to African traditions of the "aesthetic of the cool," "ashe," "improvisatory drive and brilliance," "vital aliveness," (Farris Thompson). The sculpture’s radiating light sphere further delineates such "techniques." Gate's depiction suggests a centrifugal and centripetal social and actual morphology of the Afro. Afro presents the bicameral resonating of its wearers – which is neon's literal call and response. Afro marks more than accoutrement, incisively tracing shared notions of the cosmological and cosmopolitical. If, as Gates has said of drawing (mark-making) as being "definitive strokes," Afro’s neon drawing as a sculptural marking brings to mind the "definitive stroke" of what it "represents." Afro is a representation via a "definitive stroke" underlined through an incarnation of that social body. In Afro: a luminous marker of a "being with," conduits of a "communitas" (shared community energy and language that can be coded and decoded by faithful adherents), social intrusion and disruption (see the rhizomatic spilling wires), modes of social cohesion and belonging and at once being a definitive stroke pointing to individuation, interior exploration, the enlivening of black life, and heady rumination (the Afro's waves/antennae) that must come before and with the common. Gates has “dropped” nothing less than the lines of sidereal intentionality and a gesture of social sculpture. [2]