------
There's Nothing More American Than Black Americans
I want to address three questions asked by Glenn Ligon in his essay on Kelley Walker’s work. I have chosen three rhetorical questions that were mostly tangential to the primary argument of Ligon’s essay, but nevertheless resonated for me.
1. When is a race riot not a race riot?
If there are black people and they are rioting, they are rioting, as far as others are concerned, because they are unhappy; unhappy with their blackness and what it has done to them, how it has maimed them, and resulted in their maladjustment to society. When there is a race riot, the roots of it need not be examined, because it’s simply black people, angry about being black, as they always are, and as always, unwilling to cooperate. A similar dismissal can happen in the realm of art. The riot, the art, is seen as a temper tantrum, a protest against being black.
But for me, it’s protest about the structure under which some humans are expected to cooperate. Cooperate is a useful word. It means one thing: working together toward a common goal, but also means another when broken down: working side by side but on separate goals. Sometimes I feel cooperative with my peers, and even with someone like Kelley Walker, who is rupturing, defacing, (transforming? maybe not) the history, images, representations of black people. ‘Let us together,’ I think, ‘twist up this narrative.’ But then, in the same stride, I feel gravely unbalanced, very, very, VERY different from Walker. Because those black bodies are analogs for my black body. And the rupturing is of my own face and my own body. It’s then that I’m aware that we’re working very much toward different things. He is working to reconcile with ‘the other’ and I am that other, working to reconcile with myself.
When is a race riot not a race riot? When do I engage in a creative act that is not some form of protest? Does Kelley Walker know what protest is? Not marching, not petitioning, no dogs--but just being in opposition to expectations? I want my racialized riot to be just a riot. So that it can be understood that my anger is not at being me, black, female, but at a world that is slow to see themselves in that identity.
2. If a black person makes ‘black images’ are those images even blacker than if a white person had made them?
It makes me think about the game I play with my sister. (Not a sister, but imagine a sister). We go back and forth beginning with the phrase ‘If I were black I would...’ It’s based on the complaints we hear in the worlds we navigate from people who have been denied something they felt entitled to. ‘If I were black I would have gotten into that school.’ ‘If I were black I would have gotten that job.’ When I play it with my sister it starts with the usual ‘If I were black I’d be statistically more likely to contract HIV or be in jail.’ And it moves quickly to the more personal. ‘If I were black I would spend twice as much time making my hair to look ‘professional’’.’ ‘If I were black I would be expected to talk authoritatively about race.’ ‘If I were black I would regularly wonder how my blackness is affecting my relationships with people.’ We think a lot about how our personal experiences inform our work. For me it is to a large extent. And then, to what extent our personal experiences are black experiences or female experiences. But back to the question about the images made of us and those made by us of ourselves. Of course there’s a nuanced difference between documentation and representation. But regardless, the real problem lies in the attempt to quantify blackness. As though, as our wronged colleges lament, they could have put blackness on for this occasion and that occasion and their dreams would have been realized. Blackness is a lot of things, a lot of different things, a lot of things to a lot of people, and never standing apart from a body, a site, a context.
3. He’s white?
Kelley Walker is white? Hilton Als is black? Martin Puryear is black? Rick Astley is white? I am always intrigued by these misimaginings of race. Somewhere along the production line the artist has crossed a mystical threshold. We are shocked, impressed, not unlike we might be by an excellent drag performance. It makes me wonder where and where we think race resides. Is it something? Is it nothing? What does it mean to be able to disguise, imitate, and appropriate race? What does it mean to me that I’m interested? What does it mean to others? Is it important that I be upfront and overt in my performance of blackness? What do I think of people who aren’t? Do I judge them? Do I envy them?
Kelley Walker makes work that could pass for the work of a black artist. What would I make if I wanted to pass for a white artist? Would it be convincing? Would Kelley Walker be successful making work that read as less black?
Would I?
No comments:
Post a Comment