Black Body Returned: A Response to George Lewis’s talk “In Search of Ben Patterson: An Improvised Journey”

As we’ve been thinking about translation so far at this conference, we touched on some powerful issues, including the translation of the artist’s desires as it meets its subject and with that, the work of the critic as product of that alliance of desires. As Brent Hayes Edwards has reminded us: “mutual interest lies in mutual translation.” This weekend, we continue to ask, “How do the objects of our inquiry translate us? Undo us? And how can the desires and questions that they arouse tell us how they operate?” These questions bring up not only how we are interested in the objects we study but also how the objects are interested in us. How might our inquiry into them reveal the ways that our objects of inquiry are seeking us out through their rhetorical and performative strategies, their modes of operation? For example, when last night during Dawn Lundy Martin’s poetry reading, Charles Rowell revealed that he was haunted by Dawn’s breaths between her language, that mutual interest then opened up the space for Dawn to talk about the operation of her language in revealing trauma, how trauma affects language generally. We also get this sense of that mutual cycle of interest in the title of George Lewis’s talk, “In Search of Benjamin Patterson”—this sense of a subject who is waiting to be asked, whose art, in fact, is meant as a catalyst for inquiry, for translation. Yet this meeting of desires is tricky. George warns us: “after you hear music, it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.”

If we think of George’s title as a real life or projected conversation with Ben Patterson, it brings us to a line of inquiry that would seem, in some ways, to be guided by the personal, the intimate, conjuring up the close relationship between dedicated scholar and elusive and/or neglected subject. (And as I write this, I’m looking at—and lifting—George Lewis’s hefty, lovingly detailed volume, A Power Stronger than Itself, testimony to the power of the mutual haunting of subject and object of inquiry, and to his dedication to unearthing the details of his subjects.) On a very basic level, George Lewis’s paper asks us to include and make visible Ben Patterson’s body as a particular body among other bodies—as part of a movement. In that spirit of the personal, George’s essay takes us to issues of identity and representation, including the erasure of Patterson from the canon of Fluxus performers, and more widely, the erasure of black participation in Fluxus, despite the fact that the Fluxus movement was born in the context of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the Vietnam War, and, as George says, the black avant garde in jazz, including the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

Yet in some ways, the work of Fluxus resists reading as a fully transparent response to social justice struggles and particularized issues of identity. This is reflected in art historian David T. Doris’s assessment of the movement:

Fluxus took the position of a sort of aesthetic Everyman, doing many small things in many small ways. . . . Fluxus challenged notions of representation, offering instead simple presentations that could provoke awe, laughter, disgust, dread—the entire range of human response. In the midst of an increasingly mediated world, the artists of Fluxus attempted to wake up to the experience of simply being human, a strange enterprise indeed.

(Doris 92)

In its interest in “the human” and in the interrelation of the body and object as “pure,” opened up as sensation, there seems to be a weighting in this language toward the “strange” but translatable experiences of bodies in space. So one of my questions is what do we do with the Black body in Fluxus and in Patterson’s work, especially as we recognize the intimate relation between subject and object of inquiry, as we recognize the ways that black bodies, names, and histories are...