512021, issue 2
From Downton Abbey to Minneapolis:
Aesthetic Form and Black Lives Matter
Tom Huhn
After 400 years of brutality and oppression, what nally made possible for a majority
of American citizens the realization that some large portion of our fellow citizens con-
tinues to be systematically diminished and discriminated against? One answer is Netix
and HBO, along with the whole suite of online viewing platforms that deliver visual
narratives.
By summer 2020 there was a certain fatigue – after months of quarantine
viewing – and thus an appetite for more compelling drama. More pointedly – and here
is where the role of aesthetic form becomes prominent – there was the preparation
provided over the last several years by the expansion of a relatively new form of visual
narrative, of the miniseries and multi-season series formats. Contemporary viewers are
thus aorded, via these novel forms of consuming narrative, a more extended, nuanced,
and thus deeper involvement with whatever dramas unfold. We thereby became, by
means of our narrative imaginations having been reformatted and extended, more
invested in the signicance of things and perhaps thereby more attentive. These formats
cultivated in us a hunger for an ever-greater commitment to extended drama, just like
that which Aristotle dened as the enactment of the meaning of what human beings do.
Regardless of how explicit the video evidence of black people being dehu-
manized and killed, we have only our imaginations to rely on to tell us the meaning of,
and allow us to sympathize with, the horrors that we witness. However well-meaning
all those Sidney Poitier lms, or the poignancy of Norman Rockwell’s paintings of
integration, whatever sympathy they elicit seems not to have suciently prompted
the imaginations of white people; they did not go deep enough within the souls of
white folk to rouse them very far up. So too the relentlessness of the video evidence
of violence against blacks, the CNN format of the 24-hour repetition compulsion of
horror, which often leaves us more numb than awakened. Evidence, sadly, might prove
insucient fuel for the imagination.
We can only imagine ourselves, unfortunately, into the humanity of our fellow
citizens – as well as our own (which remains an ongoing task for each of us) – and I’m
suggesting that what might have played a critical role in the retrotting of the white
imagination such that it could take in the reality of ‘I can’t breathe,’ is that black lives can
come to matter only if the white imagination is prepared to see them and to admit it.
Other commentators on race relations, far wiser, believed that love would be the means
for preparing the expansion of the imagination. But, in the imagination, love – at least
in regard to race – has shown itself to be as feckless as evidence.
In the face of the ongoing insuciency of love, the multi-season, multi-episode
form of visual narrative helped make possible what love has been thus far incapable of.
It’s as if the accumulation, nally, of so many previous seasons of violence against blacks,
the episodes of Emmett Till, Rodney King, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland,
Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Breonna Taylor, et al., culminated
in the season nale George Floyd. Binge-watching helped prepare the imagination to
522021, issue 2
realize Floyd’s murder as the culmination of too many episodes and seasons of brutality.
I don’t in any way mean to equate these horric events and murders with entertain-
ment, but I do believe that what made it possible only now for white America to see the
meaning of them is that they appeared to happen – in the imagination – according to the
aesthetic forms by which we now mostly consume visual dramas. (Note the curiosity
that the broadcast of Roots in 1977 was one of the very rst miniseries).
Human actions become meaningful when the imagination has the means and
forms to make them appear so. Aristotle explains in his Poetics that art is superior to
history because the latter, regardless how true, remains too close to events for their
signicance to be experienced. History thereby oers precious little opening for us to
imaginatively take in and feel the drama of events. It’s as if we couldn’t fully imagine the
extent of the system of tragedy until we had repeatedly witnessed an unending mini-
series of tragedies. Consider again the prophecy of Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution
Will Not Be Televised; the revolution that consists of the realization of systemic racism
was indeed televised, but only after television was revised to aord the appearance of a
deeper and broader drama. Seeing exactly what continues to happen did not suce to
elicit the desire for change. We can’t know the meaning of the reality we inhabit until
it appears as a form we can imagine it in. And only then, perhaps, might we begin to
imagine it otherwise.
Tom Huhn is the chair of the Art History and BFA
Visual & Critical Studies Departments at the School
of Visual Arts in New York City. He received a PhD
in Philosophy from Boston University, and has
been a visiting professor at Yale University and the
University of Graz, Austria. His books include:
Imitation and Society: The Persistence of Mimesis in the
Aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant;The Cambridge
Companion to Adorno;The Wake of Art: Criticism,
Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste; andThe Semblance
of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.His
publications include:New German Critique, Art &
Text, Oxford Art Journal, British Journal of Aesthetics,
Art Criticism, Telos, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Oxford Encyclopedia of
Aesthetics, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Art Book,
Art in America.Huhn has been a Getty Scholar and
Fulbright Scholar. Huhn’s curatorial works include:
«Ornament and Landscape,» at Apex Gallery; «Still
Missing: Beauty Absent Social Life,» at the Visual Arts
Museum and Westport Arts Center; “Between
Picture and Viewer: The Image in Contemporary
Painting” at the Visual Arts Gallery, NYC.
Biography
