Summer 1970
" ...I want to make the black people remember they're black to define their heritage ..." [Dana Chandler, "Art in the Ghetto," Harvard Art Review, inter 1968-69.]
"The assumption ... that slavery in the United States destroyed the creative memories of newly arrived Africans ... holds that no form of African influence remains." [Robert Farris Thompson, Black Studies in the University, Yale University Press, 1969.]
"... basically we come from a non-visual culture or people ..." William Williams, "The Black Artist in America," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 27, No. 5; January 1969.
When I complained of negative comparisons in art criticism and comments in diverse publications which at the time seemed disposed to ridiculing black people's endeavor in the areas of painting, graphics and sculpture, I rather adopted the attitude that among institutions, museums were just as guilty of that hidden but quite positive decline of standards which must have started with the most serious attitudes and highest motives. It occurred to me that everybody has been complaining. For the most part, though, what is obvious in the marked asides, when not direct statements of anger, is who has been left out [ or left themselves out] and why. As I sat down to write I asked myself if I was not slowly slipping into the same groove of negative comparisons and uncritical complaints. For instance, is there any real point, when discussing the present Boston Museum show. "Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston" in reflecting upon the work of diverse talents like Zell Ingram, Emma Amos, Thomas Sills or Richard Mayhew in dissert with Matisse or, perhaps closer to home, Milton Avery [ Matisse happens to be in the news] when it may result in the conceivable detriment of these serious, concerned painters? Or to talk about that world of private configuration verging on the most dynamic aspects of Surrealism as exemplified by Albert Pinkham Ryder when confronted with the less successful attempts of Luther Van or Vincent Smith? And if what we are troubled by in this particular pictorial neighborhood is skill, how well would Cliff Joseph and at least one of Lois Jones' attempts fare? After the recent Realist show at the Whitney, how does one assess [re-assess?] the works of Ernie Critchlow, or for that matter, Reginald Gammon or Richard Waters? How useful is it also to bemoan the absence of stouter mettle and greater stature in the "Establishment Art. World?" [Mistake me not; the two, that is recognition in the Establishment Art World and strength or stature, do not necessarily go together.] These are all questions that need answering and fairly soon, but I fear that the contentions that will ensue from any attempt to do justice by answers will at the moment degenerate into that confused sphere: is black as good as white? Is black different from white? How? Why? Does proof justify either neglect, dominance, etc.? Perhaps what I am saying is that I am not prepared, or that I am ill-equipped to deal with those pertinent issues which I contend, uphold, assert, that though slightly inside, are paradoxically almost totally outside any positive assessment of art content. Quality is the only criterion from which to judge: in individual works as in the case of a mixed showing or achievement in that direction - and quality in the case of a body of work by an individual. And of this fact everyone is aware.
The question, the only question, that remains is the one that publicly at least no one seems to ask. It is possible to put on yet another black show? [Call it Afro-American if you want.] Now when I complained of comparison, did I not fall into that same trap? After all, I was thinking of California, the Waddington Galleries, Kasim, Emmerich, the Lawrence Rubin Galleries, modernism. American-European style, all the lush emporiums downtown, the entrepreneurs and the heated gossip. There seemed to be a movement. There was even a show called " 5 + 1" under the, I thought, healthy protection of Lawrence Alloway and Sam Hunter at Stony Brook.
In another recent museum exhibition [about which it was widely remarked but again hardly ever publicly asserted] black artists were not included. And perhaps why? But then to ask that may have been going a little too far. In the catalog to the exhibition, Harold Rosenberg claimed, "What makes any definition of a movement ... dubious is that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement..." because he was talking about art, it is one of the times when I profoundly agreed with Mr. Rosenberg. Movements are fugitive and at best a just tolerable, irritating burden. After endless discussion, most of the people who used to meet and discuss came to recognize that there was no movement and like every other artist gathering, met through common need, like all the other gatherings, to make a dent in the situation, to draw blood from those hardened arteries.
" 5 + 1" had the avowed intention to once and for all put a stop to all those rotten ethnic shows -- throwing caution to the wind and declaring that the idea that there was "quality" was not some romantic notion about black bravery of the sort people readily identify with Black Panther sacrifice. It was not even meant to attract a wide audience. In the sense that the exhibition was deliberately university based, the attempt was to garner a corner in the heated discussion of essence and worth. It was not so much black pride but thoughtful speculation addressing itself to aesthetic realizations. The young people clamoring for more and better Black Studies seemed a natural audience to which one could address one's own discoveries. [Perhaps it would be better to say the trails left behind in one's searches, for there was certainly a lot of talk about letting those young people into one's studio and passing around in written form everything, including extremely adverse criticism of art.] If white artists' works, over the last twenty years, amounts to thumbing noses at bourgeous society, and a conspiratorial coalition between the artist and the only people who could wear their intellectual mantle with ease - the rich - it constitutes little less than a Babylonian raid of gigantic scale on the jaded appetites of the inheritors of the "dream." The black artist was confronted with a put on-or shut-up situation of awesome proportions. There was to be no flunking direct engagements, yet there was the inherited dilemma of art, like all the other dilemmas black people inherited. It was at this point that no meaningful separation could be made; for art had become, because of the breakdown, the crisis, call it what you will, of bourgeois society, the property of all with its accompaniment of existentialist man and alienation as a reality and a dilemma. However, separation was in the works as a political and social reality, dragging art, which had, in fact, been left to its own devices, with no obviously and readily definable function. In the scramble for works that were in fact made by black people, the barrel-scraping process began and goes on today.
The European / African confrontation and splitting apart have produced, in music, jazz with its distinct stamp of blackness. African utilities and motifs have sustained artists like Joe Overstreet, his friends, and a host of designers where black rhetoric had recently failed. One wonders, therefore, if outside the theatre and music, one can answer that real question of whether one can legitimately put on another Black Art Show, with its direct implications about the nature of black art - for with what else do you fill a Black Art Show?
The opportunity presents itself with a vengeance. Coming together, almost on the same day, are the openings to the public of "African Art" [Brooklyn Museum] and "Afro-American Art: New York and Boston" [Boston Museum of Fine Arts]. It gives us an opportunity to do some comparing. An opportunity not just to do another kind of comparing but the only real kind of comparing one can legitimately do at the moment. How does Black Art here and now in the United States fare alongside old Black Art, i.e. traditional African works? On these showings, so close in time and place, the answer is an unqualified; badly . Clearly missing from the realms of garbage [as I view it from where I stand, that is, as an avid consumer of what the people are given to read about the situation and a participating contributor to the on-going polemic], is that expected run on research, its dependence on continuous argument; the discoveries and therein the suggestive teasing between concerned minds accepting and rejecting from concrete evidence advanced. In fact, the great sifting process from which only will we get the truth is, for the most part [there are the rare exceptions], sadly missing. One explanation could be that the numbers, the profusion and trite non-observations, like the exhibitions themselves, are without art purpose.
"Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston" fares very badly indeed for all kinds of reasons alongside what we have very justly claimed with pride as inherited contributions from the ancestors. But mostly by the flimsy and ever so transparent, in a literal sense, flirtation, almost embarrassed, in some sense of the most worth-while and strongest works here. Dan Johnson's tulip trip through chrome-plated graveyards of California vulgarity has left the work wanting from any understanding. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that from his earlier interest in the linear scarifications of traditional African masks - the tightly symmetrical abstract deductions, evident in flat reliquary guardians, in fact, the inability to encompass the breath of these well-honed functionary pieces - the funerary aspect seems to have overwhelmed at best a rather indifferent joiner. Wakes and jazz [out of funeral marches] celebrate pro-life, whereas hawking elegant boxes for the already dead is an undertaker's shot, despite the elegance. Minimal Art, with its direct criticism, arrived at something. But these obelisks, when denied their purity, are blunt. Here is a grassland marauder straying into the desert, eyes stinging from the debris of a vast wind-blown arid waste, stabbing in the dark which is supposed to be light.
Of the older artists in the Boston show, there can be no doubt that Bill Rivers survives the Western cliché of seniority; a camp disguise as prima donna for the sake of balance. ["Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston" is on view at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, May 19 - June 23; "African Sculpture" is showing at the Brooklyn Museum, May 20 - June21.]
[PICTURES] WITH ABOVE ARTICLE
Daniel L. Johnson, The Boy Wonder Dejohnette [1969] oil on wood
Benjamin Jones, Five Faces Images [1969] fluorescent acrylic on plaster, 8 1/2" x 6" each.
Sherbro, Massive Soapstone Head [c. 16 th cent.], 14" long, shown at Brooklyn Museum.
Richard Waters, Tutankhamen [1969], latex on canvas.
Bill Rivers, Eclipse, oil on canvas.
Jack White, Deo-dare [1966] white marble.
Frank Bowling, Mel Edwards Decides [1969] acrylic on canvas, 10' square. At the Boston Museum show.
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