the young people's professor

The scholarly journal Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory has just released a brand new special issue on "passing" edited by Duke University anthropologist John L. Jackson and cultural historian Martha S. Jones. The publication features a short review essay I wrote last year on the work of black artist/painter Kehinde Wiley and his exhibit "Passing/Posing" which showed (to rave reviews) at the Brooklyn Museum in January-February 2005.

The issue also features great new essays by variety of scholars in literary, art, and cultural theory, including Kara Keeling, Jane Gaines, Tavia Nyong'o and many others. For anyone interested in scholarly perspectives on the politics of racial and sexual "passing" in the twentieth century, especially as it emerges in the realms of art and performance, i'd recommend the journal to you highly.

Even though its a little dated, I thought i'd go ahead and post my essay here since its short and gives a little bit of an introduction to the some of the provocative recent work of Wiley, whose one of the artists that I am thinking about writing on in my larger dissertation project.

Enjoy!

Du-Rags, Beepers, and Venetian Frescos: Kehinde Wiley’s Passing/Posing

by Frank Leon Roberts

Published in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Issue 29, 15:1, 2005



“you see us, admire us, [yet] when you reach out to touch us, we are gone…”
~Kehinde Wiley, “Passing/Posing”

It makes sense that the brief epigraph cited above, taken from the accompanying video text of Kehinde Wiley’s new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, Passing/Posing, serves as a strange commentary on the intersections of ephemerality, visuality and black(male) subjectivity: a haunting absence-presence that is at once “out of touch” and inaccessible yet also open and easily available for public consumption. Indeed this queer non-presence, or what Frantz Fanon once described as the here/not here matrix through which black subjectivity is produced and sustained, animates each of the eighteen, explosively colorful, slightly larger than life paintings encompassed in this collection.

“Passing/Posing”, a reference to “the tension created by the need to attain the privilege and power traditionally associated with whiteness and the desire to preserve one’s identity” according to exhibit’s accompanying description by its curator Turnelo Mosaka, is an extraordinary collection of eighteen portraits of black men from Harlem, Detroit, and Los Angeles, painted and photographed between 2002 and 2004, all “posing” in the tradition of the imagery of classic Venetian and Rococo era Italian masters such as Titian and Tiepolo, as well as British landscapists such as Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable. The end result, a montage of images of urban black men clad with beepers, Du-rags, and oversized hoodies framed by decorative designs influenced by Islamic and French Rococo ornamentation, occasions a moment when traditional re-presentations of the artistic portraiture genre (notoriously void of black images), black masculinity, and hip-hop culture counteract and collide. The brilliance of Wiley’s undertaking here is not however in his ability to simply plant ‘new’ black bodies in(to) the ‘poses’ and spaces traditionally occupied by yesterday’s Old Masters, but more specifically in his ability to transform the image; in the haunting dissonance of these familiar images made unfamiliar.

Wiley, trained in the graduate program in Art History at Yale University, has a “flair” for re-presenting blackness through Venetian aesthetics: each of the works in this collection and his earlier installation project “Faux Real” bear subtle traces to Venetian scuolas, frescos, and ceiling classics. Similarly, “Shequida” the black drag queen whom he hired for the exhibit’s opening night performance in a chapel style gallery space of Brooklyn Museum—trained as an Italian mezzo-soprano of course—performed her operatic rendition of black punk/pop sensation Kelis’ smash hit “Milkshake” is her finest Venetian style gown.

Wiley’s nuanced methodological approach to the project—located in the betwixt and between of ethnography, performance art, photography and traditional portraiture painting—consisted of him approaching (“picking up”) random black men “on the street” and taking them back to his studio to look through major works of art, and asking them to choose the “Old Master” images that appealed to them most. Wiley then photographed the men in their selected poses and after they left painted their images—captured in the photos which then served as his image of an image-to a slightly larger than life size. The exhibition features both the finished paintings and the original “source material”: that is, photos of the actual black men who “posed” for the Wiley’s lens.

The central aesthetic technique exemplified in each of the eighteen portraits—one of which is a colossal, ceiling-hanging portrait entitled “Go” featuring black men floating among blue clouds with all the color and exuberance of the Sistine Chapel’s “Creation of Man”—is a three layered montage that consists of an image of an actual black male body; a solid, neo-bright background base; and a softer, top layered decorative pattern of Islamic or European influenced designs. Each of the paintings are named directly after the figures Wiley’s black male models “posed” as: “Jean de Carondelet”, “St. Clement”, “Bishop Harold as Duke of Franconia”, “St. Thomas the Apostle”, “St. Remi” and the most popular choice of all of his subjects, “Female Prophet Anne, Who Observes The Presentation of Jesus on the Temple.” Other portraits, such as “Easter Realness” featuring bright pastel colors such as those traditionally worn in African American churches on Easter Sunday and “Assumption” portraying a black man performing his most careful straight “cool pose”, are subtle references to black and queer vernacular traditions.

Clearly influenced by Hip Hop’s notorious “bling-bling” approach to the re-presentation of black masculinity, Wiley’s paintings are all framed in exuberant bright golds which index both the grand opulence of pre-twentieth century European high cultures as well as that which Manthia Diawara has described as the “Homeboy Cosmopolitan” impulse in contemporary black urban, Hip Hop aesthetics.

With “Passing/Posing”, Wiley contributes to a growing archive of work in black masculinity and visual culture, a multi-disciplinary project once described by Herman Gray as being primarily committed to the “production of complex intertextual work whose cultural meanings and effects are constantly shifting, open to negotiation, challenge, and rewritings.”[1] Resisting a simple “positive” vs. “negative” approach to re-presenting black male bodies, the performative force of the exhibit lies in the way that each of the images labors to produce a generative space of black(male) visuality that queers and signifies upon traditional notions of black masculinity, and calls attention to the ghosting absence of nuanced or transgressive cross or self-representational images of black(male)ness in that majoritarian sphere which is the portraiture canon.

-Frank Leon Roberts

Works Cited:

[1] Gray, Herman. “Black Masculinity and Visual Culture.” Callaloo 18.2 (1995) 401-405, pg. 403.

Posted by the young people's professor on 1/18/2006 at 12:04:00 PM | Permalink