Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. - book reviews

Art in America, Dec, 1995 by Brian Wallis

Hooks pointedly avoids making arid, academic divisions between mind and body, brain and heart. But behind her "just folks" approach lies a rigorous theoretical attempt to connect "the social construction of black identity, the impact of race and class, and the presence in black life of an inarticulate but ever--present visual aesthetic governing our relationship to images, to the process of image making." As an analytical project, Art on My Mind seeks to understand the formation of African-American identity and its place in postmodernism; as a political project, it tries to teach those who are oppressed to decolonize their minds.

How, then, does hooks explain the persistence of the perception that there are no "great" black artists? And how does she explain her own contention that "black people have made few, if any, revolutionary interventions in the arena of representation" Her answer is to point to a disjunction in African-American culture between the function of art and its audience. According to hooks, so-called high art has never been central to the lives of African-Americans because it never had an immediate relevance for them; popular culture, television and movies, along with forms generally unrecognized as "art," like snapshots or sewing, have always seemed more pertinent. Hooks claims that since authenticity and direct experience have been the standards that African-Americans have used to judge art in the past, there has been an additional incentive for blacks to resist the defamillarization typical of most modern and postmodern art. Thus, when modern black artists like Romare Bearden sought to validate the black experience through abstract means, many African-Americans found his work unappealing and rejected it. But, hooks argues, "black folks must be able to believe fully in the transformative power of art if we are to put art on our mind in a new way."

When she speaks of the transformative or healing power of art, hooks's tone is curiously different from the unvarnished anger of many of her trenchant political analyses. Yet it is crucial to her purpose in this book to make her readers see that the two subjects are related. All the recent critical writing about identity politics, difference, postcolonialism and third worldism should not be about ameliorating diversity but about learning from it. Hooks suggests that one way to heal the rift between cultures in the current global context is to recognize these cultural differences, to reclaim and validate suppressed knowledge, to liberate the minds of those who are oppressed, and, not incidentally, to "decenter, interrogate, and displace whiteness."

One of my favorite essays by hooks (included in Yearning, but unfortunately not in this corection) concerns her grandmother Sarah Hooks Oldham, an ardent and skillful quiltmaker whom she called Baba. As hooks notes, Baba never referred to herself an artist, but saw quilting as an expression and natural outgrowth of the processes of daily life. Baba's early works were "crazy quilts," a form hooks claims was invented by black women quiltmakers, in which irregularly shaped scraps were fitted together in a random pattern and replaced when they wore out. For Baba, crazy quilts "were a reflection of work motivated by material necessity." For hooks, her grandmother's quilts are a piquant symbol of home, but they are also important examples of an oppositional cultural strategy.