Cassandra da Costa
May 6, 2015
Black Stars: The Production of the Contemporary Black Artist by the Global Art Market
If one ventures to New York City right now, one can envelope herself in several
well-publicized exhibitions of contemporary black art in museum spaces. At the
Brooklyn Museum, there are Basquiat’s notebooks, Kehinde Wiley’s portraits, and
photographer Zanele Muholi’s photographs of LGBTQ South Africans in the Elizabeth
A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The Studio Museum in Harlem not only houses
exhibitions, but artists themselves, with yearlong residencies for “artists of African or
Latino descent” (“The Studio Museum in Harlem: About”). The Museum of Modern Art
is exhibiting One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works
throught September, and, last year, hired black art historian Darby English as a consulting
curator. Recently, Jack Shainman Gallery showed Titus Kaphar’s Drawing the Blinds, in
which Kaphar re-figured 17th century American and European portraiture to foreground
erased or ignored black subjects. Leaving critical readings of the value of work of these
artists aside, how does one situate the apparent inclusion of or attention paid to black art
by major and significant art institutions? Specifically, how is the figure of the
contemporary black artist being produced by the global art market?
Looking at the work of Nandipha Mntambo, Wangechi Mutu, and Kehinde
Wiley—three black artists from three different countries—we might examine how their
work has alternately been distilled into sums of their references by art criticism and
tokenized for their difference by certain curatorial practices that at once drive and are
reified by the art market. Mntambo’s cowhide sculptures have been analyzed both as
referencing traditional Zulu Nguni use of cattle and as employing more “universalist”
negotiation between the masculine and the feminine or the human and the animalistic.
Mutu’s work, often praised for its imagistic inventiveness in collage, is staged as
fantastical, Afrofuturist, and beyond the real. Finally, many critics have placed Wiley’s
enormous, colorful portraits within a hip-hop cultural canon. Wiley, a gay African
American artist who solicits his models on the street, does not only have his work, but
also the imagined identities of his portraits’ subjects reviewed and marketed. This paper
will examine how the contemporary art machine—especially major exhibition spaces and
art critics—understand black art and diaspora as it relates to both the work of these artists
and the making of these artists as major players in contemporary art both within and
beyond what is designated as black art.
Certain art historians, cultural theorists, and thinkers such as Darby English,
Michelle M. Wright, and Kobena Mercer have explored the notion of how blackness,
black art, and the black artist are produced by a particular politics of representation and
interpretation, with the latter two often generated by various art institutions including the
museum, gallery space, or art criticism publication. In How to See a Work of Art in Total
Darkness, English examines what he names “black representational space” in visual art
and how it has been constituted as a totalizing signifier for “blackness,” which English
grapples with as both a self-reflexive and indexical term. Michelle M. Wright, in Physics
of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, asserts that the blackness that
has been constituted by a Middle Passage epistemology that has been upheld by many a
critic and scholar, is the wrong blackness—both narrow in its scope and unspecific in its
references. Kobena Mercer, who has written widely on the liminal but particular space(s)
occupied by the Black British artist as well as the work done by black (representational)
images themselves, seeks to expand and complicate readings of these images and what
they do.
The work done by these writers and thinkers, however, is not the work that brings
the artists I have mentioned into national and global recognition and conversation. This
work is typically done by the “art world,” which includes agents, dealers, curators,
museum directors, and art critics. As Martha Buskirk points out in Creative Enterprise:
Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace:
It is impossible to talk about art without considering how it is shaped by
the present context of its exhibition and dissemination. And, given that
recent art builds on a long history of highly specialized conventions, an
analysis of the contemporary has to be grounded on what has come before.
Nor can the field of activities identified with the art world be considered in
isolation from many other closely related practices. 5.
To better understand “what has come before” when thinking the black artist in
contemporary art culture and as produced by the global art market, one might turn first to
Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 1991 essay “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in
Postcolonial?” In the first part of the essay, Appiah focuses on a 1987 show at the Center
for African Art in New York called “Perspectives: Angles on African Art”—in particular,
Appiah is interested in the comments by curator Susan Vogel and art collector David
Rockefeller— one of the many co-curators of the show—which he uses to illustrate the
ways in which African art is consumed and understood as a commodity (338-339). If one
understands the art institution as having emerged in the 20th century as a “modern”
apparatus for the dissemination of art, then one must, according to Buskirk, examine the
success of Mntambo, Mutu, and Wiley in view of the emergence of modernity. This kind
of historiography works particularly well with Appiah’s, which claims that modernity is
not “the triumph of Enlightenment Reason,” but rather, “the incorporation of all areas of
the world an all areas of even formerly ‘private’ life into the money economy [that] has
turned every element of the real into a sign, and the sign reads ‘for sale’” (344).
If the modernity in which the contemporary art world finds its origin and frame is
really just consumer economy, then it is important to note that Mntambo’s, Mutu’s, and
Wiley’s artworks are aesthetically stunning and impossible-to-ignore installations that
one might even call beautiful or at least made to appear beautiful even in depictions of
violence or physical hybridity. These are works that one would imagine are not difficult
to sell. However, it is not just beauty that is being sold, but a particular frame for or
discourse on this beauty: blackness and the simultaneous essence and abstraction the
word has come to signify. In Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in
Multicultural America, Huey Copeland analyzes the art institution’s embracing of
multiculturalism in the nineties as an antidote to racial unrest’s invasion of the private
sphere:
[M]ulticultural discourse also tended to emphasize the rehearsal of static
identities and the imaging of corporeal differences as opposed to elective
affiliation, let alone structural analysis. The institutions of the U.S. art
world circa 1989—scarred by the culture wars, recalibrated by a faltering
economy, and desperate for federal funds earmarked to encourage
‘diversity’—were no exception. In response, politically engaged ‘others,’
[…] drew upon languages of absence that spoke to and or resistive politics
while often refusing the essentialization of identity. [Fred Wilson, Lorna
Simpson, Glenn Ligon, and Renée Green] were part and parcel of this
milieu and faced similar challenges as a result of its particular pressure: to
a great extent, they were produced as ciphers of blackness that could be
packaged, marketed, and justified with greater fanfare and less cultural
fallout than other forms of alterity. 6 (emphasis mine).
Here, Copeland emphasizes that the U.S. art world’s employment of multiculturalism as a
catchall solution to both political and economic interventions did not seek to incorporate
the work of openly queer black artists, which is to say, black artists that did not code as
black according to the significations of “blackness” at that time. The packing, marketing,
and justification of which Copeland speaks, however, is not only limited to this particular
kind of posturing in the U.S. art market. Today, within the global art market—which
extends from the U.S. to galleries, museums, and biennials in London, Venice, Cape
Town, Dakar, Dubai, Beijing, and elsewhere—art institutions have exchanged a politics
of multiculturalism for one of universalism. The global art market profits off of the
perceived internationality of art audiences. Mntambo’s work is celebrated for its
extractable “South Africanness,” Mutu’s for its unbounded yet comprehensible Yale-viaWales-via-Kenya postcolonial hybridity, and Wiley’s for its supposed hip-hop
referentiality, with “hip-hop” serving as a grammatical stand-in for what is perceived to
be the essence of African-American culture. Each essentialized reading is not exacted to
neatly incorporate the art’s difference into the art world, but to sell that difference so that
the viewer can incorporate its wide-applicability into her own world-view.
This commodity-as-incorporation can be seen in the ways in which museums and
galleries have used critique not as strategies to rethink their own foundations, structures,
and practices, but as ways to re-brand in order to appeal to potential new audiences. As
Buskirk explains, “[…] the ability of museums to absorb, even foster, what once
appeared to be critical discourse has helped align the institution with a larger marketplace
for culture often described in terms of an experience economy” (5). In this way, one can
begin to understand why, even after Mntambo’s sculptures were initially (mis)read as
references to traditional Nguni practices, Mntambo’s assertion of her work as part of the
discourse on rigid human/animal dichotomies has been accepted by the global art market
as appropriate branding for the cowhide figures. The “experience economy” becomes the
vehicle through which the art institution can profit off of subversive work by
systematically marginalized artists. In an interview with Installation Magazine, the
interviewer asks, “How have audiences reacted to your work?” Mntambo responds,
The work has been received in interesting ways by diverse groups of
people. I have not been made aware of any particular groups of women
who have had a visceral response. I think the success of my work is that it
has an effect on a cross-section of people and not isolated groups. (Moret)
Here, Mntambo is careful not to place her work into a particular discourse, though seems
to avoid one in particular: that of blackness or, maybe more appropriately for the African
artist, Africanness. An article in Another Africa further evidences Mntambo’s deliberate
moves away from signification within the realms of identity or culture:
Mntambo’s art subverts cultural signifiers like the cowhide to create work
that pushes boundaries with a distinct look and feel, all the while
challenging how material is used, interpreted and understood. The
aesthetic influences however are best described by the artist herself.
(Maradzika)
In the interview, Mntambo goes on to explain that her “work was never meant to be a
direct exploration of the African Female body. I just happen to be African and female and
use my body in my art making process.” Mntambo positions herself for the experience
economy by refusing readings within the “black representational space” English
critiques.
Nandipha Mntambo, Nandikeshvara and Emabutfo, Installation view. 2009, cow hide, resin.
However, instead of forging a new space in which her work might be read more
complexly than as “black art” or “African art,” Mntambo’s assertions reify the negative
space of the “post-black,” a so-called post-racial philosophy that is still steeped in the
language and psychology of race and racial difference (Appiah calls “post-” a “spaceclearing gesture” [343]). What Mntambo and some of her reviewers seem to not
recognize is that because her work includes the black female body (or its absence), it also
includes the multitudinous ways in which that body is (mis)read. The work itself cannot
wholly subvert racialization, but can go further than the acts of race representation and
signification by complicating those very acts, especially within the exhibition spaces
worldwide in which Mntambo’s work is shown. As English points out, “[w]hat is at stake
here […] is not so much the art as what it is asked to do, when a bevy of
‘thematizations’—aesthetic, cultural, moral—attach like barnacles to the designation
‘black artist’ and anything one touches” (44). The global art market seems to reward
black art that can either be housed neatly within a constructed black representational
space (that can easily be compared to other internationally recognized art), or black art
that can somehow transcend this space to become wholly universal, untouchable. It seems
that an artist like Mntambo should not have to take such efforts to clear a space for her
artwork to be immutably hers, though the default nature of white art and the economic
pressures of a global market require her to assert herself as “happening” to be black so
that critical interpretations of her work do not isolate the potential “experience economy”
of her work. Appiah quickly arrives at this very conclusion in his reading of African art
as commodity, pointing out that in order “[t]o sell oneself and one's products as art in the
marketplace, one must, above all, clear a space in which one is distinguished from other
producers and products—and one does this by the construction and the marking of
differences” (342).
If an artist like Mntambo is produced as a star in negative space, then Wangechi Mutu
is couched comfortably in the liminal space that is reserved for transnational artists—
especially those that are showing work prone to interpretative ambivalence. English
maintains that ambiguity in work by black artists is an aspect to which art criticism needs
to pay careful attention instead of diluting so that the work can fit a rubric of prescribed
blackness. That said, the “hybrid,” transnational, or liminal artist has become another
figure for the global art market to repackage for experience.
Typically the point of transfer, from artist to collector or museum, is a
moment when something that might have remained fluid or provisional in
the artist’s studio is defined as finished, fixed. Buskirk, 6.
While Buskirk seems to be referring here to the very dilution that English works against,
this transfer of the work from artist to collector or museum can also be read as the
making of the artist herself. In the same way that Mntambo had to formulate an artist’s
statement that would push interpretation of her work in a certain direction, Mutu’s
appearance on the global stage as an artist seems to be predicated on a fixed identity as
hybrid artist. In a New York Times review of Mutu’s 2013 survey at the Brooklyn
Museum, Holland Cotter outlines the artist’s personal history:
When Ms. Mutu arrived in New York in the 1990s, she, too, had cause to
feel herself somewhat alien and on guard. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in
1972, and educated there in a convent school into her teens, she moved to
the United States to study art and by 2000 had earned degrees from
Cooper Union and Yale. Her presence coincided with the high tide of
multiculturalism, when particular aspects of her identity — as black,
African and female — were all under local, distancing,
compartmentalizing scrutiny. At the same time, she brought with her a
history that she had to sort out for herself at a geographical remove from
its source.
One way or another, all of this fed into her art and still does. Judging by a
selection of sketchbook sheets in the show, some going back to 1995, Ms.
Mutu’s primary forms and themes were in place at an early point. Collage,
which has the potential to join unlike and even discordant elements into a
fractious harmony, was a preferred medium, enhanced over time by
painting and drawing.
Wangechi Mutu, from Family Tree. 2012. Suite of 13, mixed-media collage on paper.
In the review, Mutu’s geographical background displaces cultural allegiance as
multiculturalism is dismissed as promoting a politics of identity that Mutu was unable to
fulfill because her identity was and is unstable. She is portrayed as an artistic talent
floating through the rigid “local, distancing compartmentalizing scrutiny” of the U.S. so
that her art can then become a sort of cross-cultural revelation. Cotter’s review also
seems to name culture or ethnicity or both as history, which supposedly has one, in part
geographical, source: a vertical Kenyan family tree. From that source, Mutu can then
create her “fractious harmony” out of apparently discordant materials using the collage
form. Cotter’s understanding of artist-in-relation-to-work seems to fall within a
whimsical arena of Afropolitan quilt making—Mutu, as multi-regional, transnational,
global, hybrid artist, can create harmony in her work that refuses to claim any one
identity. In her rejection of an essentializing Middle Passage epistemology in Physics of
Blackness, Michelle M. Wright proposes a building of the dimensions of blackness rather
than a simple stitching together of what are thought to be oppositional elements of
blackness.
Physics of Blackness shows how Black discourses can endlessly expand
the dimensions of our analyses and intersect with a wider range of
identities by deploying an Epiphenomenal concept of spacetime that takes
into account all the multifarious dimensions of Blackness that exist in any
one moment, or “now”—not “just” class, gender, and sexuality, but all
collective combinations imagined in that moment. 20.
To allow Mutu dimensions, to have her black art enacted beyond the catchall of class,
gender, and sexuality, would be to allow her work to exist on a level of abstraction.
Buskirk calls the educational bent of museums a manifestation of their social control (7).
Abstract or ambiguous work is not didactic, so Mutu’s liminal geographic narrative
becomes an instructional pathway into her distorted, cyborg figures, scenes, and
landscapes, allowing critics to mention race in reviews without actually speaking about
its place in her work.
In her introduction to Flow, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s third book in a series
of emerging artist surveys, curator Christine Y. Kim acknowledges her desire to call the
“new generation of ‘cultural hybrids’ from Africa” whose art is included in the survey
“post-black,” before deciding on some more flexible terms:
Decentered and polyvalent, Flow continues to emphasize and extend the
realities and urgencies of a diasporic understanding of blackness witnessed
in Freestyle and Frequency, as its transnational focus reframes the scope
through which we might view and eclipse forms both global and local,
including the nation, capitalism, militarism, warfare, self-making, desire
and collectivity building. (Emphasis mine).
Here, the words “decentered” and “polyvalent” are not purposeful but on display. Kim
not only wants diaspora to be recognized, but to serve a function—to allow viewer,
reader, curator, and institution to be able to see differently, and then use global
connectivity to relate that seeing, thus enacting a global experience economy. Kim
continues,
Locating decolonial demands within a history of global capitalism,
transnational racial classification and shared forms of psychic trauma, the
ethos and energy of Africa’s anticolonial movements reflect a globalized
way of thinking. What’s more, the thinkers of these movements paved new
ways for their successors to conceptualize colonialism itself as a global
experience that contributed to the universalization of representations,
techniques and institutions. (Emphasis mine).
Interestingly, Kim calls out global capitalism while championing a “universalization of
representations, techniques and institutions,” which seems to be the very mechanism on
which global art market—which is driven by capitalism—thrives. Conflating
internationalism and universalism with anticolonial acts allows for art institutions to take
on a progressive stance by employing radical vocabulary while employing no radical
practice. The making of Mutu as a major player within the global art market—and it is
important to distinguish between Mutu the artist as produced by the market and Mutu the
artist in her practice and work—is predicated on this kind of superficial mixing of
transnational hybridity and progressive political action. Perceived Africanness that is not
tethered to Africa seems to be the selling point here, rather than the actual significance of
what it might have meant for an artist like Mutu to form knowledge and develop practice
across several continents. Furthermore, accounts of background and history rather than
the work itself seem to be the entrance point for many critics, who are always quick to
draw surface-level links between identity and practice for non-white artists.
With Kehinde Wiley, an artist who displays colorful, pop art-inspired, largerthan-life size paintings primarily of black men, the consequences of black stardom in the
global art market can be carefully examined. One of the most curious aspects of reviews
of Wiley’s work is a consistent willingness to address supposed “urban culture” or
“global hip-hop culture” as well as civil rights history in his work with the role of
sexuality and desire included as an aside or afterthought if at all (Diehl, Smith). In a 2008
review in the Village Voice, after mentioning the absence of women from his work at the
time, art critic Martha Schwendener includes in the last paragraph,
There's a reason for this. Wiley himself states that the works are about a
kind of coded homoeroticism. (In some of his paintings, vegetal patterns
in the background wind around the figures in the foreground, replicating
sperm.) But in a catalog interview, when curator Christine Kim tells Wiley
that one of his American models "left the building" during a panel
discussion in Columbus when gay sexuality was brought up, Wiley
backtracks, stressing that, in the studio, he attempts to create a ‘neutral
environment.’ You can't have it both ways, however, and this neutrality
spills over into the paintings, which feel most of the time like a hedging of
bets between multicultural political correctness and messier gay/black
politics.
Schwendener positions the presence of homoeroticism or gay themes in Wiley’s work in
direct opposition to the absence of women, as if gayness automatically serves as a standin for femininity or femaleness. A mention of suggestive sperm-like figures and reference
to an interview in which gay sexuality is mentioned are the critic’s only words on the
“messier gay/black politics” which she claims are overridden by “multicultural political
correctness” in Wiley’s work. In other words, for Schwendener, Wiley’s work is not quite
gay enough to make up for the lack of representation of women, and this apparent gap
comes as a critical punctuation mark. For critics, it is easier to place Wiley firmly within
one camp of black stardom: either he is allowed to be the grand multicultural pop artist,
the urban African-American populist painter, or the pointedly gay expressionist. It is as if
to say, any negotiations between roles, embedded codes, or expressed ambiguities in the
work are unacceptable, for how could large, bright paintings of black people be that
complex? In this vein, Wiley’s “backtrack[ing]” could be read as apprehension to confuse
the fixed portrayals that have built his brand, which is evidence of artist complicity in this
kind of institutional production1.
Kehinde Wiley, Femme Piquée Par Un Serpent II. 2010, oil on canvas.
The production of Kehinde Wiley by the art criticism institution is not unrelated to the
production of the artist by the global art market at large. By positioning and branding
Wiley as the urban artist with grandiose portraits that champion black representation,
galleries, museums, and other institutions can easily circulate the work worldwide.
1
See Darby English’s How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness for further discussion
of black complicity in creating essentialized blackness or black representational space.
For English, a desire to be seen or represented often leads to complicity in producing and
perpetuating simplistic, reductive categorizations and interpretations of black art.
Wiley’s participation in the global circulation of his work can be seen in his World Stage
projects in Haiti, Beijing, Israel, France, India, Sri Lanka, Africa, Jamaica and Brazil.
The works themselves become part of the gallery of experience economy by providing
cultural institutions worldwide with the opportunity to participate in the production of
Wiley’s stardom. For instance, World Stage: Israel was shown at the Jewish Museum in
New York, and PUMA commissioned part of the African series to celebrate the 2010
World Cup (“Kehinde Wiley Paints the World Stage”), an overtly market-driven
international event that uses ideas of global connectivity and cultural exploration as a
front for capitalist development.
Despite his own participation in and beneficence from the global circulation of his
work, Wiley seems to lose out where the blackness in his work becomes a measure of his
or his models’ blackness. In the art world, Wiley is not just a superstar with a global
reach, but a hyper-visible black artist who is so present that his work is often glided right
past. The hip-hop culture/Old Masters dichotomy that is brought up not only in reviews
of his work, but also in his own artist statement, often serves as a shorthand that allows
any engagement with the work to remain two-dimensional. In discussing the nature of the
white civilization/black culture dichotomy in the U.S. Copeland explains,
Blackness functions, then, as both a free-floating trace unmoored from
individual subjects and as a concrete index of power relations that reveals
the deep structure of modernity’s modes of visualization, the despotism on
which they rely, and the ways that they might be contested in the present.
At once abstract and bodily, literal and metaphorical, the ultimate sign of
aesthetic negation and the prime marker of the socially negated, blackness
marks those historical forces that continue to differentially engender
subjects and objects in the modern world, everywhere shaping a cultural
unconscious in which the individual effects of racialization assume a
shifting texture despite the unyielding ruthlessness of their overarching
logic. 11.
A lack of engagement with what the overt presence of blackness and a coded implication
of queer sexuality actually does in Wiley’s work, seems to be a way of allowing
blackness to continue functioning as a mode of othering, of strategic racialization that
allows the white-owned and –controlled art market to profit off of the black artist without
having to listen to him. Even with the rise of a black artist like Wiley, whose work is
shown, discussed, and debated worldwide, aesthetic and social negation is still a mode of
control for the global art market, which is uninterested in blackness beyond its
racializing, spectacle-producing aspect.
Despite its role in diluting the potency of art made by black artists, blackness as a
“free-floating trace unmoored from individual subjects,” recognized as such can become
a subject for the work. Artists Nandipha Mntambo, Wangechi Mutu, and Kehinde Wiley
each work within terms specific to their own points of view and practices even as
diaspora connects them in by various threads. The gaps—between each artist but also
between the artists’ identities and art, communities and art, or histories and art—are
significant locations of questioning, and where work by each artist seems to truly do
unmarketable work. English maintains that work by Isaac Julien, Williams Pope.L, Kara
Walker, and Fred Wilson “reimagines the very representational structure of its chosen
subjects, supplying us with new terms for their understanding,” and that “to take this art
seriously is to traffic in the unfamiliar” (21). I would go further in saying that the practice
of trafficking in the unfamiliar need not only be done with art that openly reimagines
representational structures. Work by Mntambo, Mutu, and Wiley, and by any artist that
can be produced as a star in terms of the marketability of their skin (rather than simply of
their work) must be taken seriously by critics and institutions alike.
The presence of work by black artists is significant—yes, because the artists are
black, but also because the art does work in an institutional system that ignores this work.
The production of the black artist as global superstar is not only a cultural phenomenon
that comes from the global art machine, but is also a specific form of cultural erasure that
seeks to position blackness as a sellable category. As a result, an artist like Mntambo has
to code herself as only incidentally black, while Mutu becomes the intersectional poster
girl and Wiley urban god. To engage the work rather than the apparent phenomenon of
the artist’s existence (read: blackness) is not to move on to the post-black but to actually
begin to face blackness in its construction, abstraction, difference, similarity, and glaring
unquantifiability so that neither the claiming nor negation of blackness will be
significant, but the complication of its very terms.
Works Cited
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Buskirk, Martha. Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and
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Copeland, Huey. Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in
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Cotter, Holland. "A Window, Not a Mirror: A Survey of Wangechi Mutu at Brooklyn
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English, Darby. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Cambridge: MIT Press,
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"Kehinde Wiley Paints the World Stage." Interview Magazine. Interview Magazine, n.d.
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Maradzika, Natasha. "Nandipha Mntambo | Hide & Seek." Another Africa. Another
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Moret, A. "Nandipha Mntambo: In Her Skin." Installation Magazine. Installation
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Schwendener, Martha. "Kehinde Wiley's Pomp and Black Circumstance." Village Voice.
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Smith, Roberta. "Review: ‘Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic’ at the Brooklyn Museum."
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"The Studio Museum in Harlem: About." SMH Studio Blog. American Alliance of
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Wright, Michelle, M. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Print.
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