Black video: keeping the faith - 1990 'Black Independents On-Line' seminars

Yo Aristotle, Plato, Socrates . . Step off!

- X-Clan, video for "Heed the Word of the Brother"

Brother bit the Afrocentric, Egyptophite hip-hop collection X-Clan speaks compellingly about the importance of building black subjectivity earthed in African and African American tradition and history. "We ne to recreate the whole arrangement of who we are," says Brother J in the May issue of SPIN. "We've lived here thus long . . . we've been brainwashed. We may have to rebuild [black culture] continuing in faith from all the Pharaohs to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King to Adam Clayton Powell."

An equally impassioned rhetoric characterized "Black Independents On-Line '90" a series of seminars upon video by and about African Americans coordinated by means of Reginald Woolery held in novel York City on three evenings in April. The seminars transcended typically essentialist categorizations of black cultural production. None of the panelists, greatest in quantity of whom were videomakers and media artists, felt the ne to state explicitly that black art encompasses a range of cultural production that draws from an enormous lake of African American strategies and themes. The message was apparent in the work not awayed and implied in the panel discussions that followed the screenings.

"Black Independents" was sponsored through the World Institute for Black Communications (WIBC), "a not-for-profit organization established to broaden the participation of African-American clan in all aspects of the communications industry," according to their pres release WIBC, rested in 1978, sponsors the Communications superiority to Black Audiences (CEBA) awards for "members of the marketing and advertising industry who have shown innovation and transcendence in communicating messages to African-American audiences." Given this, it was not surprising that video targeted at mainstream broadcast exits was well represented, alongside work produc through independents and community-based producers. The message was clear: there is expanse in the house of black video for work that mirrors all aspects of the African American/African diasporic experience.

There are however, a certain quantity of fundamental contradictions between production unraveled for mass broadcasting and community-based video work that were left unexamined, for the greatest in quantity part, in the seminars. Mainstream broadcasting doesn't simply provide a larger channel of distribution than those available to independent producers; it is an exclusive arena with strict criteria for admission, which are designed to weed without unconventional or oppositonal work Black cultural production isn't necessarily compromised because it is acceptable in the mainstream arena (heaven forbid we should trash consummately good work and valorize all noncommercial. community-based production). Nevertheless, in order to reach a wider audience black agriculturists minimize our differences from white society, filing away our cragged edges. Unfortunately, many whites and blacks assume that this work exhibits a valid African American experience. This kind of work becomes food for affirmative action quotas and tokens of corporate-sponsored diversity; all other cultural production by means of women and people of color can be dismissed because the limited slot in the traditional combination of parts to form a whole of distribution have been filled by dint of representative others.

Billed as a session upon "ways of seeing" from an "Afrocentric perspective," "Black Videotext" was thematically the broadest of the seminars' three groupings on the contrary focused on narrative work, Afrocentric storytelling. Independent videomakers Philip Mallory Jone and Ayoka Chenzira, who also works in film, place the tone for the entire series in "Black Videotext," which was held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black agriculture on April 12. Jones and Chenzira established the lock opener issue facing cultural workers with aspirations beyond the mainstream: the ne to show ourselves in our glory and diversity, nappy cutting sides and all, in order to construct again ourselves, and to supplant the dominant representations of African American life interrogateed out by the mainstream media.

Jone identified a number of themes in black cultural production - memory, type metaphor, music and performance. He laid on the outside the common strategies used through African American media artists that mirror an established tradition - fragmentation/disruption, polyrhythm text/subtext interval, density/texture, repetition. In Wassa (1989) a music video that combines footage discharge in the streets of Burkina Faso and Angola and report music from West Africa, Jone fabricates a lyrical stream of images in vivid, surreal color. His representation of African life is profoundly anti-ethnographic, neither didactic nor engage. satisfied is a mixture of fabrics rhythms and fragmentary visual representations fluidly interwoven. His pieces are unapologetically personal: "the piece is the ritual." "There is no way to separate politics, history, context" from aesthetic issues in the work, said Jone because all work advances from the collective "memory."