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Notes on Critical Black U.S. Performance Art and Artists

 

Clifford Owens

 

Contemporary black U.S. artists working in the medium of performance art suffer a serious crisis of meaning in art world culture because their work refuses to be relegated under the hermetic rubric of black artistic expression. In other words, black artists who don't primarily make pictures and objects that look like art by black artists often find themselves farther at the bounds than many black artists. This may have something to do with the fact that performance art, in general, defines itself as an indefinable practice necessarily working against the art world establishment. (After all, dealers don't profit from performance art unless they inflate the value of performance documentary photographs, hustle performance-based videos on DVD, a practice I find criminal and exploitative, or sell dumb performance objects as sculpture. And museums and institutions generally don't fund performance art events because they are not willing to jeopardize federal funding or take curatorial risks. To my knowledge, no U.S. museum or art institution has ever organized a survey of black U.S. performance art and artist. I should say here that performance art is wholly different than the "performing arts" which museums are more than willing to accommodate because it can be read as black cultural expression). Furthermore, black performance artists necessarily embrace what many artists withdraw from: social responsibility. Indeed, social responsibility is a distinctive feature in black performance art production. But, the lure of the marketplace has forced some of the most prolific contemporary black artists who built there careers on race politics to retreat from the battle field of social responsibility to the bunker high art respectability.

William Pope.L, Charles McGill and Wayne Hodge are interdisciplinary artists who have a particular penchant as performance artists. They make visually engaging, socially relevant and politically potent art without forfeiture of social responsibility. They don't make slick art about social and political black life that is bent to fit the tastes of mass consumption. Furthermore, these artists are among a distinguished group of black contemporary art practitioners (Rico Gatson and Sanford Biggers are young artists also working critically in the "performative matrix" who come to mind. Gatson's work is particularly interesting in its ability to retain social responsibility in its political specificity) who draw on diverse artistic and intellectual influences.

 

(above)

(top) William Pope.L: eRacism, Performance at Threadwaxing Space, NYC, 2000

(bottom) William Pope.L: Race Becomes You, 2001, ink on plastic fabric 4' x 16'. Courtesy of The Project New York and Los Angeles

 

William Pope.L, "black performance art laureate," to borrow a phrase from Lowery Stokes Sims, is the most significant black U.S. artists working today. He has been a formidable presence on the national and international visual and performance art scene for over 20 years, but has come to greater prominence since the National Endowment for the Arts revoked funding for his 2002-2003 retrospective, eRacism. Pope.L, "the friendliest black artist in America," is a provocateur of the highest order. His performances, installations, and texts penetrate the fissure of race and class matters with critical mass. His cerebral performance piece eRacism, presented to a large audience at Thread Waxing Space in New York City in 2001 (in fact, for over 10 years, variations of this work have been performed in a number of venues across the U.S.) is no exception. The performance involved many elements, including a spoken text about a racist encounter at the supermarket, slide projections of his family members, 3 blocks of ice, and the artist's body as conveyor of meaning beyond its physical presence, his ripe body odor. Pope.L, donned in a salmon-colored cocktail dress and distressed work boots (work boots and jock strap are signature apparel in many of his performances), delivered a highly discursive, critically convivial performance about racial identity, social expectations, sexuality, and his familial genealogy. At one point during the performance, after he removed the cocktail dress to reveal a half-full, plastic gallon milk container that was grafted on to a jock strap, he invited me onstage to move a heavy block of ice from on location to another. I willingly followed his direction, unaware at the time that he was, in fact, indicting me in a critique of the ways in which class matters inform and deform relationships in the black (African American) community (if there is a black community). He was asking me, as poor black people jokingly ask each other when it comes to supporting black owned businesses instead of white owned businesses, and as David Hammons asked viewers in his 1990 installation: Whose Ice is Colder? William Pope.L made this point more explicit in a text banner he created last year that, despite all efforts to resist the temptation, Race Becomes You.

I first saw Charles McGill stepping out of his two door sedan parked in front of Gallery M on 135th Street in Harlem. He was wearing golf argyles, a black Kangol cap, and dark sunglasses. His persona was a Black Panther/yuppie golf aficionado hybrid. He became race. McGill is a protean artist; he is an ardent golfer and golf instructor who has managed to integrate that activity into his art practice in a remarkably fluid way. I was at Gallery M for the occasion of a panel discussion about black (African American) performance art, held in conjunction with his solo exhibition Black Baggage. The exhibition included fabrications of a fictional line of golf products displayed in a glass case and on shelves: golf balls emblazoned with Nigger 2000, photographic images of black historical figures affixed to Titleist golf ball boxes, a golf club festooned with the artist's hacked dreadlocks, and a golf bag collaged with images of Huey P. Newton, Colin Powell, and African slaves. The public performance component to Black Baggage involved McGill (assisted by a white caddy named "Leroy") hitting golf balls from various locations in Harlem; from the hood of a discarded, charred automobile, from a pile of whole watermelons placed in the gutter. A cleverly negotiated dialectic of race situated in a geopolitical context, McGill transplanted a presumably white male sport spectacle to the "heart of darkness": Harlem. This gesture draws attention to the class exclusivity and entitlement in golf culture, and deflects attention away from monolithic notions of black male "genius" in other sport events, particularly basketball. (The futures of too many young black males living in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods are holding fast to "hoop dreams" for class mobility). Of course, Tiger Woods has supposedly broken racial barriers in golf culture; but unlike Woods, McGill does not repudiate his blackness as a burden to his representation, he embraces its contradictions and complexities.

(above) Charles McGill: Black Baggage, 2001

(above) Charles McGill: Black Baggage, 2001

The panel organized by Gallery M director Todd Roulette included Charles McGill, Desiree Wallace, Wayne Northcross, Anthony Meyers, and me. For McGill, the panel discussion was an extension of his street performance. None of us were quite sure what we were suppose to say about black (African American) performance art, because no one knew what to say about black artists who make performance art. Of course, blacks in the "performing arts" (song, dance, theatre, spoken word, cinema, and television) have never suffered a crisis of meaning in the culture: we have always and will always be expected to sing and dance. As panel participants stumbled over a few under-defined decades of black performance art (our scattered conversation kept defaulting to the usual suspects, David Hammons and Adrian Piper) Charles McGill sporadically, disruptively in fact, announced through a small megaphone: "My name was never Uncle Tom," "I have never been a runaway slave," "I have never used a hot comb," "I have never been an invisible man," "I have never had a dream," "I have never done anything by any means necessary." If you consider the fact that McGill's greatest influence as a performance artist is Malcolm X, it is no surprise that he issued such confrontational proclamations in such a deft oratory style.

Wayne Hodge is a brilliant 26 year old artist working primarily in installation, video, electronic music, and performance art. He has a sharp analytical mind and an intellectual curiosity unmatched by many artists in his generation. Hodge also has a deeply profound sense of history. In 2000, when he was a graduate student at Rutgers University, he performed a marvelously complex work titled Banana Dance. Banana Dance was a loosely constructed parody on Josephine Baker's sexually charged dance routines performed in Paris in the 1920s, in which she directed particular attention to her buttocks. Hodge's interpolation of Baker's savage sexual performances simply involved the artist engaged in a timidly repetitious Box Waltz with an attractive white woman primped in a long, sleek burgundy dress. Hodge was dressed only in a handicraft costume of irregular phallic banana shapes attached to tight-fitted underwear, with thin black ribbons tied in to bows around his neck and ankles. As the couple continued to dance in a seemingly innocent manner, more sinister associations began to unfold. There was a certain pleasure in discomfort with the spectacular consumption of racial difference and sexuality that outstripped a reactionary reduction of this as little more than a simple case of jungle fever. In other words, we were forced to re-think interracial sex and sexuality in more complex historical terms, in ways that called in to question the representation of a performative black female body in the early 20th century in contrast to representations of postmodern black masculinity. Hodge's performance was a courageous commentary against the mythology of black sexual potency and prowess.

(above) Wayne Hodge: Banana Dance, 2000

To be sure, there is a great deal of critical work to be done by black artists working in the battered and discredited area of performance art. The challenge is to work against the impulse to abandon rigorous political inquiry and social responsibility in the service of grater visibility. William Pope.L., Charles McGill, and Wayne Hodge are really "keeping it real."

 

Clifford Owens is an artist working primarily in video and performance art. His work has been exhibited in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He lives and works in New York City. His collaborative video work with Young W. Lee Dress You Up in My Love was shown at Fylkingen in April 2003 as part of diSTILLation programme.

 

(left) Stills from video Dress You Up in My Love, Owens and Lee, 2002

Both William Pope.L and Wayne Hodge contributed to Fylkingen with their video works Sylligism (Pope.L) and Untitled (Hodge) through the video screening programme diSTILLation curated by Lydia Grey.

 

(right top) Still from video Sylligism, William Pope.L, 2003

(right bottom) Still from video Untitled, Wayne Hodge, 2002

 

 

 

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