Kehinde Wiley: Splendid Bodies

KEHINDE WILEY SPLENDID BODIES Dereck Conrad Murray Kehinde W iley, Portrait 90- N k a Jo u r n a l o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A f r i c a n A r t Passing/Posing (Decoration of the Chapel of the Sacrament in the Cathedral of Udine, Ressurection), oil on canvas m o u n t e d o n pan el, 9 6 x 6 0 , 2 0 0 3 T oday's New York art scene has seen a ritualistic return to the ethos of the street hustler. The outsider narrative of the urban capitalist has found its way to the center of the art world. Just as the hip-hop elite has moved to the cultural center, the black art scenesters and power brokers have made similar strides—albeit with a newer, gruffer, grimier attitude—coupled with unbridled economic rapacity and a penchant for couture. In recent years, there has been a push on the part of a contingent of curators and journalists to aggressively promote a form of black art that embraces and altogether reifies stereotypical depictions of blackness—archetypes that were once the locus of intense intellectual scrutiny. The rigorous social critique is gone; it has been discarded as the detritus of academic stoicism, humorlessness, and essentialism. Just as hip-hop culture has self-consciously embraced black stereotypes and outlaw personas such as the pimp, the gangsta, the ho, and the thug, the high art world has simultaneously begun to celebrate and make spectacles of black bodies in the global marketplace. This phenomenon is occurring most prominently in New York—a city where the material successes and cultural excesses of hip-hop are most visible. The economic aggressiveness of hiphop culture has opened up new possibilities for the envisioning and attainment of black economic achievement. It only makes sense that its influence would begin to spread to other spheres of industry. The New York art world's self-styled black glitterati have begun to reject the groundbreaking scholarly theorizations engendered in the 1980s and 1990s, opting to forgo key discussions related to globalization, identity issues, power relations, and the politics of representation. The "visualized" racial stereotype—-as cultural capital—has been stretched to the limits of viability by hip-hop culture's guerrilla capitalism. And the embattled black body—as commodity fetish-—has never been more at the center of mainstream culture. Thelma Golden's 2001 exhibition Freestyle introduced an alternative terminology to the usual binarism of black and white, with her media-ready "Post-Black" manifesto. Coined by Golden and artist Glenn Ligon, "Post-Black" is a kind of shorthand phraseology initially used between the two friends to indicate a certain effusive quality in a work made by a young black artist: "[Post-Black] was a clarifying term that had ideological and chronological dimensions and repercussions. It was characterized by artists who were adamant about "not" being labeled as "black" artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness."1 On the heels of the essentialist 1970s, the multiculturalism of the 1980s, and the globalism of the 1990s, Golden posits Post-Black as the organic next phase in black artistic production . While intentionally problematic on many levels, Post-Black does gesture toward something perceived to be new about the ideological conFall 2007 Nka* 9 1 cerns and identity formations of these Freestyle artists. Since the Freestyle exhibition, Golden has rejected any corollary between hip-hop and high art. Nevertheless, when the curator proclaimed that, "Post-Black is the New Black," what she was really forecasting—if unintentionally—was the discursive impact of hip-hop's hustler mentality on a new generation of cultural producers. Greg Tate, when speaking of Golden's formidable business savvy, described the powerhouse curator as a "Mack Diva" (or the hustler par excellence). For Tate, Golden is the player; the global art world is the game to be hustled for all it's worth. But if Post-Black artists are fetishists of the inner city and the black body (as they are often regarded), then it can be suggested that Golden...