Your country? How came it yours?
Before the Pilgrims landed, we were here.1
Immediately following the Senate confirmation hearings preliminary to Clarence Thomas’s
appointment to the United States Supreme Court, and Anita Hill’s public accusations of
sexual harassment, I was in full preparation for a conference. The poster announcing the
conference juxtaposed images of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill; it immediately became a
collector’s item. It was so hot, in fact, that the Studio Museum in Harlem, which hosted
the opening night, banned it from being shown on 125th Street.2 The conference “Black
Popular Culture” brought together the most prominent black intellectuals, scholars and
critics ever seen in one place at the same time.3 The event was sponsored by Dia Art
Foundation at their SoHo location—a neighborhood that had not yet become the sleek
designer mall it is today—as the next in their series, “Discussions in Contemporary
Culture,” all of which had resulted in important books.
4 At that time, Dia was the acme
of white, male, conceptual artists, some of whom the institution had collected and
maintained on generous stipends over the years. To the degree that black visual artists
had ever been recognized, they were still seen as both marginal to the art world and,
evidently, to the beating heart of black authenticity.
The stellar speakers had not flown in from the four corners of the earth at Dia’s expense
to talk about the art scene. We black folks had real problems to talk about—a blossoming
AIAIDS crisis, increasing rates of crack addiction, teenage pregnancy, homelessness,
rampaging homophobia, unemployment and incarceration, not to mention regressing racism
and anti-affirmative action on the political and financial fronts. Although such noteworthy
filmmakers as Isaac Julien and Arthur Jafa were included in the line-up, they had not
been selected for their contribution to visual culture, but rather in spite of it. From
the outset there was an intrinsic misunderstanding in the notion of “Black Popular Culture”
as it was presented at the conference, one I felt helpless to correct as the event
progressed for three sleepless days and nights. Although I participated in the selection
of speakers, in many cases my judgments were overruled and I ended up having little
control over what actually happened.
“Black Popular Culture” drew equally and in combination on the trend toward mechanized
and commercialized mass culture as well as toward a notion of cultural production, which
was expected to exhibit a greater “honesty” and appeal to a larger, more roughly hewn
audience. On one hand, popular was intended to cater to the masses (black or otherwise),
or to “the folk furthest down” (as Zora Neale Hurston would call them), but on the other
hand, it also meant capable of reproduction and dissemination at a rapid rate owing to the
increasing cheapness and availability of technological modes of reproduction. Then, as now,
hip-hop epitomized the nexus of mechanical reproduction and the possibility for artistic
genius. Despite these two qualities—convenience and popularity—which might easily have
contributed in a previous century to the perception that the resulting art was less than
fine, in the case of “Black Popular Culture,” excellence of a high order was still
considered possible and even likely.
What generated the excitement in the air throughout “Black Popular Culture” was precisely
this new atmosphere of what some might call “the black postmodern,” in which a primal appeal
could be forged with the highest level of technological apparatus.
5 It also appeared as
though the cultural byproducts of the African diaspora were the particular focus of this
postmodern twist. Deeply relevant to this amalgamation of the folk and the postmodern were
such internationally famous musical performers as Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, Otis Redding, Sam
Cooke, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan and
Nina Simone, and the list could go on and on.
6 Thus many of the speakers at “Black Popular
Culture” didn’t go any deeper than the music.
In my experience, the discussion of black popular culture has been limited to music and
sports. Yet my hesitation went beyond the question of what we should have done because I
knew, firsthand, that most of the participants had not given a thought to issues of visual
culture in any sense. Moreover, most of them had never considered the possibility that
visual culture could be a productive participating factor in “Black Popular Culture.”
If
anything, the visual would have been cited as a negative component of popular culture in
the sense that the visual is most commonly associated with the problem of negative
stereotypes and mistaken impressions of race. At that time visual culture still wasn’t
part of the lives of most blacks, even bourgeois blacks, perhaps because of this old
unpleasant link between visual stereotypes and American popular culture and illustration.
Much of this history has even been deliberately suppressed from public view. Taking into
account that most museum exhibitions are subject to corporate sponsorship, it’s evident
why this work is never seen despite the abundance residing in the storehouses of major
American museums, archives, and libraries.7
I was disappointed by the pointed lack of reference to African-American visual artists,
apart from my own closing remarks concerning the lack of “great” black artists as the
canon of art history was then constructed, and the address of Judith Wilson on the use
of pornographic images in the collages of Romare Bearden. It seemed to me that black
artists were not being given their dues by the canon of world art history. In 2008, this
may still be partly true but I think that art-historical judgment matters less, and/or
simply takes a backseat to market trends in relation to contemporary art, while the
designation great no longer carries with it its once presumably timeless and inviolable
aura. All inequality hasn’t been corrected or addressed but it’s obvious that
African-American contemporary artists have begun to make a dent in the bottom line of
the marketplace, and further, that the marketplace may trump the museum in the end.
Thankfully, the art world is no longer quite as colorblind and colorstupid as it once
was. Today, a broad range of art by living African-American artists is being collected,
displayed, and exhibited in public and private museums and galleries throughout the world,
not to the degree that it could ever make up for the prior neglect, but in a manner that
is nonetheless interesting to study and notice. How contemporary art will transit into
the contested terrain of the museums of the future is difficult to fathom but it seems
to me that many black artists will stand a pretty good chance of surviving the fray at
least as well as many of their white contemporaries.
In the conference “Black Popular Culture,” I asked, “Why are there no great black artists?”8
I was paraphrasing Linda Nochlin’s important essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?” (1971), as well as drawing attention to how Nochlin invokes simultaneously the
idea that there were no great black artists for much the same reason: the achievements of
both women and blacks had been suppressed because of bigotry and suppression. I used the
Nochlin piece to emphasize the erasure of black visual artists in our black popular culture
conference. Today I feel comfortable in the assumption that not only is there a wide range
of wonderful black artists, but that, increasingly, their contribution to the world language
of the visual arts has been and will continue to be recognized and understood. Moreover, I
question the indistinguishable greatness of an artist or any other cultural achievement,
along with the notion that important objects are more important than individual lives. Life,
which cannot be objectified, is more important than things, which can be counted but never
really endowed with spiritual qualities.
With museums and research libraries attracting megacrowds to their websites, and with 500
television channels broadcasting everything from avant-garde silent films to vulgar dreck,
not to mention the information and entertainment coming our way via computers, iPhones,
and Blackberries, the distinctions between elite and mass culture have ceased to carry
their former importance. Each of us is invited by the Internet to carve out his or her
own individual culture from the endless resources of a growing electronic archive of
information and images. Barack Obama has been nominated as the Democratic candidate for
the office of President of the United States by unanimous acclamation, something that
has never happened to an African-American in the history of the United States. (Indeed,
by the time this essay is published he may be president.) Today, even as I have been
keeping my eye on the elections, I’ve been watching on and off a documentary summary
of the Lyndon Baines Johnson audiotapes, the last volume of which is devoted to the FBI
conspiracy against Martin Luther King and leading up to the murders of JFK (1963), RFK
and King (1968). When events overtake me, I like to situate myself in history. Johnson
was not only the person who screwed up in Vietnam; he was also the president who provided
this country with its first national legislative racial landmarks after Reconstruction
with the passage of the civil rights bills of 1964 and 1965, making it possible for black
men and women to vote in large enough blocks to throw local, state, and even national
elections. Such possibilities were a ticking time bomb as far as southern segregationists
like J. Edgar Hoover were concerned. The more one becomes a humble student of history,
the more one realizes that not much happens either suddenly or completely by accident.
The situation is nowhere near the ideal of racial or gender equality many of us long to
see, but the fame and financial heat of the international art world was never designed to
be fair. Nor can we really discuss equality between the races until we can broach the
subject of reparations—whatever that might mean—for the lasting damage of centuries of
African slavery.9 And who should pay since both culprits and victims are long in their
graves? And it’s evident that the descendants of both groups still find it impossible
to occupy the world peacefully together, or so the high rate of incarceration of black
men would seem to suggest.
Thirty years or so ago, Mera and Don Rubell began collecting art according to their passions.
In the course of this activity, they amassed a prescient and substantial collection of
art by African-Americans. “30 Americans” at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami displays
works by many of these artists throughout the twenty-seven galleries of the former DEAEA
warehouse that is now this museum.
A number of these works immediately set me contemplating the African sublime, which I think
of as the generations of pain and suffering of our black ancestors, now transformed into
the beautiful, poetic, and lyrical by the emotional and spiritual patina of experience. I
felt closest to the photographs of Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems, which take me back
to the exhibition “Harlem on My Mind”10 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969. This
was the first time that I saw the photographs of the great James VanDerZee. It still makes
me weep when I search the Metropolitan Museum’s art history timeline on the web for
VanDerZee, to find no trace of him or “Harlem on My Mind”!
One must take into account the perpetual scandal of the image of the black (male or female)
in Western civilization in order to comprehend the ongoing problem of inadequate recognition
and contextualization for black artists. Nonetheless, the exquisite flair that VanDerZee
exhibited over a lifetime as a Harlem photographer, persistent in his desire to document
every strand of contemporary African-American culture—right up to a portrait of Jean-Michel
Basquiat—is well represented by the meticulous sensitivity of Lorna Simpson’s photographs.
In the twenty-two precisely executed images of false hairpieces that comprise Wigs
(Portfolio), Simpson wrestles with the philosophical and feminist issues of representation
and subjectivity in the context of the black body. The rigor of her work engages in the
same kind of imaginative anchoring of black culture and consciousness as Carrie Mae Weems’s
re-stating of the intersections of European anthropological methodologies with American
slavery as evidenced by Louis Agassiz’s photographic studies of four slaves in the late
antebellum period, in her series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Descending
the Throne) (1995-1996). Hank Willis Thomas’s sly and subversive photo-montages present
compositions of advertising images denuded of their logos and banal consumerist messages,
revealing the vulgar and graceless racial manipulations in which these photographs were
initially conceived.
Other conceptual artists in this exhibition—David Hammons, Glenn Ligon and Renée Green—are
all represented by some of their best work. For Hammons, it is Esquire (or John Henry)
(1990), a rock set on a shoe-polish lid, atop a plinth made from a section of rusted railroad
track. The crown of the “rock head” is covered with nappy hair gathered from a local
barbershop and adhered with the sweat of the human hand. John Henry is one of Afro-America’s
favorite legends: a steel-driving man, the most powerful in the land, who, in a match of
strength against the steam-powered hammer, beat the machine only to die from exhaustion.
Renée Green examines tropes of race and gender in her selection of representative film
stills throughout history. In Untitled (I Sell the Shadow to Sustain the Substance) (2005),
Glenn Ligon uses glowing white neon to convey a message taken from a daguerreotype of the
former slave and vocal black feminist abolitionist leader, Sojourner Truth, drawing
comparison between Truth’s relationship to public discourse as a nineteenth-century black
female, and his own as a black male artist living in the twenty-first century. His is one
of the many references to the enslavement of African-Americans throughout the works in
“30 Americans.” By drawing upon the less well-known aspects of American history and
culture related to the African-American experience, these artists are at once testing
and training their still predominantly white audiences.
Years before “Black Popular Culture,” New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged their infamous
exhibition “Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,”
curated by William Rubin, which attempted to map the relationship between modernist art
and “primitive” art from Africa, the indigenous cultures of North America, and the Pacific
Islands. The copiously illustrated, double-volume catalog for the exhibition immediately
set the standard for the incorporation of the visual cultures of people of color into the
narrative of modernism. At the time, the participation of contemporary African-American
artists was not even imagined by anyone other than themselves, and yet by 1984 there were
and had been for some time key African-American artists participating meaningfully in the
unfolding of the American art scene—William Johnson, Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Romare
Bearden, Alma Thomas, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Faith Ringgold, just to name a very few.
But the extensive and heated debate at the time over the exhibition and the catalog centered
on whether or not the museum’s narrative had diminished the importance of the modernist
debt to Native American, Pacific Islander, and African cultures by insisting upon referring
to them as affinities rather than influences. On the face of it, their argument versus mine
would seem a minor, even moot, distinction.
Yet what was really at stake in this linguistic squabble—between one side that seemed to
have all the right of way and the other that was inhabited ideally by the subject position
of people of color who had produced these highly influential works of primitive art—was the
theft and appropriation of cultural legacies whose importance and intelligence had been
dismissed and denied ad infinitum. If this work wasn’t pivotal, then why so much discussion
about it? Why, indeed, couldn’t modernist art legitimately admit to influences from outside
of European cultural conventions? And why was this position so emphatically stated in
precisely the country in which the pressure of racial and cultural differences had always
been so intensely manifested in a variety of noxious forms, from blackface minstrelsy to
spectacle lynchings, to the explosive rage of the Civil War?
Rubin wrote in his introduction to the exhibition:
Only since World War IIII has the discipline of art history turned its attention to
this material, however, graduate level programs in Primitive Art are still comparatively
rare, and few of their students are also involved in modern studies. It should come
as no surprise, therefore, that much of what historians of twentieth-century art have
said about the intervention of tribal art in the unfolding of modernism is wrong. Not
familiar with the chronology of the arrival and diffusion of Primitive objects in the
West, they have characteristically made unwarranted assumptions of influence.11
In unconscious justification of the Western ownership of some of the most prized and
magnificent objects of “Primitive Art,” he willed himself to forget entirely the millions
of African bodies lying at the bottom of the ocean and those that helped to populate and
generate the modern cultures of the New World. Such works as those of Jean-Michel Basquiat
included in this exhibition, Bird on Money (1981), One Million Yen (1982) and Untitled
(Self-Portrait) (1982-83), might have persuaded him of the folly of making such projections
regarding the exchanges between the primitivism harvested from the Pacific, the Americas
and Africa, and the consequences for the most revered artists of European and American
modernism of the twentieth century. Rubin’s claims involved an over-simplification of a
complex series of cultural and historical events across continents and language groups.
Suffice it to say that art-making simply doesn’t work as Rubin would have it. It is neither
predictable nor definable. His very use of the category art has a specific and finite
history whereas the objects drawn upon in making art are virtually unlimited.
In considering questions of primitivism, I think rather of the struggle over the classification
of the Outsider in today’s art world, and how this term has been applied to explain the
extraordinary and profoundly moving presence of African-American visual art in communities
that were assumed to have no visual life—yet another manifestation of the invisibility Ralph
Ellison so accurately diagnosed in his masterpiece, Invisible Man. All African-American
artists have been considered outsiders both to African-American culture and European-American
culture for a very long time. If outsider isn’t stamped on the life or lifestyle of the
black
artist, it is surely somewhere in his or her use of form, design, color, and/or materials.
In this exhibition the outsider is everywhere. Take the over three thousand paintings on
found objects and materials by Purvis Young, made between 1985 and 1999, as well as the
film Purvis of Overtown, and the illustrations in the second volume of Souls Grown Deep.12
Young is not the product of the New York art scene, nor is he the product of a prominent
art school, and yet his work reflects as surely as Basquiat’s the prototypical tragedy of
African-American life, that of the saga of the African diaspora via the Middle Passage,
slavery, Jim Crow and racism—a saga that gave rise to a very particular type of compulsion
to create, regardless of the visible lack of education, and despite poverty and deprivation.
Kara Walker’s Camptown Ladies (1998), comprises a series of inscrutable silhouettes, with
urine and semen squirting through the air and a mountain of feces concluding the tale. It
seems the Middle Passage is never far from her creative process. Walker’s fascination with
its dynamics was most apparent in her recent exhibition “Kara Walker at the Met: After the
Deluge” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006.13 Together with her own drawings,
silhouettes, and paintings, Walker drew upon the art of John Singleton Copley, John Carlin,
Winslow Homer and Joseph Turner—nineteenth-century painters who reflected on the consequences
of slavery and American racism—together with silhouettes by Auguste Edouart, William Henry
Brown and John Warner Barber,14 and some African sculptures, in order to recall the poignant
collective histories of floods and water in intersection with narratives of race. In
Camptown
Ladies, she continues to manifest her singular path as a commentator on the African-American
condition, the title referring to a song written by Stephen Foster and made popular in the
late nineteenth century by blackface minstrelsy. In Walker’s characteristic appropriation
of blackface and the pretense of submission, there is a mocking of the simplicity, naiveté,
and roughness of the so-called American primitive. Here the primitive is no longer African
or even tribal or ancestral but rather it refers to the animalistic or psychologically primal.
The Enlightenment gradually offered a scientific and biological notion of inferiority to
substitute and supplement the cultural one, since the cultural definition of inferiority
would become less reliable as the technologies of visual reproduction, travel and
communication advanced, and made imaginative speculation about the other less conclusively
seductive.
Robert Colescott pursues a different manifestation of the primitive in his compelling
charcoal drawing Passing (1982), in which a white female and a light-skinned black male
kiss inside a heart, at the top of which is a man who exhibits the exaggerated features
of a stereotypical cartoon of a black man. In an untitled unique woodcut in twelve panels,
Kerry James Marshall depicts a set of average African-American lives. Moving across a
brick
wall, a window, a living room, an expanse of pink interior wall, and finally a
bedroom—obviously in an apartment or tenement building—the viewer’s gaze scans the life
of a group of African-Americans relaxing in a circle of conviviality and conversation.
The subtle focus of this image of people captured inadvertently in their lives is compelling,
as is his innovative use of the traditional woodcut. In her cross-cultural emulations of
historical Japanese woodcuts, Iona Rozeal Brown combines African and Japanese signs—black
skin, decorative fingernails, Japanese textiles, and hairstyles—into ornately detailed
paintings. Fascinated by a Japanese sub-culture that devotes itself to imitating
African-American hip-hop culture, Brown renders blackface, perhaps more palatably, upon
a grid of Japanese cultural and visual signs.
“30 Americans” contains a near-comprehensive repertoire of the tropes of black postmodernism
and the African-American sublime, in which the negativities of slavery, Jim Crow, blackface
minstrelsy, racism, sexism and sexual slavery are constantly invoked and interrogated for
the rich, dark spaces and designs that their still-warm undersides may reveal. Every
African-American artist I can think of whose work I admire finds some way to signal his or
her existential outsiderness. In a dominant visual culture in which blackness is often
viewed as a negation of both culture and worth, the outside holds as much interest and
cachet as the inside. We black people always want to know, regardless of our education
and family background: What relation does your work have to the outside where most black
people continue to be found everywhere you can look?
October 2008
Michele Wallace
Michele Wallace is a professor of English, Women’s Studies and Cinema Studies at the City
College of New York and The City University of New York Graduate Center. Since her 1979
influential work, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: The Dial Press,
1978), Wallace has continued to contribute significantly to the field of visual culture
as it relates to gender and race with books such as Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory
(New York: Verso, 1990) and Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press,
2004). In 1991, she organized a groundbreaking conference at the Studio Museum in Harlem
entitled “Black Popular Culture.” In the subsequent book by the same name, she contributed
an afterword titled “Why Are There No Great Black Artists? The Problem of Visuality in
African-American Culture.”
1. From W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of the Sorrow Songs,” in The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg &
Co.; Cambridge: University Press John Wilson and Son, 1903).
2. 125th Street in New York City’s borough of Manhattan is a major thoroughfare and shopping district
and often considered the “heart” of Harlem.
3. The conference, titled Black Popular Culture, A Project by Michele Wallace, had in attendance:
Houston Baker, Jr., Jacqueline Bobo, Hazel Carby, Angela Davis, Manthia Diawara, Coco Fusco, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., Paul Gilroy, Ada Gay Griffin, Stuart Hall, Thomas Allen Harris, bell hooks, Arthur
Jafa, Isaac Julien, Julianne Malveaux, Manning Marable, Marlon T. Riggs, Tricia Rose, Valerie Smith,
Greg Tate, Cornel West, Sherley Anne Williams, Margo Jefferson and Judith Wilson; and was followed
the next year by the publication of the book Black Popular Culture, A Project by Michele Wallace, ed.
Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press and Dia Center for the Arts, 1992).
4. Titles included Discussions in Contemporary Culture, edited by Hal Foster; The Work of Andy Warhol,
edited by Gary Garrels; Remaking History, edited by Barbara Kruger and Philomena Mariani; Democracy,
edited by Brian Wallis; If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory and Social Activism, edited by
Martha Rosler and Brian Wallis; and Constructing Masculinity, edited by Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis
and Simon Watson.
5. Thelma Golden, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, (New York:
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994).
6. L Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Art News 69 (January 1971); reprinted
in Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 145-78.
7. Wallace, “De-Facing History,” Art in America (October 1991).
8. Wallace, “Afterword: Why Are There No Great Black Artists? The Problem of Visuality in African-American
Culture,” in Black Popular Culture, A Project by Michele Wallace.
9. I I have begun collecting cultural references to reparations. My favorite thus far is Cassandra
Wilson’s song devoted to the topic, “Justice,” from Belly of the Sun, Blue Note Records, 2002.
10. A Allon Schoener, ed. Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968 (New York:
New Press, 2007).
11. William Rubin, ed., Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,
2 vols. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984).
12. William Arnett and Paul Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, vol. 2,
(Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2001); Purvis of Overtown, DVD, directed by David Raccuglia and Shaun Conrad
(Atlanta: Tinwood, 2005). The work of Purvis Young is featured on the cover of Souls Grown Deep, vol. 2.
13. Kara Walker, Kara Walker: After the Deluge (New York: Rizzoli, 2007).
14. I Ibid.
15. I Interestingly, in the eighteenth century there was a former slave named Moses Williams who worked
as a silhouette maker in the museum of his owner, the famous American painter Charles Willson Peale.
Cutting silhouettes was considered a lesser art form, more appropriate to William’s status as a former
slave in antebellum Philadelphia society.
