RESEARCH - EVENT OR WORK

What does it mean to shift boundaries? The panelists at the Eighth Annual American Art History Graduate Student Symposium at Yale University explored strategies of deconstructing the subject matter of “Black Art”  through critical interpretation.  Each student was examining “Black Art” from the perspective of American Art discourse. There were only three people of color, out of seven presentations, discussing African American artists and the fact that the artists discussed were African American was part of an invisible subtext. The discussions ranged from comparing the physical architectural structures of African American and African Diasporan museums to redefining the position of black artists place in the context of art history. The questions after this conference which begged to be asked are:  Who is constructing this history, and to what end?

One of the panelists, Katherine Jentelson presented  the work of William Edmondson in the framework of his agency being defined according to institutional agendas. He was a sculptor, grave stone artist, and the first African American artist to have a solo exhibition at MoMA in the 1930s. His work was said to have been carved with a railroad spike. The sculptures were of religious figures. They were similar in the their aesthetic simplicity to the work of Brancusi.   The photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, was credited with initially finding Edmondson’s work and promoting it. This was the beginning of Edmondson’s work being defined in an institutional framework. The show at MoMA was marketed with the phrase "a Negro Shows art in the Modern Museum" in Time magazine. Jentelson made an interesting point that  the language attributed to Edmondson changed considerably depending on if the news source was an African American periodical or national periodical. The periodicals that were not African American put an emphasis on a hyper stylized regional speak.

One of Jentelson ‘s main  polemics was the way Edmonson was characterised was manufactured by a “White Supremacist institution,” as she calls it. She described this process as a ‘folding’ meaning that Edmondson was folded into folk art, then primitivism, and  finally modernism. All of these classifications depended on the point  being presented in academic discourse. She discussed his rediscovery and subsequent re-emergence into the canon of Modernism in 1982. This idea of re-discovery made the Q&A portion of the panel segue into questionable territory about the loaded term, 'discovery' and whether or not it is an applicable term. The presentation was critical, but made one question if the presenter was engaging with the same “white supremacist institution” that she was critical of despite her awareness of it.

Much like Jentelson, Joanna Fiduccia also discussed the reframing of a black artist’s work. She presented an intriguing  analysis of William Pope L.‘s public performances. Her presentation posited that Pope L. ‘s work could be framed in the context of land art. The main works which she examined were his self burial piece and William Pope L.’s crawling performances.  In the crawling pieces, Pope L. dons a superman costume with a skateboard  attached to his back ‘for emergencies’ and crawls on his forearms and knees in public spaces. She quoted William Pope L. as saying, “being black was a lack worth having,” and used it as a point of departure to discuss the landscape as being a void. It became an interesting point of comparison between Pope L. ‘s body and the land. His body is often in the landscape but not a part of it much like other land art.

The artist's crawl performances also functioned as a larger metaphorical structure for engagement with the landscape. She said that Pope L. “opens up space and democratizes it”. The masochistic nature of the crawls can be seen as a means of ‘obliterating the body’ which was compared to the racist practice of lynching in which, once obliterated, the body becomes integrated into the landscape. She also presented his work in comparison with land artist Kieth Arnatt’s self burial piece, who like Pope L., had buried himself in the  ground. According to Fiduccia, this burial formed a rupture, which was akin to a lack, much like Pope L.’s position on blackness. He is placed into an absurd context to show how the boundaries of genre in fine art are porous. It is not a debate whether or not he is naive or if a pejorative means of categorization such as ‘folk art’ is accurate. Fiduccia used Pope L. as a tool in a sophisticated game of which one of these is not like the other.

S.J. Brooks is a young black scholar who presented research on the construction of the African American Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. She asked, “What construction of African American Identity will be presented in this museum?” Is Black Culture antithetical to the  creation of such a construction, as Black Culture is being institutionalized? “The beginnings of a Black  Museum” were in homes in various urban centers. The homes were private space that became used as public space. They were places that black people in communities could come and learn about themselves and experience a reflection of culture relevant to them. They established a language of presentation for “Black Culture”These museums used to be in black neighborhoods and now they are being erected in cultural centers. As institutions become more as accessible the art becomes less present in the neighborhoods and spaces where it was created. The original missions of these institutions was to serve a specific audience and now they are being built to appeal to a multicultural audience.

The keynote speaker was Northwestern University Professor and Harvard University WEB Dubois Institute for African African American Research Fellow, Huey Copeland, discussing his book entitled, Bound To Appear. Copeland in a similar way to the other black panelist presented about a type of work revolving around how black culture established a language for presentation. His book  discusses the work of Renee Green, Lorna Simpson, Glen Ligon and Fred Wilson. The presentation approached  the manners in which the effects of slavery are translated in the work of black artists at the culmination of the last century. He asserts that these artists are architects of the what Copeland termed the “lingua franca” of black political dissent in in the form of installation art. They changed relationships to objects.

Copeland discussed the Fred Wilson installation Mining in the Museum (1992).  In the piece shackles are juxtaposed against a silver tea set, both from the Baltimore Historical Society. The work of Renee Green's Mise en Scene (1991)  is used to construct a framework for appraising  the role in which French cities such as  Clisson  played in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Greene uses objects to show the relationship between slavery and the commodities trade.  Copeland propounds that objects such as the shackles and the commodities become surrogates for black bodies in the way they are used to elicit historical events by their spatial proximity to other objects from the same time period. Each of the artists integrated text, objects, and other elements such as sound to establish connections to ideas of race and agency indirectly referencing the issues of the time, for example, LA riots, Rodney King, police brutality.

The Symposium managed to address some relevant questions and simultaneously prove to be problematic. In some respects, through re-contextualization, the works took on a new life. The  shifting boundaries seemed to be moving towards a new era of ubiquitous historical revisionism. The questions in  the shift in the historical categorization of an artist from naive to modern and  questioning the genre and framework of a contemporary black artist’s practice, when imposed by a white scholar can be considered problematic. Interestingly enough, black scholars are doing the same type of re-positioning in their discursive practice, is this less problematic? Are boundaries shifting to a place where there can be an accessible discourse on black art where the normative group can avoid the paternalistic pitfalls of the past? It is doubtful.

Contributed by: Jabari Owens-Bailey, Curatorial Fellow

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