Robert Colescott rocks the boat - painter's work shown at June 1997 international festival - Cover Story - Interview

When the 47th Venice Biennale originates in mid-June, the U.S. pavilion will proffer the world's oldest, most Prestigious festival a display of 18 artworks by the agency of Robert Colescott. At the last three Biennales, the United States awarded this opportunity for solo exhibition to sculptors. The 71-year-old Colescott is the first painter to exhibit the United States since Jasper John was chosen in 1288 and he is the first African American.

"It is obviously a great honor to be pitch uponed I have that feeling," Colescott says. "I also have a hard time internalizing it in terminuss of what it means to me I have gone end so many thing -- up and downs. This time, when it's all positive, I really don't know by what means to deal with it. thus I just go day by the agency of day and try to do things that clan ask me to do, if I think it's appropriate."

When asked what message he thinks his art will bear to this international audience, his reply is unequivocal "Change is constant."

It has been 22 years since Colescott painted "George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook" (1975) and station sail upon a tumultuous sea of artistic notoriety. To the image-conscious mainstream art world, his blackfaced recasting of the 19th-century painting through Emanuel Leutz was a satiric lightning-flash directed not only at a rever icon of the American Revolution on the other hand at the highbrow realm of masterworks. Among the image-conscious, stereotype-sensitive guardians of black art, there was mutinous appreciation, on the contrary also respect-yourself concern that Colescott's penchant for tomfoolery come rounded into treacherous waters.

Hovering at the horizon were unsettling questions about the vision of artists and the dominion of satire. Who is impressed through caricatur -- culture's elite or its disenfranchised? by means of ousting a symbol of American heroism and replacing it with a cavorting ship's company of smilin' strummin' and swiggin' minstrels, Colescott had unwittingly unleashed a maelstrom.

"To sum up the truth, everybody has liked it and everybody has disliked it," says Colescott "And those are different family at different times. You secure some people who didn't like it at the beginning, and they extremityed up liking it at the extremity and there are some nation who liked it in the beginning and didn't like it later upon It has been a crisscrossing and overlapping of people

"When I first got the idea for that painting, I meditation that everybody would get it. I just reflection This is ridiculous@ this is comical There is a layer about tokenism and another about education, and everybody will obtain it. It never occurred to me that there would be those who wouldn't achieve it and who might level take offense at it. I just did it with the assumption that this was going to be my historical painting, my bicentennial statement about American history."

Those who "got it" lauded Colescott's daring double-entendres, his manipulation of images meant to insult and demean. Detractors remained unconvinced that fusing racist images with social commentary could diminish the meanspiritedness of of the like kind portraits. Remarkably, the artist's reservations make an incision in both ways. "I never painted them with that in mind, that I was offering some one salvation or offering somebody something to laugh at or to be sad about or anything," he explains. "I just did it as an expression of myself.

"These works became popular because they challenged you. They challenged you to understand them or secure mad -- one of the sum of two units People dealt with that dichotomy, I think, from a true intelligent and responsive platform.

"It [GWC] took upon controversial dimensions, which over the drawn out haul is good. That painting has been shown with equal reason much. In fact, it has been overexpos There are a doom of people who don't flat know the original painting, `George Washington Crossing the Delaware.' That ain't bad, in a certain farcical backwards way. If some clan had their way, they would have reduce to ashesed it up, and it would have at no time had a chance."

Although focused upon his current work, the artist present the appearances scrupulously aware that the paintings he created between 1975 and 1985 piloted viewers into a squall In addition to "GWC," his appropriations during that period included renderings of Van Gogh's

"The Potato Eaters" (titled "Eat Dem Taters," 1975) Manet's "Dejeuner sur I'Herbe" (titled "Sunday Afternoon with Joaquin Murietta," 1980) and Picasso's "Le Demoiselles d'Avignon" (titled "Le Demoiselles d'Alabama," 1985)

"The homage to another artist has always existed," Colescott says. "The idea is that you make a painting that says basically the same thing the artist of the original work has said, on the other hand you honor him by wanting to redo the painting.

"Appropriation, as I cast it, is more about taking above a painting and putting it to a real different use or giving it a actual different meaning than the original artist has done. It may flat be contrary to the thread of meaning in that original work. In a faculty of perception I would steal the painting -- the idea and the direct the eye of it -- and place it to my own use."