1968, Now and Then: Black Lives, Black Bodies

Figure 1.

Adam Pendleton, Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter), 2015–2018. Digital print on polyester. 72 × 108 in (182.88 × 274.32 cm).

Copyright Adam Pendleton. Courtesy of the artist.

It is 2018.¹ The flag is almost illegible (fig. 1). It has been tied so tightly, hoisted up, held out to be a willing victim to hard sun and harsh winds. Tattered by vicious thunderstorms, violent rains, and the skin-cracking cold of the coldest of cold spells. It looks tattered. Tired. Worn and worn out. Torn almost asunder. Looking nearly ripped apart. Yet it still flies. Flutters in the breeze. Struggles to fight back. It is a marker of past horrors and, oddly also, a beacon for the hopes of the future. Pensive. Optimistic. It says a great deal about the seemingly overwhelming struggles now, and the promises of 1968 then. And in November it will be brought down, untethered and untied, folded up with great respect or simply crumpled up and tossed aside. All for good. Perhaps for good.

The flag in question is not the flag of the United States, but neither is it altogether distinct from that flag. Reminiscent of Jasper Johns’s artistic indictment of American materialism and imperialism in his early encaustic painting Flag, from 1954–1955, the flag in question also symbolizes yet is almost illegible. It is called Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter). It sits atop a flagpole in an historically problematic spot on New York City’s Randall’s Island, at least through November 2018.² It is Adam Pendleton’s contribution to Frieze New York, the annual citywide art event begun in 1991 and that has since expanded to other cities and other countries (“From ‘Suffragette City’ to Black Lives Matter in ASSEMBLY”). Like Johns’s Flag, Pendleton’s Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter) references quotidian elements even as it calls into question the supposed historical inevitably of these referents. Johns’s flag-as-painting, of course, has only forty-eight stars, alluding perhaps unintentionally to America’s subordinating imperial ambitions, ambitions that would later lead to the addition of two more stars to the U.S. flag to represent Alaska and Hawaii. The references for Pendleton’s work, too, are historically complex, although in Pendleton’s flag-as-protest the references focus explicitly on the often violent struggles against racism and for racial equality in the United States.

The influence of 1968 pervades the contemporary efforts of the Brooklyn-based artist Pendleton and his Black Dada project. Pendleton’s creative enterprise takes inspiration from the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and in particular from the poem-cum-manifesto “Black Dada Nihilismus,” written by the BAM founder (Everett) LeRoi Jones, also known as Imamu Amear “Amiri” Baraka. While both BAM and Black Dada align themselves with more overt political projects, the Black Power and the #BlackLivesMatter movements, respectively, Pendleton’s efforts to create an aesthetics of resistance operate quite differently from that of Baraka’s and those of his BAM colleagues.³ Put in other words, whereas BAM focused on creating forms of black cultural expression separate and distinct from the dominant culture, Black Dada today focuses on the suppressed forms of black cultural expression in both historical and contemporary contexts.

BARAKA, BLACK ART, BLACK POWER

Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus” is the paradigmatic poetic expression of BAM; the poem-cum-manifesto’s publication coincided with the early relationship between the Black Power movement and BAM. The poem serves, as well, as a call for a separation of black cultural expression even as it invokes the otherwise dominant (read: white) cultural signifier of European and North American artistic rebellion: the Dada art movement.

The term “Black Power” had been in circulation even before the 1960s. But its first popular use as a political and racial slogan by Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture) and Willie Ricks (aka Mukasa Dada) occurred in 1966. With their focus on unifying black people as a collective force...