Orly Sever

We are invited into a black space. The pupils dilate, the feet stumble, the body hesitates: How does one enter a black space? The space is inviting, enticing, it marks out the route by which it may be entered, yet there seems to be a trap here. It is a space without images, without objects; a hollow space; some of its walls are blackened. Even the object at its center is nothing more than a black wall dropped to the ground at an angle. Just black walls. And yet, it is the space itself that is black. Black, as we know, absorbs light without reflecting it back. It swallows everything, devours all that is hurled against it. The black wall is therefore not just a boundary delineating the space. It is a wall made thicker. Not just the edge of an empty space, a preliminary ground to be filled, a support for action (a wall with pictures, a canvas with images, a sheet of paper with words). On the black wall there is nothing at all; nothing but itself as a thing.
For the black wall is in fact a blackened wall: it was coated with black tar through hard, protracted work. The viscous tar hardened on the wall in a variety of stains and textures. The wall has turned lumpy and voluminous. It does not sustain or display a material, but rather upholds the material’s action. The heavy tar, sealing and sealed, certainly displays nothing; the tar does not emit anything outward but rather absorbs something inward. The black space invites you in to the same extent that it confines you; going in, you are swallowed by it. For just as the black walls are not simply a support or boundary, so are the objects between them not merely discrete figures distinct from the space in which they are set. The space creates a centrifugal movement toward the black material of its walls. This is a trap: we may yet find ourselves rolled up in tar and feathers. The blackening action has not been completed – one wall has remained white – and it is infinite. It turns to the blackness as if longing for an end.
 
However, this turn is nothing but a modernist bias that has stuck to us like tar: white as a beginning, black as an end. This is how Wassily Kandinsky articulated the difference between these two motionless colors as the difference between two silences: the silence of the black is “Something burned out, ... something motionless like a corpse. The silence of black is the silence of death”; while the silence of white “is not dead silence, but one pregnant with possibilities. White has the appeal of the nothingness that is before birth.”1 In Kandinsky’s thought, white appears as a moment of genesis, a space of potentiality, “the nothingness that is before birth,” while black is imbued with loss, with the seal of finality, “like the ashes of funeral pyre.”2 Indeed, the non-objectal painting of the early twentieth century, which explored the conditions and possibilities of the two-dimensional medium, regarded the white support (the canvas, the museum wall) as the primary surface on which lines, forms, and colors are imprinted. White was a fertile emptiness ready to be filled, while black was regarded as already full, blocked, and fixed. Conversely, Orly Sever’s blackened space signifies black as a fertile ground, a possibility. Black seals nothing here; rather, it forms the route by which the process takes place. The entire space is in the process of turning black.
How does one think of blackening as a creative act? Perhaps through melancholia – in Greek, melaina-kholé (literally, black bile) – one of the four basic bodily liquids, or humors, whose quantity and quality determine, according to Classical Greek medicine, one’s health, disposition, and temperament. Melancholia got a bad reputation in modernism – as hopeless sadness, endless depression, or disrupted, incomplete work of mourning. In the past, however, melancholia was considered a creative force, sickly at
times yet powerful. Accordingly, Aristotle asks, “Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry, or the arts are melancholic, and some to

1    Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), p. 39.

2    Ibid.
 
such an extent that they are infected by the disease arising from the black bile?”3 Aristotle answers by listing the various forms black bile takes, running the gamut between fiery desire, madness and brilliance to laziness and stupidity. The black psyche quivers in diverse forms, often related to the creative act. The genealogy of melancholia – which runs from medicine,
through the Fathers of the Church and first monasteries, Albrecht Dürer,

German Baroque melancholy drama (Trauerspiel) and all kinds of Sabbatai Zevi-like messianic figures, to the Warburg School disciples and of course Walter Benjamin – makes it evident that melancholia does not just consist in obscuring the world and retreating from it, that is blackening as a seal and an end, as destruction and splitting of the self, but rather entails a way of referring to the world and holding onto it. Melancholy is indeed a work of loss, but it thereby establishes a world – that is, it constitutes its subjects as already lost, and in doing so forms its own phantasmatic attachment to them.
Therefore, its action does not just consist in fixation and paralysis but also in creation: it creates the lost subject, the loss, and the desire for both. Its “blackness” is not a renunciation and an end but rather positioning and appropriation. While its action is excessive in nature – mentally and objectally, crowded and crowding – it is not closed to the point of bursting; it does not signify death, as Kandinsky claimed, but rather the feverish creativity of loss. And so it is in Orly Sever’s black space. Black does not appear in it as a huge lump of materiality filling up the space, blocking its passages, bursting up within it and expropriating it (as Sever did ten years ago in her installation in this museum). Instead, the black here is the tar flattened on the walls and crystallizing on them, that is, a materiality which creates a space, forms gaps and voids, establishes loss. Its power is in not being sealed. The black tar could have continued to be heaped onto the horizontal and slanting walls.

3    From Aristotle’s Problems, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), p. 12; See also David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.), Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). These texts underlie my discussion here.
 
Moreover, it threatens to blacken us. Herein lies its demonic power. Blurring the distinction between wall and material, between support and figure, between condition and body, the black work is endless; we may all turn black.

And perhaps we are. Achille Mbembe, a theoretician and intellectual born in French Cameroons and currently teaching in South Africa, has recently published a complex, bold book under the reverberating title Critique de la Raison Nègre.4 In this book Mbembe endeavors to redefine the term “black” (or “black man”) in the current neoliberal age by exploring “black reason”; not the reason of black man, but rather the reason which has created the black as an active category in colonial European culture. This black takes multiple forms: as a flawed copy of the European; as the latter’s mythical predecessor; as his unevolved, childish state; or as a possessed, irrational quality which threatens him. All consist of the black appearing through the white and in relation to it: as a fantasy, a fiction, a delusion – always in relation to; a relation articulated by the European “black reason.” But what happens, Mbembe asks, at an age when the European center is becoming destabilized, an age of far-reaching social and economic changes, an age in which modern European culture is no longer a necessary point of departure and fulcrum, in which black is no longer defined exclusively in relation to it; what is the black – as a notion, an identity, a stance – which is not in relation to? To understand this, he claims, one must look at blackness through the history of capitalism, and in so doing see it in the current capitalist moment. At an age in which an exchange value with no reserve is the norm, in which many fields of existence have become entirely quantified and the range of

4    Achille Mbembe, Critique de la Raison Nègre (Paris: La Découverte, 2013). In fact, the title could be translated as Critique of Negro Reason, for “negro” (nègre) is the term used in the writings of Mbembe’s forerunner, the psychiatrist and National Liberation Front (FLN) member Frantz Fanon. The title of Mbembe’s book is of course in dialogue with Kant’s three Critiques as well as, in the French context, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical
Reason, written in the late 1950s and influenced by the author’s meeting with Fanon. post-human technology has broadened, the social and economic system is underlain by recurrent production of non-difference. And blackness, which had come into being in relation to whiteness and turned into a signifier of all that is distinct from it, has become transformed within a difference-pulverizing system and changed character. “For the first time in human history, the name ‘black’ does not refer just to the condition brought into being for people of African extraction in the age of initial capitalism (robbing them of various orders of life, dispossessing them of all power of self-determination and, above all, of the future and of time, these two matrices of the possible). This new fungibility, this fluidity, their institutionalization as a new norm of existence and its generalization throughout the world, this is what will hereby
be called ‘the turning-black of the world’ [le devenir-nègre du monde].”5 Thus,

instead of the black man resembling the white – as in the colonialist fantasy (of his attempt at turning into a civilized man) or the liberal one (of his evolving into a productive man) – it is the white which has been turning more and more similar to the black. Labor migration without social rights, surveillance and control systems, turning people into animated objects or mere statistical data
– all these apparatuses, which in the past had been turned on the black man, are nowadays applied to extensive parts of human society. This is the form which power takes, and therein must be found the paths of resistance, too. Africa is the future.

And so, Orly Sever’s black space, which at first sight seems like a closed space signifying the past – like a burial site or memorial – turns into a creative space. The unending blackening which underlies this installation may also blacken those who enter it. This space may also indicate a horizon for a museum in a world which is turning black: tarred walls and empty spaces; material threshold and lack of images and objects; not an acquired albino syndrome but rather creative blackening.

How, then, does one enter a black space? It seems like we are already
in it.

5 Ibid., p. 16.