The Mystery Of
From the song
Its been a wild start to the year. I’ve got 2 PhD applications in, a teaching application, a major project proposal, and 5 exhibitions before April. My horoscope says grand things require the work, of course, I am not shy in that respect. I’m putting forward that filling my plate will yield some results. Always the results. Some positive results. Always the positivity. Whatever of it, I want and the way to relieve a want is in addressing it. I’ve been lax in this place of posting so here is a long post for you. Below is my writing sample for my art history PhD. I’m not going to elevator pitch it, I’ve got enough going on today. Give it a read. I’ve gotten some good feedback so far, the better feedback is a, drum roll, acceptance letter. Wouldn’t it be nice.
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Phd Writing Sample
X Carter
PhD Applicant Fall 2025
At the heights of power in America and arguably globally, an orbit of black masculinity is maintained in the fashioning of order in the midst of anarchy. When I write America I do not mean the United States, I mean the continent North and South and the Caribbean and the colonial outposts under the control or self-governing in the Western Hemisphere. The fabled magical negro sage, knowing-better-than-their-white-counterparts-could acts as an instrument of God. CIA documents speak of the conception of the messiah that will liberate the consciousness and body politic of blackness. The blood and image of this being is spilled and refashioned as generations pass in their relevance to a contemporary representation of the American identity. A portrait of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is housed in the collection of Republican Kingmaker Harlan Crow. This representation of black masculinity is contentious to a popular understanding of the black identity and sovereignty but this blackness is an American thing, maintained through the American experiment as, “the negro,” has always been the x factor in the building of the empire. This essay parses out the relationship between performance, materiality, sexuality, and black masculinity in the context of America through an art historical analysis and an evolving understanding of the contemporary production of media objects in an art historical context.
As a counterbalance to the painting of Clarence Thomas is the Presidential portrait of Barack Obama by the painter Kehinde Wiley. The only African American President in United States history, Obama represents a neoliberal ideal for the progress of the nation's ethos. Embodied in the Obama Presidency is the dream of the immigrant, the dream of the negro in centuries past, the dream of those knowledged black men of the Civil Rights era, the dream of the middle class, the dream that through determination, eloquence, and poise, you can rise to hold the greatest power on the planet. This dream proliferated in the American consciousness by figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Thurgood Marshall, and Jesse Jackson. This dream runs counter to a black radical tradition housed in bodies like Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, and Malcolm X. The rhetoric of, “by any means,” is beyond the steps of political intervention. Barak Obama represents an acceptable, merited, black masculinity, and a lack of, maybe even a castration of the masculine libido attached to black masculinity as the bestial, subhuman, drive towards pleasure without regard for responsibility so often depicted in popular media.
Art History is revelatory in its expansion towards accessibility and not necessarily acceptability in the public imagination. The building of the western canon is self congratulatory in its inclusion of non white, non-European, femme, and queer voices, this is no surprise considering those consumed by the machinery of western civilization. Art History is an arm of the architecture of domination set in place over centuries of white supremacist rule. Representation in a democratic society is often conflated with an ability to effect change in that society. We continue to see that representation is subverted and repositioned as access to new markets for economic expansion while the subjects being represented are consumers of human capital with a face like theirs on goods that send wealth far away from home. Descriptors like enhancement, redevelopment, and redistribution speak towards an action of making more than or an active repositioning of the heart of the matter. This is the incremental progress housed in the liberal tradition that is often behind the cultural ball when dealing with lived realities. Approaching this as an art historical document looks to highlight practices counter to what is currently accessible to the field and looks to expand on a growing discourse around bodies and practices on the bounds of history. The political divide that frames this work is in need of reimagining that forwards culture through a liberal ideal that is insufficient in housing the reality of artistic production. Conservancy and liberation as they relate to analytical structures for moving ideology that makes consciousness recognizable are insufficient in housing the technical and intellectual strides of those existing on the other side of the programmatic mission of those structures. Instead this is a movement towards a revelatory analysis of the margins, nascent, groundbreaking in their harnessing of the plastic parts of consciousness and imaging.
Attaching this analysis to black masculinity unlocks a threshold where art history separates modes of survival from the creative act. In this space my practice as an artist exists alongside industries on the brink of consumption by forces much larger than I can imagine. And still they are conceivable through their replication of the inequities of capitalism, colonialism, and religious zeal in the field of cultural production. It is this adaptability to an unpredictable means that is central to understanding the way black masculinity has been represented in art history. The stuff of access, how production is carried out, and what has historically been taboo to the cause presents black masculinity as a regimented system that perpetuates a capital driven and market centered understanding itself. In researching and producing artworks I ask myself, “to what ends is this the case?” Those ends I think they play out on a timeline longer than I will be here to see but the ends are definitely connected to art’s functioning as a currency that moves among people.
In the most powerful nation on earth, at the height of political power, in a position that is an appointment for life, Clarence Thomas sits in judgement of those citizens deemed most free in the world. Supreme Court Justices outlast Presidents. They represent the morality of the nation, maybe more so in the context of the United States as an increasingly theocratic society. Through the culture war waged over the greater half of the 20th century into the 21st century, the make up of American morality has increasingly been rewritten into the image of a Christian nation with its “truth” taken from biblical inerrancy.
To exhaust feel good descriptors and reveal something of the economics of the place, America is a pyramid scheme. In this painting the viewer's gaze is directed by overlapping triangles embedded into the composition. The central triangle being formed between the sculpture of a Native American and one of the most recognizable weapons of the Native, the arrow head. Lower, we have a triangle of men moving the foreground of the painting inward. The painting can here be divided into two with a possible third mode that I think is most easily identifiable as the way that power uses symbols to conflate non symbolic systems; the historical representation of man and power, and the focusing of power towards a foreseeable future, and the disconnect between historical fact and the narrative process for making sense of events. All understandings require a long view of justice as contained in the black masculine body.
In the composition of the painting, the central figure, the most conservatively dressed, long sleeves rolled up, long pants, Mark Paoletta, looks towards Justice Clarence Thomas moving our collective gaze towards who, and what, the subject of the painting is. The painting as described in Slate magazine by University of Miami Professor of Contemporary Art and History of Photography, Heather Diack, as, “like Thomas is holding court.” And if this is the case the operative tip of the arrow drawn is Paoletta, functionary as the transition lawyer leading for Republican President Donald Trump. Like a drawn arrow the power of justice flows from Thomas to the other men in his company.
It could be a photograph but the mystic of painting sets this work of art in a history that can be immediately understood without the burden of a photographic truth. Did every bit of light fall through the canopy to place the perfect shadows on the brows of Clarence Thomas and his company? Probably not. And here we are confronted with a different kind of reality, a realism embedding details so specific that the image can be mistaken for the real thing yet is a creative endeavor. In the painting we are presented with something historically recognized in the progress of artistic production of images from painting to photography to cinema. While the painting may appear as reality it is an object meant to lock power in its construction, inscrutable in the mind’s eye because the style of its representation and its rendering to something easily recognizable as the real thing. A question of what is that “real thing” is part of the nature of power. How its access is handed down through figures like Thomas and how the painting commissioned by Harlan Crow builds history around an augmented reality that addresses that question.
The business of America has a long history of representation in American art. The historic representations of the nation are largely locked inside of portraits of captains of industry, their political affiliations being a marker of where they stand economically. In this telling the national portrait gallery represents the weath of the nation. A pivot point around this factoid moves on the understanding of the concept of wealth. For what is wealth when you have all the money in the world? What is wealth with all the power at your fingertips? What is wealth when your kin are in bondage? To navigate these questions, race in America has provided a vessel to those eagerly seeking a definition of wealth that takes into account historical inequities and subjugation inherent to the story of America.
When does wealth become power? Arguably when it buys torches, guns, chains and binds men in prisons or under its boots in any number of ways. Violence, the threat of or expressed is a phenomenal tool for transitioning wealth to power. Judgement and the use of words to bind is as sharp as any knife against the throat. The esoteric nature of a spell, it's like magic the way that words can hold sway over our actions. The ability to hand down the word makes Gods out of men and women. Think of the lynched bodies frozen on postcards flanked by smiling white faces archived and the stories they tell. What are the words that moved people to brutalize in the most heinous ways children and families?
There have been two Black men appointed to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. In this lineage is the power of something near infallible, the word. In this lineage is the law of America. Allegiance to a place, unity under the flag and all it grants, a law that in its pledge, under God, cannot be divided. In this lineage those who pass judgment hold a supreme power to dictate the flow of liberty and what is just. Under justice is access to that ideal state of being, an alignment with the almighty and its protectorate.
Being brought to America in the bottom of ships in bondage, the slave is an economic unit through its processing. Like a gear in a larger machine, the easily discarded bits of humanity embodied in the experience rhetorically housed in a double to blackness represents in a large part what we say of this thing that is America. The story of making the self from the meagersest of means in the face of not only a larger but the insurmountable force. Empires, lords, armies, all fail to impress upon the American spirit, in it treading the waters of something like the ultimate faith only manifesting in the darkest embodiment. As the day has come, out of that darkness has emerged over a thousand portraits of blackness, untethered to the inconsistencies embedded in the nation's founding documents and the cruelty and ignorance of those without truth to what America is.
It is an American fallacy to believe that the inequality of all is equal. There have always been exceptions to the established dynamics of power at an interpersonal level that negate the leverage of social, economic, political, or other modes of domination. Out of these exceptions we have the relationship between Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow. The billionaire developer’s friendship with the Supreme Court Justice is well documented. Trips, vehicles, homes, and this painting present a balance in a relationship that categorically should not exist. With this exception we are presented with a kind of utopian vision of what America is. The cultivation of this relationship and its ends being the subject of wealth’s movement to power visions what black masculinity can be at its height, a tool for shaping the mass of humanity into a functioning body. Faith, social status, and political convictions make fast friends. The repressed details of this painting draw a line between the public and private meaning the difference between an innocuous after hour cigar and whisky romp and the mastering of the judiciary in an act of subversion led by a Black man amongst patriarchs.
This painting is uniquely American in its symbols. Dressed down from the image we traditionally think of when we imagine a Supreme Court Justice, 5 men sit smoking cigars. I immediately think of dogs playing poker as a kind of litmus for the imagery here. And why not? Dog in that anagram for God, that thing man made to protect through the primordial night, the sometimes pejorative, subject to control, I think fits with the duty of an American opp. Much like Dogs Playing Poker this painting is an advertisement for an American way of being. Considering my language on account of the composed stage, the performative nature of the painting foregrounding the black masculine vision, it is a humorous fantasy that makes the base the savior of the ideology of dominion. That vision is the embodiment of enacting justice in America. Centuries of suffering of a people have been overcome to bring you this moment, a moment where the Slave has become the arbiter of the ideals that govern the most powerful nation on earth. Justice is a black dog ahead of a dime store Indian, wooden, arms outstretched, in the forest of the mind. Khaki pants are the contemporary kin of the power suit. When the day is done and you go home, take your shoes off and slip into something more comfortable, a second skin. An evening walk, cocktails, a round of golf, all are appropriate appointments to wear the gear of the white collar man. With the West conquered, denim is out. The imagery of white men of leisure, that word leisure, that word white, more words that in their definitions converge with their significance for categorically divergent beings. Think bad men in white hoods, good men dressed in black. Where the Founding Fathers continued to wear their wigs and makeup making sense of what this place was to be, deals in the form of philosophy are now put down outside of business hours over a few drinks. In this court, Clarence Thomas is the big dog, cigar in hand.
At the top of the pyramid presiding over it all is a memory, the boyish face of a man at the foot of what this place once was, savage, noble, welcoming, the tip of an arrow. On the far left, the radical youth, silent, stoic, uncompromising. The far right, smiling, sun dappled, looking back on who he was in his day. Where do we sit in the midst of this spectacle? Outside. Maybe the aim is as sport, or maybe the aim is a point above us, where the arrow flies when its target is an apple. This is a game and the game is always to win. In a conversation between equals, what are sight lines? If you crop in on the men of the photo, just above their head is the swinging dick of America, hard as wood, moving the loincloth like the breeze. As a break between the conversation, a three two split, balance comes as a kind of equality that the libido, the passion of the country is not in the eyes but below the waist. The frozen air of the moment our breaths held in a kind of awe that suspends belief, what will happen next? A release.
A wall of leaves shaded different tones of green sprout bunches of flowers. In the middle of the painting the most unique sprout, a chair with a suited black man, watch on wrist, wedding ring on finger, arms crossed, face shaven, leaning slightly forward, his gaze calm, his face relaxed. This is the presidential portrait of Barack Obama. From 1989 to 2017, the stylistic choices of this ceremonial portrait have a good amount of variance. In them the personalities of the sitter are captured in a kind of romantic realism. Bush Senior, suited and standing, all business, Bush Jr, seated, casual dress, smiling, Donald Trump on a black background, serious, face cast in shadow. The Republicans of the group come with a visioning of reality in the way that the history of photography evokes reality. These are white men in power at various stages of their lives in the highest office in the land. Democratic representation is closely pinned on a fine art liberalization of imagery. The Clinton portrait by Chuck Close, one of the premiere names in painting at the time of painting, holds no bars in making it clear that the manner of representation is that ideal kind of imaginary progressivism championed by the art world elite. In that same stream the presidential portrait of Barack Obama plants itself in the high art tradition of money and representation foregrounding a pseudo progressivism.
A black painter is demanded for the painting of the first African American President. 2008 to 2016 launched a number of initiatives aimed at addressing the historic inequalities of the Black community in America. Museums across the country clamored for Black art on their walls and in their permanent collections. I am a beneficiary of the second wave of this moment. Kehinde Wiley emerged with a triumphant portraiture of Black figures backed by baroque patterns and clouds, on horseback, in the pieta, dressed in luxury or in bare skin rendered in shades of the finest leather goods. In recent years, controversy on the subjects of these paintings, the manner that they were painted, the relationship between Wiley and his models and other artists, have been widely discussed in the media. Wiley has expressed his artwork as an exploration of sexuality, gender, and identity. The press coverage of the scandals of his abuse of models and artists draw a stark contrast to the beautiful images produced from his studio. In a deep cut of analysis, utilizing the imagery of the old masters may have influenced the way in which Kehinde Wiley uses his subjects on and away from the picture plane.
The use of sex workers as models is not a new invention in art. It is enough to mention Robert Mapplethorp to make the point. Similarly, Kehinde Wiley has utilized sex workers as models for his paintings. This carry over charges the images with a power granted in authentically capturing the subjects and pushing them into a context that complicates the traditional narrative around the kinds of tableaus he places the models in and references a kind of hidden history within art that has and continues to exploit those without means as muses for what the world actually contains.
Typical of the painter and the painting is the lush background. A wall of leaves sprouting flowers are easily identifiable as a mark of Wiley’s style. In this context it is the arrival of a kind of spring for the nation after centuries of inequality. Blackness is finally receiving its day in the sun. For the artist perhaps it is the metaphorical saddling of the horse to ride alongside power in this moment of unparalleled strength. While the category of presidential portrait has shown to be a vehicle of transmitting a value system through political ideology and political genealogy, the Obama portrait shows peak expression of the shift towards elitism in Democratic political theater. The choice of elite artists in the portraiture of Democratic presidents from Clinton onward is clear signaling of an alignment with the images of a class that finds and directs culture at an institutional level. In this way the choices in presidential portraiture have become a prop for a class consciousness.
The Obama presidency is symbolized in the chair. In this way the flow of history can continue through it rather than ultimately being seized by one man that can only categorically embody the truth of the nation. Not a throne, a chair, and a seat at the rhetorical table that the audience is assembled around. This is a place of dialogue with the broader notion of representation, an imagery of possibility, what we can be rather than what we are. The conscious effort to not make a man into a King is a founding principle in the rhetoric of America. The Commander in Chief, the Chief Executive of the country, these are roles where the chair dictates the use of power during time served. Chairs sit on boards, lead departments, dictate, and lead but do not constitute the actions embodied in absolute authority. In that way they lack the libido of absolute leadership. What Wiley has portrayed is a desexed notion of the power traditionally embodied in his paintings. Gone are the horses, the flesh, the ornamentation of history that built the practice of representation that had been so emblematic of what we come to expect of a Kehinde Wiley painting.
What we are left with is symbolic sentimentality, a finger pointing towards something that is easily called to mean rather than the thing of understanding and presence. The wedding band, the exposed watch, the forward lean, no tie, unbuttoned collar, and silent stare out of the painting. The symbol of a family man, the symbol of time and its passing, the symbols of listening with a casual but firm ear for detail. There is no response to economic disenfranchisement in favor of corporate hegemony, campaigns of total war against those struggling against political violence through resistance globally, or domestic strife buttressed by austerity and vibes. In similar fashion the claims of abuses of power, misdealings, and rape of models and peers are received with silence. What does an Artist mean to a President and vice versa?
The portrait can be understood as a place for direct expression, a one to one of sitters captured in each other's gaze. That word gaze introduced to the public through a one sided viewing of white men on the world. In this moment subversion stands as a wink and nod (or maybe parenthetical wag of the finger) at the past rather than an active dismantling of the systematic oppressions built into the how and why we address the individual failings of leadership. As a way to address collective trauma, portraiture becomes just another tool for constructing a narrative that those worthy or capable of sitting are the ones worthy or capable of moving the bar. The liberal overreach of symbols is inherent to the artistic tradition of portraiture and in that the portrait of Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley accurately captures the dialogue carried out at the heights of Black Power in America. It is a conversation between monied interests about ownership of the space culture occupies.
Damn they don’t make em like this no more. A common refrain if you’re versed in rap that bleeds across our understanding of the moments we live through. The death of the real, the end of something inherent to the what and why of our total existence. Opined in literature, the obsolescence of authentic being underpins the recurring falls of civilization. Like Amiri Baraka said of freedom in his poem Dope, “You gonna get all you need once you gone.” The things we give up on seeking, in their return, are the parts of our consciousness that make us able to register our complete plight. The death of dope manifests itself in capitalism on one hand and a bitter authoritarianism on the other. The can’t be of the world exists as a glue that keeps us stuck like rats in place and fed though at the will of poison and growing more attached to a bitter end that can only be granted by giving up everything for a concentration of power in the symbolic and sometimes embodied. They don't make em like this no more because it costs too much, too much money, too much time, too much energy. When asked the question what has America made of one of its foundational elements, force majeure of the nation, the black masculine body, we are stuck between deck chair judgements and a desk chair.
Built into every mythology is the shadow side of the Godhead. The pantheons and perversions in the whims and cruelty made muscular in the bodies of angry, lasciviousness, petty and powerful gods. In the mythologizing of America’s foundation the shadow to the Founding Fathers is made real in the body of the slave. As instruments moving in the fields, singing, weighing what freedom is in action. As trauma enacted, as a logistical body, the process of a philosophy, the black masculine can be anything ultimately, with the right push. In this thought there is only the masculine. There is a rift that our becoming can never be a feminine, thus the focus is on that rubbery over chewed piece of meat between the teeth of this America and a kind of progress that is the geopolitical positioning of America. Radical reality would have to contend with who birthed the power of the nation. We may know of equality, women equally brutalized, dissected, raped, toiled in the field, and maybe pain is the most democratic feature of America. History as a field of study can only handle so much at a given time, art history more so, and here we are.
Between these two images in the performance as a tool for black masculine embodiment into presence passes that bestial plane that is masculine energy. In the kind of nesting doll that is humanity there are only degrees closer or away from truth we can get. The dominant urge, imperialism, is subservient to the notion of the father. The absurdity of this is hegemonic White Supremacy where the nationalist model of a White God with his long beard begat onto the world all to be attained by the will (not hand) of those faithful to him. Presently the faithful are a homogeneous lot. To the fortune of those seeking God’s power are God’s tools making it easy to recognize the righteous from those further down the line. The gospel of prosperity, that through God’s will we will be granted the kingdom and all that comes with it. Nothing rhymes with God, in his trinity, his son becomes him through suffering, maybe even death, the transformative act, or the spirit, the all contained in the symbolic world beckoning towards the will of God. In that, women, the raced, children, animal, and all brought into the world through the hand is a manifestation of God's love for man. Sounds crazy.
At this time it also defines myself in some ways. As an artist, a performer, a philosopher, as a lover, as a man, as non conforming, as a commons containing multitudes known and unknown I am exploring the material presence of a people becoming human again.The question, what is absent as a conscious omission in this place? What is foregrounded? The axiom of where you go, there you are, foregrounds the lived, actionable, space within each of us as the ground for our understanding. As the world moves towards revolution, the political position of America, the cutting edge of violence, the capitalist culture hub, and the regressive social movement saddled to the overall machine in the form of White Supremacy, America is less of a place than a set of measures put in place to overcome. To what ends I ask again? The decline of western civilization and the creation of the new world.
Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Barack Obama, the painting of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, these images are of the venerated extremes that black masculinity is imaged. In its populism memetics as a measure of comprehending forms of dialogue in the community, the meme of a crying Michael Jordan, the meme of a double exposure of Steve Harvey, one laughing one pensive, and the meme of five black men dressed in white tee shirts and boxers flanking a smiling white woman in braces present comedic relief and a sharper critique of where the black masculine holds its ground in America. Black masculinity still holds a major market share in a place of caricature keeping the representative forms couched inside of a narrow band of expression. Black masculinity in this context is housed in deviant sexual behavior usually in some kind of debasement of whiteness, stunted emotional vulnerability, and a performed double consciousness when faced with confrontation of pleasure and acceptability.
As populism would infer, my description is a slice of the representative pie. Is there an overarching visual metric for looking at the black masculine that holds the totality of how black masculinity has been represented? The entertainment industry holds the most real estate on matters of representation. Entertainment news, sports media, the 24 hour news cycle, music, and film, and an increasingly evangelical faith centered programming available across all forms of media all fall under this umbrella. The ubiquity of media in our lives presents an abundance of space where we may encounter images. Where publications like magazines and newspapers may have previously been a primary point of contact with images of the black masculine, we now have a compendium of all of that content available in the technology of a smartphone, smart watch, smart television. With this closeness the possibility of a more democratic form of representation seems on one hand a given. On the other hand there is a heavy monetization of all media that continues to narrow the window of what we see through the industrialization of self expression and social interaction. The black masculine has always been a product in America. Through the channels of content creation what constitutes the black masculine market share is spread across a nigh infinite array of voices clamoring for dollars.
The historical ties of blackness and legality present the frontier of representation. Pornography presents the media frontier for representation. Meant to entice our desires, pornography speaks to a truth that is not readily expressed. This gives ground to what we really think of when we are alone, of each other and of ourselves. As an expression of rawness, pornography presents a vast middle ground in the space of culture, an untapped resource in some respects, or the flesh from which our processed sausage of entertainment is made. The regulation of media, the what can and what cannot be seen is held in the condition of blackness. The Object/ Subject dichotomy gives a layer of seeing and being seen in a society that grapples with the line between art and artist. The Performer/Director dichotomy can be presented as a stand in for the laminated layers of that relationship.
From a place where the visibility of black bodies was outlawed to understand what is happening on the acceptable side of that line of what constitutes art we need to understand what is happening on the other side. Questions of domination and submission, fantasy, fetishization, pleasure, violence, race, and the means of production come to a head on this side of what images we see and can share openly. Creators Micky Mod, King Noire, and Isiah Maxwell are three artists that have built successful careers navigating the fluctuation of societies craving for the black masculine in pornography. These artists claim the autonomy surrendered by many of Kehinde Wiley’s subjects and what Wiley himself surrenders in representing Barack Obama. It is one thing to represent and another to embody. Addressing that division illuminates what is held in power’s grasp on reality, it releases what is held over us as a punitive measure for controlling how we express ourselves.
Our most accurate depictions rarely fall within the bounds of the apparatus of representation. In the western psychology there is a pervasive thought that the most victimized do not understand their oppression. In the case of pornography, the production of such is mostly deemed as a wholesale degradation of humanity through an exploitative, abusive, hegemonic power structure. How much of the structural boundaries to our self actualization prevent a consciousness that moves past complacency. On a long enough timeline we all pass away. So what of short term pleasures, folly, and experience through the ends of abjection? Mireille Miller-Young describes being labeled an academic pornographer through the process of developing her book, The Taste For Brown Sugar. As she goes on to note she is not the first in this network of dealing with transgressive images and their makers. The absolutes around the negative connotations of this work give me pause and ultimately give me breath to explore what it's all about as subject and producer. The frameworks for describing psychologies only go so far as to pass the mind's biases and defenses. Key to each is an active discourse as to what the black masculine is in its performed function. Utility as an abstract houses the multivalent modes of understanding the phenomenological what, how. We are in a why, and when with the where of it all, the destination, waiting to reveal itself.
The nature of power when it comes to imaging is structured as such that the appeal of power is coated in a veneer of some other kind of thing to make its otherwise abstracted body an understandable and often palletable object. This is a key aspect to what I write. In the systematic leverage that power places on black masculinity, access to the defining structure is granted through a few views. More so the attention of power is often called through the same imaging, creating an echo chamber of an imaging and actualizing process separate from identity intrinsic to some kind of authenticity. Thus identity is reduced to a scramble for power. What I have described is not a circumstance unique to black masculinity, it is a process. What is unique is the hyper conspicuous nature of black masculinity. The policing of the black masculine through power, to have it reflected back onto itself, turns black masculinity into a self policing body and paired with the impetus for identity, the black masculine becomes actualized through the exercise of power in the form of conspicuous policing, consumption, sexuality, piety.
Contemporary artists have grappled with this moment that seems to be always arriving since black people arrived in America. The preeminent performance artist of our time, Pope L. presents a compelling body of work to what this representation is in artistic form. Through installation, text, and painting, the combination of these elements give a world view of blackness that is embodied in a performance of black masculine body at the bounds of being seen. The crawls being the entry point for that body, the public nature of his performances destroy the apparatus of the easily recognizable art object, blurring the artist and the thing society makes the black masculine into when it exists in the world. The horizontal body in motion has yet to surrender in its space, it is a simple slowness, to endure in the transit to the other side when that release can be expressed. Miles Greenberg exists as that expression, sculptural, upright, tied to history through the progress towards a vertical. Shared is the endurance of the object. When images remain and what remains of those moments of transition into something that builds our understanding of the world. America’s relationship to Cuba continues to be refined through political interventions and revolutions of its people. Within this context Carlos Martiel’s practice is a full body critique of the history of subjugation, weaponization, criminalization, and fetishization of black masculinity. Again the path of endurance runs deep. Is standing before we die a stance, what is it to exist in a silo, how far can we go before we move down river and where does the movement of the past take us? Jacoby Satterwhite brings us into the world on the other side of the screen. Constructed through on a technological frontier we are brought to explore the notion of black masculinity as errant technology, harnessed, discarded, repurposed, and moved through systems purporting a newness but are repetitions of white supremacy’s stranglehold on representation.
Liberation. The art of freedom becomes the art of power. Its symbolism is made palpable through the historicizing of a collective understanding or misunderstanding of our fitting together. The language of this relationship is muscle moved across centuries, buried, dug up, made to dance or penetrate, suspended like a puppet or pinata in a play of meaning. If we could all be free what would we talk about? The decentered man is no longer man, the black is a body, our happiness, warm guns, rope, chains, appliances, all the things used to kill, dance, around the body of the oppressor no longer oppressor, a lover. Sometimes a daredevil dies, defying death.
The images in this text are painted with possibility. The poetic vision as it relates all subjects. Where much of the social sciences reflect on experimental, experiential, derived in the wandering, the possible is more a cement for the known vision. The reward of possibility puts lives in the space of meaning in a world where meaning centers human subjectivity as the height of action. What does a land speed record mean to a hurricane? Better yet, what does the combustion engine mean to a glacier? Presently the second question is coming into a starker vision, one that means the degeneration of the environment, melt, flooding coastlines in the most vulnerable landscapes, mass extinctions as the reality of climate change. This isn't to take a nostalgic or regressive view of the matters at hand. Rather this is an indicator of a failing in progressive positivism. Net gains do not account for the kind of churn at a human level. In that vein slavery was a good thing, a necessary evil to be built upon through a more concentrated mode of extraction. Where the slave was black, the slave could be a prisoner at the hands of the state, child at the hands of parent, wife in household. The matter always reflects a relationship of individuals to power rather than a fully collective realization of the circumstances. To the masculine it is the performed action of a past body. To the images. The painting of Clarence Thomas surrounded by white men in the shadow of a Native American, the Kehinde Wiley portrait of the first African American President, Barack Obama, the memes of pop culture icons and pornstars behind a smiling white woman compound and inform one another and society at large as to what black masculinity is about. Artists at the boundaries of our societal vision have always spoken of this moment, art history remains slow footed towards the table.
With the ubiquity of images available and the people making images and objects more recognizable it is important to expand on the historical arc of art to encapsulate a broader sense of how humanity operates in the world. With the weight of capitalism and the economic systems leverage on political systems influencing how we receive media it is important to point out that while the subjects of the works I am discussing may have only a tangential expression in art history, it is important to approach them as it is nearly impossible to escape the technological forces that have attached themselves to our perceptions of what art is. As an artist and historian my practice has a stake in the increase of representation in the arts across the board and the dismantling of systems of oppression. The philosophies that go into intersectionality, feminism, transhumanism, queer theory, marxism, liberation theology once considered fringe now inform much of the thoughtful discourse on artistic movements past and present. However with progress, the flow of knowledge is undirected in some ways and thus the ways fundamentalism, conservatism, and reactive thought are bolstered in new and unexpected ways. The balance being struck is always a living act.
What is experienced in these cultural moments is the superficial and contrarian rather than the tapping of a Jungian subconscious. The description of a dog whistle is accurate. The reactivity in these moments is geared towards the already initiated and the stoking of admonishment or confusion by the uninitiated. In the flood of information the ground for the uninformed is smaller and smaller. If it is instinctual to make meaning then at best communities the world over are engaged with a hyper sensitivity to what is happening in the world thanks to the spread of technology. And in the worst, abuse can be carried out on a massive scale with a push notification in our exponentially expanding information ecosystem. If the singularity comes at the collapsing of the bounds of technology and ourselves then that includes culture and values. While all these things are abstract constructs, the subjective matter of this equation wants for an identity that is more than the stuff surrounding its vision.
Works Cited
We Need to Talk About That Clarence Thomas Painting - Slate Magazine - Shirin Ali - April2023
Painting of Clarence Thomas,Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo, Mark Paoletta, and Peter Rutledge - Sharif Tarby
Dogs Playing Poker (For Brown and Bigelow) - Cassius Marcellus Coolidge - 1894 - 1903
Barack Obama - Kehinde Wiley - 2018
Bill Clinton - Chuck Close - 2006
Dope - Amiri Baraka - 1982
A Taste For Brown Sugar - Mireille Miller-Young - 2014