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  • Orienting "Composure" in the Sculptural and Poetic Work of Barbara Chase-Riboud
  • Reginald Jackson (bio)

I wanted freedom from the tyranny of the base.

—Barbara Chase-Riboud

Centrifugal work begins with good-bye, wants to bid all givens good-bye. It begins with what words will not do, paint will not do, whatever medium we find ourselves working in will not do.

—Nathaniel Mackey

Also, while always aware of her African-American identity, Chase-Riboud never overstressed this fact. To the contrary, she likes to quote her grandmother's dictum: "Make things look easy as a matter of good breeding. Letting people know you are carrying a load is a Third World attitude toward life."

—Peter Selz and Anthony Janson

Introduction

What happens when a desire for sculptural freedom runs against and even threatens to abandon the dictates of "good breeding"? This essay represents an attempt to think through the intricate interplay between these concepts of freedom, friction, and fugitivity by considering the intersection their encounter produces in two of Barbara Chase-Riboud's sculptural and poetic compositions: the poem "On The Terrace at 11 Nan Chihtze Street" (written in 1965, but published in 1974 in the book of poetry From Memphis & Peking) and the sculpture Zanzibar/Gold (1972) [Sculpture 6]. I'm interested here in interrogating the implications of the injunction to "make things look easy," an injunction concerned with concealing certain types of embodied labor, as it relates both to gravity's inescapable mandate as well as to the centrifugal imperative to keep moving away. Since this fundamental law of gravity is one in relation to which any earthly object must necessarily work, the sculptural embodiments of Chase-Riboud's desire for "freedom from the tyranny of the base" must necessarily work around this law in order to effect some semblance of liberty. And her grandmother's dictum means that the perceptible traces of this exertion need to be concealed (and smuggled out of sight as they take their leave). [End Page 958]

My main project in this essay will therefore be to engage critically with the ways in which Chinese elements figure into this aesthetic circumvention and suppression of labor, especially in terms of its links to a "Third World" disposition deemed unseemly by an African American middle-class principle of feminine propriety. How should we understand Chase-Riboud's iconoclastic artwork as orbiting not only a particular inescapable gravitational axis, but as also being contoured by the powerfully orienting tenet of "good breeding" endorsed by her black grandmother? In asking this question, I want to stress that I'm not interested in positing Chase-Riboud's work as some transparent reflection of her race, gender, or class politics. Rather, I mean to take the grandmother's admonition seriously: as a basis for theorizing how sonic textures come to materialize in the articulation of linguistic and plastic forms. I privilege her words as composing one highly suggestive statement through which to understand better and read more critically the manner in which the matter of "carrying a load" and the physical exertions attending that transport are addressed by Chase-Riboud's poem and sculpture. In short, I would like to suggest that the phrasing Chase-Riboud "likes to quote" alludes to an underlying class-politics and an ethical, ideological dimension well worth exploring as a constitutive, if understated, element of her far-reaching aesthetic engagements with the world.

The problem I keep returning to in my thinking about the implications of these vectors is the way in which labor is to varying degrees highlighted or concealed by the artworks' sculptural and poetic maneuvers. Trying to understand this subtle amplification or attenuation in the context of China's significance and the racialized class politics of "composure" as it materializes in the silk skirt of the sculpture Zanzibar/Gold requires recourse to an aural analytics of the visual. Such an approach becomes necessary because, as Chase-Riboud notes in her interview with Suzette Spencer in this Special Issue, "There is ponderousness from which, all of a sudden, a flight of adjectives takes wings. Words intertwine as in the knotted silk to congeal in a descriptive passage that seems almost immobile...

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