Queer Artists of Color as Producers

Posted on by
Reply

Sentences:

Julien: Looking for Langston exhibits an ethereal non-linear narrative following the life and thoughts of a gay black man in the Harlem Renaissance.

Golden: The endangerment, Sweet Sweetback’s  Badassss Song, Black Power era, the rise of Hip hop, and the Rodney King incident contributed to Golden’s program for her exhibition of black male representation.

Kobena-Mercer: Fani-Kayodes contributions to the transatlantic black gay cultural diaspora encapture his role as a migrant translator.

 Response:

I thought the film Looking for Langston used beautiful prose and images of the life of a gay black man living in the Harlem Renaissance, intertwined with meditation, dreams, and reality. The invisibility of the gay black man’s life in this film in the way the main character never engages with another person, talking to them directly. He becomes ignored even in gay culture itself, and his actions become a secret due to dangerous consequences, when a mob of angry white men storm through the club while everyone is dancing. The film i id dedicated to Langston Hughes, presented as an icon and cultural metaphor for black gay men who were ostracized because they did not conform to the overbearing pressure given to black men to be masculine and heterosexual. These goals for the black man were formed due to assimilationist methods pushed by the NAACP and existing structures and norms in social behavior. Kodera Mercer’s article stresses there has been an extreme sexualized role given to the black man, as the brutal aggressor  stemming from colonialism and whites fear of blackness. However, artists such as Mapplethorpe has repurposed and appropriated these stigmas and turned it into beautiful compositions of black mens bodies. The question becomes where the line is drawn between appropriation and the examining of new purposes for the body in art. It’s interesting to me that art examining the representation of black men deal with the incorporation of homosexuality in a different way than Zanele Muholi or other queer artists of color. How do these representation differ across different parts of the queer community, and what is being emphasized? How does the body change when it’s labeled as ‘queer’? These artists explore the different meanings  and layers their art can take as a queer producer of color, and how these might be different from the subjection to ‘black art’ and art dealing primarily with race.

Fani-Kayode

Zanele Muholi

The Problem with Simplifying Biraciality

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
1

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.

Black Female Sexuality

Posted on by
Reply

African bodies have traditionally been depicted as both oversexualized and desirable. The tale of their sexuality chronicles a racist history of exploitation and exaggerated imagery. Their bodies are not their own, they belong to the viewer(power structure), the white heterosexual male. Fear and desire simultensously play in the psyches of Western viewers.  The sexuality of black women has experienced a narrative of exploitation that aligns with the colonization and exoticizing. Colonization remains the largest force behind the racists notions of black sexuality, and these notions prevail in the current perception of beauty. The legacy of colonization is aligned with the ideological values it brought; the ideas of beauty and how black women fall in and outside these standards.  Art has become the most important counteract to these ideologies

Pariah: The film explores the internal and external perceptions of black female beauty; Western culture’s perceptions of beauty clash with Alikes’ and create a confusing atmosphere that combats her growth.

Taylor: Document 11 examines the increasing globalization of art and the influence on cultural identity.

Thompson: This piece discusses how black womanhood has entered cycles of discovery and repression, particularly in regard to historical events like colonization.

Senzeni Marasela

Posted on by
Reply

In Barbara Thompson’s chapter “Decolonizing Black Bodies: Personal Journeys in the Contemporary Voice” my attention was drawn to the work of South African artist Senzeni Marasela.  Marasela uses a variety of media to explore her painful relationship with her mentally ill mother who was absent most of Marasela’s childhood.  She also explores collective memory and colonial perceptions of the black female body in her series of embroidered scenes from the life of Sarah Baartman, a former South African slave who toured Europe as “The Hottentot Venus.”  Sarah Baartman’s body was exoticised and fetishised as embodying the form of a black Venus.  Her body became a site of Western attraction and repulsion and became a representation of racist western imaginations of the back female body.  After she died, her body was dismembered by Napoleon’s physician and her gentiles and brain were put on display at the Musée de l’Homme until Nelson Mandela requested that her remains be returned to South Africa and respectfully buried in 2002.  Thompson discusses the dismantling of the black Venus image and stereotype but doesn’t mention Marasela’s Baartman series (she talks about Marasela’s work in relation to motherhood) which is why I thought I’d highlight it here.  This series both in subject and in medium connects the stereotype of the black Venus and the story of Sarah Baartman with the artist’s relationship with her mother.  The images evoke the ideas of collective consciousness and collective memory by making these connections.  She uses a technique traditionally labeled as “women’s work” and associated with female relationships and tradition.  I think that because of needlework’s history and cultural associations it has the ability to transmit elements of the female experience in a much more intimate and personal way than other mediums are able to.  Additionally, the associations of needlework being a skill passed down through generations of women makes visible the artist’s connection to her mother and to the subject of the series Sarah Baartman as well as to all women who came before her.  In this series Marasela relates the dismembering and scrutiny of Baartman’s body to her own experience as a black woman in a Western urban environment.

 

 

 

Appropriation or Spiritual Exploration?

Posted on by
Reply

In our presentation today, my focus was on artists within our own collection at the Davis that illustrate intervention into the history of black female bodily representation. I have chosen to focus on the methods used by Renée Stout. Stout is an African American artist from Pittsburg that uses art to both bring to light and explore religious practices of the African diaspora. Her art is very much a reflection of her own spiritual journey. At first I was quite confused by Stout because she often bounces from faith tradition to faith tradition in her art. One minute she’ll be exploring ideas of black femininity through a Congolese Nsiki, the next numerology, and the next creating an alter ego of a Haitian root worker named Fatima Mayfield.

There is a tension in the Black American community often times between exploring your “African” roots and being appropriative. I was concerned that Stout’s work crossed this line since researching Stout I know that she grew up in the Christian tradition and did not have access to exploring these belief systems until later in life. I was concerned that her representations of different African belief systems had the potential to either misrepresent these faith traditions, or appropriate something deeply personal for many people, like religion, for her own artistic expression.

However, the more I thought about this idea of exploration vs. appropriation I realized that it was not such a clear cut question. The Thompson reading discusses how artists based in African countries like South Africa utilized other more general ideas of African femininity, expressing them through objects that were not necessarily a direct part of their personal, or their countries’, experience. And yet, their use of these different objects effectively expressed the ideas of beauty, femininity, masculinity, and diaspora that they were trying to communicate. Furthermore, stereotypes of Black bodies in the U.S. have derived from a history of African colonialism and the relationship of the “West” to the African continent. With the transatlantic slave trade those ideas and relationships have literally been transplanted into the Americas.

This leads me  to conclude that the entirety of the African diaspora has had such a transnational experience, to the point where you can’t simplify a discussion about authenticity, and thus appropriation as it relates to members of the African diaspora relating and communicating with each other. The conversation involves acknowledging that people were literally colonized and this caused people to convert or remix their faith traditions accordingly because of where they were being located, their safety, or simply how the politics of the region influenced their faith.

Furthermore, the article also often used the term “African women” in a way that implied it was talking about women of the entirety of the African diaspora because of overarching themes that impacted most African peoples given shared histories of colonialism and white supremacy. Situating the work of Renée Stout in this larger historical context of remixing as a way of responding to history and creating locations for self-empowerment, the way that she as an female of the African diaspora utilizes faith traditions and objects in her art makes more sense.

The Gaze

Posted on by
Reply

Summaries:

Pariah: In Pariah, Alike confronts her sexuality as she struggles with the identity of her black womanhood in the context of her family.

Black Womanhood, Barbara Thompson: Diverse artists from the diaspora disrupt and reply to the Western standard of Black females via stereotypical appropriation.

Contemporary Art, Taylor: The artists featured in Documenta 11 addresses the context of identity on an international level.

In Black Womanhood, Thompson provides examples of various artists who not only disrupt and reply to the Western European standard but also the gaze of the art world, another sphere of influence for the Western white male. This gaze acts as a form of judgment or standard from the art world which asserts the perspective of the western white male. The “other” identities depicted in traditional work are considered in relation to this “ideal” identity, demeaning the value of the “other”. The works of artists who disrupt and reply to the gaze is important because they also provide a space and canvas for reaffirmation of the other identity. In Black Womanhood, Thompson presents diverse artists from the African diaspora who redefine and reaffirm the identity of the black female as well as counter the gaze of the art world. Such artists are necessary as the traditional Western white male perspective has dominated the art world and defined the black female identity as overtly sexual, subordinate, and savage-like. I think Thompson describes the new perspective best when she states that through the work of such artists, viewers can “imagine themselves in her skin taking up negative space of her absent body with all of its cultural baggage and expectations.” This contradiction of existence and identity cannot be understood through the gaze of the art world or the western European standard, asserting the necessity for the perspective of diverse artist from the diaspora.

Berni Searle and the Reclamation of the Black Female Body

Posted on by
Reply

Pariah: Chronicles the coming-of-age of a 17 year African American girl as she experiences societal, communal, and familial pressure for her to conform to pre-established norms of Black womanhood.

Barbara Thompson: This article discusses the works of contemporary artists in their efforts to challenge our historical canon which has projected an image/perceived reality of Black women as savage, inferior, and immoral beings.

Barbara Thompson’s mention of Berni Searle’s (South African artist) campaign to “reconstruct a micro-history of the personal” resonates with my own desire to abandon and re-script the visual narrative and identity that has been “made for me,”as a Black woman. Her recognition of the black female body as a site of oppressive politics in the historical narrative is noteworthy; but it is her subsequent decision to re-appropriate her body in an effort challenge racialized stereotypes- despite the debilitating weight it carries- that I view as a brilliant act of courage. In our own class discussions, we have pondered this very question of how an individual who has been defined as a material object for centuries can then transform their identity into that of an intelligent human being. Searle uses her nude body, which is anything but a neutral palette, to interrogate our traditional understandings of non-White beings. With the ever-present risk of outsiders “recognizing” her pieces as ‘more of the same’ images of un-clothed black bodies, Searle embraces the opportunity to promote images of black females practicing self-love, acceptance and ownership of their politicized bodies.

Thompson digresses into instances in which the nude black female body has been used explicitly as a “tactic of resistance.” Though I support Searle’s campaign to re-appropriate  the identities already given to black women, I don’t know that I endorse the metaphor of “self-exploitation” that is mentioned later in the article. I look forward to discussing the implications behind and the utility of a concept  like “self-exploitation” in our efforts to abandon stereotypical narratives that continue to oppress women of color worldwide.

 

 

 

 

De-colonizing the Queer Self

Posted on by
Reply

“You should wear your hair down.”

“Your father likes it up.”

Pariah, a film lauded for its representation of the black lesbian community, follows protagonist Alike as she struggles to find an authentic queer identity in a conservative, black, middle-class family. Alike is alienated by her ultra-normative parents and feminine younger sister, yet even the family itself chafes at its own normativity – the desperate attempts of the mother to seduce her own husband, his only constant the beers he swills as he becomes forever more and more absent. They all recognize their individual and collective failures at (hetero)normativity. Frantically, they attempt to retain that normativity, that perfectly organized (colonized?) family unit – the mother buys Alike pink blouses, the father asserts his patriarchal authority and supposed “untouchability”. “Why you asking so many goddamn questions, girl?” He demands of Alike. “What’s wrong with you? You don’t question me.”

 “Tell him! Tell him that you’re a nasty-ass dyke!”

To escape the crushing (hetero)normativity of her home life, Alike depends on Laura, her older, butcher, working-class friend. Laura attempts to help Alike navigate queer life, taking her to the lesbian club nearby, lending her clothing and even buying her a strap-on dildo at one point. The club represents a queer “safe space” for queer black women, an opportunity to defy heteropatriarchal impositions. Yet even within this safe queer haven, they are unable to escape the colonizing forces of normativity. The lesbian club Laura and Alike frequent is strictly butch-femme, allowing only for the coupling of an AG (aggressive) like Laura and the submissive femmes she picks up. Alike feels this pressure to adhere to this binary within the queer community, overhearing one feminine-presenting straight girl at school say that she might be attracted to her if “… maybe if she was a little bit harder…” Despite Alike’s valiant attempts at an AG presentation, it seems that she is still not quite masculine enough to be acceptable in this dichotomous world. She hates the strap-on Laura buys her, claiming it chafes, and throws it away. She feels uncomfortable at the club, seemingly uninterested in or unwilling to play the butch-femme game to pick up women. Even Laura, the model AG, appears to recognize the limits of this so-called “freedom”. When talking Alike about her (Alike’s) new love interest, she says in a melancholy tone, “I really am happy for you… Because I love you.” After uttering those words, Laura turns away, taking the acceptably femme partner she had picked up at the club with her, leaving Alike open-mouthed with her femme counterpart. Did Laura desire Alike all along, unwilling to take action because of the forbidden nature of a butch-butch coupling? Regardless of the nature of her desire, one cannot argue that Laura is not one of the most (if not the most, in my mind!) faithful, most loving characters in Alike’s life. She cares for Alike when she leaves home after her mother beats her when she is forced to come out despite the fact that she and her sister are struggling to make ends meet, stroking her arm softly to comfort her in one touching scene. Laura undoubtedly loves Alike – could it be that in another context she would express that love differently?

“I am not broken, I am free.”

After a violent and emotional confrontation with her parents, Alike leaves home, claiming that she is “not running, I’m choosing”. She knows that she can no longer bear the yoke of “acceptable” black womanhood, and that she must, as Thompson suggests, de-colonize her own queer self in order to find true freedom – outside of her oppressive household, outside of the false freedoms of the club. It must be brought to attention that Alike’s wardrobe changes towards the end of the film – something that is not at all insignificant. She is perhaps still more masculine-of-center, but no longer attempts the hyper-masculinity of Laura or other AGs. She wears hoodies and jeans, but she occasionally wears pink, she keeps her earrings in – she is no longer forced to choose between the hyper-femininity of her mother or the extreme AG masculinity of Laura. Alike introduces herself to the outskirts, a truly queer world, where she does not have to fit norms of any origin. Through extreme pain, she is able to graduate early with her perseverance, talent, and intelligence and go into an early college writing program. She forgives her mother, telling her that she loves her, though her mother is not able to repeat those words back to her. Ultimately, on the bus ride to college, despite the incredible loss she has experienced, Alike appears happy. She knows that she is not broken, she is free.