"The Black Female Body in Art" Panel at the Brooklyn Museum

"How has the black female body been idealized and misread in visual culture?" And: "How might these tendencies affect black women today?"

Tisa Bryant, Isolde Brielmeier, Deborah Willis, Carla Williams

These were just two of the many provocative questions posed yesterday at a Brooklyn Museum of Art panel discussion entitled "The Black Female Body in Art," which took place in conjunction with the museum's superb current exhibit, Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe. The exhibit, featuring a range of Thomas's (1971-) current work, includes a mural, large scale paintings, smaller mixed-media works, photographs, a room-sized multi-part installation, and a video, and is located in the Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, on the museum's 4th floor. It runs through January 20, 2012. The panel comprised four distinguished participants, each of whom brought distinctive perspectives to their viewings of and discussions on Thomas's work, and on the broader topic: visual artist, photographer, curator, historian, and NYU professor Deborah Willis; Isolde Brielmaier, Chief Curator at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar; Carla Williams, coauthor of The Black Female Body: A Photographic History; and my very good friend, writer, art and cultural critic and CalArts professor Tisa Bryant.

The conversation, which ran for about 2 hours, somewhat skirted the very open-ended questions I noted above, yet did provide insightful context for and readings of Mickalene Thomas's show, and of topics and themes related to and deriving out of it. One of the issues the panel spoke about involved Thomas's revisioning and reappropriation of imagery from the European art historical tradition. The very title of her show, "The Origin of the Universe," derives from Gustave Courbet's controversial 1866 painting of a nude, head-and-limb-obscured white woman's genitalia, "L'origine du monde," though as Tisa and other panelists queried, what happens when the artwork and the gaze implicit in it is a woman's, a lesbian's, a black woman's, a black lesbian's (and Thomas is a black lesbian) how does that resituate the image, as well as its relation to Courbet's image? (No one noted that Courbet was a committed ideological and political leader of the French avant-garde, and how that underpinned the vision, gaze and gestures implicit in his work, including this one.) Moreover, Tisa pointed out the metonymic resonances in Thomas work, among them black physicality, sensuality, reproductive agency and power, and an invocation of Lucy/Dinknesh, the first human mother/female ancestor. (Other figures Thomas riffs on, directly in terms of images and styles, include Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, and David Hockney, though I also saw a bit of Richard Diebenkorn, the Cubists, and Romare Bearden in her collagistic compositions.)

Mickalene Thomas's "“Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, Fractured” (2011),
a direct riff on Edouard Manet's "Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe"

Some other topics I'm still thinking about include Carla Williams's point about the specifics of Thomas's technique and images, and how, despite the artist's direct engagement with the Euro-American (male) artistic past, one could come to and connect with them without "the history of [Euro-American] art," in part because of their rich, bedazzled surfaces, their inviting and provocative imagery, and the personal histories a viewer, especially a black female viewer, might bring. (I thought as well of Kehinde Wiley, Thomas's contemporary, and his use and appropriation of Renaissance iconography, as well as of predecessors like Robert Colescott and Bob Thompson, just to name a few.) For Tisa, the "bling" of the rhinestones--one of the most arresting aspects of Thomas's work, from a distance and up close--brought to mind associations such as the celestial, cosmology, stars and the star system (of mass culture, the art world, etc.), high and low culture, the earthly and the heavenly. "What shines?" she asked aloud, much as the paintings ask us as we look at them. Mouths, eyes and eyelids, sometimes jewelry, areola, fleshly contours, pubic hair and genitalia: what happens when Thomas focuses our gaze on these aspects of her paintings? Where is the feminine, the queer gaze, and how is she activating it? (My question.)

The topic of black woman's gazes, and black women looking at, seeing, and painting/creating artwork about and for each other, arose several times, including when Deborah Willis asked Tisa specifically about the "diaristic" aspect of the work. Isolde Brielmeier had just noted the "multiple directionality of the gaze," echoing Thomas's own comments, the many "points of entry," the queerness of looking. For Tisa, in the installations was where "subjectivity was most palpable." Carla Williams added that Thomas was one of only a few very well-known and high profile contemporary out black queer female artists, which made even more significant the ways in which she was changing "iconography." I thought about this and about what it means for a black queer woman, especially in an art world that continues to be dominated by white male artists, and which primarily has elevated black male (straight and queer) artists while overlooking many black women, to portray one's mother, one's female friends, one's female lovers, as subjects and objects of love, desire, fantasy, beauty--and manage to shift viewer's expectations, while also not losing your own focus.  This issue of looking led Tisa to note the presence of mirrors in Thomas's work--calling to mind Oshun, among others--and the concept of women, regular women, as sources of inspiration, as "muses," to use Willis term and an idea long known to male artists. As Tisa asked, "Who do we look at?" In Thomas's work, "reverb(erations)"--reappropriations, repurposings, revisionings--she answered, are taking place.

The panelists before one of the many evocative images
that accompanied their conversation

Auf Wiedersehen, signandsight.com

It know that it occurred 7 years ago, around the time I began this blog, but I cannot recall the route by which I first happened upon signandsight.com, the website whose motto is--or was--"Let's Talk European." I say was, because almost a month ago, on March 28, the editors, Thierry Chervel and Anja Seeliger, posted a valedictory letter, letting readers know that this little internet torch of knowledge would be doused; there would be no more new articles, magazine essay summaries, feuilletons, links, anything. All good things do come to their end, but the web will be intellectually and discursively poorer without signandsight.com, which focused primarily on German arts and letters, but cast its net widely to gather together reviews, intellectual debates, controversies, new cultural discoveries, translations, and a range of other materials few other sites matched.

German writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar (signandsight.com)

Most of the authors, among whose ranks you could find the likes of 2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller, eschewed the sort of refined, sometimes icy hauteur in displaying their prodigious learning a reader might encounter in The New York Review of Books, yet by the same token they also delved more fully into their topics than New York Times or Guardian journalists. Since the site was anchored in German history and culture, that country's and the Germanophone world's concerns usuallyfilled its scrolling headings, but the range of topics often crossed (European and global) national boundaries. The weekly (every Tuesday at noon!) European magazine summaries, the last appearing March 27, were like smorgasbords of information, often offering a slant perspective on American takes on the news.  To give one example, there's been little coverage in the US press, save in Paul Krugman's blog posts, about the growing rise of fascism in Hungary, but in this last grove of links, you could learn about the mutual far-right admiration societies in Poland and Hungary, the latter's influence sending chills up the spines of moderate and left-leaning Poles.

Among the longer articles, a representative range might include "The medium is English," questioning whether there were still any British intellectuals; "Against obscurantism," which covered the Argentinian philosopher and scholar Horacio Potel's battle against publishers who sought to kill (and did) his not-for-profit websites featuring texts by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others; and "How to save the quality press," an impassioned and informed article by none other than Jürgen Habermas, one of the world's greatest living thinkers.  More than once on Sign and Sight I learned something new about a figure, like Christa Wolf, whose work I thought I was conversant with, but I also would learn about writers and thinkers I'd never heard of. For example, Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011) a German media theorist, scholar, and peer of and correspondent with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Klaus Theleweit. In an interview conducted by Andreas Rosenfelder originally in Welt am Sonntag (Sunday World newspaper) that signandsight.com posted, I learned that Kittler's seminal works examined "discourse networks," war and militarism, hacking and computers, popular culture, and, in his latter years, love as concept and practice. Such is his following that there exists a group of young scholars who call themselves the "Kittner Youth." I also learned that Kittler wrote the first chapter, on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, of his influential dissertation only after rolling a joint and inhaling deeply. He also apparently had crackups, traveled to hear Jacques Lacan's seminars, and proposed a distinctive way of thinking about technology, including writing as technology and the technology of writing. I have, suffice it to say, since sought Kittler's work out.

Here is his response to Rosenfelder's question about whether he has any interest in Facebook:

No, not remotely. It gives me the uncanny feeling that normal people have become so unimportant for those in power and business that self-presentation is the last resort. When I arrived in California for the first time and went up Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley heading for campus, I passed a playing field full of exhibitionists running about. People dressed as harlequins begging for money or smoking dope. When I then entered campus and looked at the people there, they lowered their eyes. People either seem completely depressed or they put on a huge show and telephone loudly in the train restaurant.

As for the interview itself, he compared it to the pleasures of psychoanalysis, the creating of literature while lying on the couch. A bit of that literature, he hinted, might have been created in his conversation with Rosenfelder; a trove of literature, it's clear for anyone who regularly read signandsight.com, could be found behind its seven-years-worth of headlines. Auf wiedersehen!

Remembering Derrick Bell

Derrick Bell
(aalbc.com)

I have been fortunate over the years to interact directly with some very extraordinary people, whose vision and generosity stamped something indelible on me, and one of these was Derrick Bell (1930-2011), who passed away yesterday.  At the time of his death he was a visiting professor of law at New York University, where he had taught for nearly two decades, but long before that he had repeatedly taken courageous stands and stood on principle when, given his keen intellect and well of charisma, social expediency and conformity could easily have paved his route to wealth and success.

For example: in 1959, Bell, who had only recently graduated from the prestigious University of Pittsburgh Law School in 1957 and was the only African American working in the US Justice Department at the time, refused to resign his membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which his bosses thought might compromise his objectivity, or call into question that of the Justice Department, and instead quit his job.  Or: in 1961, after taking a job with the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he supervised the legal aspect of James Meredith's attempts to enroll in and eventual admission to the University of Mississippi, in 1962.

And: in 1980, Derrick Bell, after having taught at Harvard Law School since 1969, where he became that institution's first tenured African American law professor, left to become the dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. He resigned from his Oregon post in a dispute over the lack of faculty diversity.  He subsequently returned to Harvard in 1986, where he staged a 5-day sit-in in his office to protest HLS's denial of tenure to 2 junior colleagues who were working in what would later become the widely disseminated "critical legal studies" methodology. And again: in 1990, after taking account of HLS's dismal record of hiring and tenuring women and people of color, Bell announced that he was taking an unpaid leave of absence until the school appointed a woman of color to its tenured ranks. When he did not return from his protest leave, having taken a temporary position at NYU Law school, HLS dismissed him, in 1992.  Harvard would not hire a tenured woman of color to its law school ranks until 1998, when it appointed civil rights attorney and former University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Lani Guinier.

During my stint at NYU's Faculty Resource Network, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Bell, who graciously agreed to lead a seminar for the faculty members participating in this academic development program from smaller local and national institutions, including a number of historically black colleges and universities, and Hispanic/Latino-serving colleges and universities. Not only was he a pleasure to deal with, but he made it clear that he saw his role as facilitating knowledge exchange with fellow scholars. The enthusiasm that all the participants of his seminar expressed before it began and after it concluded was a summer highlight. Though he often spoke softly, he had a galvanizing voice and manner, and his innovative, insightful mode and manner of thought, his courage and conviction, and his gentleness and kindness kindled in whatever he was talking about. I never had the opportunity to study with him, but I was able to take his measure and have considered him a model of what a professor, a scholar and a public intellectual might be. Everyone I know who studied under him sang his praises, and working with him, I got to see why.

Derrick Bell's books include Race, Racism and American Law (Little Brown & Co. 6th ed., 2008, original ed., 1973); Silent Covenant: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (Oxford University Press, 2004); Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth (Bloomsbury, 2002); Afrolantica Legacies (Third World Press, 1998); Constitutional Conflicts (Anderson Press, 1997); Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protestor (Beacon Press, 1996); Gospel Choirs (1996); Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992); and And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1992).

His passing is a great loss. RIP, Derrick A. Bell Jr.