Art projects beyond race and color; beyond America. It is universal, and Americans—black, white or whatever—have no exclusive rights on it.…12
Certainly the American Black artist is in a unique position to express certain aspects of the current American scene, both negative and positive, but if he restricts himself to these alone, he may risk becoming a mere cypher, a walking protest, a politically prescribed stereotype, negating his own mystery, and allowing himself to be shuffled off into an arid overall mystique.13
Saunders had concluded, “Can’t we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end?”14 At the end of the twentieth century—when invisibility was no longer the central issue for African Americans—such contrarian notions sounded less and less like treason.
When the portrait artist Kehinde Wiley was once asked if he was making Black art, he answered, “I think one of the primary goals of what we defined as ‘Black art’ in the 1960s had to do with presenting the ills of society to the world. That Black art was concerned with correctives,” he said. “The fact that [my] paintings of Black men can occupy an uncontested space in the art world is important and transgressive. But that is, in my view, only a starting point. The areas with which I am more engaged in have to do with a more personal toying with the possibilities of easel painting.”15
Golden’s curatorial work had liberated him to come out as a formalist. To him, she was interested in asking two questions: “‘Why do we always have to talk about race when we talk about people of color creating beautiful stuff?’ and ‘Is it ever possible to create an authentic moment without referencing race first?’”16 When the writer Touré asked Kara Walker to define Post-Black in a word, she responded, “Individualism.”17
For Golden, Post-Black felt institutionally right. “Let us say,” she told Bomb magazine’s Betty Sussler, almost as if she were addressing her board at the Studio Museum, “that as an institution we were now willing to exist at a place where we could talk about the complexity of Black creation and the politics behind it through multiple voices and through multiple strands.” And it felt personally right. “[Post-Black] wasn’t a kind of art, it wasn’t a particular way of making work. It was a stance, an attitude, a vibe, a feeling,” she said.18
But how would the art world respond? After the early 1990s, it had closed itself to discussions about racial identity, even as it was increasingly open to gender and queer identities. It had also closed itself to discussions about equity and representation, even though the numbers were as bad as they had ever been. Golden was faced with a two-ended trap. She needed to force the question of identity and the reputation of her uptown museum into the center of the discussion.
The Post-Black idea cleared space for young Black artists to express themselves. Color could be the means and the end. Or color could simply be the means or the end. But it also meant to expose the new artists, make them legible to the mainstream art world. It had to help a new generation escape the old traps.
And so the idea of Post-Black—as opposed to “Post-Blackness,” which would come later, when the joke had gotten far away from two friends and the whole world was more confused than amused—became a generative idea. Soon there would be talk of “Post-Latino,” “Post-Chicano,” “Post–Asian American,” “Post-Native,” “post-identity,” and most controversially of all, “post-racial.” Perhaps the elders weren’t yet ready to embrace this development. But maybe the key to fostering the radical diversity that they had demanded for a quarter-century might be found here.
THE RUINS OF THE CULTURE WARS
The twentieth century had begun with the morphology of race, the notion that difference was biological and unchangeable. But the Post Time of the millennium was about the morphology of racism, the ways that structures were shifting to maintain inequity along color lines.
From the early 1990s young artists of color had more access to the mainstream. They appeared on the horizon as the exceptional—the exceedingly well-pedigreed—and the exceptions—negations of the angry old race-men and race-women. But in their MFA programs and beyond racial identity had simply become “passé.” As in—fine, race is a construct. So what? Next.
It was a casual kind of violence.
The novelist Zadie Smith told a story. When she had been a precociously well-read and opinionated fourteen-year-old, her mother brought her a copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. She was not interested. The young girl did not yet know the backstory, though if she had she may have been even less interested.
It was the late 1980s and Hurston’s works had long been unavailable. In previous eras of integration and uplift her books had fallen out of print, her reputation out of favor. Perhaps she was too ribald, too comfortable in her own skin to suit the tastes of those times. In her piece “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston had written, “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
But now, at the same time hip-hop heads were moving as far as they could from crossover Motown nostalgia, sampling P-Funk and the Meters from out-of-print records secured at used record stores or spirited from family collections, Hurston’s work was undergoing a revival. What George Clinton and Co.’s psychedelic disquisitions on race and democracy and the Uptown Rulers’s deconstructed architectures of space and rhythm signified to hip-hop heads, Ms. Hurston’s aphoristic folk wisdom and earthy language were for a generation of writers and critics trying to make a canon of their own.
Yet Smith’s mother may as well have been handing her daughter a plate of broccoli. Zadie had already declared herself partial to Nabokov and Keats, indifferent to Morrison and Rhys. If anyone was going to resist Ms. Hurston’s company it would be this girl. “I wanted to be an objective aesthete and not a sentimental fool,” Smith wrote. “I disliked the idea of ‘identifying’ with the fiction I read: I wanted to like Hurston because she represented ‘good writing,’ not because she represented me.”19
After not a little prodding Smith cracked open Their Eyes Were Watching God, finishing it in a single reading. And she wept. Smith wrote, “At 14 I couldn’t find words (or words I liked) for the marvelous feeling of recognition that came with these characters who had my hair, my eyes, my skin, even the ancestors of the rhythm of my speech.”20
One of the things multiculturalists had won for their daughters was the privilege of taste and judgment. When her mother had pressed a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God into her hands, Zadie Smith could be skeptical of her mother’s claims of its greatness. That she did not find it wanting was evidence that her mother’s generation had been right.
“Fact is, I am a Black woman (I think this was the point my mother was trying to make) and a sliver of this book goes straight in to my soul, I suspect, for that reason,” she wrote years later. “Those aspects of Their Eyes Were Watching God that plumb so profoundly the ancient build-up of cultural residue that is, for convenience sake, called ‘Blackness’… are the parts that my own ‘Blackness,’ as far as it goes, cannot help but respond to personally.”
Yet in writing of this awakening decades later, Smith was uncomfortably aware that in championing Their Eyes Were Watching God she risked sounding like her Black mother and her mother’s Black friends “talking about a Black book.” She still needed to justify her pleasure. It was very Post-Black to be more self-conscious than enraged that the modifier Black could still signify “something less than.” For all the talk about white guilt and identity fatigue, the traumas and ruins of the culture wars remained.
RAISE YOUR FLAG
In 1988, about the time that Zadie was discovering Zora, twenty years after Ernest Withers shot the famous photo of a line of striking Black workers in Memphis raising placards that read “I Am a Man,” Glenn Ligon made a painting that mimicked the sign in thick black and white strokes. This was the work
that shot him to fame. It had, the art critic Darby English wrote, fused “three ostensibly irreconcilable representational modes—the formalist painting, the political statement, and the private question—into something fraught but whole.”21 In this way, Ligon and his contemporaries forged the kind of practice that would be taken up by the Post Generation.
The private question was the thing. What did it mean that a placard calling for union recognition of nameless sanitation workers gathering on a Memphis street had been transformed into a text painting by a gay Black man to hang in a white New York gallery? There were layers here—history, masculinity, class, generation, movements, legacies. Ligon seemed to want to create the work less to find an answer than to ask questions that opened into more questions.
Another of Ligon’s early oil stick paintings, hung prominently in the 1991 Whitney Biennial, featured one of Hurston’s money lines from “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” In retrospect, the painting seemed to form a dialogue with Daniel J. Martinez’s 1993 Biennial tags. It also seemed to reverse polarities on its viewers, the way Faith Ringgold had reversed chiaroscuro. “When do you feel most white?” was a question that would gain steam in the new millennium.
But Ligon’s work—and those of many of his colleagues—also positioned itself against previous art movements. Against realism, the work took a sharp conceptual turn. Irony replaced ardor. Doubt replaced dogma. Ambivalence replaced moral drama. When the pieces caused anguished debates in the galleries among Black crowds, they had done their work. They were unromantic, antiessentialist, irreducible.
Yet they carried within them their own kind of hope. Responding to Charles Taylor, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah had written, “If I had to choose between the world of the closet and the world of gay liberation, or between the world of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Black Power, I would, of course, choose in each case the latter. But I would not like to have to choose. I would like other options.”22
Writing “as someone who counts in America as a gay Black man,” Appiah closed on a note of optimism. If some had been concerned that identity politics might leave society wracked on the shoals of either-or dichotomies, Appiah wrote, “[I]t is equally important to bear in mind that a politics of identity can be counted on to transform the identities on whose behalf it ostensibly labors.”23
In 1996, Ligon unveiled large unstretched wall-size canvases onto which he had silkscreened newsprint-like images from the Million Man March. He had been inspired by a debate between Isaac Julien and Essex Hemphill about whether Black gay men should participate in or protest the march, and come away with an overwhelming ambivalence.
Hands captured an image of hundreds of palms and fists and peace signs raised into the black air, as if in praise and affirmation. In We’re Black and Strong, there were shadows of the crowd’s heads and fists against a towering white sign that had featured those words. The sign flew like a “flag of representation,” as the curator Franklin Sirmans put it, but Ligon had removed the text.24 So now it stood taut in the wind, wordless, a tabula rasa for the new writing of history—or maybe the writing of nothing at all.
Glenn Ligon, We’re Black and Strong (I), 1996. Silkscreen ink and gesso on unstretched canvas.
NO WORDS, PART 2
The fruit of Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon’s Post-Black discussions was a 2001 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem called Freestyle, which featured twenty-eight young Black artists.
On a personal level, it marked Golden’s return to uptown, the place to which her paternal grandparents had immigrated, and to the museum, where she had first interned in 1987 during the multiculturalism era, a space that itself had been inaugurated in 1968 by partisans of the Black Arts movement. Her curatorial question was simple: after the twentieth century, after Colescott and Hammons and Piper, after the crossovers of multiculturalism and hip-hop, after Ligon and Weems and Simpson, what kind of art would Black artists make?
Los Angeles–based artist Kori Newkirk was experimenting with form, making abstract curtains with hair beads and wall-size paintings with pomade. But it was a self-portrait called Channel 9 that magnetized Golden. Newkirk had taken a photo of himself standing at the end of a graffitied alleyway in front of a silver metal riot gate. His hands were behind his back, and he was dressed in a bright red tee over a white tee and blue jeans. He had pixilated his face as if he were a brand logo in a music video or a criminal suspect on the evening news.
With this digital masking the image exploded in potential meanings. Was this a televised image of a gang member? An unfairly profiled Black man? A photographer’s test-shot of a stand-in? A guy who photo-bombed a picture of a riot gate? Was this a denial, an erasure, a private joke? Newkirk’s work startled Golden. She later told him, “I realized that [the self-portrait] intrigued and unnerved me because I didn’t have a vocabulary to describe it.”25
She would have similar revelations throughout the process. Dave McKenzie’s videos Edward and Me and Kevin and Me showed him performing dances and movements in a Middle American town in Maine, at a supermarket entrance and on a footbridge. He began by acting out movie scenes—as Ed Norton in Fight Club or Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects—then, as if possessed by the spirit, rolled, shook, hand-sprung, and tap-danced as white passers-by gaped or ignored him.
Then it was over. He replaced his glasses and walked on. He later said he made the videos because he “lacked the words to say what needed to be said.”26 He seemed to embody the moment: here I am, in America, inside the break, doing my thing without words.
The title Freestyle was a direct nod to the hip-hop cipher, that freedom space in time where the MC or b-boy/girl, Golden wrote, “finds the groove and goes all out in a relentless and unbridled expression of the self.” “Freestyle” was a generational neologism. It seemed to acknowledge ideas like “freedom song” and “freedom struggle.”
But this cipher was not Raymond Saunders’s feared “mere cypher,” that reduced the artist to an empty vessel for words and ideology. This cipher released the artist, freeing him from the constraints and oppositions of the past, firing the flame of creation, bestowing him with that inchoate, ephemeral feeling of fullness just before meaning cohered.
“Post-Black,” Golden concluded, naming the moment after that moment, “was the new Black.”
Golden’s gambit was risky. Freestyle was first about being, loudly and proudly, an all-Black show at a historically Black institution at a time when both things were unhip in the art world. It was about whether a show of young Blacks could be seen as something other than a show about the state of Blackness. And it was a concession to mainstream critics who felt artists of color were not overly concerned with formal quality. As an identity parade, it was both an act of defiance and a strategic retreat, the least likely path to victory.
But, opening five months before 9/11 amid a period of art-world conservatism, the show felt like An Event. Vibe magazine did a five-page spread, treating the artists as they would have rising rap stars. The New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote, “Ms. Golden may have located a paradigm shift in contemporary art. She didn’t engineer the shift, and she is by no means the first to detect it. But she gave it a name, which is what often snaps an amorphous, floating-around-out-there idea into focus and ends up bringing about change.”27
In the galleries, crowds gathered around six seven-hundred-watt soundclash-size twelve-inch woofers boxed and branded in red-white-and-blue. This was Americana, the work of Nadine Robinson, a Jamaican American artist. Her family and friends were in the rap and dancehall industry. She also loved the intellectual rigor of the minimalists, and found in the designed space of the dance an analogue to Ryman and Reinhardt’s experimental paintings. For her, culture was embedded in form, roots with quality. Bass, as much as race, was in your face.
Pumping through Americana’s stacked woofers was audio of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dr
eam” speech. But Robinson replaced the sound of applause with the sound of laughter. She turned a block-party mood bone-chilling. Robinson was mocking the way movements for representation had created false hopes. But she was also reprehending the way anti-diversity demagogues had turned King’s words against him. She was questioning the value of all the old words.
In Newkirk’s pomade painting of a diving police helicopter, Mark Bradford’s epic perm-paper constructions, Kira Lynn Harris’s photos of her flickering light walls, David Huffman’s Afrofuturist space travelers, Julie Mehretu’s deconstructed architectural flows, Sanford Biggers’s turntablized fatlace-draped Buddhas, and Adler Guerrier’s placeless travelscapes, the new energy pushed out as if freedom no longer felt finite.
CAN YOU SEE ME?
The implications of Freestyle—and Golden’s subsequent exhibitions Frequency (2006) and Flow (2008)—were immediate. By the mid-2000s Asian American and Chicano curators had assembled their own presentations.
In September 2006, Melissa Chiu, Karin Higa, and Susette Min’s One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now opened at New York’s Asia Society featuring seventeen young artists born between 1966 and 1980. The exhibition would open during the Asia Society’s fiftieth anniversary and twelve years after curator/critic Margo Machida’s groundbreaking 1994 Asia/America exhibition show there. But what began as a simple Asian American generational survey became an extended inquiry into the changing condition of marginality, and even the viability of the identity show itself.
A divide appeared. In One Way or Another’s catalog essays, Machida, Higa, and famed Asian American journalist Helen Zia contextualized the rise of Asian American identity and art history. Underrepresentation and invisibility framed their narrative. But some of the young artists appearing in One Way or Another had already shown at major museums. Many had not come up through the ranks of Asian arts organizations. Some did not feel attached to being called Asian American artists.
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