Depending on a tank and regulator, however, never resonated with him as much as the one-breath aesthetic. He spent more time observing than spearing fish, and freediving became a part of his life.Īs a teenager he got his dive certification in Belgium and became a PADI divemaster at 18 and an instructor a year later. As he had to go deeper for game, he learned to equalize. By the age of 7 he was satisfying his curiosity about the underwater world by snorkeling, and he started spearfishing a few years later. He began reading voraciously at 4 years old. Boating was a family passion, and while his parents weren’t divers, Buyle was curious about all things related to the ocean. Buyle missed the active era of his father’s life in fashion photography, as he was retired from that career by the time Buyle was born.įor at least two months each summer the family sailed to Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Norway. His grandfather was a fine art painter, and his father was an advertising and fashion photographer in the 1960s. His great-grandfather was an innovative and acclaimed photographer in Brussels and portraitist to the Belgian royal family. Moten’s additional publications include All That Beauty (2019), The Service Porch (2016), The Little Edges (2015), B Jenkins (2010), and Hughson’s Tavern (2009) and he is co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013).Buyle came to photography naturally - some might say genetically. He has taught previously at the University of California at Riverside, Duke University, and the University of Iowa. Since 2017, he has served as a professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. Biographyįred Moten received an AB (1984) from Harvard University and a PhD (1994) from the University of California at Berkeley. Through his writing and lectures, Moten is demonstrating the power of critical thinking to establish new forms of social actualization and reconfiguring the contours of the cultural field broadly. In his 2014 collection, The Feel Trio, for instance, language hovers at the edge of sense so that sound rises to the fore and the reading of the poem approaches musical performance.
Moten continues the project of his theoretical work in his poetry. The breadth of his theoretical insights in these volumes extends across the arts and humanities-from the music of Curtis Mayfield and Billie Holiday to the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Theodor Adorno-as he explores notions of performance and freedom and formations of Black identity. Moten’s recently completed three-volume theoretical treatise, collectively called consent not to be a single being (2017–2018), includes essays written over the course of fifteen years. For example, in considering Frederick Douglass’s famous account of the “terrible spectacle” of slavery, Moten identifies the screams of Douglass’s Aunt Hester as the materialization in sound of Black resistance, thus opening onto a new way of understanding the trauma of slavery as something not just seen but emphatically heard as well. His first book, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), offers seminal insights that emerge from taking sound, as opposed to visual or textual imagery, as the point of departure for interpretation. Moten’s diverse body of work coheres around a relentless exploration of sound and its importance as a medium of Black resistance and creativity. He is developing a new mode of aesthetic inquiry wherein the conditions of being Black play a central role.
In his theoretical and critical writing on visual culture, poetics, music, and performance, Moten seeks to move beyond normative categories of analysis, grounded in Western philosophical traditions, that do not account for the Black experience. Fred Moten is a cultural theorist and poet creating new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life.