Category Archives: African-American Art

The Portrayal of Various Forms of Masculinity

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Golden: This reading explores the over interpreted representations and codifiable images of the Black male and Black masculinity in various forms of media that denies the truth of the black male identity.

Mercer: Kobena Mercer illustrates Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s use of erotic fantasy, ancestral spiritual values, and European elements to create cultural mixing and explains the influence that migration and separation from his Nigerian homeland had on his artistic production of photography.  

Looking for Langston: This black and white film portrays the collision of race and sexuality in the queer community.

This week’s film and readings explored the role that sexuality, gender, and race plays in reinforcing and reinventing the various types of Black masculinity, an identity that Ralph Ellison deems as “invisible and overinterpreted” in media. Considered as invisible in society, the Black male is fetishized and given visibility in art, films, and music.

Thelma Golden’s article was of particular interest to me because her exhibition serves as an umbrella to the Mercer article and the Langston film by portraying different stereotypes, cultural-defense mechanisms, and (mis)representations of the Black male as “ultra-violent [and] ultra-romanticized” (22). Golden’s project draws together artists that display the five signposts: 1) the transition from Civil Rights to the Black Power era; 2) blaxpoitation films; 3) the endangered Black male; 4) the death of rhythm and blues; and 5) real life drama. With the exception of the first signpost, the other categories signify the negative perceptions of the Black male and how they are used to create and circulate ill images of Black masculinity. Despite the artists’ attempt to negotiate identity and educate the audience of common racist assumptions, I am skeptical about the reception of outsiders, or non-Black audiences because instead of negating the negative generalizations, these images can reinforce and confirm them. With that being said, I would have liked to see positive images of Black men without the presence of stereotypes.

On a positive note, I do appreciate the diversity in the “Black Male” exhibit because it brings to light how Black culture is commodified through the portrayal of the Black experience both with and without the use of the body. For example, Mel Chin and David Hammons use objects, such as guns, sneakers, and the construction of basketball hoops to critique the commonly portrayed stereotypes of crime and sports within the Black community. Given the absence of the body in these pieces, the audience is still able to interpret the relationship between society’s ills and generalizations about Black masculinity. I wonder if the absence of the body in art offers a more critical critique of the pieces because the presence of the body can draw attention away from status detail, which is significant in identifying characteristics that are not as obvious.

Offering Alternatives

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Golden: Discusses how the exhibition Black Male addressed aspects of invisibility and over-interpretation of black male body.

Mercer: Fani-Kayode’s photography explores the erotic as it relates to black masculinity by employing a ruptured disasporic spirituality and his own positionality as a queer man of African descent to make “interventions at the intersections”.

Julien: There was quite a bit going on in this film, but suffice to say Julien succeeded in queering the archive of the Harlem Renaissance not just with the abundant visual representation of queer black men, by also by neatly balancing representing black queen men as producers rather than as purely subjects and discussing the ways that queer black men can become subjects (i.e. the erotic tourism of white men to Harlem, employing the photos of Robert Mapplethorpe, etc).

All three texts that we were assigned today for class can really be brought together when we explore the bell hook’s quote that Golden presents us which says that the conversation of black male representation is not simply a question of critiquing the status quo, but about transforming the image, creating critical alternatives, and subverting what already exists. This is undoubtedly difficult to do especially because, as Golden points out, sometimes what we consider our “good” representations don’t necessarily offer us new locations and interventions, but stop at reactions to and critique of the stereotypical representations of the black male body created by white producers.  What is important about watching Looking for Langston and reading about Fani-Kayode (as well as being offered the various artists in Black Male) is that we are analyzing texts that are offering alternatives that can exist both as new forms for intellectual and cultural exploration and in this presentation up against the images that we have learned so well, they can also exist as critique. Especially evident in Looking for Langston, today’s texts emphasize the importance of being exposed to black producers creating new, interventionist black products. Being exposed to this next step seems especially important since Golden’s framework that she presents the exhibition in really emphasizes the necessity of having three elements present in analyzing the black male body (images that explore the physical and the psyche, images that transform what we are currently being offered in the mainstream, and images that represent true multiplicity).

Black Male Body

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Originally aired on the highly successful British series Out on Tuesday, a weekly lesbian and gay news show appearing on commercial television, Looking for Langston weaves the poetry of Langston Hughes and contemporary black gay poet Essex Hemphill with pieces of Bruce Nugent’s Harlem Renaissance short story ‘Smoke, Lilies, and Jade’ to effect what director Issac Julien has described as a ‘relational shift between the past and the present’.

 The film’s discontinuous non-linear visual style is a montage of archival footage of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes reciting poetry to a jazz accompaniment, and contemporary imagery including a focus on the photography of Mapplethrope. The non-linear narrative is particularly striking and demonstrates the relational shift between the past and the present. This artistic choice authorizes a rethinking of the question of the relationship between the present and historical representation.

 Looking for Langston challenges its viewers to investigate racial histories that are intricately and antagonistically intertwined with histories of (homo)sexuality. These challenges demand accounts differential places within the historical development of racism, racial stratification and racialized cultural.

(In)visibility of black masculine identities

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Golden: How have contemporary black artists navigated the constructions of black masculine identities in the quest for authenticity?

Julien: Isaac Julien’s “Looking for Langston” embodies the search for a sense of “place” for the black gay male in a heterosexist and racist world.

Mercer: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, a photographer by trade, uses the black male body in his work as the incarnation of an entre-deux, a living intersection.

After reading the first few sentences of Thelma Golden’s piece “My Brother”, I immediately thought of an exhibition I saw in DC of Hank Willis Thomas’s work, an artist we’ve encountered before in this course. In the series “Branded”, Thomas explicitly confronts contemporary black masculinity and its construction by (white) America. The piece that most struck me from this collection, Branded Head, is a lightjet print from 2003 (pictured below).

Branded Head 2003

 

Also in this series is the equally stunning (and discomfiting) Basketball and Chain, another lightjet print from the same year.

Basketball and Chain 2003

 

Both images, which can be found at Thomas’s site under “2011 – Branded”, speak to the continued white ownership, in some sense, of black masculinity. Here, Thomas uses the example of professional basketball and Nike’s (here, literal) branding tactics to make apparent the trap of contemporary black masculinity, which according to the artist seems to be a modern reconstruction of slavery. Ownership, of one’s own body and of masculinity and representation, is especially pertinent here and in the works of the other artists named by Golden, as they seek to navigate the loaded subject of the black male. These artists must, in a sense, unshackle the black masculine in order to find a liberating authenticity.

In the same vein, I’d like to challenge Golden’s claim that “hip-hop culture has become the signifier of black male heterosexuality”. Golden is right to claim that hip-hop/rap have become sites of the demonstration of “fitness” as a (heterosexual!) black male, but I do not think that this territory is so flat. Not only do queer black rappers/hip-hop artists exist, but does the overwhelmingly heterosexual music of the mainstream necessarily conform to heterosexual ideals? I think this is a claim that can be played with and disproved, especially with an examination of “acceptable” white (hetero)sexuality and the “other” sexuality. In the meantime, I’d love to share some up-and-coming queer rappers with my classmates and followers of the blog. Please recall, however, that while these artists are in a way “pioneers”, as the article claims, they are in no way the ONLY queer hip-hop artists/rappers and they are certainly not the first ones. Just thought this would be an interesting read with regards to the overwhelming heterosexism inherent to constructions of black masculinity and gender!

“Looking” Behind and Beyond the Image of Black Masculinity

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Thelma Golden brings together artists who challenge the fetishized and over-determined image of black masculinity.

Kobena Mercer highlights photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s interest in the ecstatic possibilities of shattering identity.

Looking for Langston defies narrative and temporal conventions in a queer historiographic intervention.

History is “the smiler with the knife” in Looking for Langston. Violence is foregrounded as a powerful force in the construction of historical narratives as well in the very act of looking.  If we agree with Thelma Golden’s assertion that representation is central to power and that “the real struggle is over the power to control images,” then Looking for Langston can be seen as an intervention speaking truth to power.  The formal experimentation with narrative structure, the nonlinear montage of poetry with archival images, for example, and the use of multiple voices supports the radical intervention undertaken by the film.  Isaac Julien undertakes an intersectional exploration of race, gender performance and sexuality that, in terms of both content and form, is multifaceted and fluid.  As Golden and Mercer point out in their analyses of the images circulating of black masculinity and sexuality, these images overwhelmingly confine black male identity to the fixed, singular vision of white patriarchy. The film self-reflexively displays the processes by which images of black gay men are consumed while attempting to reclaim a space for black voices to queer the dominant narrative about the Harlem Renaissance.  In a sequence about midway through the film the possessive white gentleman from the club sequences walks past a series of projected images of black male nudes, touching the screen as he passes.  Thus this film, like the photographers who reacted to Mapplethorpe’s Black Males series, for example, explores the troubled dynamics of voyeuristic pleasure and fetishism that operate in the images circulating of black masculinities.

The Fight for the Black Male Body

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Looking for Langston depicts the “hidden” gay black male identity during the Harlem Renaissance as a verbal & visual aesthetic black and white film.

Mercer: Fani-Kayode confronts the hybridity of his identity in depicting black masculinity and gay culture.

Golden describes the use of stereotypes in art to represent the ignored diversity in black male culture.

In the essay, “My Brother”, Thelma Golden depicts the high desire to use the black male body as a canvas. In the past, western artists fetishize the body with stereotypes of savagery, overt sexuality, and defiance. Now, contemporary black artists, left to reconstruct and decolonize the body, appropriate stereotypes and various mediums in an attempt to reclaim the black male body. The canvas continues to fascinate media as pop culture consumes the black male body for its fame and infamy in sex, crimes, and sports. These multiple uses of the canvas represent a fight and struggle over the body’s representation. The contradiction that this contest produces is undeniable: the black male body is invisible yet overrepresented, an endangered presence yet a historic icon, demonized yet overinterpreted. Kobena Mercer explains it best when he describes the body as a site of “social identity in crisis” and “ideological representation.” The debate over the representation of the black male body exemplifies the crisis of the canvas.

The debate sparked by the negative imagery of the black male body, which overshadows the positive imagery, continues as the negative images are thought to represent black masculine culture. Golden emphasizes that this misinterpretation is false, as black masculinity, like other cultures, cannot be defined by stereotypes. There is “no single way to represent the black male.” Since black masculinity exists as an identity of otherness, the debate over representation and the authors of the imagery will continue to exist. Despite the privilege of masculinity, black males still face the social construct of their blackness, which defines their otherness. Jeff Koons, a Caucasian American, produced the work below, Moses. It notes the success of black men in sports, representing Moses Malone, a professional basketball player. But the contradiction of the name Moses, a hero from the Bible, and the hell-like background plays on the double consciousness of the black male, one with the privilege of masculinity yet the burden of blackness. The artist’s identity and the image’s contradiction set an example of causes for the continued debate over the image of black masculinity.

Moses by Jeff Koons, 1985

Moses by Jeff Koons, 1985

 

Black Male Body

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Within the Davis Museum’s own collection, I find Rashid Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas’s photograph entitled “Portrait of Two American Artists as Young Negro Scholars” (digital chromogenic print; 2008) to be visually and formally striking, in addition to presenting a reconsideration of stereotypical representations of black men.

Portrait of Two American Artists as Young Negro Scholars, Rashid Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas, 2008

Portrait of Two American Artists as Young Negro Scholars, Rashid Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas, 2008

As noted by Thelma Golden, mainstream images of black men typically fall into three predictable paradigms: “sex, crime and sports.” (Golden, 27) However, this works falls outside this standard prescription of the black male form. In viewing the photograph, I perpetually wonder what it accomplishes and I often return to Golden’s question of black masculinity representing a contradiction in terms. (Golden, 19) While the author uses this question to posit whether black masculinity is inherently contradictory, I wonder what contradictions this photograph presents to the stereotypical representations of black men. They are not sexualized, athletes or criminals; they therefore work against the simplified depictions of black bodies and present themselves in a distinctly different fashion (intentionally, I would argue, based upon the title) as scholars. In Golden’s red-black-green theoretical color scheme, this image occupies the red, not only challenging rampant negative stereotypes, but also proving that “there is no one black masculinity.” (Golden, 25) In stark contrast, as discussed by Leigh Raiford’s Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, the eponymous image of Huey Newton seated in a wicker chair, gun in hand, served as a political and tactical tool for the Black Panther Party. Undoubtedly, photography served as a deeply intentional medium for the widespread dissemination of the image that came to be synonymous with the political prowess of the BPP. As noted by Kobena Mercer, the black male body is inscribed with ideological representations and serves as “a site upon which the nation’s crisis comes to be dramatized, demonized, and dealt with.” (As quoted within Golden, 19) While this image served as a political tool for the BPP, it also embodied the fears of the American media and many politicians, who framed the BPP as militant and hypermasculine. The image puts both the BPP and black masculinity under a veil of violence and therefore plays to Golden’s argument that “media fascination” telescopes its attention to representations of black men as threatening. (Golden, 27)

Throughout both the Black Male Whitney exhibition catalogue and within Looking for Langston, references to Robert Mapplethorpe perpetually raise the question of the subjecthood the men he photographs. Mapplethorpe’s Black Book (1986) relentlessly sexualizes the male body in formally stunning photographs that coalesce within his “world of splendor and sexual enthrallment.” (Golden, 33) The photographs—debated, denounced and often censored—are incredibly beautiful representations of the nude male form that have largely been countered as racialized and problematic. While Golden argues that “the controversy they provoked… speaks volumes about the fear of black masculinity,” his fascination with the male form presents decontextualized bodies who, by and large, lack subjecthood. (Golden, 33) Mapplethorpe’s approach speaks directly to the sexualization of the black body (and, in many ways, perpetuates this sexualization) while also attempting to “detach compulsive heterosexuality from black masculinity.” (Golden, 33) I would be curious to gauge class perception about whether these images are exploitative or progressive because while they strip men of their subjecthood (and their clothes), they also debunk the hegemonic heterosexuality of representations of black masculinity.

The Problem with Simplifying Biraciality

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In “Biraciality and Nationhood in Contemporary American Art”, Kimberly Pinder highlights contemporary artists who explore the complexity of multi-racial identity in the US.

In “Eros and Diaspora”, Kobena Mercer explores the sexuality aesthetic in the works of Rotimi Fani-Kayode.

For me, “Biraciality and Nationhood in Contemporary American Art” explored the main focus of this course thus far: how contemporary society constructs racial bodies and the artists who challenge those constructions. The popularity of multi-racial celebrities Tiger Woods and Vin Diesel (and, I would add, Dwayne Johnson and Jessica Alba in more recent years) combined with the often-glorified inter-racial historical relationships are truly the most prominent discourse on bi and multi raciality in the US. This had created the idea that race as a construction in the US will one day cease to exist, as everyone will be an ethnic mix.
But, as Pinder points out, that is just not the case. Contemporary representations and narratives greatly oversimplify the complexity of bi and multi raciality, often ignoring America’s history of immigration, slavery, and genocide. Artists such as Adrian Piper (as we have discussed in class), Lorraine O’Grady, and others discussed by Pinder have used their own biraciality in their works to critique the conceptions/perceptions of race in the US. Rather than glossing over this country’s racial history, these artists address its effects to explore the complexities of multi-racial identities.

Reconstructing Black Masculinity and Representation

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Sentences

Golden: Thelma Golden, curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, in the exhibition catalogue for Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art (1995) at the Whitney Museum of American Art (where Golden was then working), presents a history of black male representations in art from the 1970s to the 1990s, by examining the works of white artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe who photographs black men in a beautiful yet exploitative manner to David Hammons’ body prints which suggest the way the contemporary society has molded representations of black men.

Mercer: Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s identity as a Nigeria, specifically Yoruba man as well as a gay man is explored through his photography in which the body becomes a location for exploration of erotic desire and Yoruba religious traditions

Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston: Issac Julien traces gay culture through the life of Langston Hughes in the 1920s and beyond by exploring Hughes poems as well as imagery depicting black gay males such as the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Response

The exhibition, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art (1995) at the Whitney Museum exemplifies the ways in which black male bodies have been comodified, exploited and even ignored. Thelma Golden’s analysis of the exhibition for which she is the curator, provided a comprehensive example of the history of the black male presence in art and the origin of such representations. Golden’s method of conception for this exhibition is, in my opinion the most compelling portion of the piece. There was a five-pillar understanding of how the exhibition would be composed, in other words five events that controlled representations of black men in contemporary art. They were 1) the Black Power Era 2) the rise of blaxploitation films beginning with Melvin van Peebles Sr.’s Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song (1972) 3) the debate about the endangered music 4) the rise of hip hop over rhythm and blues 5) the Rodney King incident in south central Los Angeles.

Interestingly, in the beginning of the Thelma Golden highlights the work of Adrian Piper and David Hammons, two artists whose work we have examined extensively this semester and who in fact were listed as artists who operate in the Hammonsian mode as defined by New York Times art critic Ken Johnson. Johnson, claims that Hammons, Piper, Fred Wilson, and Kara Walker among others approach blackness in a way that is not aggressive for those who might not be used to dealing with race in art. This becomes almost comical in conjunction with Golden’s description of Piper’s performance piece and film Mythic Being (1974), in which she dresses up as black man with an Afro and large sunglasses engaging narratives of the Black Power Movement and simultaneous examining whites fear of blackness.

Fred Wilson, an African-American artist working within the framework of institutional critique concludes the show with his work that is part of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum. The work entitled Guarded View (1991) which features four black headless mannequins dressed in museum security guard suits, engages notions of black male invisibility is a variety of spaces including museums. This notion of invisibility pertains directly to the work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston, which both discuss the invisibility of gay black men with in African Diaspora and Westernized culture. This is clear through Fani-Kayode’s want to not be identified as black or gay in considerations of his art as well as Julien’s examination of great black poet, Langston Hughes, who sexuality is rarely discussed in connection with his prolific poetry, as it was probably not acceptable at the time he was working during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. Looking for Langston has clearly inspired other films such as Brother to Brother (2004), a feature film that engages a contemporary black gay artist in connection with the Harlem Renaissance.

 

Black Female Body and Sexuality Part 2

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In the second half of the article Thompson explores the intersectionality of Black womanhood as it relates to the Black female body. Thompson challenges us to think about the compacted effect race, gender, and sexuality has on the Black female body in the section of her article entitled “”.Nandipha Mntambo and Berni Searle, both artists from South Africa, challenge pre-conceived notions of the Black female body by reclaiming the body and using it as a site of protest. In Berni Searle’s art she forces the viewer to be conscious of both her identity as a woman and as Black. I feel this intersect of identity is complex but is often over-simplified through the eyes of Western Viewers.
 

For this reason, I appreciated Stearle’s fight against the Western propensity to associate nude Black women with sexuality. She instead uses her nude body to counteract and criticize the Western perspective and to evoke the history of abuse and violence directed toward the Black female body, specifically violence against the Black female body in the various forms of sexual abuse (299). Zanele Muholi, also an artist from South Africa, takes it a step further through exploring the added layer of sexuality in relation to the Black female body. LGBTQI issues are not often discussed with in Black communities and I think Muholi’s intention to use this photograph to make a political statement is both awesome and admirable. Muholi’s piece Sex ID Crisis is one of my favorite pieces in this article because the image is able to capture the complexities of what it means to be a Black lesbian woman in a simplistic manner. Muholi’s image also evokes a history of violence against the LGBTQI community. For me the piece incites critical thinking about what it means to be a lesbian in an black society and the unique challenges accompanied by that multi-layered.
 

The final part of the article encompasses the component of transnationalism into the conversation on the intersectionality of Black female identities. This section of the article reminds me of W.E.B. Dubois’s concept of “double consciousness”. Dubois explains “double consciousness” as the dilemma of having to embody two distinctly different and contradicting identities into one identity. Thompson explores art from producers rooted in histories of forced migration and art from artists who were raised in the land of the colonizers. As an African-American woman I have struggled with defining my identity especially in relation to Africa. Consequently, I really enjoyed learning how artists from similar backgrounds,who struggle with identity crises too, express their sentiments on this issue through art. The fusion of both identities is really beautiful to me especially when conceptualized in art forms like Magdalena Campos-Pon’s piece When I am not Here.