Art and realness
As I mentioned I was going to, last weekend, I attended a panel on the exhibit at the Brooklyn Musem of paintings by Kehinde Wiley.
The exhibit is exciting. It is based on Old Masters paintings in terms of the stances adopted by the models, but all are paintings of
"urban-ly" dressed African-American men depicted in void or stylized-void space, with background motifs derived from baroque, rococo, and Islamic decorative arts, among other genres. Wiley's process is that he approaches strangers on the street, whom he finds visually interesting, and shows them his portfolio of paintings and polaroids of past models. If they agree to model for him, he shows them his art books of Masters paintings and they collaborate in choosing their own pose. A wall text says that he was inspired to do this work by, while walking in Harlem, seeing a police sketch of a wanted African-American man, and wanting to offer another kind of representation.
"Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them. This is my way of saying yes to us."--Kehinde Wiley, on gallery wall card
It was a strange experience, seeing this panel. For one thing, Kehinde Wiley was scheduled to be there and wasn't, so all of the panelists, especially the curator, a South African transplant named Tumelo Mosaka, were put in the position of speaking for him by summarizing things he has said in the past, or refusing to. For another, other than his website which has eensy thumbnails, I was unfamiliar with the artist beforehand and got there late so I didn't get to absorb the art fully before jumping into the panel. So some of the conclusions drawn by the panelists seemed premature to me, thought I might have immediately jumped to them myself had I not had it done for me.
In the first place, it seemed inandofitself radical to choose to make this depiction. The arts have integrated at radically different speeds and the world of fine art seems in some ways the slowest to do so, and the most dependent on the echelons of entry provided by art school degrees, residencies, etc. (with the exception of the weird category of "outsider artists" of course). In some ways, I wonder if it has advanced much farther than the demeaning interactions with patronage Langston Hughes was writing short stories about approximately 100 years ago. In that context, I must imagine that Wiley, who has weathered those echelons, does not see many people who look like him in the circuit of openings and lectures and whatnot that are semi-required of a professional Artist. Merely to redress the balance, his work is a significant act.
For making this decision, he has been declared Mr. Thing and (hewasbornin1977) has his own museum show, something which, Isolde Brielmaier (an art historian/curator from Vassar on the panel) pointed out, is usually reserved for artists well over 40 with a large body of work. The curator of Wiley's show mentioned that he was still finishing paintings for the show more or less as they were hanging it. One worries about the effect of such success on such a young artist. Particularly when, as I did on the way out, you watch the little video of Wiley pretending to work on one of his paintings with talking head quotes resembling the wall-card text quote above positing him as Mr. Black Artist Spokesmodel, and then you get to the end of the little video and the credit goes:
A portrait in black by Kehinde Wiley: Easter Realness #5 [painting dissolves to car]
A study in black by Infiniti G35
There are some things I deeply enjoyed about the pieces. His use of color is fearless and bold. Several of the backgrounds were color-clashy in a way Barry Michael Cooper compared to Hype Williams's use of color, and which I would also compare to the electric pink and green Versus by Versace was using a couple of seasons ago, or (winking at illlaw or mightypen) the cheaply produced laminated bright blue and red folders my high school gave out every first day of school. Whomever in the administration was responsible, that red and blue were perfectly calibrated to be nearly impossible to look at next to each other.
There were also things about the technique I found a bit grating: fields of color in the face that seemed to make obvious that he was working from high-contrast photos rather than live models, an amateurish-looking technique on the cornrows of some of the models. It reminded me a bit of Senegalese barbershop sign-painting, or other kinds of art that is usually described as "vernacular" or "outsider." I wondered why Wiley made that choice. Perhaps he intended to sample outsider technique alongside his Old Master influences but aesthetically I wasn't in love with that choice.
In a lot of ways, they reminded me of some Hughie Lee-Smith paintings I saw at the Chicago Cultural Center once, of young black girls walking decaying urban sidewalks against bright skies with balloons or unspooling ribbons in the air around them--I can't find any images that really resemble my memory of these paintings but here and here are as close as I could get, particularly the latter (in the Grant Hill Collection, interestingly). There was a similar sense of joy and color in Wiley's skies, but Wiley is breaking from the social realist tradition that Lee-Smith started in and embracing the surrealism of those bright ribbons. Nevertheless, there is always the expectation that an African-American artist will be somehow working in (or choosing not to) social realism, that their work will be either political or apolitical, an always-already dialectic in which the work is read and to which the work's positioning by Wiley and the museum clearly responds. And the discussion went there quite quickly too.
For example, although only one of the paintings depicted a man wearing a jeweled pendant, black consumerism, bling, and throwback jerseys came up almost first thing in the discussion. To be fair to the panelists, Wiley has apparently spoken about bling at length, but it was interesting to me that it wasn't actually in the art. There is a way in which panel discussions can often become a group of smart people being smart and interesting without actually staying that on-topic. There was also the specter of the thug, the romanticization thereof in recent pop culture, to which one audience member said, not in so many words but nearly, "Why it gotta be a thug though?"
Barry Michael Cooper made the point that the art makes use of a tradition of religiosity and dying young, enshrining black men as saints and angels, which he compared to Biggie and Tupac. In certain of the images, I saw the sainted jouissance or ecstasy that Teresa de Avila painting is famed for. From there it went to the idea of sexual ambiguity and metrosexuality (with Andre 3000 quoted by moderator Jason King as the model of African-American metrosexuality, hmmm). It is all very tempting to see the male gaze on the male subject and the way in which Wiley approaches potential models on the street as a sexualized interaction and maybe it is. It is simultaneously, provocatively, both highly intimate and highly transitory and distant. But something in me resists this interpretation, especially when one panelist (I forget which) identified the use of female saint names for some of the portraits as some indication of sexual ambiguity. Well, maybe, but the paintings are all titled according to which old painting the poses are chosen from. If there's an embrace of sexual ambiguity there, it's the model's choice of a perhaps-female pose, not the artist's imposition of a female/drag identity on his model's body, IMHO.
Afrofuturist did promise a more detailed reading of Wiley's method and technique, which he has yet to deliver (what's up with that, T?) but I'm sure will blow me away. At the very least I have to applaud his bringing Marlon Riggs and his fabulous quote "Brothers loving brothers is the ultimate revolutionary act" into the room. But for now my question is, how much of this interaction is identification, how much desire? And actually, though I think Afrofuturist is right that Riggs is a black gay saint (for good reason), his quote, to me, applies just as radically to other forms of love.
Because while you can argue that Wiley's gaze is implicitly or explicitly, theoretically or actually a homosexual one, there is a great deal in these paintings about HETEROsexuality and, specifically, the hypersexuality attached by American culture to heterosexual black male received images. One of the paintings had a midnight blue background filled with a riot of small white forms which on closer inspection proved to be sperm. Other paintings' decorative backgrounds were subtly composed of sperm arranged into the motif. There is no real answer to what that means, but it reminds me of when I wanted to write a paper about sexuality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and, because he knew me to be a homa, my professor assumed what I meant by that word and said he didn't think there was any "sexuality" in the book. Hetero is a sexuality, my friend. And the sexuality in Wiley's paintings is, yes, ambiguous, but to go straight to the queer side of it w/o passing go, to me, omits how they respond to the very embattled and demonized thing that is black male heterosexuality.* And the response is extremely unresolved and provocative.
"What a strong black male is" is another discourse name-checked by the panelists into which the work enters. The question was asked, is the act of depicting in portraiture an act of power-giving? Who is represented, particularly in the tradition of portraiture which is traditionally one of the aristocracy? Or does that apply here, since the models are anonymous and the artist controls more or less everything about how they are depicted, other than letting them choose the pose? And what of the void space/lack of context? None of the portraits were placed in an actual room, but on fields of color or, many, in a celestial field of clouds.
There was a clear sense in the discussion of the hunger for representation that Wiley's work responds to, in many of his African-American viewers. In one incredibly charged moment, a young woman spoke on behalf of four young "men" she had brought to the exhibit and panel (I would put them at between 8 and 12 in age), who said that they did not see themselves in the work. They took particular issue with what they saw as exaggerated emphasis on the lips. The curator averred that perhaps there was some grotesquerie or sensualization intended but there was no way, without the artist or source polaroids present, to establish whether the lips were exaggerated or not. But that wasn't really the point. The point was that these people had been promised images of people like themselves, a rare enough occurrence, and felt cheated that they failed to identify. It was a bittersweet moment made slightly ludicrous when an MD in the audience took it upon herself to deliver a potted introduction to hormones and the aging process to the young men.
I think the most inspiring thing was how packed the room was, and how passionately engaged the attendees, who were, I'd guess, well more than half African-American, were in the discussion. I've rarely been to an art event of any description that people seemed as provoked and inspired by. koaloha recently saw the Brooklyn Museum's show of photographs of Marilyn Monroe which she said was expected (in The New York Times review among others) to be the kind of pandering show that apparently the Brooklyn Museum is becoming known for, which the critics sneer aren't really "art" but are just trying to get the hoi polloi in the door. I don't know whether the Wiley show has been vulnerable to that kind of criticism (I mean, some of the paintings were on loan from Russell Simmons but who knows how the art world is feeling about hip hop this week) but if it has I think it should be obvious that textually they are rich enough to deserve their place, no matter how young the artist is.
A last thing I will say is that I was expecting to be impressed with Ta-Nehisi Coates having read his work, I was relatively confident that the curators would do their job and they did, but I was really impressed with Barry Michael Cooper. I wondered if he was there to serve the Man of the People role--he was in a logo'ed knit cap and sweater, and he did write New Jack City and Above the Rim after all--but his engagement with art was really inspiring, to this fellow non-professional. He mentioned an artist, John Biggers, that I want to find out more about.
*Yes, if it hadn't already been decided for me, I probably would also have quickly identified Wiley's method as cruisy, and that "Easter Realness" is the title of one or a series of these paintings does not escape me. But if only because that Toni Morrison paper nearly caused me to have a breakdown, I stick on this point.
Phew, I've been working on this one for almost ten days!
The exhibit is exciting. It is based on Old Masters paintings in terms of the stances adopted by the models, but all are paintings of
"urban-ly" dressed African-American men depicted in void or stylized-void space, with background motifs derived from baroque, rococo, and Islamic decorative arts, among other genres. Wiley's process is that he approaches strangers on the street, whom he finds visually interesting, and shows them his portfolio of paintings and polaroids of past models. If they agree to model for him, he shows them his art books of Masters paintings and they collaborate in choosing their own pose. A wall text says that he was inspired to do this work by, while walking in Harlem, seeing a police sketch of a wanted African-American man, and wanting to offer another kind of representation.
"Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them. This is my way of saying yes to us."--Kehinde Wiley, on gallery wall card
It was a strange experience, seeing this panel. For one thing, Kehinde Wiley was scheduled to be there and wasn't, so all of the panelists, especially the curator, a South African transplant named Tumelo Mosaka, were put in the position of speaking for him by summarizing things he has said in the past, or refusing to. For another, other than his website which has eensy thumbnails, I was unfamiliar with the artist beforehand and got there late so I didn't get to absorb the art fully before jumping into the panel. So some of the conclusions drawn by the panelists seemed premature to me, thought I might have immediately jumped to them myself had I not had it done for me.
In the first place, it seemed inandofitself radical to choose to make this depiction. The arts have integrated at radically different speeds and the world of fine art seems in some ways the slowest to do so, and the most dependent on the echelons of entry provided by art school degrees, residencies, etc. (with the exception of the weird category of "outsider artists" of course). In some ways, I wonder if it has advanced much farther than the demeaning interactions with patronage Langston Hughes was writing short stories about approximately 100 years ago. In that context, I must imagine that Wiley, who has weathered those echelons, does not see many people who look like him in the circuit of openings and lectures and whatnot that are semi-required of a professional Artist. Merely to redress the balance, his work is a significant act.
For making this decision, he has been declared Mr. Thing and (hewasbornin1977) has his own museum show, something which, Isolde Brielmaier (an art historian/curator from Vassar on the panel) pointed out, is usually reserved for artists well over 40 with a large body of work. The curator of Wiley's show mentioned that he was still finishing paintings for the show more or less as they were hanging it. One worries about the effect of such success on such a young artist. Particularly when, as I did on the way out, you watch the little video of Wiley pretending to work on one of his paintings with talking head quotes resembling the wall-card text quote above positing him as Mr. Black Artist Spokesmodel, and then you get to the end of the little video and the credit goes:
A portrait in black by Kehinde Wiley: Easter Realness #5 [painting dissolves to car]
A study in black by Infiniti G35
There are some things I deeply enjoyed about the pieces. His use of color is fearless and bold. Several of the backgrounds were color-clashy in a way Barry Michael Cooper compared to Hype Williams's use of color, and which I would also compare to the electric pink and green Versus by Versace was using a couple of seasons ago, or (winking at illlaw or mightypen) the cheaply produced laminated bright blue and red folders my high school gave out every first day of school. Whomever in the administration was responsible, that red and blue were perfectly calibrated to be nearly impossible to look at next to each other.
There were also things about the technique I found a bit grating: fields of color in the face that seemed to make obvious that he was working from high-contrast photos rather than live models, an amateurish-looking technique on the cornrows of some of the models. It reminded me a bit of Senegalese barbershop sign-painting, or other kinds of art that is usually described as "vernacular" or "outsider." I wondered why Wiley made that choice. Perhaps he intended to sample outsider technique alongside his Old Master influences but aesthetically I wasn't in love with that choice.
In a lot of ways, they reminded me of some Hughie Lee-Smith paintings I saw at the Chicago Cultural Center once, of young black girls walking decaying urban sidewalks against bright skies with balloons or unspooling ribbons in the air around them--I can't find any images that really resemble my memory of these paintings but here and here are as close as I could get, particularly the latter (in the Grant Hill Collection, interestingly). There was a similar sense of joy and color in Wiley's skies, but Wiley is breaking from the social realist tradition that Lee-Smith started in and embracing the surrealism of those bright ribbons. Nevertheless, there is always the expectation that an African-American artist will be somehow working in (or choosing not to) social realism, that their work will be either political or apolitical, an always-already dialectic in which the work is read and to which the work's positioning by Wiley and the museum clearly responds. And the discussion went there quite quickly too.
For example, although only one of the paintings depicted a man wearing a jeweled pendant, black consumerism, bling, and throwback jerseys came up almost first thing in the discussion. To be fair to the panelists, Wiley has apparently spoken about bling at length, but it was interesting to me that it wasn't actually in the art. There is a way in which panel discussions can often become a group of smart people being smart and interesting without actually staying that on-topic. There was also the specter of the thug, the romanticization thereof in recent pop culture, to which one audience member said, not in so many words but nearly, "Why it gotta be a thug though?"
Barry Michael Cooper made the point that the art makes use of a tradition of religiosity and dying young, enshrining black men as saints and angels, which he compared to Biggie and Tupac. In certain of the images, I saw the sainted jouissance or ecstasy that Teresa de Avila painting is famed for. From there it went to the idea of sexual ambiguity and metrosexuality (with Andre 3000 quoted by moderator Jason King as the model of African-American metrosexuality, hmmm). It is all very tempting to see the male gaze on the male subject and the way in which Wiley approaches potential models on the street as a sexualized interaction and maybe it is. It is simultaneously, provocatively, both highly intimate and highly transitory and distant. But something in me resists this interpretation, especially when one panelist (I forget which) identified the use of female saint names for some of the portraits as some indication of sexual ambiguity. Well, maybe, but the paintings are all titled according to which old painting the poses are chosen from. If there's an embrace of sexual ambiguity there, it's the model's choice of a perhaps-female pose, not the artist's imposition of a female/drag identity on his model's body, IMHO.
Afrofuturist did promise a more detailed reading of Wiley's method and technique, which he has yet to deliver (what's up with that, T?) but I'm sure will blow me away. At the very least I have to applaud his bringing Marlon Riggs and his fabulous quote "Brothers loving brothers is the ultimate revolutionary act" into the room. But for now my question is, how much of this interaction is identification, how much desire? And actually, though I think Afrofuturist is right that Riggs is a black gay saint (for good reason), his quote, to me, applies just as radically to other forms of love.
Because while you can argue that Wiley's gaze is implicitly or explicitly, theoretically or actually a homosexual one, there is a great deal in these paintings about HETEROsexuality and, specifically, the hypersexuality attached by American culture to heterosexual black male received images. One of the paintings had a midnight blue background filled with a riot of small white forms which on closer inspection proved to be sperm. Other paintings' decorative backgrounds were subtly composed of sperm arranged into the motif. There is no real answer to what that means, but it reminds me of when I wanted to write a paper about sexuality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and, because he knew me to be a homa, my professor assumed what I meant by that word and said he didn't think there was any "sexuality" in the book. Hetero is a sexuality, my friend. And the sexuality in Wiley's paintings is, yes, ambiguous, but to go straight to the queer side of it w/o passing go, to me, omits how they respond to the very embattled and demonized thing that is black male heterosexuality.* And the response is extremely unresolved and provocative.
"What a strong black male is" is another discourse name-checked by the panelists into which the work enters. The question was asked, is the act of depicting in portraiture an act of power-giving? Who is represented, particularly in the tradition of portraiture which is traditionally one of the aristocracy? Or does that apply here, since the models are anonymous and the artist controls more or less everything about how they are depicted, other than letting them choose the pose? And what of the void space/lack of context? None of the portraits were placed in an actual room, but on fields of color or, many, in a celestial field of clouds.
There was a clear sense in the discussion of the hunger for representation that Wiley's work responds to, in many of his African-American viewers. In one incredibly charged moment, a young woman spoke on behalf of four young "men" she had brought to the exhibit and panel (I would put them at between 8 and 12 in age), who said that they did not see themselves in the work. They took particular issue with what they saw as exaggerated emphasis on the lips. The curator averred that perhaps there was some grotesquerie or sensualization intended but there was no way, without the artist or source polaroids present, to establish whether the lips were exaggerated or not. But that wasn't really the point. The point was that these people had been promised images of people like themselves, a rare enough occurrence, and felt cheated that they failed to identify. It was a bittersweet moment made slightly ludicrous when an MD in the audience took it upon herself to deliver a potted introduction to hormones and the aging process to the young men.
I think the most inspiring thing was how packed the room was, and how passionately engaged the attendees, who were, I'd guess, well more than half African-American, were in the discussion. I've rarely been to an art event of any description that people seemed as provoked and inspired by. koaloha recently saw the Brooklyn Museum's show of photographs of Marilyn Monroe which she said was expected (in The New York Times review among others) to be the kind of pandering show that apparently the Brooklyn Museum is becoming known for, which the critics sneer aren't really "art" but are just trying to get the hoi polloi in the door. I don't know whether the Wiley show has been vulnerable to that kind of criticism (I mean, some of the paintings were on loan from Russell Simmons but who knows how the art world is feeling about hip hop this week) but if it has I think it should be obvious that textually they are rich enough to deserve their place, no matter how young the artist is.
A last thing I will say is that I was expecting to be impressed with Ta-Nehisi Coates having read his work, I was relatively confident that the curators would do their job and they did, but I was really impressed with Barry Michael Cooper. I wondered if he was there to serve the Man of the People role--he was in a logo'ed knit cap and sweater, and he did write New Jack City and Above the Rim after all--but his engagement with art was really inspiring, to this fellow non-professional. He mentioned an artist, John Biggers, that I want to find out more about.
*Yes, if it hadn't already been decided for me, I probably would also have quickly identified Wiley's method as cruisy, and that "Easter Realness" is the title of one or a series of these paintings does not escape me. But if only because that Toni Morrison paper nearly caused me to have a breakdown, I stick on this point.
Phew, I've been working on this one for almost ten days!