Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. - book reviews

Art in America, Dec, 1995 by Brian Wallis

Several years ago, black feminist critic Michele Wallace posed the question, "Why have there been no great black artists?" Echoing the title of Linda Nochlin's classic 1971 essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Wallace wondered why Mrican-American visual artists, like women artists, had been ignored by art history--not only unrecognized as "great" but rendered invisible. Wallace's question and her subsequent art-historical investigations were directed as much toward the critical inattention to black artists by African-American intellectuals as toward the broader problem of internalized racism in the standards and institutions of the predominantly white art world.

In Art on My Mind. Visual Politics, bell hooks takes up Wallace's challenge and seeks to explain why black visual culture has been suppressed and invalidated by what she repeatedly calls the "white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy." At first, this book is frustrating and disappointing: what appears to be a hasty assemblage of reprints--21 essays and interviews originally prepared for monographs and exhibition catalogues on postmodern artists like Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, Alison Saar, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andres Serrano and Felix Gonzalez-Torres--is given an unpromising spin by hooks's hallucinatory introduction, which veers from autobiographical musings about her own childhood paintings to New Age-sounding homilies about the healing power of art with a capital A. In addition, the book is marred by a haphazard selection of illustrations, by repetitions and misspellings, by an inconsistent (or maddeningly absent) use of footnotes and other documentation, and by a strange oscillation of tone. But gradually, as one sifts through this uneven batch of writings, one discovers a strong and consistent argument about race relations and the place of art in African-American life, an argument that is given particular potency by its grounding in discussions of specific artists and artworks.

You might be forgiven for not immediately thinking of hooks as an art critic. Certainly, she is best known as the straight-talking author of such classic radical feminist texts as Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), and Talking Back: Thinking Feminism, Thinking Black (1989). In those books she honed her distinctive plainspoken, discursive style, "talking back" to the authority of dominant values in a language that pointedly rejected the conventional forms and bibliographic niceties of academic critical theory. Against the imperialism of white Western Eurocentric knowledge, hooks pressed the notion of nonwhite feminism rooted in the everyday experiences of women of color, women who are simultaneously burdened by race and class discrimination, by economic inequity and by gender power struggles.

Alongside other nonwhite feminist critics, including Gloria Anzaldfla, Sylvia Boone, Hazel Carby, Coco Fusco, Chandra Mohanty, Barbara Smith, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Michele Wallace, hooks has challenged the conventions of, on the one hand, white, middle-class feminism and, on the other hand, patriarchal rules and hierarchies. Collectively, their work is about crossing cultural borders, exploiting the margins, celebrating the critical practices of fragmentation and reconnection, and acknowledging that the constitution of identity takes place in the specific, the local, the everyday. In addition, for hooks, as for most of these women, there is a relationship between political liberation and esthetic pleasure.

Consequently, for the last five years at least, hooks's writing has been increasingly focused on questions of visual culture, making connections between feminist politics and issues of representation and esthetics. In fact, Art on My Mind is best seen as a companion volume to Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990), in which hooks spelled out in more direct and explicitly theoretical terms the relationship between an alienated African-American culture and the critical debates around postmodernism. In both books, she argues that cultural colonization--rather than institutionalized racism--is the key problem facing African-Americans today. As hooks sees it, her ancestors were subjugated by more than chains: they were domesticated by being dispersed and stripped of their homes, their families, their languages, their communal bonds and their cultures. What hooks traces in this book is a cultural genealogy of resistance to this subjugation. Through allusions gleaned from the work of contemporary artists she discusses, hooks shows how African-Americans have sought to avoid domination and retain their heritage by perpetuating traditional forms of culture like quiltmaking, storytelling and folk art, as well as vernacular modes of architecture, music and photography. These forms have generally been dismissed as insignificant by the arbiters of the dominant white culture or they have been appropriated and commodified in a process hooks calls "eating the other." Either way, African-Americans have been told they have no culture and no right to one.