This post is in response to Ken Johnson’s 25 October review of ‘Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles,’ at MoMA PS1
It was sent via email as a letter to the editor of the New York Times on 27 October 2012.
Dear Madam/Sir:
I am an artist who lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. While I often enjoy the writing of Ken Johnson, I was greatly disturbed by his review of the above referenced show. His text is really a lazy piece of writing. It assumes that black people make art with social and timely connection and so-called white people don’t. What was DaDa if not a response to the political madness of WWI? Black and white people have lived together for 3 centuries in this country. If so-called white people cannot access the texts and sub-texts in the work of black artists it is because they choose not to, just as some of them choose to ignore the social realities of the country. These things are not beyond their comprehension or experience, despite the article’s reification of the myth of inscrutable blackness.
While it is appropriate to discuss the history and context of every artist, and race is a part of that, we need to stop pretending that black people are the only ones with a “race.” Does anyone ever talk about Robert Ryman and whiteness? Also, does Johnson not realize that the presence of the work of a black artist like Melvin Edwards, alters our understanding of what a work by a white artist like Richard Stankiewicz can mean? Johnson reinforces the spurious notion that black people make art about being black and so-called white people make art.
Also shame on Johnson for positing the notion that if you aren’t black you aren’t going to get the work, or that some of its poetics will be lost or inaccessible to you. There is one art world, and it’s long past time that people stop treating black artists like they are from some other planet. We are part of the traditions of Western art and I’m tired of people telling us that we aren’t.
Sincerely,
Steve Locke
Dear Steve,
This is a very important conversation. Have you received a response from Johnson? Have they published your letter? I have always wondered at being labeled a female artist versus, well, an artist who happens to be female as well as many other things.
A.
They haven’t responded. I got an automated message receipt, but that was it. Maybe they will get around to it…
No reply as of yet aside for a confirmation email. We’ll see. But artists need to start talking back.
Things remain the same until we question our own assumptions about who we think we are. Same goes for the art world and everyone in it. Excellent piece, Steve Locke.
Get em’ Steve!! I forgot white people invented everything’
Good points – but Dada predated WWI. – Armory Show was 1913.
Respectfully Scott, from the Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms:
Dada
An anarchic movement which flourished c.1915–c.1922 and ridiculed traditional notions of form and beauty. Originally European, though it also took root in America, it was partly born out of the disillusionment engendered by the First World War. The name was apparently chosen at random by inserting a penknife in the pages of a dictionary (‘dada’ is French for ‘hobby-horse’). It was first used in 1916—by the poet Tristan Tzara according to the artist Jean Arp. Both were members of Dada’s founding group of artists and writers in Zurich. Traditional media such as painting and sculpture were abandoned in favour of techniques and devices such as COLLAGE, PHOTOMONTAGE, and READY-MADES. Chance was credited with a valid role in the act of creation. By the end of the war Dada had spread to a number of German cities such as Berlin, Cologne, and Hanover, but it also took root almost simultaneously in New York, independently of Europe. Its main practitioners were figures such as Duchamp, Picabia, and Man Ray. Other centres of Dada came to include Paris and Prague. Although it was short-lived, Dada was highly influential and inspired many later anti-art movements in the course of the 20th century.
This was what I had to say, and its bits and pieces of the ‘paper’ I’ve been working on that I thought you may be able to help with at some point. If you are interested.
My thought and post to it was:
The Hegemonic process of regulation continues today no matter what we would like to think. This presents the disembodied act of literal and metaphorical seeing. Most people and groups are looking to optimize and maximize their resources even though doing so usually involves the denial of resources (or access) to others. Limited opportunities for poor, disadvantaged, differently abled, or the ethnic or racial ‘other’ to take part in the arts as spectators, creators, or participants raises questions about the ways which the art world continues to oppress, marginalize, and dictate to the ‘other’.
Well done, Steve. The problem with any show of this sort is that it invites hyper-analysis of an identity-ness – whatever that identity may be. I may be on an island here, but I think over-identifying art is the problem. It blocks an authentic, real encounter with an object, superimposing an uber-idea about it. That idea may be true to a greater or lesser extent, but in my opinion it should breath in the experience of the work – outside of any bracketing of it. That goes far beyond ‘identity-ness’ to any conceptual bracketing that uses the art object and the art experience as a caption.
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