The Source of Self-Regard Page 9

  When I use the term “slavebody” to distinguish it from “blackbody,” I mean to underscore the fact that slavery and racism are two separate phenomena. The origins of slavery are not necessarily (or even ordinarily) racist. Selling, owning people is an old commerce. There are probably no people in this auditorium among whose ancestors or within whose tribe there were no slaves. If you are Christian, among your people were slaves; if you are Jewish, among your people were slaves; if you are Muslim, among your people were the enslaved. If your ancestors are European they lived under the serfdom of eastern Europe, the tenancy of feudalism in England, in Viking Europe, Visigothic Spain, or fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Venice, Genoa, and Florence. The majority population of ancient Rome and ancient Greece—all were deliberately constructed slave societies. Medieval Ghana; Songhai Mali; the Dahomey and Ashanti kingdoms. Slavery was critical to the world of Islam and systematic in the Orient, including a thousand years in Korea alone. We are all implicated in the institution. The colonists of the New World, patterning their economies on those earlier and contemporary societies that were dependent on free or forced labor, tried to enslave indigenous populations and would have imported any foreign group available, capable, and survivable. Available because highly organized African kingdoms could provide laborers to Europeans; capable because they were clever, strong, and adaptable; survivable because they were creative, spiritual, and intensely interested in their children—foreigners from Africa fit the bill.

  Not only the origins but the consequences of slavery are not always racist. What is “peculiar” about New World slavery is not its existence but its conversion into the tenacity of racism. The dishonor associated with having been enslaved does not inevitably doom one’s heirs to vilification, demonization, or crucifixion. What sustains these latter is racism. Much of what made New World slavery exceptional was the highly identifiable racial signs of its population in which skin color, primarily but not exclusively, interfered with the ability of subsequent generations to merge into the nonslave population. For them there was virtually no chance to hide, disguise, or elude former slave status, for a marked visibility enforced the division between former slave and nonslave (although history defies the distinction) and supported racial hierarchy. The ease, therefore, of moving from the dishonor associated with the slavebody to the contempt in which the freed blackbody was held became almost seamless because the intervening years of the Enlightenment saw a marriage of aesthetics and science and a move toward transcendent whiteness. In this racism the slavebody disappears but the blackbody remains and is morphed into a synonym for poor people, a synonym for criminalism and a flash point for public policy. For there is no discourse in economics, in education, in housing, in religion, in health care, in entertainment, in the criminal justice system, in welfare, in labor policy—in almost any of the national debates that continue to baffle us—in which the blackbody is not the elephant in the room; the ghost in the machine; the subject, if not the topic, of the negotiations.

  This museum’s projects have enormous powers. First is the power of memorializing. The impulse to memorialize certain events, people, and populations comes at certain times. When what has happened is finally understood or is a forthright assertion of civic or personal pride, tombs and palaces are built, flowers heaped, statues rise, archives, hospitals, parks, and museums are constructed. Time being such an important factor in this process, most of the participants in the events being remembered never see them. But the growth of this country in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, resting heavily on the availability of free labor, is complicated and exceptional. Exceptional because of its length and its chattel nature; complex because of its intricate relationship to the cultural, economic, and intellectual development of the nation. That is what must be remembered. There is another power this project has: of making us aware of the ever flexible, always adaptable, persistently slippery forms of modern racism in which the slavebody is reconstructed and reenters the blackbody as an American form of ethnic cleansing in which a monstrously large number of black men and women are carefully swept into prisons, where they become once again free labor; once again corralled for profit. Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor.

  The third power of the museum’s project, perhaps its most important, certainly its most gratifying, is the gaze it has cast on the ameliorating, triumphant aspects of the history of the republic—in black and white. This is what I sense: in spite of all the commercial and political strategies to separate, divide, and distort us, young people seem to be truly tired of racism’s control over their lives. The art community is exhausted by and rebellious toward its limitations. Low-income people who discover how entangled and held down they are in its divisive economic grasp loathe it. Scholars unintimidated by its cling are disassembling it. We are becoming more industrious in substituting accuracy, other perspectives, other narratives in place of phantom histories, polluted politics, and media manipulation.

  I am pleased that my appearance coincides with the exhibition of African American artists whose eyes encountered at every level the stereotyping and visual debasement prevalent elsewhere. Through their art, their taste, their genius we see African American subjects as individuals, as cherished, as understood. Viewing this display of their force, their life-giving properties, their humanity, their joy, their will ought to be enough to forestall the reach of racism’s tentacles. Ought to be enough to protect us from its uninformed, uneducated, relentlessly toxic touch. Just as the commitment of this community ought to be enough. Don’t you think? Thank you.

  Harlem on My Mind

  Contesting Memory—Meditation on Museums, Culture, and Integration

  TODAY’S DEBATE on the place, power, and purpose of museums as reservoirs of cultural memory and/or a source of community integration is vital. Such debates are endemic to museums. The history of the Louvre itself bears witness to radical attacks and passionate rescue, yet it survives as a revered model and indispensable example of the universal survey museum. As Neil Harris writes, “The size, wealth, internal arrangements, and architecture of museums, as well as the inherent decontextualization of museum exhibits, had attracted hostility in the nineteenth century and certainly in the early twentieth century. The gargantuan temples of the early twentieth century were labeled by some critics ‘dignified disasters’; their organization of exhibits…a ‘Minotaur’s labyrinth,’…museum policies were condemned as socially aloof and indifferent. Some educators fumed about museum failures to acknowledge contemporary needs and interests, while others condemned large-scale collecting as the poisoned fruit of capitalism.” Furthermore, he notes, “museums have been labeled racist, revisionist, hegemonic, elitist, politically correct, mercenary, greedy, and self-serving.” Why, then, one wonders, are museums experiencing what can only be called a “boom,” as larger constituencies are solicited, as revenues increase along with the sale of goods and services that “blockbuster” shows produce, as patrons and funding sources compete with one another for standing and generosity to museums? Transitions are taking place, not least of which is recognition that the “foreigner is already home.” And the mission of today’s museums takes into account their claims.

  Curators, artists, directors, art critics, and historians recognize the urgency of these deliberations anew. Their articles fill journals; boards of traditional museums reconsider structure and content; recent arrivals in the landscape of museums shape their acquisitions to accommodate the demands of new or underrepresented audiences.

  The provenance of one such demand for representation in the United States provides a map that dramatizes both the vulnerabilities and opportunities under discussion.

  As the New York scene in the sixties roiled with fresh visions wit
hin the art world (abstract expressionism, pop art), the Metropolitan Museum in New York welcomed its new director, Thomas P. F. Hoving. A medieval scholar become city parks commissioner, he was excited about introducing new projects into an institution some believed had become moribund. One of his projects was an exhibit designed to reflect the culture of Harlem—an African American neighborhood in New York City famous for its writers, poets, painters, musicians, and nightclub life. The exhibition, announced in 1968 and called Harlem on My Mind, opened at the Metropolitan Museum in January 1969 as a fifteen-gallery portrayal of Harlem history, identity, and cultural tradition consisting of photographs, murals, slides, films, documentary recordings, music, and memorabilia. Encouraged and directed by Allon Schoener, the visual arts director of the New York State Council on the Arts, Hoving mounted what they both described as a “total ethnic environmental show” covering Harlem from 1900 to 1968. Using the then-radical exhibition techniques including photographs on the ceiling and as murals, soundscapes and television, the show paralleled an earlier one in which Schoener was involved: The Lower East Side: Portal to American Life at the Jewish Museum—a paean to immigration in America. Great as the enthusiasm for the Harlem show was in many quarters and funding sources, there were rumblings of discontent before the show opened: there were accusations of marginalizing the counsel and the advice of Harlemites; of blacks being used as “window dressing.” But the denouement was louder with more virulent outrage not only from the black community, but from a wide range of groups including some of the directors of and donors to the Metropolitan. Conservative art critics such as Hilton Kramer held that such shows had no place in an art museum. “In mounting the Harlem on My Mind exhibition,” he wrote, “Mr. Hoving has for the first time politicized the Metropolitan, and has thereby cast doubt on its future integrity as an institution consecrated above all to the task of preserving our artistic heritage from the fickle encroachments of history.” Jewish, Irish, and Hispanic groups found Candice Van Ellison’s introduction to the catalog patently racist vilification, since in it she wrote, as follows, “Psychologically, blacks may find that anti-Jewish sentiments place them, for once, within a majority. Thus, our contempt for the Jew makes us feel more completely American in sharing a national prejudice.” Patently racist vilification. Hoving himself was reviled for his apparent condescension to his black servants (his “sunny maid,” his black “dour” chauffeur) and his remark that peer relationships between the races were “ludicrous.” Schoener, too, for his assertions that “Harlem is [black culture’s] capital. White mores and values are not universal.” From Hoving’s populist intentions there arose strong class conflicts. Certainly the controversy was heightened by the turbulence of the sixties, yet the implications of what went wrong with Hoving’s multimedia show are resonant today. From insult to cultural injury, artists, politicians, scholars, journalists identified quite serious objections to the intellectual and aesthetic premises of the exhibit. Among these complaints were: no African American representation on the selection committee; near total reliance on photography, principally the work of James VanDerZee, and deliberate exclusion of painters and sculptors; the museum’s promise of a “separate” show never materialized; the theme was more entertainment than art—another example of white voyeurism with a camera set up in Harlem at 125th Street for a closed-circuit viewing, rather like a zoo, for patrons at the museum. The dismissal of such artists as Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Cliff Joseph, Elizabeth Catlett, Raymond Saunders, and many others, both established and emerging, prompted a protest group, forced Roy DeCarava to withdraw his work and Romare Bearden to leave the committee. Without the full participation of these artists, the focus misled viewers toward sentimentalized and caricatured representations of black life as criminal, impoverished, exclusively sensual. Further insult was perceived in the choice of an African American high school student, rather than a knowledgeable scholar or artist, to handle the catalog’s introduction. Even the show’s title, selected by Schoener, inflamed already raw sensibilities. Borrowed from Irving Berlin’s song, it followed the same pattern Schoener followed: a white man writing knowingly, authoritatively about Harlem culture, the lyrics describing a black showgirl (and perhaps mistress) in Paris missing the “low-down”—that is, licentious—life among urban blacks. “I’ve a longing to be low-down / And my parlez-vous will not ring true / With Harlem on my mind.” Minus local working artists, without board representation, without even an art scholar to introduce the catalog, with no reference to Harlem’s prosperous civic life, what the community believed was the real importance, meaning, and variety of its cultural life was completely, arrogantly dismissed. It appeared to many that Harlem on My Mind was fundamentally an ethnographic exhibition presented in an art museum—one of the leading universal survey museums. Thus it angered those who thought ethnographic displays did not belong there and frustrated those who wanted work by African Americans to be there. The crux of these charges and frustrations seemed to be that the Metropolitan Museum had treated black culture as “foreign,” as the work product of strangers whose home it first appropriated then selectively celebrated. A kind of petri dish for the curious.

  The consequences, however, of the Harlem on My Mind show did create opportunity. Among disgruntled “minorities,” the citizens of Harlem and African American artists were not alone. Their experience of being silenced by an exhibition ostensibly about them is duplicated in many places, and the hierarchy of cultures is being intently questioned and refuted. Communities are no longer content to remain passive recipients of museum activities. The Studio Museum in Harlem, with its concentration on African American art, is one of the success stories directly related to the fallout of the controversy. The proliferation of ethnic museums in New York and elsewhere is another. Furthermore, less than a year after the show closed, the black artists who formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and protested against Harlem (Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, Raymond Saunders, Vivian Browne, and Cliff Joseph, among others) met with officials at the Whitney Museum of American Art to begin negotiations over its policies of discrimination against black artists. In 1971 the coalition called for a boycott of the Whitney’s exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America because black participation in its organization was limited. Fifteen of the seventy-five artists chosen by curator Robert M. Doty scheduled to participate withdrew, and, true to form, critical response to those who remained in the exhibition centered on black political reaction, with little discussion of the art itself.

  New York’s Guggenheim Museum’s 1996 survey Abstraction in the 20th Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline included no artists of color. Nearly twenty-eight years after Harlem on My Mind, a major American art museum excluded African American painters and sculptors from a major exhibition, and in doing so once again raised questions of race, politics, and aesthetics. But the thrust of the criticism had shifted. The art museum was still being asked, What is the domain of black visual art—figuration, abstraction?, while the artists themselves and some critics were asking whether racially defined art was limiting and whether the question was a problem itself, especially when critical response to the exhibition of black visual artists centered on politics with little discussion of the art itself. What was the art museum’s aesthetic evaluation of visual art created by blacks? Cliff Joseph hazarded an approach in an interview: “I would not say that there is black art per se….There is, however, a black experience in art; I think every culture has its own experience which the artists of the culture brings to his work.”

  Many of today’s young black artists agree with Mr. Joseph and see racially defined art as stifling if not condescending; as a problem itself. An increasing number of them insist their work be evaluated on the basis of aesthetics only, wondering if their art was not classified under the rubric of black culture would it read as African American? If the artists were not presented according to their race, would their work be mined for racial or
political content? These questions and others have given rise to the term “postblack” among the newer artists—a term that both signals racial identity and refutes its established borders.

  The narrative and consequences of the Harlem on My Mind show are at the heart of this current debate on the mission of museums as it relates to the foreigner’s home. And much of the news is good. If the Guggenheim failed to recognize American abstract painters and sculptors of color, other opportunities have not been wasted. Kellie Jones’s recent show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980, is a strong response to the Guggenheim’s omission from its abstract survey show. Since Harlem closed in 1969, new generations of curators, scholars, art historians are deepening and broadening the idea of the visual art museum and the material and cultural museum. In 1968 the ethnographic replaced the artistic at the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition; ethnography and art were largely separate. But in the 1990s the development of these areas of study—art and ethnology—began to converge, and fields such as world art history seem to have gained increasing attention, as well as controversy. Fred Wilson’s 1992 show, Mining the Museum, at the Contemporary museum in Baltimore included works from the Maryland Historical Society. Wilson plumbed these works for new information about black American life from the figuration and portraiture in the work of white artists in early American history and reframed the works to tell that story. It became increasingly apparent that museological decisions and curatorial ones are as much ideologically determined as they are aesthetically determined, and that such decisions are made in the context of power. Yves Le Fur argues intelligently, in my view, that the twenty-first-century art museum cannot remain a cultural site “where nonWestern art is judged according to the standards of modern art.”