I hate to keep making posts about art, but it's simply what I am currently absorbed in. At this point I am very frustrated with the art world for many reasons. A list of my complaints does not seem necessary, but I will recount a discussion that I had with my painting professor to point out some of the larger problems.
Each week we are required to bring in an artist to discuss with the class. A lot of my work has been centered around the issues of race and gender and attempting to present them in a way that gives them agency. Therefore, a lot of the artists I have been looking at deal with similar issues. A couple of weeks ago I came across an artist that at a quick glance I thought possibly he was working with similar themes. His name is Cleon Peterson and his work is all very graphic.
The figures are simplified to black and white, sometimes red. http://cleonpeterson.com/work.html
I could tell right away that the images were violent, yet I did not immediately dismiss them because of this. Upon closer examination, I realized that the images depicted broad chaotic environments, covered in bodies enacting violence on each other. I then realized, that at least in his current work, the main perpetrators were black figures and the victims were white figures. There is actually even one image where black figures are forcing white female figures into sexual acts. As I continued looking at the images, I concluded that any attempts to be critical had fallen apart. These images are racist and sexist. I looked up statements from the artist to find out if he was attempting to deconstruct notions of sex and race in terms of acts of violence. Every quote I found from the artist said nothing about the racial and sexual issues that were glaringly present in these images. The artist stated that he was attempting to simplify binaries of good and evil to portray the violent and chaotic state of our society. He gave anecdotal references to time spent in New York as a drug addict to support the hectic temperament of many of our modern societies that he was trying to depict, but never once acknowledged the sexual and racial indications of the work. He did not talk about the problems that come along with simplifying binary codes of good and evil to black and white. An entire history of black and white in image making was completely ignored. As a socially conscious artist, these are the histories that I strive to deconstruct in my own art and I am very taken aback when other seemingly well respected artists simply ignore it. These are all points that were brought up to my painting my professor. For the most part he agreed with me, yet ended the discussion saying that ultimately it was not the artist's responsibility to address issues of race if he did not want to. This comment was very frustrating to me, and made me realize where a lot of my frustration with the art world comes with. Artists seem to believe they play no part in the social situations that surround them. So many are all plagued with notions of self expression and the artist as genius to really respond, deconstruct and better their own environments. To me, my professor telling me that it is not his responsibility to address the racial issues in his work is like him saying he does not have to take responsibility for anything he does. These are the sentiments running rampant through the art world that I feel I have to fight against. I don't think this is particular to artists, but I do believe that the mainstream art world allows if not encourages it. It seems that historical notions of the artist encompass and reify ideas of the individual, and these individuals are not taught to care for others when making their own art. What do you all think about artists not feeling like they are responsible for their own social environments?
I feel like in the case of this artist, he does not necessarily feel like it is a race issue that is portrayed in the works of art (even though to me it clearly seems racist), but rather a sense of light/dark and good/evil that has existed long before any contemporary sense of racism and black culture being associated with negativity and white with positive. I tend to agree with the art professor on this one, in that reading into the works of art, especially when they are done in an ancient style (such as the one with sexual violence with the Venus de Milo in the center background), reading our contemporary situations into the work is a bit of a stretch. I think the artist, while it appears to be racist, is attempting to mix some aspects of modern culture into an ancient style that was made in mainly binary colors to portray good and evil in certain ways
ReplyDeleteAriel, your post made me think of a discussion we had in Queer Theory the other day about the responsibility of the artist. We watched The Kids Are Alright for our class and also read The Hours, both of which raise issues about the responsibility of the artist (in this case, the filmmaker) in representing minority characters. We dealt specifically with the issue of the queer artist representing the queer character. In both The Kids Are Alright and in the scene with the filmmaker in The Hours, the goal seems to be to present queer characters as "normal." Just everyday people struggling along. On the one hand, this can help to destigmatize queer identity and make queer individuals more visible. On the other, it has the potential to erase the struggles of these characters and allow the audience (largely heterosexual) to miss completely the angst of queer life and their own responsibility in the creation of that angst. All that is to say, I agree with you; I'm extremely disturbed by the idea that artists of any kind don't have social responsibility in their work. If, however, what Matt is saying is true, that the artist didn't intend for the work to be racist or deal with race, how should we proceed? Should the artist then address the unintentional race issues of his work, possibly moving away from his own message? I ask specifically because we had a similar discussion about the responsibility in The Kids Are Alright. Although she may have meant to "normalize" lesbian relationships by making a movie that just happened to have lesbian main characters but that deals with issues that many can understand, the filmmaker ultimately offended many in the community by failing to recognize the potential damage of her work. What is her responsibility to the queer community?
ReplyDeleteI've been reading a lot of Frantz Fanon for a research paper I'm doing. His work is influential in post-colonial studies and the philosophy of race. So when I looked at Cleon Peterson's work, at first I thought that it might be using the black and white figures in a representation of violent decolonization. The two works titled "Struggle of Will," would seem to suggest the situation in which the black slaves revolt against the oppression of the white masters (the burning building in the background of "Struggle of Will (Power)" seemed to me to be like a plantation house).
ReplyDeleteOn closer examination, this seemed less the case. The most glaring problem, to me, is the use of figures that recreate the stereotypical black male. All of the assailant figures are the same: black, bald, muscle-bound, naked. The image is of the black man reduced to body, a body which carries out sexual and violent acts. The figures end up reproducing stereotypical images of the black male. All of the white figures, male and female, are victims of a literally Black violence. Furthermore, where are black female bodies, in Peterson's work? Nowehere to be found: the only women in the images are white, being either killed or raped by the black men. Once one reads the overt racial and sexual overtones in Peterson's images, it becomes very difficult to maintain that the work is trying to depict good and evil in non-racial or sexual terms.
I agree with you, Ariel. Even if the artist did not intend for his work to have racist or sexist themes, the construction of black and white bodies in his artwork itself reproduces destructive stetreotypes. If an artist does not want to deal with race, gender, or class in her or his work, then that is fine. But one must take responsibility for the ambiguity, the multiplicity of meanings that may be "read" from one's works of art - whether that be a painting, a poem, or a novel. By privileging the artist's intentions and perspective on his or her own work, we limit our own ability to bring criticism against it.