Blue(s) as Cymbal
Beauford Delaney (Elvin Jones) James Baldwin
Fred Moten
This lecture brings together James Baldwin’s writing, Beauford Delaney’s painting, and Elvin Jones’ theory of music. Baldwin’s writing often complicates representation of personhood, blurring distinctions between fiction from nonfiction genres both to achieve the aims of narrative and to refuse writing’s ossified images. Delaney’s use of color in his painting likewise challenges how we understand the relation between abstraction and figuration in traditional portraiture. Complicating technique in this way allows both artists to experiment radically with understandings of Black life and identity. This lecture is concerned with two questions: Do both artists immerse their audiences in the artwork in a way that allows something else of blackness to show up beyond the any predictable nexus of personhood, narrative and portrait? And is it possible that this new and generous way of representing blackness becomes sensible for us through the theory of “musical color” formulated by the great drummer Elvin Jones, as a kind of synaesthetic nonsense?