The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,34
American Art to begin negotiations over its policies of discrimination against black artists. In 1971 the coalition called for a boycott of the Whitney’s exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America because black participation in its organization was limited. Fifteen of the seventy-five artists chosen by curator Robert M. Doty scheduled to participate withdrew, and, true to form, critical response to those who remained in the exhibition centered on black political reaction, with little discussion of the art itself.
New York’s Guggenheim Museum’s 1996 survey Abstraction in the 20th Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline included no artists of color. Nearly twenty-eight years after Harlem on My Mind, a major American art museum excluded African American painters and sculptors from a major exhibition, and in doing so once again raised questions of race, politics, and aesthetics. But the thrust of the criticism had shifted. The art museum was still being asked, What is the domain of black visual art—figuration, abstraction?, while the artists themselves and some critics were asking whether racially defined art was limiting and whether the question was a problem itself, especially when critical response to the exhibition of black visual artists centered on politics with little discussion of the art itself. What was the art museum’s aesthetic evaluation of visual art created by blacks? Cliff Joseph hazarded an approach in an interview: “I would not say that there is black art per se….There is, however, a black experience in art; I think every culture has its own experience which the artists of the culture brings to his work.”
Many of today’s young black artists agree with Mr. Joseph and see racially defined art as stifling if not condescending; as a problem itself. An increasing number of them insist their work be evaluated on the basis of aesthetics only, wondering if their art was not classified under the rubric of black culture would it read as African American? If the artists were not presented according to their race, would their work be mined for racial or political content? These questions and others have given rise to the term “postblack” among the newer artists—a term that both signals racial identity and refutes its established borders.
The narrative and consequences of the Harlem on My Mind show are at the heart of this current debate on the mission of museums as it relates to the foreigner’s home. And much of the news is good. If the Guggenheim failed to recognize American abstract painters and sculptors of color, other opportunities have not been wasted. Kellie Jones’s recent show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980, is a strong response to the Guggenheim’s omission from its abstract survey show. Since Harlem closed in 1969, new generations of curators, scholars, art historians are deepening and broadening the idea of the visual art museum and the material and cultural museum. In 1968 the ethnographic replaced the artistic at the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition; ethnography and art were largely separate. But in the 1990s the development of these areas of study—art and ethnology—began to converge, and fields such as world art history seem to have gained increasing attention, as well as controversy. Fred Wilson’s 1992 show, Mining the Museum, at the Contemporary museum in Baltimore included works from the Maryland Historical Society. Wilson plumbed these works for new information about black American life from the figuration and portraiture in the work of white artists in early American history and reframed the works to tell that story. It became increasingly apparent that museological decisions and curatorial ones are as much ideologically determined as they are aesthetically determined, and that such decisions are made in the context of power. Yves Le Fur argues intelligently, in my view, that the twenty-first-century art museum cannot remain a cultural site “where nonWestern art is judged according to the standards of modern art.”
European “high art” and the foreigner’s “material or craft work” is bridged by archaeology (the unearthing of both craft and art from dead cultures and ferried to museums in Europe) and is being reassembled, recontextualized among scholars who accept the position that exhibitions claiming to be authentic representations of peoples and their cultures—that attempt to define what is essentially African or European—are hegemonic practices that reproduce the values and privileges of the center.
Happily, the dialogue is ongoing: in the history of art production; on issues of culturally specific aesthetics; about the invisibility of the foreigner in established institutions and the curricula of art departments; the expansion of