May 1969
The question remains: why have black artists, given their historical role in art, contributed so little to the mainstream of contemporary styles or better still, why have they contributed so little to the great body of modern or modernist works? Left at sea, as I indicated in my last effort, I have been groping madly for answers. {PICTURE: William Williams, Untitled [1969]} To such a fundamentally obvious question there can't be any easy answers, and it's surely simplistic to state – as William Williams did in a taped interview at the Metropolitan Museum and reproduced in the Met's bulletin in time for the "Harlem On My Mind" show – that "we don't have a visual tradition..." Even given what was being discussed, the American Northern big city scene, this is a rather narrow and flabby declaration. However I have to come back to this as I want to deal with where its at and that is America. The confrontation of Black or in this specialised case Black Art is American. One could go further and say New York but that would be overstating it. One of the points I made last was the relative economic positions black people held within the structures: Here I want to emphasize the economic structure of America. The Blacks were first "no-citizens", then rural near chattels and lower class "ghetto" citizens. This is the straight line of interpretation and my recent readings and planned trip to the South do not put me in the category of "expert." However what is hard to define in the inexplicable bombing of a black middle class. The explanation is that there never was a Black idea here. There always was [and perhaps still is] the American Dream: which is white. See James Baldwin's essay on being an American. Your black middle class of which so many of us boast in all the right publications and places were European geared. Whiteness was its essence. Black middle class people were either European trained, versed or loaded toward.
The standards were measured by the same ones articulated in a brochure put out by the Center of Inter-American Relations [an institution to which I want to return] which states "the purpose of the center is to strengthen understanding between the people of the U.S. and of other nations in the western Hemisphere..." and then goes on to state its visual arts programme"... the one area of hemispheric culture most easily communicated to U.S. audiences is the visual arts. It transcends language barriers, its origins trace back to our common European cultural heritage."
The class system in America cannot really be evaluated in as easy terms as the class system in England. The constant shifting, renewing and changing life style pertaining in this country makes analysis part of that complex. However, a large part of the reason for why there is no tradition or Black preoccupation with advanced works of art lies with the sort of people who at one time were the essence [apotheosis, apogee?] of that milieu: namely the light skinned Mulatto. The fact is that "their" middle class was a slavish harking back, or seeking of the past [white]. This left only cul-de-sacs. For fuller discussion of this see Cedric Dover's largely stodgily put together but otherwise excellent book, "Negro Art." My esteemed friend and co-worker William Williams notwithstanding, the explanation can only marginally, if at all be blamed on "...no visual tradition..." Almost without exception the black middle class, now vocal and militant, is profoundly uneducated and [in many instances] "...can't spare the time..." for high art and plastic values. Bob Thompson's "instinctive" reaching for total expression in this area is rather like those throw-ups who underline a rule.
Reading and looking at a lot of what was, and is, popular Negro art prompted me to go back to Clement Greenberg's essay "Avant Garde and Kitsch." Negro art up until recently was a perverse kind of Kitsch, rather in the order of slavery. Greenberg has a lot to say about Kitsch which applies to Negro art and now to Black art. {PICTURE: Mel Edwards, Untitled, 1968}[I suggest the term is interchangeable.] We know from the middle class bit that Jazz wasn't music, nor dancing, nor for that matter singing. By the same token Picasso's use of Negro sculpture [Primitive Sculpture and the like...] was not painting and the lesson of him and his cronies in the Bohemian coteries was not to be tolerated. I find a real equivalence in all that Greenberg talks about when quoting Dwight McDonald on Russian films and his subsequent discourse and see no point in either quoting or stating bits. I refer the reader to this essay in toto. Incidentally there is a recent piece by Harold Rosenberg in the "New Yorker" which is a journal Greenberg cites. Doesn't McDonald write for this – I recommend it to my readers – there's not a single nigger mentioned.
The bombing-out of the black middle class and the subsequent challenging of all old and largely outmoded concepts being harassed by the young give a great deal of moment to this multilayered, fraught, and essentially self-defeating attitudes the young are involved with. It's not a question of who admires who and hence gives underlying force to who, but of standards in terms of that wonderful phrase Life-Style. I hope I have given at least an indication as to why Black artists have contributed so little to the Mainstream. My next point is that now they definitely are, which is inherently part of why they have not before.
The new middle class black product is as alienated from society as the white: the American dream has failed and all these badly misled people are not so much wrecking as getting together: hence questioning and feeding off each other. It's a great revolutionary moment but it still has its roots in what feeds it. Black art is still being done by black people only now it isn't Kitsch; it's the real thing. Take an artist like William Williams. It has been said that William's work is rather like Noland's [that school] but these paintings, although painted in that no nonsense flat masking tape and all process are so "irrational." One thinks of multiple swing rest points... One thinks of single swing rest points/ stable, rigid, [dead] as, say, in the construction of a quadrant arch with a brittle instrument. Or multiple swing rest points as say when describing a circle by the "primitive" method of string and any kind of mark-making tool [brush, pencil, charcoal] the maximum of ones natural reach: regular and irregular heart-beats. But nothing holds; these paintings are articulated in such an anxious "slipping-n'-sliding" fashion as to be eminently "niggerish" in content and it's no use confusing this work with some sort of influence by Frank Stella. The off-hand nature in the order of a Stella is very much a shrug. In Williams it's a "holler."
Again an artist like Mel Edwards could be superficially confused with David Smith except that Edwards produces a kind of ambivalence unknown in Smith. The calibration of weights is a basic generation [rather like "red" in the spectrum of theoretical "white" light]. Since the weight of an object is determined from the sum of the masses of small weights which just balance the object, it is essential in exact work that the masses of the individual weights be accurately known: Impossible! Those Mel Edwards works posed alongside architecture are not a challenging or an education – it's very much a love thing. I suspect Edwards is much closer to Caro than Smith, in that what furnishes the passion and informs the forms is a love – a nigger love – where humor is something like flying in the face of death.
Walking into Danny Johnson's studio was like walking into a death house, not, mind you, a morgue, but a mausoleum; but gay, man, gay. The light. The color. Those beautiful, decorated coffins were so sunny, pretentious, and healthy in a completely unhealthy way. It dawned on me that Johnson's recent discovery of African sculpture has engendered an uncanny expression of the Californian death thing now common currency via Waugh books and films: those streamlined funeral parlors and arty graveyards. Johnson's work is black in the same proportion [expressing a similar complementary, perhaps, but never identical aesthetic] as an artist such as Kienholz. Johnson's earlier work used to involve smashed dolls painted black and other kinds of urban ghetto debris rather in the manner of the so called "Funk" school but he was never in anybody's book on Pop Art or group show involving that. Johnson's instinctive understanding of the linear aspects of certain African sculptures locked in an intense marriage with current "striped paintings" a rebirth completely fresh and triumphant. Yet on a knife-edge and troubled with questioning. What was once an almost academic tyranny is now a flowering of possibilities. With all the attendant risk. The irony is what came out is not African but "Black" Californian. Johnson's use of this source material is like and at the same time totally unlike Picasso's whose work from an authority like Rosenblum to Life magazine sets up only generalizations, or better still confusion. The sculptures that were supposed to have influenced Demoiselles d'Avignon are so different and from tribes [African tribes] so far apart as to annul or frustrate checking. Picasso's use of this material is completely original and remains mysterious [perhaps] even ironic, frustrating and amusing] in much the same way, in this area as Johnson. And there is an irony in that from "Nothing" we went straight into Kitsch and from Kitsch to this splendid flowering; one wonders if it is going to happen now so suddenly: Integration. It would be awful, wouldn't it. I hope that I may discuss why it isn't desirable or possible in the Arts next time.
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