Race bears depth, width, dimension, and space. These spatial considerations find purchase across a myriad of forms, content, and continuums. Indeed, to wrestle with such a complex construct requires new approaches. Art – as in the arts, plural and interdisciplinary – is a site where the most crucial discourses occur because it can both beguile and illuminate, building to a point of saturation once encountered.

“The concept of ‘saturation,’” writes Lisa Phillips in the introduction, “refers both to a materiality of pigment and to the sense of something becoming so full that it is weighed down, rendered immobile, or unable to be added to – a reading that suggests current paradigms cannot fully encompass the complex contemporary reality of race” (xii). This reality permeates nearly all points of society from the workplace to urban spaces, neoliberal institutions, and the academy. The question of representation, and if there is ever too much representation – that is, does the act of representation across channels reach a point of saturation? – is explored in Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value. This anthology gathers a collection of writings and visual content that is at once provocative, sometimes unsettling, but always inviting, for both the eyes and mind. It takes to task “The centrality of whiteness to [Isaac] Newton’s visual theory … an understanding of race as peripheral to whiteness in Western thought” (4). By this we understand Newton’s theory of saturation to favor whiteness over other colors, which are viewed as inferior or “primitive” (3). Such ideas seem crucial to the formation of race as a construct.

As part of a series started in 1984 with Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation and culminating with a revival in 2015 with the book, Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, Saturation takes up the challenge to be different from its predecessors, pushing the conversations surrounding race, sexuality, art, and geopolitics along different planes. In this case, the focus  on art, performance, and the intersection race (re)kindles along seemingly invisible fault lines. The book comprises a mixture of voices, from scholars to artists, including “essays, portfolios, and conversations” (5), which move easily from one genre to the next.

Divided into two sections, The Saturation of Institutional Life: Race, Globality, and the Art Market and Methods of Racial Matter and Saturation Points, challenges the reader to dig deeper, to work harder for the unified whole as, occasionally, it can be elusive. There is so much to take in, to reflect on, that the work invites reading over time. Like the best anthologies, it works well as a veritable choose-your-own adventure. 

However, what holds it all together is this notion of a collective experience shared across geopolitical realities, both quantifiable and qualifiable. Each of the contributors are writing from a different frame of positionality – many are scholars or artists, novelists, or filmmakers, amongst other fields, and this makes for a rich combination of viewpoints and analysis. What they share collectively is an appreciation and adoration of art in its many forms, while challenging the reader to think about race and art. With twenty-seven entries to choose from, Saturation invites the reader to walk around these spaces, as if they were in a museum with a roadmap – and a handful of colorful brochures – pointing to a variety of works that must be sampled and explored. 

The photographs, art, and general layout of the pages encourage an approach not entirely reliant upon alphabet texts – it’s a physical book in the truest sense. Take for instance, Anish Kapoor’s “150-meter-long, 35-meter-high” sculpture “Marsyas,” which, as cultural theorist Lisa Lowe, observes in her essay, “captures the scale, movement, uncertainty, and contradictions that are indices of what we have termed for some decades now ‘globalization,’ but also thematizes the problem of representation itself with respect to our late modern present” (28). Lowe’s “Metaphors of Globalization and Dilemmas of Excess” serves as a reminder that globalization does not always inspire equity. It reveals the stakes ahead, anticipating the book’s attention to power structures and art’s mediation around these boundaries.

Sarah Haley’s essay, “Racial Capitalism’s Gendered Fabric” argues for a reconsideration of gender and racial capitalism, specifically looking at labor and “reproductive labor,” and “gender’s role within racial capitalism in relation to historical carceral regimes” (15), and the justice system’s failing of female bodies of color. Taken in a different direction, disability justice is the centerpiece of Aimi Hamraie’s essay, “Parallels Intersections, Solidarities,” where the author has worked tirelessly to organize a disability justice collective in their community. In sum, Hamraie offers “a disability justice analysis of disability accessibility as a racialized project” (129). This is mainly achieved by looking at disability and its connection to spatial segregation (the acknowledgement that accessibility is colored, by race). 

One of the most striking essays from the collection is Jay Prosser’s “A Palinode on Photography and the Transsexual Real.” The word palinode, Prosser writes, is “a recantation (palin-ode: literally singing back or again); it is a counterbalancing of one’s primary ode, in which one brings to light what one could not see before” (261). Using Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (a gathering of ruminations on the art of photography) as a catalyst to discuss transsexuality in modern photography, Prosser describes various examples of depiction and representation through a transsexual lens; an approach obviously missing in Barthes’ book. Moreover, Prosser is wrestling with how he might “reveal the real of transsexuality in photography” (263) in unexplored ways. This beautifully-crafted meditation on transexual semiotics effortlessly vacillates between conversations with Judith Butler, Barthes, Lacan, Plato’s Phaedrus, and Walter Benjamin (among others). It is, simply put, a masterclass in autoethnographic/performative writing. 

The collection ends with the essay, “From Out of Space: Ralph Lemon in Conversation with Thomas J. Lax.” Lemon is a choreographer and visual artist whose photographs – all black and white, some shot on an iPhone – examine spaces related to the lynching of Emmett Till. It shows “The grocery store where, on August 24, 1955, Emmett Till may have wolf-whistled at a white woman” (356), the “barn where he was murdered” (359), and “The river where they recovered his fourteen-year-old mutilated body on August 31, 1955” (360). This artist portfolio “that grew out of an email conversation with curator Thomas J. Lax” (365), is melancholic, yet strangely energetic in how it manages to both personalize and reimagine the space decades later. Even if these photographs depict ghostly, dilapidated structures, it effectively historicizes, and works as a monument in pictorial gesture – a reminder of the saturation of race upon American soil.

Saturation is an important work—a sprawling, thought-provoking volume that can double as both a coffee table conversation starter and a serious entry into postcolonial and performance studies. It strips down the walls, crushes expectations, and rebuilds something possibly better: a conduit for deeper communication, while calling for activism on a greater, aesthetically-posed scale.