What is black art?

Steven Nelson

With the attention given to postcolonial studies during the past decade, Frantz Fanon's politically charged, revolutionary writing of the fifties and sixties has enjoyed a contemporary resurgence because of the complex ways in which he so successfully attached theory to lived experience. He did this by not only addressing the effects of colonialism on the psyches of colonized and colonizer but also by demanding in his writing both literal and psychic decolonization.

This return to this icon of radicalism also shows how contemporary black subjects of the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora must wrestle with the same issues as Fanon did nearly a half-century ago. This engagement with black subjectivities in the aftermath of colonialism has, in part, led artists and scholars, who are working in the wake of reductivist nationalist movements, to de-essentialize blackness. They do so not only vis-a-vis Fanon but also with respect to a new recognition of diasporal experience. Understanding the hybrid nature of black cultures, both books considered here look critically at black diasporal presences as a way to shift from a unitary black subjectivity to one that highlights black heterogeneity. In that sense, both books exist within a framework that does not take terms such as "race," "the black community," or "the black experience" as givens, but rather sees them as complex social constructions.(1) From this point, the books attempt to open up possibilities for showing the complexities of black representation in art as well as culture-at-large. Powell's book examines these in the past and the present, while Read's anthology investigates the ways in which this complexity can allow for a reformulation of black subjectivities.

Richard J. Powell's Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century functions both as a survey suitable for the general reader as well as an introductory text that could be assigned in courses on the arts of the African Diaspora. Powell's account considers social history and the analysis of objects as a means to expand and reformulate interpretive paradigms of black art. Powell, who is associate professor of African American art history at Duke University, has organized his book both thematically and chronologically, with six chapters, entitled "Art, Culture, and 'the Souls of Black Folk,'" "Enter and Exit the 'New Negro,'" "The Cult of the People," "Pride, Assimilation, and Dreams," "Black Is a Color," and "Culture as Currency." He frames these chapters with an introduction and a conclusion that respectively set up the conceptual structure of the text and question the very definitions of a diasporally-based "black art." This is indeed an ambitious undertaking that attempts concisely to complicate and reposition the study of the arts of the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora. It shares with its predecessors, works such as Samella Lewis's 1978 African American Art and Artists, as well as A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present, which Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson published in 1993, the desire to underscore the ways in which visual culture contributed to the construction of African American identities and subjectivities. However, unlike those earlier works, Powell attempts to show these processes through the cultural forces that have shaped twentieth-century diasporal concerns. Absent is the biographical celebration of the artist who has weathered despair and racism to achieve "greatness" (an almost obsessive concern with many earlier surveys on black art), yielding a more detached narrative that reveals how "black" imagery engages with larger issues to achieve its symbolic force. Another important difference between Powell's book and those of his predecessors is his coverage of a wide range of media - including film, performance, graphic arts, and computer generated imagery.

Using the work of Fanon and the sociologist Stuart Hall, Powell views "black diasporal culture" as "the things that significant numbers of black people do" (15). This definition is social as well as aesthetic. For Powell, a "black aesthetic" is "grounded in the idea of a new, post-Emancipation, post-colonial, black identity which . . . thrives in black communities where artistic creativity and performance are the basic cultural currencies" (15). Here Powell falls into a morass which is not uncommon in the field of black studies. While much work exists that attempts to de-essentialize blackness (and this is not the same issue as showing the complexities of representation), much of the field still maintains a desire to lay claim to a unitary black aesthetic as a way to tie together disparate issues from a myriad of places and influences. Given the survey format, this uneasy relationship between the one and the many will, for someone unfamiliar with the field, come across as the history of a singular black aesthetic. In fact, a large number of my own students have the idea of a singular black essence ingrained in their minds, and this book did not manage to change that for many of them.

In his section entitled "Art, Culture, and 'the Souls of Black Folk,'" Powell examines media as diverse Henry Ossawa Tanner's 1893 The Banjo Lesson, turn-of-the century sheet music, and D. W. Griffith's 1915 Birth of a Nation, showing the relation between high art and popular culture. This strategy ties this author to earlier African American scholars such as Henry Morris Murray, Alain Locke, and James A. Porter - all of whom saw representation as an interpretive battleground and understood the innate connection between representation and perception.(2) Powell critically examines their works in combination with the object as a means to reveal the complexities (and sometimes the failure) of representation put into the service of remaking the perception of black people for both blacks themselves as well as for whites. Furthermore, this critical engagement allows him to examine the different (and, at times, problematic) ways in which black artists have understood both European modernism and tropes about "Africa."

In addressing the complexity inherent in race and representation as well as the limitations inherent in standard interpretations of black art in the United States, Powell's section "Enter and Exit the 'New Negro'" is by far the most successful part of his book. Here, he considers the object in light of the twenties debates about the connections of representation and ideology, which took place among writers, artists, and scholars. As exemplified in The Crisis, the magazine for the NAACP, questions were asked about the ways in which the black image could be recast. Through the analysis of art, literature, exhibitions, and the dispersed locations of artists - unlike the critical mass of black literati in Harlem - at the time, he expands the definitions of the Harlem Renaissance, implicating it "within the more inclusive concept of a metaphoric racial landscape" (54). By highlighting the differences between art and literature, Powell demonstrates that this period cannot be defined in the same way for the visual arts as it has been for literature.

In other parts of his book, Powell is less successful in departing from standard interpretations of black art. For example, in his chapter "The Cult of the People," a consideration of the relationship of African American artists to the work of Regionalists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Social Realists such as Ben Shahn would have shed light on African American perceptions of their representations in art by nonblack artists.(3) In addressing abstraction, his chapter "Pride, Assimilation, and Dreams" does not offer a re-examination of its use by black artists. Powell, like others before him, discusses the idea of black abstraction as based in music and black "signifying" (in the case of Norman Lewis). Yet he provides little sense of the connections between these artists and the larger worlds of abstract art. As such, we may assume that black abstraction is different, but the book leaves us asking the perhaps unanswerable yet important questions, "What is black about black abstraction?" and "Is abstract work by black artists necessarily racially based?"

In the end, Powell's later chapters are more successful in the de-essentialization of the meanings of blackness (but not in analyzing the idea of a black aesthetic) than are the earlier parts of the book. In all likelihood, this is due to his more direct engagement with cultural theory and feminism in these sections. However, one wonders what the result would have been if Powell had explored earlier work in the same ways he does that of Lorna Simpson, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Looking at their work, the author considers how the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality questions ways of seeing, as well as perceived notions of the black body.

Powell's survey - like surveys generally - creates a canon of black diasporal art, defining for students and general readers the critical people, objects, and themes within the field. With that fact in mind, his use of an overriding "black aesthetic," the structure of his chapters, and some glaring omissions make this book fairly problematic. Although Powell works to define blackness and black cultures in terms of diasporal experiences, his work is ostensibly about African American art. He considers artists from the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora, but his narrative positions African American visual production as the survey's central theme. His arguments are also at their strongest when he addresses African American art. Moreover, his failure to discuss any South American artists (not to mention his comparative neglect of African artists) constitutes a major hole in a book that claims to speak about the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora. Despite these problems, however, Powell's text is an important contribution to the study of the work of black artists.

If Powell touches on Fanon only tangentially, the celebrated author is the center of Alan Read's book. His title, "The Fact of Blackness," is itself the title of one of the seminal chapters of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Read's book (which derives from a conference that was part of the London Institute of Contemporary Arts' 1995 exhibition "Enigmas of Race, Difference, and Desire") seeks to reveal the ways in which Fanon's work is inscribed in contemporary politics and cultural practices. The book contains essays and texts by Stuart Hall, Francoise Verges, bell hooks, Lola Young, Ntozake Shange, Kobena Mercer, and Homi Bhabha as well as visual work by Martina Attille, Sonya Boyce, Renee Green, Lyle Ashton Harris, Isaac Julien, Marc Laramie, Steven McQueen, and Raoul Peck. This array of women and men from the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and the United States supplies the book with voices from many parts of the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora, but, as in Powell, the work and insights of people from South America are absent.

Perhaps the most useful thing this body of work shares is not so much its attachment to Fanon, but rather the many ways in which close readings of his work tease out the complexity of contemporary concerns. In this light, Fanon's work becomes a central resource for the material contained in this volume. Methodologically, these works rely on Fanon's understanding of psychoanalysis as well as his relationship to the philosophical work of G. W. Hegel and Jean-Paul Sartre. They attempt to engage with Fanon's aggressive dialogue with European philosophical, Marxist, and psychoanalytic discourses as a means to subvert ingrained strategies of Othering embedded in multiple regimes of European thought. In undertaking such a strategy, the contributors to Read's volume understand race as a socially constructed category, and with this foundation, these transgressive images and texts not only resist but also attempt to destroy ingrained stereotypes of "blackness" through separating it from biological fixity. For example, Harris's Venus Hottentot 2000 takes the paradigmatic image of the Venus Hottentot - a nineteenth-century icon of black Otherness - and creates an image which at once reiterates the tropes of desire and the projection of sexual licentiousness embedded in the breasts, buttocks, and genitaha of the Hottentot. But through her direct stare at the viewer, her anthropomorphic armor that covers her breasts, and her hand on her hip, Venus Hottentot 2000 insists on her own subjectivity. Harris has transformed her from being an object of scientific and psychological projection to a subject who destabilizes the legitimacy of the stereotype of the black woman and upsets the viewer's ingrained myths about blackness.

In examining Fanon and his legacy, the writers in this volume do not celebrate him; rather they take his work to task, critically analyzing his blindspots with respect to essentialism, gender, and sexuality. bell hooks, whose essay, "Feminism as a Persistent Critique of History: What's Love Got to Do with It?," explains the place Fanon occupies in her own thought. Seeing the ways in which black women are virtually absent in Fanon, hooks eloquently takes the reader through her family romance with the author, showing how this process - a flight from Fanon to feminism and back - allows her to imagine a transgressive space in which the relations between black men and women become a site of resistance as well as healing. This presumes (as does much of the work in this volume) that we are always "becoming." Moreover, hooks's intellectual journey becomes the means through which she realizes how Fanon's work exposes the pain of lived experience as well as her strategy for carving out a space for women within his oeuvre. This move to theorize, or to place women into Fanon, is also the central force of Young's and Verges's essays.

This issue of seeing Fanon's slippages or blindspots also drives Mercer's work. In his essay "Decolonisation and Disappointment: Reading Fanon's Sexual Politics," the author, along with Young, iterates the ways in which Fanon's sexual politics were highly problematic. From this point, Mercer attempts to show how Fanon's relations to homosexuality and women underlie significant moments of anxiety in his writings. As such, Mercer's project, simply stated, is to demonstrate how sexuality complicates and disavows notions of a fixed identity or a position from which to speak. Moving beyond a narrow reading of Fanon, Mercer insists that raising the issue of homophobia in black intellectual discourse offers an alternative to what he calls "the culture of retribution" that was a part of the nationalist sentiments of the Civil Rights movement. Discussion of homophobia is for Mercer a way to avoid the "ideological traps in which an identity politics of gender can get stuck" (128).

Although Read's volume is ostensibly about the relationship of Fanon to visual representation, the visual is strangely absent in this work. The texts - with the exception of Mercer and some of the dialogue - contain no meaningful discussion of Fanon's legacy with respect to contemporary visual production. Moreover, the book is designed so that the images become little more than icons or design elements. Putting some of the images within the pages of the essays gives readers the impression that they are illustrations rather than works that stand on their own.

Collectively, the work in Read's anthology passionately asserts the necessity of constructing alternate concepts of black subjectivity as a means to confront our own psychological damage resulting from history and essentialism. Unfortunately, too often the book is marred by an overuse of theoretical jargon and essays which, in their opacity, resist clear understanding. Bhabha is the worst offender here, though jargon also predominates in some of the discussions among artists, writers, and the audience. Moreover, in order to understand the prose clearly, readers need to have some previous experience with the writings of Jacques Lacan, Hegel, and Sartre. To my mind, this makes a collection of texts and images that attempt to create real spaces of liberation quite ironic, for it raises crucial questions concerning who the real audience is for such a book. For those who do have the academic background, The Fact of Blackness is a valuable contribution to studies in contemporary representation and theoretical debates in which it participates. Those who do not must await another book.

1. Some other texts and exhibitions that are important in this framework as well are Interrogating Identity, exh. cat. (New York: Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, 1991); Gina Dent, ed., Black Popular Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Thelma Golden, ed., Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, exh. car. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994).

2. See Freeman H. M. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture (Washington, D.C.: The author, 1916); Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Athenaeum, 1980 [1925]); and James A. Porter, Modern Negro Art (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1992 [1943]).

3. In a 1972 interview, Palmer Hayden explicitly discussed what he perceived as one-dimensional representations of African Americans by white artists, singling out the work of Thomas Hart Benton; see "Palmer Hayden interviewed by Camille Billops, James Adams, and James Hatch, May 14, 1972," Hatch Billops Collection of taped interviews with visual artists 1971-74, Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, tape I, side 2.

Steven Nelson, assistant professor of African and African American art history at Tufts University, recently completed his Ph.D. dissertation "Site and Symbol: Framing Cultural Identities in Mousgoum Architecture," at Harvard University. He is also the co-editor of New Histories, exh. cat. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996).

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