Black Life and Culture
is black art about color?...
The pressure of cultural nationalism on a global drift has given rise in the United States to a passionate, confused, but fashionable black nationalism, and with it a justified if shrill cry for cultural distinctiveness. The dilemma of adequately defining differences and giving them concrete form in aesthetic terms cannot be overstated, and is formidable due to confusion, urgency, and historical nearness. Objectivity about art is always a tall order, but a vested interest by whites and blacks in black art deepens the situation to near opacity. In any attempt to shed a little light on the sweeping generalizations about cultural distinctiveness that are currently being disseminated, such generalizations and the position taken by their proponents must be seen for what they are: sincere attempts to define blackness, but not within the context of sculpture and painting. The question still is, Is black art to be appraised for its blackness or its artistic merit?
Most of the noises being made about black art sound, on the first few hearings, completely concerned with the conception, not the actual delivery [the actuality!] of a positively articulated object, set of objects, or thing. Such concern with intent begins to run contrary to the criterion, the accustomed yardstick which aesthetic judgement demands broadly and which such disciplines as painting and sculpture inherently need particularly. The heart of the matter seems ultimately to rest on the irony that what is being called for in such disciplines as painting and sculpture is, at bottom, really a set of ideal potentialities whose true model of being is purely semantic. It exists, if at all, only in principle, and is therefore waiting for an ideal interpretant.
We begin to run into more difficulty when we recognize that in recent years the standards -artistic standards, to be sure -applied to works being touted under the black label in black shows have disintegrated. That the black shows have, for the most part, been disheartening, dishonest, and questionable, has been seen not only by white critics and mixed audiences, but also by the black artists and their interested black supporters. In fairness it should be stressed that the white critics have been accused, justly or not, with prejudice, lack of equipment, and lack of any clear understanding of the issues involved, and, therefore, of being incapable of unbiased critical assessments. If the people who held the positions of ultimate arbiters and who have long resisted black participation now do exhibit the work of black artists, they do so with the burden of uncertainty.
A Comparative Perspective on the Problems of Standards
The situation touches on more than we must necessarily confine ourselves to. Consider, for example, some statements from Writing in England Today, an anthology put together by Karl Miller, the current editor of The Listener, the official journal of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the erstwhile literary editor of both The New Statesman and The Spectator, considered the most influential organs of the left and right wing of British politics, in that order. In his introduction to this anthology Miller writes that his book is "less an attempt to show the best pieces and the best people than to offer something like a corporate description or evocation ... It seemed right that Commonwealth fiction should be represented." "All over the world," he goes on to say,
"writers have been reared in the tradition of English literature and it looks as if their hour has come [Italics are mine.]"
There are a few very positive and significant reasons for our touching upon Miller's drift. In the first place, it seems that in this debonnair, catholic broadside of an introduction, Miller adopts [perhaps it would be better to say echoes] very much the establishment attitude of giving "black endeavor" an "airing." That Miller is fortunate in having such a convenient term as "Commonwealth' [as a euphemism to include nonwhites] should not blind us to how meaningless this term is on close scrutiny. The situation in the United Kingdom in Miller's opinion, calls forth "less an attempt to show the best ...than ... a corporate description or evocation." Or to put it another way, perhaps a trifle more extreme, what this statement actually amounts to is: let us first, not only accept at last that they are one of us, but second, lower our standards to accommodate them.
That this attitude is extant to a very large degree here in the United States hardly needs underlining. What is painful, though, and frustrating to a degree, is the ever widening and distorted curves of the circles as larger and larger pebbles -now rocks -are dropped into the pool. The increased quantity of works by black artists seems to do little more than cpmpound the demonstrable irony inherent in the contradictory attitudes in this lust for accommodation. That the works may not have true and valuable distinctiveness, which can only be substantiated by quality, is something which constantly worries black people -artists and others. The question in short is, By what absolute standards are these works being measured?
The difficulty encountered when trying to answer this question can perhaps be seen in greater definition if we pursue Miller's volume a little closer, but without too much specifying, for it is not my intention to hold up Miller's book as a racist tract. That it might be so is not incumbent upon me to prove; my task is to point up confusion - possibly my own.
Since none of the pieces in this anthology are dated later than 1966, one can assume that by the mid-sixties Miller [who is, incidentally, a Scotsman] and people like him were already aware of far-reaching ethnic differences in the corporate body of English expression. In fact, at about the same time certain wheels must have set into motion the now notorious, nation-shaking event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the "Harlem on My Mind" exhibition. Too much has been written about that misguided fiasco for me to add to it here, but it is a landmark in that it was the introduction to - perhaps it would be more accurate to say "the first brush" with - the official establishment for many a black artist. [See Benny Andrews in Arts, Summer 1970.] The editor of the exhibit's catalog included a quite distinctly racist declaration by a black high school girl, and this, like the wholesale giving in to black nationalist pressure, was unprecedented.
For anyone interested in the history and politics of the present situation, the difference in the British and the American attitudes on accommodation due to recognizing ethnic differences would seem quite clear. But their point of collaboration, on what is good and meaningful to the present consciousness of ethnic difference, is misleading. Hence, they are of great importance to the present essay. The Miller book and the catalog are not equal. For our purpose, where they converge is on touching common cultural dilemma and in the attitude which informs the: Establishment. If we argue on Establishment terms, then Miller's book is something of a success and the exhibition and its catalog was a relative disaster. The arbitrary choice of these works [and the other choices that follow] is only permissible in that what we are discussing is education, and not essentially the individual books or attitudes. For this reason we can compare Miller's attitude and the Metropolitan's. On the one hand Miller reveals himself an old-fashioned pedagogue, while the exhibition and its catalog were a wrong-headed attempt at public education from a contemporary point of view.
Included in Miller's book is an essay by Frank Kermode discussing William Golding's novels in which Kermode says, "the best course for sympathetic critics is to be a shade more explicit, to do what the novelist himself perhaps cannot do without injury to the books, which grow according to imaginative laws and cannot be adjusted to the extravagant needs of readers." If this is true for books, it is even more so for works of painting and sculpture. In discussing black art, it is therefore necessary to try avoiding what is potentially misleading and to "be a shade more explicit."
White America has been seen to be historically racist, and black endeavor is about to suffer from overexposure, bringing in its wake, I suggest, much the same criteria by which this art has always been judged; the criteria od racism. Because the British do not have to deal with cultural differences on a strictly one-to-one, black-white basis, tokenism is rampant. For example, no critic who says Victor Naipaul [ who is included in Miller's anthology] is an important modern writer can think that literature should embody contemporary life in terms of both form and content. These critics cannot understand the writer's drive to reshape the world [ a world found pretty rotten] in his own image within the context of his given discipline. What, in fact, they are concerned with are National Morals and the upholding of these morals by clearly described, if old, often mothball-covered axioms, such as "the Englishness of an English writer."
It is perhaps proper to restate at this point a belief that the urgency to define "black" and hence to lay bare, to articulate the passionate essence throbbing therein, is not strictly an American phenomenon. It is quite simply that historically this task fell to us, and that socially, economically, and hence politically, we are, if anybody, best placed to deal with what, after all, has been described as the only relevant problem of the twentieth century. At the same time the discussion, with its emphasis on education, will have to be centered on the United States, however much the concerns are global.
The following observations are essentially part of a continuing dialogue brought about by the prevailing pressures, fascination with, and committed interest in art done by black people. Hannah Arendt [whose essay "Reflections on Violence" is uppermost in my thoughts and must influence this work in more ways than I can acknowledge] has written:
The danger of being carried away by the deceptive plausibility of organic metaphors is particularly great where the racial issue is involved. Racism white or black... objects to natural organic facts - a white or black skin - which no persuasion or power could change; all one can do, when the chips are down, is to exterminate their bearers.
It follows that any discussion within this context would be indulging in the contemporary rhetoric of violence and would be relevant only because it is the fashion.
The Distinctiveness of Black Art
Dealing with black art is a bridge-building process. As a painter, one soon discovers that art comes out of and feeds off art; thus, much of what is being painted is ancestor worship of one sort or another. This is nothing new to add to what we already know about the traditional African in general and the traditional African artists in particular. In the case of black art, a distinction will just simply have to be taken for granted between what is black now, what was traditional African then, and what is contemporary African now. What has molded the contemporary entity labeled "black" is consistently and irrevocably intertwined with that which has brought about what we now understand as the United States - which simply means that, unlike negritude, blackness finds its energy centers somewhere in the heart of American [Western] society, while trying on the mantles and adjusting to, as well as mainly influencing, the global brotherhood of subject peoples and shared ethnic roots.
It is idle to suggest, as some do, that the black American is [exactly?] like any other man of color. It is a fact that what distinguishes him is, however grudgingly acknowledged, his complex inheritance of more than just his African beginnings in America and this he shares with few, if any other, national types. Culturally, if the black American is not a Western man, he is not an African man either. He is a new man, the nearest and most culturally rich hybridization of the wheels of eternity. This is perhaps the distinction which blocks the door of full comprehension. But the word "hybridization," though convenient, is highly out of place here. "Black" is a round, total entity. An indisputable fact. This forces one to push past the oversimplification of the identification with just simply skin coloring and to seriously rummage into the philosophical and psychological content of all the influences. The prospect of this is mind-blowing, and the fact that it has probably not been done is another story, but it must not delay us.
The acceptance of inherited ethnic particulars and cultural diversity in the fabric of other disciplines, notably music and dance, is very rarely questioned now; yet the same situation is hardly ever advanced, much less upheld, in the plastic arts. The explanations for this are many-sided. Many say that the continuing bond between the African and the black American was ruptured by slavery, and that the mark-making abilities peculiar to blacks were lost once they came to America. That there is little evidence of a continuing tradition brought from the fatherland might be a consequence of the outrage [slavery], but it is more likely to be a consequence of the scarcity of research done in this area. The second assertion, that the Africans' mark-making abilities were lost on the journey across, is to me patently absurd. The little evidence extant, however, does indicate that a statement such as that made by William T. Williams in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin [ January 1960] - "It seems to me that one of the underlying things is that basically we come from a non-visual culture" - is very far from the truth.
It is quite obvious that the education, if not the entire training of blacks was left in the hands of white people. The numerous books on art, whether traditional African or European, that have come down to us or are now being produced are mainly by white people. A random selection of recent books that have come to my notice includes the Mentor-Unesco Art Books, introduced by William Fagg; Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art, edited by Daniel Biebuyck; African Art: Its Background and Traditions, by Rene S. Wassing; African Sculpture Speaks, by Ladislas Segy; Art in Africa, by Tibor Bodrogi; and in a different category, Black Studies in the University, edited by A.L. Robinson and others which includes among other things, Robert Farris Thompson's essay "African Influences on the Art of the United States."
The increasing number of these books, their content, educational value, and the fact that they are all written by white people is a constant source of vexation and fatigue, and one cannot fret away the dilemma. However, the point I want to emphasize is that they vary, and just as well, too, from the really atrocious effort by Mr. Segy to the excellent and scholarly Tradition and Creativity. It is legitimate to ask the people who are putting out these books whether they are conscious of, and are dealing with, the problem of what constitutes black art, for it is slippery and perplexing. At the same time, one is encouraged. In an essay in the New York Review of Books, one of the contributors to Tradition and Creativity, Professor Robert Goldwater, mentions the "collector," among other things [ see my article in the spring 1970 issue of Two Rivers], and talks at length about acculturation, that is, the influence on the contemporary practicing African artist of the affluent world -broadly speaking, the white world. This business of the "collector" does have enormous bearing on the issue of education. Though the difference between the contemporary African artist and the black artist is an obvious, often cited, and important one, and for our purpose a different discourse, what is of real significance is that the teaching and opportunity for training sources have an equivalent in that they were European-steered [educated]. For example, there is the case of Oshogbo, the history of whom is described in Uli Beier's book Contemporary African Art. The book shows a really frightful example of well-intentioned European meddling in the education of African artists, to judge from the evidence of the works illustrated in the book. When last heard of, Mr. Beier was off to the South Seas, no doubt to discover more native, unspoiled talent.
That painting and sculpture "grow according to imaginative laws and cannot be adjusted to extravagant needs" is just the point that the waring fractions tend to miss, and consequently they try to stretch painting and sculpture to meet such needs. It is accepted that the experience of traditional African works contributed largely to modernism via cubism, surrealism, and other styles. But the reason for the relative lack of contributions, with any distinctive stamp, by the "natural" inheritors - those who, as LeRoi Jones describes them, "finally looked up in some anonymous field and shouted, 'Oh, ahm tired a dis mess, Oh, yes, Ahm so tired a dis mess,'" - is yet to be given. [See this contributor's discussion, "Black Art 1 and 11," in Arts, April and May 1969. ]
The difference between the African and the Afro-American is what happened when the latter looked up and realized he wasn't going back to Africa. This was traumatic, for "one of the main points of the [Melville] Herskovits book [ The Myth of the Negro Past ] is that most of the attitudes, customs, and cultural characteristics of the American Negro can be traced directly, or indirectly, back to Africa," observes LeRoi Jones in Blues People. He adds that this is compounded by the fact that "the African, because of the ... differences between what was native and what he was forced to in [Western European] slavery, developed some of the most complex and complicated ideas about the world imaginable." Just as all this may go a long way in explaining why the black aartist hesitated to take up the talisman of his rightful inheritance [and Blues People is as worthy as any account of the spirit of rerouting], it fails to take the measure of what Black Art there is. Furthermore, the art that has been presented as black art is questionable, more characterized by some of the observations in Miller's foreward and in the wilder declarations in the exhibit and catalog of "Harlem on My Mind." Or it is presented with basically humanist arguments, which Jones and a lot of other Americans [blacks] advance. Since the publication of Blues People , Jones's statement, "The idea that Western thought might be 'exotic' viewed from another landscape never presents itself to most Westerners," has been put in doubt by the publication of a book by Cottie A. Burland called The Exotic White Man: an Alien in Asian and African Art. Thus, at this point there is nothing so "mysterious" about the black experience.
I am not for one moment suggesting that the arguments so lucidly and passionately presented in Jones's book are discredited. On the contrary, the muscular prose with which his points are driven home, as with a pneumatic sledgehammer, serves as something of a physically twitching awakening for me with each reading. However, I resist the niggling humanist thread which waves its way through this work, for I know of no quality in traditional African expression with which I feel comfortable or admire in black modern literature and painting. In fact, what attracts me to certain examples of Antillean and African expression is a certain irony-even cynicism - and real realism. We mustn't loose sight of the fact that in a sense black art, like any other art, is a posture. Thus, in the polemic marketplace the posture is a postulate to be supported, redefined, restated within its individual and contextual world. It means that what hones and essentially distinguishes black art is the spirit that informs the activity inside its separate and special disciplines. It is completely intrinsic to artistic expression.
Knowledge About the Development of Black Art
The suppression of the inquisitive disposition in blacks born in the New World has never been sufficiently discussed. There is a relative dearth of any mention or suggestion of artistic life in the existing literature. But the blacks' investigation into what would have [ must have ] appeared alien and strange in artistic terms must have been forcing newer art forms and greater or different ranges of expression. Black people went through a process of understanding through what must be described as the white stages [alas! for want of a better term with which we could distinguish this essential process of growth] and then on to the development of this new entity black . The process must have involved - as with learning the new language and musical instruments - a thorough, unique grasp of all the axioms and issues involved to have climaxed in full-blown expression. Since black people are born to this natural cultural inheritance, the logical conclusion is that the trials left behind lack a thorough investigation. In my recent reading only Robert Farris Thompson has ventured a suggestion of this, and it is largely substantiated by my own limited experience in the South.
This spirit, of its very nature, is hard to define in simple language if one recognizes that one is dealing with nonverbal expression, i.e., painting and sculpture. It may simply be that recent criticism, if such it can be called, has recognized that the various thematic conflicts expressed in black artistic endeavor are remarkably tenacious. However, this criticism has, in general either emphasized the ingenious and highly complicated manner by which such conflicts finally resolve themselves [by ignoring them] in accomplishment, or has reflected upon the fact that these conflicts are a stock set of attitudes defined [or perhaps "recognized"] within a certain intellectual and social history. This is essentially either a refusal or an inability to "define: them. in the final analysis a certain unified theme [Historylessness, Rupture, Bondage Neurosis, Outrage, Pride, etc,] is elucidated , whose familiarity belies the ferocious intensity that the conflicts generate and from where they arose. These attempts do little more than demonstrate critics' basic arbitrariness.
It is best, therefore to go back into the familiar to take issue with the techniques or processes which give rise to or articulate the thematic conflicts in order better to bring up whatever distinctions there exist. In this way the matter of ultimate resolution, if not entirely discredited, will, I hope, at least recede.
To go back to Karl Miller's anthology; in his introduction he talks a good deal about the 1950s. "They were tired of the international experimental avant garde ... mandatory modernity ... they were democrats ...'Exit the hero' ... they painted themselves battleship grey and were called 'The Movement'..." Well. The painters were in uniforms as well. The order of the day was wearing hobnailed boots and overalls, and they were all into "Expression," be it with thick paint or "drawing" with paint straight out of a tube. Miller continues that even though much of " 'The Movement' involved ...reversions to ordinary speech and moral earnestness...not uncommon in English literature ...the novelty of its programme" was the distinguishing factor. But, as Clement Greenberg says, "novelty as distinct from originality, has no staying power." Exaggeration caused The Movement as such to dissolve in England. There is no equivalent in the United States of any parallel grouping, but there are sociological connections.
Leaving aside but not forgetting the previously mentioned racist diatribe in the "Harlem on My Mind" catalog, the catalog's heading, "1950-1959," is described as : "Frustration and Ambivalence." While there was an equivalent of this feeling in the intense immigration and buildup in the Unites Kingdom of black people from the West Indies and other parts of the British Empire, culturally there was a reflection of this black surge, but no recognition of it. Much as Miller can talk about Commonwealth literature having its hour in the 1960s, he cannot be blind to the fact that some of the people active and working during the 1950s were very properly Commonwealth, if that term has any meaning [ and I don't think it has]. Doris Lessing and Dan Jacobson are southern African and included in the anthology, but I doubt whether, in talking about "Commonwealth literature," Miller had them in mind. The case of Colin MacInnes is pertinent too. Brought up in Australia, his sense of understanding more than Little Englsnd is well-known. However, his novel City of Spades [published in 1957] was widely discussed- but not because it was about a city of spades.
From all this and more, one is forced to concede that the real consciousness of black distinctiveness ripened in an amorphous past [ as reiterated countless times] but actually coalesced, actually took place, during the sixties, in Britain as it did here. This leads me to believe that the arguments surrounding black art are structured somewhat on a framework akin to the conflict between The Movement and modernism - a revolutionary, elusive framework be it so.
Rather than dealing with modernist ideology with its elitist implications lone-ing it etc.
[ the connection between this and the witch-doctor sorcerer figure should not be missed, but must not detain us], there is today's rhetoric of militancy and the more accessable identification with the people. This turns out to be a signal social-climbing device, the perils of which were amply demonstrated by The Movement [ but less by their generational equivalent, the Beats]. The works and the personalities revealed through their black rhetoric prove grasping and desperately unpleasant.
An Examination of Some Selected Works
In an important essay, "On Expression and Expressionism," published in Art and Literature [summer 1964], Richard Wollheim discusses Marion Milner's On Not Being Able to Paint and observes:
...to talk of putting a particular feeling or emotion into a subject or activity is highly metaphorical; unless ... we take the phrase ... and use as our criteria for its application the fact that after the x-ing the feeling or emotion is no longer experienced [Marion Milner wrote, "... when the drawing was finished ... the original anger had all vanished." She put the feeling into a picture, as one might a cat in a box.
This last sounds very much like Benny Andrews' rationale for his painting "The Champion" as published in his letter to the Sunday New York Times of June 21, 1970. This painting had recently been seen in an exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Wollheim goes on to say: "the phrase 'when the drawing was finished ... the original anger had all vanished' obviously has no relevance ... Art is not simply made by discarding life." Obviously, in the case of "The Champion," the cat jumped out of the box again, for the work, though painted, has little expressive of paint and does not investigate the use of paint. The design of this work is ordinary and does not engage interest, and the papier-mache-collage-and rope turns out to be a moribund brumal like effort hailed upon with tactile rhetoric. In fact, it is a sort of funereal, disengaged journalism.
Further, Wollheim invokes Wittgenstein:
At one point Wittgenstein asks us if we can imagine ourselves using one phrase and meaning another by it [e.g. saying "It's cold here" and meaning "It's warm here"] ...our explanation would probably take the form of alleging that as we say the word "cold" out loud, we say the word "warm" to ourselves. [Not even that, I venture!] Or that we treat our utterance .... As though it were a slip of the tongue...
Every dweller in the black ghetto [community?] from junkie to jack-of-all trades, "knows" about these changes. That is their life style. Says Wollheim:
We might find here a suggestion as to how the present question about the limits of expression is to be answered. For it might seem that a man can express y-ness by x-ing, only if x-ing stands to y-ness in a relation which is, or is analogous to, that of meaning ...Marion Miller failed to express her feelings in the Downland landscape ... failed to because [roughly] the kind of picture she drew does not "mean" peace.
Thus [!!] Benny Andrews.
The case of Danny Johnson, too, is pertinent here. In the foreword to the catalog of his recent exhibition at French and Company, Margit Rowell disclaims any connection between Johnson's sculptures and the form of expression known as minimal art. She claims that "no formal adventures distract the eye." Even though one should not succumb to the temptation to speak of minimal art [ the clear implication from Margit Rowell's statement], these painted pillars of wooden statuary could hardly be said to have started out to offer an alternative. These works if not considered as minimal art, should tempt one into formal deductions [adventures] through the eye [distraction!]. But Margit Rowell is perfectly right: They do not! Nor are they a "vehicle or support for colour." [This last quote is an ironic betrayal of how often art content in black endeavor is assumed "outside" the relevant disciplines.] As such they do not deal with the problem of "anchoring" [Margit Rowell: "solidly anchored to the ground"]. In fact, as I recall, they were not anchored even literally to the gallery floor. As works, they possessed little beyond fussy decorations, rather like old-fashioned knitting.
That these works failed to "express" most of what was inferred in the catalog's foreword is inherent in their posture. Works in the plastic art are a structured exposure of emotion in time and space, of the self undergoing a series of critical changes [ hence criticizing!]; that is, artistic episodes leave behind aesthetic trails, brought about by intensely wrought decisions through the artist's engagement with his medium-painting, sculpture, etc. cathartic emptying, reminiscent of "release," but release held together! The evolution of the act [of painting, sculpture] is a first-order activity: a forceful reminder that IT is made by a single individual with a potential of natural conveyance to a wider audience.
In sculpture the static forces of a solid body do not depend on the "quantity" of the mass [one thing sculpture just simply has to deal with is gravity] - that is, on "anchoring." Line as direction and an affirmation of depth defines actual space [not mimetic space], but does not necessarily usurp it within the static rhythms. Static rhythm, as the only element of plastic and pictorial content, incorporates aspects of kinetic rhythms as the basic forms of our perception of real time, i.e., engaging the imagination. Sculpture shares with painting the time it takes to connect up with, be engaged by, and perhaps walk toward and past, but hardly around, the work. This is not discounting the fact that the engagement might be a lasting one, like the potential of any relationship. Sculpture's self-sufficiency unaccompanied by the baggage rhetoric of a chorus must now be so established as to not need mentioning. However, in the sense that sculpture occupies "man" space, Johnson's work was particularly troubling. His sculptures were "in the road," not underfoot, but in one's path with that particular negative flat, indifferent heaviness. What saved the exhibition, if anything, were mirrors that engaged one in image play and as such had little to do with sculpture. The sculptures functioned not at all as sculpture, but as props in silent theater. They expressed nothing of sculptural interest - more accurately, nothing of personality [or emotion] through sculpture - but were altiloquent about play, which needed no special circumstances. As for all the talk about music, about jazz, who ever heard of a meticulously painted piece of carpentry playing jazz, except with the aid of electronic devices, or a jukebox.
In contrast, the artist Jack Whitten is driven to real painterly investigation. His earlier pictures have structures which are visually reminiscent of the street in a kaleidoscopic manner: circuses, carnivals, church, beaches, and swimming pools. He draws parallel conclusions about the species, caricaturing it with an exuberant, spontaneous handling equal to the imagined style [life style] of the brothers. The obvious speed with which these pictures have been done has produced a masterful ciliagraphic brush handling - paint applied and a sodden, brushed-in action, dry and direct. At times the strokes are a dense, quivering mass, filling in the entire picture plane. In other instances there is a contrast of free patches large enough to create the feeling of distinct compositional divisons. The colors are always engaging and intense, as the painter leaves delectations of nondescribed or nonspecific times and places; clothes neutral, automobiles, active; suggestion of Jackson Pollock's later misattempts. The flaws in Whitten's work begin to recede as he aims at the essential possibilities of paint. Ugliness and absurdity in measurable human terms begin to operate as paint, as mass, as line; success in portraying it [paint] as such. This is the kernel of Whitten's work, but the message has previously been governed by the stilted mannerisms of inherited dogma. Now that the anxious gesture has changed, the manner is directed at paint , hinging and hanging on paint's possibilities; the approach of his new phase repeats itself to such an extent that one wonders if this work has not begun, and will not end, in the full swoop of his secret and nondefinable blackness. This is the dilemma of Potential!
Of the older artists, apart from Jacob Lawerence, Romare Barden is probably the best known. Bearden's work consistently tends to look better in reproductions; except perhaps his prints, of whick I have not seen very many. The two most outstanding painters of this generation are, without hesitation, Norman Lewis and Bill Rivers. Lewis, whose painting at last seems to be finding an individual glow, has been long in developing. His best works seem to lie in the area of muted greys and blacks. Bill rivers, on the other han, is very much at home with primary colors and thick paint. Always attracted by the substance of paint, Rivers in his earlier works tended to be overwhelmed by a sort of European lushness. Comparatively small easel paintings, these works were overlaid with so much that has come to be identified with that candy-icing-lemonade school of Paris, stemming from Georges Braque and Henri Matisse after the war. [The best, and I daresay the most lasting, of this particular trend must be the works of Nicholas De Stael.] A driving conflict which seemed to arrest and bury most of Rivers' early work was the essential autobiographical nature of his imagination, the overlaying of a coloristic and pictorial thesis essentially neo-romantic-pessimistic in nature. This tendency to shore up pleasure by pandering to it in sweet color, slickness, and indifference which denied depth of feeling, was automatically anathema to an essentially mordant imagination which bites itself naturally into the acid yellows and flows with the reds and blues. Rivers' real cynicism and disillusionment smacked of an artificial, unconnected, pictirialpleasure. Bordering on illustration, these works tried to deal with color and demonstrated fragmentation unreconstructed "located mainly in the exhilarating and more physical facts of luscious color ... surfaces and decorously influenced design," in Clement Greenberg's words. Rivers' latest works are eminently satisfactory as statements rich in poise and declared intention.
Where Now?
The foregoing essa, admittedly not unbiased in its observations, is, I hope, clear enough to dissuade anyone who might think that I deliberately neglected to discuss the consistently increasing number of artists of merit whose efforts deserve as much space, if not more, than that allocated to the people who have been mentioned. There are people whose work I would have felt obliged to discuss, and I would have found pleasure, I'm sure, in doing so; some of them, like Joe Overstreet, Bill Williams, and Mel Edwards, I have written about elsewhere. But there are Ed Clarke, Malcolm Bailey, Chuck Bowers
---to name a skimpy few.
Then there are a number of artists in Boston and Chicago with whose work I'm familiar. They work in what I consider an absurdly reactionary vein, but the power of their rhetoric and their committed seriousness to blackness cannot be gainsaid. If I consider the product of their efforts, and often their words about their work, to be nonsense, it is only because I cannot, I don't, see that being committed to black is quite the same thing as being a painter or sculptor. The two can often exist in the same body, which is right, but with the maximum will in the world I cannot get past this skin-deep bombast. This is really beyond my powers.
In the seventies we can expect the continuing dialogue about black to be sustained with the measure of political license and tolerance existing or potentially in existence. Should works of painting and sculpture continue to be a black issue and not an art issue, it is my considered opinion that these works will suffer. It is easier to say than to paint the thesis that works from black hands and psyches have a distinct stamp. The measure of honesty an artist brings to his work cannot be too much stressed. An artist has to have something to be honest about, and here black artists have a distinct advantage. It is not as if "their hour has come." The fact is that they haave a different perspective and view of the world long in history and short on recognition. The all-functioning role so amply filled by traditional African works is not an issue either; the world has changed. It has been seen to be the case that black, given our interconnectedness, universal interconnectedness, is to type as modernism is to culture. An unknown quantity with posture and potential! The question really is, Are black people missing many links, in dealing with modernism? Since a prevaling aesthetic expression in paint is completely identified with whites,the honest answer is that were we not afraid in many ways of being considered white, we would be truly black. We would be wholly black [this new entity] and tackle our "instruments" and language the way the leading jazz musicians and writers do, and with whom we are constantly being equated to our detriment -like Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud.
Andrews, Benny, "On Understanding Black Art," The New York Times, Sunday, June 21, 1970.
----"The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition," Arts Magazine, summer 1970.
Arendt, Hannah, "Reflections on Violence," New York Review of Books [special supplment, February 27, 1969.
Bearden, Romare: Gilliam, Jr., Sam; Hunt, Richard; Lawrence, Jacob; Lloyd, Tom; Williams, William; and Woodruff, Hale,
"The Black Artist in America: A symposium, " The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol.27, no.5, January 1969
Beier, Ulli, Contemporary African Art , New York, Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1968.
Biebuyck, Daniel, Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art, vol. 2. Berkley and Los Angelees, University of California Press, 1969.
Black Studies in the University, see Thompson, R.F.
Bowling, Frank, "Black Art; Talking About Books," Two Rivers, spring 1970.
--- "Discussion on Black Art 1 and 11," Arts Magazine, April and May 1969.
Goldwater, Robert, "Black is Beautiful," New York Review of Books, December 18, 1969.
Jones, LeRoi, Blues People. New york, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1963.
Miller, Karl, Writing in England Today: The Last Fifteen Years. Middlesex, England, Penguin Books, Ltd., 1968.
Rowell, Margit, Foreword to catalogue, French and Company exhibition of work of Daniel Larue Johnson.
Schoener, Allon, ed., Harlem on My Mind; Cultural Capital of Black America. New York, Random House, Inc., 1968.
Thompson, Robert Farris, "African Influence on the Art of the United States," Black Studies in the University: A Symposium.
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1969.
Wollheim, Richard, "On Expression and Expressionism," Art and Literature, summer 1964.
