In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970
  • Phyllis Lynne Burns (bio)
Andrea Barnwell and Valerie Cassel Oliver, eds. Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded, edited by Andrea Barnwell, curator of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, and Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), showcases an exhibition of visual, video, and installation art that first appeared in 2008 at Spelman, "the only museum in the nation that focuses on works by and about women of the African Diaspora," and re-appeared at CAMH in 2009 (p. 8). Cinema Remixed and Reloaded, exhibition and catalog, traces the evolution of video presentation "for more than three decades" in order to "chronicle the contributions" of "black women artists" (p. 11).

The catalog is dedicated to "chronicle and document" (p. 10) the innovative genius and contribution of the black women video artists displayed in the exhibition and makes permanent the discussion about the "fortythree works by two generations of black women video artists who reside throughout the African Diaspora" (p. 10). Cinema Remixed and Reloaded includes transcribed interviews, essays, panel discussions, biographies, and photography. Barnwell and Cassel announce in the preface:

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded demonstrates the breadth of concerns these artists have embodied and interrogated over many years such as the subjugation and liberation of the black body, family, the male gaze, memory, loss, alienation, gender inequities, sexuality, racism, and the pursuit of power.

(p. 10)

The visuals in Cinema Remixed and Reloaded are strategically juxtaposed to the title pages of each interview or essay in order to spotlight exhibition content. Each title page is black with white print and the titles are dramatically faded on both sides, thus forcing the reader to see the titles in narrow focus. This interplay between visual and written content challenges academic rhetoric steeped in cultural binaries between the image and the written word.

Some elements of Cinema Remixed and Reloaded warrant our attention. Although the editors efface the important topics of access and money (as in the quote above, which lacks any mention of class issues), the topics [End Page 155] are discussed readily by the artists. In the interview "Reflection on Art as a Verb," Leslie King-Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims ask artists Maren Hassinger, Sengu Nengudi, and Howardena Pindell, each of whom participated in the 1988 exhibition Art as Verb, what they "believe… are some of the critical issues to the recognition of the African American female artists who work in the genre" (p. 20). Hassinger and Pindell argue that white male artists and, more recently, white feminist artists, have garnered esteem and financial support according to the "plain old prejudice of the art world" (p. 20). The art world validates their work according to traditional Eurocentric aesthetic norms and financially backs white artists. This insight points toward the complexities of the imbrication of issues of racial identity with issues of class, in which racialized aesthetic norms work to rationalize and naturalize the exclusion of black artists. In this context, Nengudi offers that the challenge facing contemporary black women artists is the dilemma "[t]o be free to be ourselves" (p. 20).

Turning to the issue of creativity and freedom, a tentative discussion about black "authenticity" is threaded throughout what is otherwise an exceptional text. Oliver opens this discussion in her essay "Artifice and Authenticity," writing that

In today's society…ethnographic photographs have been replaced with images on billboards and in magazines or in rap videos and films, in which the black female body performs predictable fiction for viewers. Contemporary society, as a whole, is no closer to discerning her authentic womanhood from the fictionalized.

(p. 37)

While her observation regarding the saturation of popular culture by racial stereotypes is well taken, it nevertheless becomes clear that Oliver positions "authenticity" in simple binary opposition to the term "artifice." Oliver reinforces this position throughout the essay, as when she writes that these "[f]ictions offer little to no insight into the complex realities of black womanhood" (p. 37). She conflates authenticity with reality...

pdf

Share