If art is a reaction or response to something, then its production coincides with the need to respond, to use skill as a form of resistance...
The history of artistic expression demonstrates the shifts that happen and the subsequent push of the boundaries of creative expression as a form of realized autonomous resistance.
Fauvistic demonstrations of extremes in color and expressive detail. The unbound expression. Wild, free, and emotive.
Matisse. Derain. The wresting of creative freedom.
Therapeutic expressionism is the medium by which Black Expression is made manifest.
“And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have pain in his eyes which will make him turn away and seek refuge in the object of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than things which are not being shown to him”
(Plato, 1892, 1997)
For the whole of Black existence there has been a resistance to its expression. It has been stifled and suppressed which has led to its continued oppression. Given the opportunity to truly express itself, the Black being may cower in the face of this opportunity because of the history of violence that accompanies the raised voice of the Black American.
The example of the allegory of the cave is demonstrative of how a collective could or would react to the opening up of a new world, one in which they have never considered while stuck in the cave as unenlightened beings, chained to each other and to the mindset that accompany it.
Black expressionism has never been able to reach its full potential. It has always been suppressed from fear of creating an environment where it can freely express itself and quite possibly expose the harmful conditions of its lived experience. The conditions that decrease the...
To be continued.
-Yogabrofessor
Goldblatt, D., & Brown, L. (1997). Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts.
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