Erich Kessel, Jr.
Erich Kessel, Jr. teaches black diaspora arts, black studies and critical theory at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His work explores the relays between antiblackness, perception, desire and capitalism.
Jack Whitten’s 1979 Self Portrait registers an ironic sensibility, declaring its transmission of the artist’s likeness while denying any real access to it. Radiating from beneath a thicketed grid of translucent black lines, the image of the figure with black circular eyes and late 1970s dress occupies a square picture plane. The square makes the likeness look nearly portable, like the kind that would occupy a small photograph to be used for government identification or stapled to an application—the format favored by administration, archive and institution to measure, record and store.
Two reigning assumptions of the present are that individuals are self-determined beings with the capacity to choose how they are represented, and that the capacity for self-determination should be the measure through which we evaluate what is good or bad about appearing to the visual. Racism marks a continual threat to these assumptions for the intractable ways it harnesses the image as an instrument of force, summoning the racialized into view to appease imperatives of both knowledge and desire.
