Black Paper by Teju Cole;

Author:Teju Cole; [Cole, Teju]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCO000000 Literary Collections / General, LCO010000 Literary Collections / Essays, LCO002010 Literary Collections / American / African American, SOC056000 Social Science / Black Studies (global), BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

Dinner Party with boxer Harry Wills,

1926

James VanDerZee

Harry Wills a k a “The Black Panther,” boxer, businessman- sits with seven other men and women, mostly women with champagne glasses raised as a woman on his left makes a toast in his honor. There are three bottles of champagne, a crystal decanter, a bottle of port, an arrangement of flowers and fruit, and before each guest an untouched china place setting.

From multiple directions, the work gestures at what cannot be seen: the original placement of the vessels that inspired Simpson’s own, the people in the photographs by James Van Der Zee, the social life of Harlem evoked by his photographs and the complexity of manners and class implied by them. All that vanished world of culture and experience is reduced to an elegant grid, as simple as an antiquarian’s catalog, a thought picture that demands calm engagement and imaginative intervention on the viewer’s part. Without being representational, it is about race, but not “race” off in some category by itself, hemmed in only by questions of skin color, separate from life.

· · ·

“Represent!” in the Black American sense means standing up for your people, expressing solidarity, and letting a shared ethos underwrite your presence and work. It is an exhortation, a greeting, and a farewell. The word also has more conventional associations in the visual arts: as mimesis, in contrast with the abstract or the symbolic. To represent, in this more common sense, is to make work that visually corresponds to realities out there in the world, to illustrate uncomplicatedly. This second sense of “represent” is enjoying a vogue in the art world. Realism is back. This is mostly welcome: after so long an absence of Black figures and Black faces in art museums, they are now being seen more frequently. Many artists, Black and otherwise, are depicting the Black body. It is necessary and, often enough, artistically successful. Yet just as often, maybe more often, it fails. The galleries are full of unobjectionable, unmemorable representations, work that offers little more than a clumsy shorthand for social concern.

A strong appeal of Simpson’s work is that she has always embraced the inherent complexity of Blackness, her own Blackness as well as the Blackness that runs ineluctably through American history. She does not reject representational depictions, but neither does she feel the need to confine herself only to “race” work. When an artist uses a Black model, she is presenting a human question by foregrounding a human presence. Is a White man a person while a Black woman is and can only be a gendered and racialized subject? As Kellie Jones has pointed out, nonwhite bodies are often thought of as “not neutral enough for the dispassionate formulas thought to constitute conceptual practice.” If a Black woman’s race and gender are the only things apparent to a certain viewer, Simpson seems to say, the ethical responsibility to escape those shackles is the viewer’s.

Freedom is Lorna Simpson’s starting point and her permanent theme. A humane

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