The Brooklyn Rail Interviews Fred Moten

For the November issue of The Brooklyn Rail, Fred Moten spoke with Jarrett Earnest about the evolution of his writing and the publication of a new book of essays, Black and Blur (Duke, 2017), which "charts his sustained engagement with contemporary visual art." A bit from this conversation:

Rail: So you had a very long and deep relationship with Amiri Baraka through his work, which you wrote about in In the Break, but you also must have met and interacted with him a number of times. I’m interested in what it means to write not just out of the knowledge of what someone has done, but from an experience of who they are.

Moten: I don’t think I could go so far as to call it a “personal” relationship, but it got to the point that he knew who I was. I wish it would have been that. And if it wasn’t that, I’m sure it was more a function of my reticence about that kind of stuff — you know, I have certain heroes, but it takes me a while to muster enough courage to actually try and talk to them. But I think I see what you’re getting at. When you read someone very closely and carefully, really immersing yourself in their work, it’s more than just a relationship with a book. That is a personal relationship too. There are certain writers that if you read them enough you begin to feel a different kind of closeness. I never met Shakespeare or John Donne but my relationship with them is more than merely literary. With Baraka it was that, too, but at a higher level of intensity.

Rail: In The Break charts a specific path through the black radical tradition that terminates with Adrian Piper, but there is nothing really “visual” in the book—aside from a luminous moment where you talk about Beauford Delaney. It is really a “sonic” and “phonic” argument. With Black and Blur, there is a lot more engagement with visual art, especially contemporary art. In fact, you mention an early important experience that you had at the Fogg Museum with a Renoir. I’d like to understand the story of your relationship with visual art, and why that Renoir was important to you.

Moten: I mean, I love visual art. And I also really love art history, as a discipline—when I say that I mean to say, like any other discipline, one has a love-hate relationship to it, because it’s got all kinds of blindnesses and exclusions and brutalities. What I love about reading art historians is that they have real talent for looking at stuff closely, and I like to read them talking about what they’re looking at closely. It’s not like I have those skills—I don’t. Those are skills people learn, and you do develop your own way of looking over the course of time, and a lot of that just comes out of repeated looking. With the Renoir…I mean, Harvard is an evil place. Part of the way that evil manifests itself is that they just own a tremendous amount of shit. It’s unfair. And it should be broken up. But you’re there, and you take advantage of it—sometimes against your own inclinations, and sometimes just by accident—they’ve just go so much. I wandered into the Fogg one day. Like a lot of nerdily inclined undergraduates I had a period of being interested in van Gogh self-portraits, and they have a good one there. But what killed me was a Renoir [Gabrielle en Robe Rouge]. I just decided to go there two or three times a week to see that painting. I started reading about it, to understand how he did it, and the thing I was fascinated by was the way Renoir used color...

Read the full interview at the Rail.