February 2008 Archives
Generous Brilliance
Tags: Arthur Jafa, Greg Tate, the Nasher Museum
Ralph Ellison probably would have never admitted it, but he was a better thinker and writer (a prolific and brilliant essayist even after the novel) because of the letters he exchanged with Albert Murray. For all of his prodding and poking Albert Murray might have been a tad jealous of his friend, but probably understood that Ellison's work represented the level to which he aspired. The relationship between black women scholars like historian Nell Irvin Painter and the late literary scholar Nellie McKay was less competitive, as they helped each other and many other black women of their generation navigate the difficulties of an Academy not quite ready for women and black folk, let alone black women folk. In both cases, these relationships furthered the genius of black writers, thinkers and artists, in part, because all involved, we're generous with their time and their opinions--a generosity that is at times missing among the generation of hip-hop and post-Hip-hop (not anti) thinkers.
The full possibilities of such generosity were recently displayed at the Nasher Museum in Durham, NC as Critic Greg Tate and cinematographer Arthur Jafa sat down (armed with laptops and I-Tunes ) to continue a "conversation" that apparently began one day nearly 30 years ago when the two confronted each other on the Howard University campus. Tate, a longtime contributor to the Village Voice and shaman behind the Burnt Sugar collective, has for decades been the poster child for a "PomoAfroNigeratti". Although his writing these days is more refined, though no less wily, Tate remains one of the best examples of a non-fiction writer whose conceptual brilliance is buttressed by an equally brilliant prose--what some might think of as an aesthetics of black criticism--perhaps only matched in the past few decades by the examples the late June Jordan, Ernest Hardy and Fred Moten.
Jafa is a well respected, if somewhat obscure (by mainstream standards) director and cinematographer, who helped enhance the visions of Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Spike Lee (Crooklyn) and even Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut). Jafa's brilliance though, transcends his devotion to cinema. There's an argument that suggest that the genius of black expressive culture in the "West" centers on the ability of its purveyors to tell stories, regardless of the genre, physical medium or abstractions that said stories animate; And Arthur Jafa above all is a storyteller. Writing about his school-days growing up in the Mississippi Delta in the Tate edited Everything But the Burden, Jafa observes the cathartic effect of the Delta as offering "An exposure to the transfixing, and for me unprecedented, blackness of its inhabitants, their arresting beauty and dense corporeal being, the inescapable duality of absence and presence, the inevitable embrace, as a nascent black man of temperamental cool, simply put, the dark matter of being." And while many others might argue (including myself) the political potency of those field hollers that might have served as our first response to the violence of our experience in the Delta, Jafa ultimately offers a story as to why those field hollers should matter to us centuries later.
What was apparent as Tate and Jafa exchanged fragments of "feedback loops" long cultivated in the midnight hours of their friendship, is that they love and respect each other enough to challenge each other's thinking, but are secure enough in their own intellects to not feel threatened when one of them might get the cerebral upper hand--because even in those cases it raises the bar. Tate and Jafa's relationship highlights that genius for genius's sake matters little if not enveloped in a committed generosity. Understandably such generosity is difficult in an era where there is a marketplace for smart negroes--and certainly for those whose prose (if not ideas) play to certain mainstream notions of accessibility (i.e. Can an oblivious so-called white literate NPR listening public understand it?). Far too many of us I think, are unwilling to publically acknowledge when one of our peers produces something that really forces us to go back to the lab. All too often our measure of what matters is connected to cover story bylines and $2.00 a word gigs and our desire to protect our individual proximities to that kind of marketplace prestige. And this is not to suggest that Ellison, Murray, Painter, McKay, Tate, Jafa, and so many others did not have to create to live--but that ultimately the it was the quality of the exchange of ideas that mattered more than a "mess of pottage."
Opening Barkley
Birth of Cool, a retrospective exhibition on the life and work of artist Barkley L. Hendricks recently opened at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina. Conceived by Trevor Schoonmaker, the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum and Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Birth of Cool is the first such retrospective of the Philadelphia native's work. According to Powell, the foremost scholar of Hendricks's work, the idea of a Hendricks retrospective was "beguiling, with the idea to encounter old friends, audacious strangers, and engrossing paintings, it seems, for the very first time." The exhibition's opening night was reflective of Powell's observations bringing together an eclectic group of people for a discussion between Hendricks and Powell, which was followed by an after-party that featured Grammy-award winning producer and DJ 9th Wonder.
Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts and Yale University, Hendricks emerges in the late 1960s just as "Black Power" became synonymous with black vernacular culture via the agitprop of Black Arts Movement figures like Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal. Hendricks was primarily interested in figurative and life sized portraiture, thus his subjects, more often than not, were simply the bodies of everyday black folk. Hendricks's aesthetic commitment to the "folk" likely helped keep him beyond the radar of the mainstream art world. As Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Mencil Collection in Houston, "these are black people who are rarely glimpsed outside their community (not art galleries), but within these communities they can easily be seen just as easily as symbols of vibrant everyday life." As such, over the past few decades, Hendricks has helped establish black bodies as sites vernacular culture--his influence seen in the work of younger artists such as Kehinde Wiley and even Iona Rozeal Brown.
In the spirit of the iconoclasm that marks the work of Hendricks, he chose not to play to the visual politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s; a politics that often demanded that black artists choose between the aesthetics of black rage and those defined of black middle-class uplift, even as both impulses pivoted on some notion of Black pride. Powell writes in Birth of Cool (Duke University Press), the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, that Hendricks was "Neither content with an Ebony Magazine-styled black man and woman whose dress-for-success look approximated the corporate mainstream, nor completely at ease with the Afro-centric vogue of black cultural nationalism." Hendricks's choices, in this regard, seemed more attuned to the "queerness"--broadly defined here as that which pushed the boundaries of mainstream visual blackness--of his subject matters.
It was perhaps this "queerness" that attracted exhibition curator Trevor Schoonmaker to Hendricks's work. According to Schoonmaker he found Hendricks as a subject compelling, much the way he found another iconoclast of Hendricks's generation, compelling. In Barkley L. Hendricks and the late Nigerian musicians and activist Fela Kuti, Schoonmaker, who curated the Fela Kuti exhibition "Black President" a few years ago, found two men who were "stanchly independent, rugged individualists who followed their respective visions to create innovative new artistic expressions, despite lack of commercial success." Schoonmaker adds, Fela and Hendricks "called attention to and even championed people in society who had been underserved and otherwise rendered invisible."
Birth of Cool runs at the Nasher Museum until July. In an effort to put Hendricks's art into broader contexts, a series of accompanying events have also been planned including a discussion with critic and musician Greg Tate and cinematographer Arthur Jaffa , public conversation featuring Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson of The Roots and 9th Wonder about hip-hop sampling and Soul music and a lecture by Thelma Golden, of the Studio Museum of Harlem.
