On Art and Contamination: Performing Authenticity in Global Art Practices

ON ART AND CONTAMINATION Performing Authenticity in Global Art Practices Soraya Murray & Derek Conrad Murray W ith the gradual shift of Western artworld interests toward a more international view, and the increasing worldwide phenomenon ol art fairs and exhibitions, man\- in the contemporary ail world have begun to consider exactly what it means to exist in a global arts network. Begun in the 1990s and continuing into the twenty-first century, an era ol postmodern critique ushered in a panoply of voices that were formerly unheard or undervalued. Among other strategies, many of these cultural producers associated with the decentering of Continental values and ideals staked their claims in the art world through an engagement with dominant culture. Generally, artistic responses utilized two major strategies: in the first instance critique was lodged in the form of antihegemonic intervention; and in the second, a development of specific aesthetic markers that pointed to politicized group belongingness. As one of many socially defined minority groups seeking recognition, black artists have utilized both of these tactics to varied and often stunning outcome. In the case of this grouping, an "aesthetics of blackness" within contemporary artistic production developed in which the rendering ol black bodies and hair, African motifs, the reappropriation of stereotypical imagerv, narratives ol slavery, and black folk and religious iconographies becomes codified as artistic shorthand for authentic blackness. Our current interest issues from a discernable move on the part of many black early- and midcareer artists away from those visual strategies ol the nineties. What does it mean to set forth a unitarv notion ol blackness through a system of signs and signifiers? Or more importantly, what cost is paid in the use of such an approach, that a postcivil rights generation of artists would want to self-consciously stray from them? Especially in relation to the notion of an African diaspora, inherent is a sense that this categorical grouping of people share a cultural link. The reality lies elsewhere , and it is certainly not a given that such disparate , globally strewn subjectivities should necessarily identify with each other, nor share an affinity . What can be said about artists who move away from their previous "marginal" relationship to a Eurocentric "center," and who instead take up a complex model of intercultural aesthetic engagement ? What can it mean for these artists to drift from the markers of authenticity so readily associated with blackness, even despite the persistent cultural currency ol these signifiers in the art world? American painter Kehinde Wiley noted 8 8 * N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art this tendency as well and, during a recent interview , located this shift in a need to articulate a newfound sense of black entitlement: I think that one of the reasons why we can move on from conversations about how the black body is codified in the public sphere has got to do with the changing nature of that sphere, and also the groundwork that was done before. With regard to the groundwork that was done before, we're talking about artists who have come out of movements such as identity art, who have already defined a lot of the terminology. So, in the end, it just becomes a very uninteresting terrain to re-tread. It's almost as though that side of the investigation can now be exhausted, given that the terms of reading of the black body in public space have now been codified. And then, there's a broad sense in which race is shifting in the public sphere.... As culture evolves, there are new fields of provenance, new things that become interesting as questions. Right now, our deepest challenge has to do with evolving a vocabulary that is just as effective at being free as it is at being bound. One of the hardest challenges is to create a vocabulary in the fine arts that is authentically endowed with a sense of entitlement. An aesthetic of healthy self-esteem, in a sense. That might be an interesting way to start thinking about what you might call a postblack art.1 The notion of "post-black"—a highly contested terminology coined by curator Thelma Golden and artist Glenn Ligon—suggests not...