a love supreme , 2005–6 Single-channel video, sound 7 minutes, 51 seconds Edition of 3 + 1 AP
In Dineo Seshee Bopape’s short video work, John Coltrane’s seminal 1964 recording of “A Love Supreme” plays in the background as the artist licks chocolate from a pane of glass. Seen head-on, as a mediating layer between the viewer and the performer, the opaque image field is sensuously removed to reveal the artist behind. Arriving from a postmodernist tradition of “video performance,” the work intensifies a sense of alienation. As much as it is a strike at the tired tropes of its genre of artmaking, it is also an upending of the tired tropes that have been used to describe the Black body. The destruction of the very thing that conceals and obscures is not an act of violence but an act of love, care, nourishment, and pleasure. The consumption of the chocolate—the substance that the image field is made of— may be a metaphor for tending
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