A few years ago, I was talking to a Filipino-American friend, who observed, ““When you walk into a room, it’s very different than when I walk in.’’ What he meant is that strangers expect a black man and a Filipino man to be radically different things. He was making a comment, in short, on archetypes (or stereotypes), and on how they influence behavior – especially the behavior of whites toward blacks. That’s not an art-world-type issue, but it is an important one. And it’s one the Whitney exhibit opens up.
To be sure, the art world is a very white place. Although it’s more open than most facets of American society (you’re judged on your art, not who your parents are or where you went to school), it still ends up quite white. Historically, the art world’s moneyed patrons, curators and dealers have been almost exclusively white, and their auctions, openings and cocktail parties are practically all white. It’s probably safe to say that many young blacks with the talent and drive to enter the art world ultimately decide they have too many pragmatic fish to fry to get involved with the decadent, arcane business of trying to out-PoMo the postmodern artists white patrons love.
When a show such as ““Black Male’’ comes along, the title alone causes spasms of defensiveness in the art world. ““I’m not prejudiced,’’ I, for example, think. ““I had a black brother-in-law, I’m sometimes the only white guy in pickup basketball games, and my daughter goes to a rainbow public school and loves it.’’ But these self-serving justifications instantly reveal themselves as hollow, fearful and whiny. I’m forced to admit that I’m a creature of my place and time, that my sensibility requires constant self-criticism and frequent retooling. So instantly, ““Black Male’’ does some good.
That may be true. But if all the good it does is make people recognize, yet again, that the world, for most whites, is an awfully white place, I’m not sure that it accomplishes anything terribly important. Practically everyone realizes at this point that the United States – and not merely its artists’ corner – is rather segregated, and that people ought not to become too smug about their presumed lack of prejudice. What most Americans also realize, however, is that black men are on the hot seat. Over the past decade, various pundits have pronounced black males to be endangered, perhaps doomed. Their muscles, we are told, are no longer needed; and their pathologies are ruining America. Be it murder, unemployment, promiscuity or educational failure, black men are on the wrong side of the numbers. With the exception of an occasional icon – Michael Jordan and Bill Cosby come to mind – African-American men are a pretty sorry lot. That, at least, is how they are portrayed in popular culture.
And a lot of people think that portrayal is way off the mark. The problem, in their eyes, is not only that black men are dying – and killing – in disproportionate numbers. It is that African-American men are portrayed as doing little else. And they wonder, often loudly, about the impact of defining black American males by pathologies exhibited by a relative few. Is the image, they wonder, creating the reality? Can humanizing it make for a better society for all? By launching this exhibition, the Whitney, like it or not, enters that discussion. But what does such an exhibition contribute?
That raises for me the prior question of how much an art exhibition can be a part of a social/political debate. People in the art world refer to ““The Horse in Art,’’ a mythical theme show. Should it be looked at for the horses in it or the art? ““Black Male’’ was still being put up when I took a first look at it. The show is surprisingly small, given its broad, defiantly blunt title. You almost think the museum has simply reinstalled one floor of the infamous 1993 edition of the Biennial exhibition – the art world’s debutante ball – which was savaged by critics for being so stridently political. In fact, Gary Simmons’s ““Lineup,’’ a station-house platform with pairs of gold sneakers in place of live suspects, returns from that show. His new work, ““Step in the Arena (The Essentialist Trap),’’ has the same mock self-mocking: a white boxing ring with dance-step diagrams loosely brushed onto its black floor, and pairs of black tap shoes strung over the ropes.
Neither of Simmons’s works, however, come close on the in-your-face meter to Carl Pope’s ““Some of the Greatest Hits of the New York City Police Department.’’ Pope, an Indianapolis artist, has reinscribed a wall of plaques and shelf of trophies so they’re now bitter awards honoring police who have killed or beaten black and Hispanic men. Bitterness is one of the show’s major thrusts. There’s also Adrian Piper’s 1986 ““Vanilla Nightmares,’’ a drawn-on newspaper perfume ad that has a horde of black heads advancing on (and one biting into) the white model.
Bitterness is not exactly the word I would use. Obviously, Carl Pope’s trophies don’t exactly soft-pedal their anger. Nor does Robert Arneson’s rendition of a frightening ““Special Assistant to the President’’ (namely Willie Horton). What they are saying, it seems to me, is that blacks are seen largely as brutes or problems, to be feared, contained or solved. And they are suggesting that this view has consequences, on blacks but also on nonblacks.
Of course, ““Black Male’’ includes celebratory works, too – images that function as pointed ripostes. Andres Serrano’s big, carefully lighted colored photographs give three homeless men back their dignity (he had them choose their poses). Barkley Hendricks’s ““Tuff Tony,’’ a 1978 portrait, is so poignantly noble it might have wandered in from the Whitney’s deep storage of quaint, premodern stuff.
Right. To me, however, the question is larger than whether the images are bitter or celebratory, negative or positive. By juxtaposing, say, Arneson’s Horton and Hendricks’s proud, stylish dudes, we may end up concluding that the points of view are complementary – and go at least some way toward explaining both black ambivalence toward their treatment in this society and white difficulty in comprehending it.
I asked Thelma Golden, by the way, if ““Black Male’’ is supposed to be a cultural-news bulletin from the ‘hood. She said, ““The way this show deals with that is through what the artists think about this issue.’’ She also said, ““I’m a contemporary art curator working in a contemporary art museum in New York. That informs what I look at and why.’’ All of which might lead you to conclude that ““Black Male’’ should be looked at for the art. But, as Golden notes, ““In the moment that this show covers [the last 25 years], there was a move with both white artists and artists of color toward conceptually based art making.’’ In other words, since the late ’60s contemporary art has gotten much more wordy, political and polemic. The art in ““The Horse in Art’’ shows these days is more about horses than art.
What that means, of course, is that a politically neutral show about a topic like this becomes almost a contradiction in terms. In the exhibition’s catalog, Henry Louis Gates writes about turn-of-the-century America when the culture was flooded with ““images of black people devoid of reason, simian or satanic in appearance, and slothful, lustful or lascivious in nature.’’ He and the other contributors to the Whitney catalog see the current show as something more than an artistic statement. It is also, he declares, ““an intervention in the politics of race and gender that so preoccupy our time.’’ He and his coauthors (including the five guest curators for the film, video and television portion of the exhibit) have created a document that is, in turn, tendentious, insightful, and, at points, simply silly; but they clearly make the case that black males are infinitely more diverse than any conceivable stereotype could allow. The larger question it all begs is what is the value of such a statement coming from such an institution? And how well has the Whitney carried it off.
Nobody worries more about that than the Whitney. Director David Ross apparently still smarts from the criticism of the 1993 Whitney Biennial (which turned out to be a ragtag theme show about the ““Other’’). He writes in the catalog: ““Some may assert that [social] concerns have no place in a museum of art, and that the interests of an art audience should be focused solely on art for its own sake . . . Equally adamant are those who see art’s true purpose as only to engage and activate social concern.’’ Then he offers conciliation: ““One can often gain a more thorough understanding of aesthetic issues through an examination of the social framework . . . [and] the study of art can be a great help in our comprehension of social issues.’’ But when a midsize show about a socially crucial topic not only attempts to do both those things at once, but also tries to show, in Golden’s words, ““how artists have combined the issues of representation and identity into an art practice,’’ it’s bitten off more than the Whitney can chew in a whole season. As an art exhibition, ““Black Male’’ is well-intended but disappointing.
I’m not sure it’s quite so disappointing as all that. It certainly tries to sit on both sides of the argument. And, given the firestorm around the last Biennial, that is perhaps understandable. I wonder whether any ““midsize show’’ could conceivably deliver on the implied promise of this exhibition. It could clearly not be a definitive exploration of contemporary representations of the black male. Nor could it shed much light on some of the more interesting questions the subject raises. There are plenty of past analogues for Willie Horton, for instance. But what really is the prior analogue for Colin Powell? He has no clear antecedents. How does his prominent portrayal interact with the predominant image of black men in America? That question is obviously well beyond the purview of an art exhibit, but it’s one of the questions a show like this implicitly raises. And it would be interesting to see it explored.
““Black Male’’ will probably be remembered more for the brouhaha around it than how it actually looked. Perhaps the catalog for ““Black Male’’ is the real deal, and the show is an odd kind of footnote.
At least the catalog admits its true intention. Incidentally, I found the catalog discussion of the impact of rap images less than satisfying. It reads to some extent like a defense of rap, which, of course, needs no defense. It also states, incorrectly, that violent crime has steadily decreased since the mid-1970s as a way of getting rap off the hook for causing violence. Most sensible people already realize that, whatever has happened to crime, rap music is not the villain. The rap against gangsta rap is not that it causes crime but that it, in large measure, seems to suffer from a failure of imagination, not musically, but philosophically. In his book ““Claiming Earth,’’ the poet Haki Madhubuti writes: ““We are not the music we used to be.’’ He goes on to say that he grew up with the Four Tops, the Dells, the Supremes, with what he calls ““Black love music of self love and Black responsibility.’’ I’m not sure if he intended those words as a criticism of certain gangsta rap, but they do raise the question, if only implicitly, of why we end up defining ourselves the way we do and what images in pop culture have to do with that.
