Then there was the sculpture, a large lustrous black stone of alien provenance. Walking around it I realised that the sculpture had been placed so that upon entering one might see only its black surface. On the other side it revealed a surface open and coated in gold glitter, geodic revelation. I knelt to inspect it closer, witness to a tiny spider crawling across its surface, from black to gold and back.

Andrew E. Colarusso’s Black Body Index takes the concept of the ‘ideal black body’ as its guiding object. In thermodynamics and physics, the ideal black body is a theoretical object that absorbs and emits all incident radiation. No such object exists, though a few come close…

Told in a mercurial constellation of fragments that move between memoir, poetry and thermodynamic theory, Andrew E. Colarusso’s Black Body Index inspects the ‘thingification’ of an ideal black life and refutes it—insisting on the freedom to live beyond the demands of an enforced objecthood.

Black Body Index is published as part of Arrhythmia, a series curated for Book Works by Katrina Palmer.

Andrew E. Colarusso was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City. He occasionally writes things when not tending to his bookstore, Taylor & Co. Books, in the Ditmas Park neighbourhood of Brooklyn.

Katrina Palmer is an artist and writer, living in London. She is the author of The Dark Object (2010), The Fabricators Tale (2014), End Matter (2015) and Black Slit (2023), all published by Book Works. She has exhibited extensively, including with an Artangel Open commission (2015), at Henry Moore Institute (2015-16), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2018), and with Estuary and Waterfronts (2021). She received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (2014). 

Published November 2024