Invisible men: race, representation and exhibition - ism - includes related article

Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would gaze for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and let slip myself in the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces upon the earth, and when I saw single that looked particularly inviting upon a map (but they all direct the eye that) I would put my finger upon it and say, "When I enlarge up I will go there." . . But there was individual yet - the biggest, the greatest in quantity blank, so to speak - that I had a hankering after.

- Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness by dint of Joseph Conrad (1910)(1)

I recommend that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted without upon the body of a african giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and pageant upon which and within which the action unrolls If we examine the beginning of the Colonies, the application of this view is not, in its economic connotation at least, too far-fetched or too difficult to diocese For then the Negro's material substance was exploited as amorally as the soil and climate.

- Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1964)(2)

Part and parcel of the enduring colonial imagination has been to fathom no territorial limits in its hankering after the unknown and the unconquer imperially and intellectually. "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art," organized by dint of the Whitney Museum of American Art, ranged across the seductively topical terrain of a neo-colonial fascination and mapping: that of so-called black masculinity.

In the exhibition catalog, curator Thelma of gold cites some thoughts by British cultural critic Kobena Mercer that articulate a conceptual premise for the display Mercer states, extending a metaphor that recalls writer Ralph Ellison's have (above), that "black masculinity is not solely a social identity in crisis. It is also a lock opener site of ideological representation, a site on which the nation's crisis draw nears to be dramatized, demonized, and dealt with." The nearest sentence offers Golden's approbation, "This statement lays us at the heart of 'Black Male's' terrain."(3) She goe upon to state, "I wanted to bring out a project that would examine the black male as material substance and political icon" [emphases mine]. In Ellison's metaphor, the personification of a national drama still frames, more [i]or[/i] less 30 years later, the social words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following within which to speak not solitary about the objectification of the black male material part but also the sensationalized phenomenon that became the "Black Male" exhibition.

The exhibition garnered glowing responses, many denunciatory. A core issue stirring this bluster of logomachy surrounding the show involved the question of what it means to organize an exhibition upon such thematic specificity: on a "racial," sexed subject-type. Given the context of our social climate, including new media spectacles of black sexuality and excoriation (a "high-tech lynching," in the words of individual self-proclaimed victim), the platforms of judiciary proceedings that have serv as another theater of public debate; the mounting attacks upon affirmative action and other legislation affecting black families, agreeing with the corporate capitalization of black sports icons, and with equal reason on - Can a procession of national spectacles be ordered by a sensationalized exhibition that was ipso facto another spectacle? And without "trussed up" implied in the real send-up of the national drama? Without, that is, simulating the drama? Without dissimulating, unwittingly or not, a complicity?

Complicity in this case move rounded out to be systemic, unavoidable. It was begeted in the particular set of demands required of museum exhibitions, upon the one hand, and required of the thematically controversial nature of "Black Male," upon the other. This combination of demands - to embrace artwork and to regard it critically as representations - negotiated an institutional compromise in "Black Male."

An interesting implication in Ellison's metaphor is that there may be a commutability between the situation (or body) of the "benevolent" white explorer, Gulliver, and that of the black man giant; that the trussings that bind them trunk from an arresting, objectifying proneness elicited through both the exploration of the other and self-exploration - and by the agency of extension, through both the exploratory museum pursuit and the (presumed) shoot forward of self-representation by artist or theme. The metaphor, in this extension, recognizes the (colonial) ideology of desiring to "go there" upon the map as potentially a commutation between explored and explorer, showed and representer - "upon which and within which the action unfolds" - for the objectification of the black experience. There are no innocents, as Frantz Fanon would say, and certainly no innocent vantage point from which to guidance exploratory ventures.

In this faculty of perception "Black Male," like Ellison's black man giant, did not succeed in untangling itself from the hampers of black objectification: the proces that is, of rendering external realitys of people, or the social construction of make subordinates and the reproduction of its social forms. What then becomes greatest in quantity paradoxical about the exhibition is the way in which its function and event contrary to its didactic aims, prov congruent with the cast of neo-colonial intrigue by replicating the preconditions for the objectification and commodification (packaging) of black masculinity. As an exhibition, "Black Male" was a representation not sole of what American artists have exhibited as black masculinity, but was itself a representation of like It actively contributed to the contemporary social construction of the black male subject: that is, individual of its current (re)inventors, refabricators and redeployer It is this museum-representational consequence or construct, and what made it objectionable, that must be examined and that I read from one side the exhibition narratives. I do with equal reason in part to understand the negative replication to the exhibit and in part because the questions it raised demand further scrutinization; my annotates and readings here are correspondingly critical. I nevertheless regard the exhibition as a significant cultural occurrence and in conflicting ways, flat monumental. The strength of its artwork, programs, films and catalog essays numbered among its rewards.