Post-black #2: Kerry James Marshall and William Pope.L

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The top three photos are from Kerry James Marshall’s show Dollar for Dollar at Jack Shainman this past fall, and the bottom photos from William Pope.L’s show that was up around this same time at Mitchell-Innes and Nash.  (Also, make sure you check out Pope.L’s cool website.) I was thinking about these shows because of my recent post on Rashid Johnson. I got hung up on the term “post-black” a few months back (and actually ended up writing one of my research papers for grad school on Glenn Ligon because of it). In my last post, I wrote about post-black in generational terms. Both Marshall and Pope.L were born in 1955 to Ligon’s 1960, making them of the same generation, prior to Rashid Johnson’s “post-black” work. The immediate implication of that statement being that the work of these artist is about blackness in a direct, intentional way, which, while no doubt true, seems like an unfair simplification of a complex theme.

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When Thelma Golden wrote about post-black for the exhibition she curated at the Studio Museum in 2001, I don’t think she meant to imply a post-racial world (which was Time Magazine’s interpretation of her phrase) as much as that a black artist of my generation could make work unlimited by being made by a “black artist.” Maybe, but I don’t think that the Rashid Johnson show displayed that kind of freedom. Don’t get me wrong: I wish we had all moved into Pope.L’s alternate universe of various rainbow-colored people, although certainly without the darker, satirical side of these stereotypes writ large.

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Post-black #1: Rashid Johnson at the High Museum, Atlanta

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Whatever I might think of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art’s for-profit status and high ticket prices and its dumbed-down (numbed-down) blockbusters (curatorial snoozefests of the treasures of the Old World), it has continued to represent African American and folk artists well over the years, and the recent show of Rashid Johnson, Message to our Folks, was no exception. Message to Our Folks, whose title comes from 70’s-era, African-American literature, consists of photography and mixed-media sculptural installations that combines a personal interpretation of a retro-funk aesthetic with contemporarily styled artistic interventions and references to African American culture.

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By looking backward at these earlier conceptions of blackness, Johnson positions himself clearer in a later, distanced position that takes blackness as its subject matter. Johnson’s work is deliberately generational, couched in terms of his parent’s blackness versus his own. This distinctly personal voice thus refrains from defining, even while thematizing, blackness and factors in the artist’s own subjectivity.

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I was reading the exhibition catalog, and in it, contemporary African American artist Glenn Ligon characterized this work by Johnson as “post-black.” This term, which caught currency after Thelma Golden of the Whitney Museum used it in a 2001 show, describes an African American artist does not categorize or define his or her work as being about race, even though it is very much still a theme. The way Ligon wrote about it struck me off, since he puts his own work in the “black” category, and it puts Johnson in the “post-black” category. It’s the generational element repeated: implying the Johnson is more free in how he can deal with such topics.

Yet I think its hard to get away from the fact that, unlike, say post-modernism which came after Modernism, post-black implies a condition after being black, but what would that be exactly? What then does that original term “black” mean? I saw a couple shows in Chelsea this Fall that also speak to the notions of “black” and “post-black,” and I want to write about those next.