Kris Cohen is Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College and author of Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations, also published by Duke University Press.
Description
Acknowledgments vii Introduction: The Human in Bits 1 1. Operational Processes: Leo Steinberg 37 2. In, Around, Above, Behind, and Other Forms of Space Flight: Alma Thomas 52 3. Nonrelational Blackness: Jack Whitten 74 4. Modernity and Fungibility: Charles Gaines 110 5. Infrastructures of Containment: Julie Mehretu 124 Coda: Resistance and Standing 150 Notes 161 Bibliography 179 Index 193
"Kris Cohen tracks how contemporary Black artists disrupt the fantasy of the human as an autonomous observer, revealing instead how racial capitalism renders the human a byproduct of technology. This critique of Western transcendentalism refuses containment within the racial hierarchies that structure society. The Human in Bits remaps modernist art criticism through the lens of Black radical thought, showing how art and technology conspire in, but also unsettle, racial value. For those committed to opposing white supremacy, the task is clear: engage Black art not as a detached aesthetic pursuit, but as a call to dismantle the systems that commodify life itself." - Tavia Nyong'o, author of Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World "Original in its conception, carefully argued, and beautifully written, The Human in Bits makes an important intervention in art historical and media studies discourses as well as cutting-edge discussions of black aesthetics, particularly in the ways it approaches themes of the nonrepresentational and nonrelational. Kris Cohen's unique perspective on the artists he discusses offers a set of conceptual and methodological tools that will become valuable for future generations of scholars. This book taught me a lot." - Shaka McGlotten, author of Dragging: Or, In the Drag of a Queer Life