Hank Willis Thomas: Appropriated imagery
BENTONVILLE — The first question that arises when looking at Hank Willis Thomas’ glossy oversize black-and-white print Branded Head (2003) is of a practical, commercial nature: Can he use that?
The “that” in question being the Nike swoosh logo, which is Photoshopped (we hope) into a brand on the side of a young black man’s shaved head. It is a witty image, one that critiques the ubiquity of corporate glyphs in our society, the way we seek to identify as part of a tribe, and the ritual scarification still practiced by some historically black fraternal organizations.
In an age when people tattoo trademarks on their skin, when we are constantly being invited to bond with the brands we consume, how hyperbolic is it?
And how strange is it that we might wonder if Nike isn’t somehow being unfairly impugned by the image — if the artist has the right to make use of their logo.
But let’s not get sidetracked into arguments about fair use. Much of what comprises “Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal …,” the exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art that runs through April 20, is appropriated imagery and symbols, a remixing of advertising conventions and facile notions that somehow renders them strange and perhaps assaultive.
Sometimes Thomas takes commercial images, strips away the ad copy and presents us with a species of “naked lunch” — what William Burroughs described
as “the frozen moment when everybody sees what’s on the end of every fork.”
Which isn’t comforting. Granted, you may feel implicated by the images this man wants to show you, by the stories he means to tell.
Thomas started out as a photographer, which you might think a passive art, more receiver than transmitter. But on Feb. 2, 2000, his cousin and best friend and sometimes roommate Songha Willis, a 27-year-old former basketball star at Catholic University of America in Washington, was murdered in the parking lot of north Philadelphia nightclub Evolution in front of dozens of witnesses by a man who wanted his gold chain. (The man was arrested a couple of months later after killing rapper Raeneal (Q-Don) Quann, who had just signed with Elektra Records, after robbing him in the same parking lot.)
Thomas — the son of photographer and photographic historian Deborah Willis who has been taking photographs since he was 12 — took his camera to the funeral. One of the shots he captured was a study in grief, a composed portrait of his family of mourners, brown people draped in shades of brown and black. Overcoats and hats on the women who, seated, lean into one another. Faces set in grim repose. A reversed-polarity Norman Rockwell.
Elsewhere in the exhibit see Thomas’ Four Freedoms (2018), a series of staged photographs (taken by Emily Shur) inspired by Rockwell’s 1943 series of paintings based on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime speech outlining four essential rights: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
While the photograph of the grieving family is compelling in its own right, it didn’t work for Thomas. Not until a few years later, when he affixed a familiar credit card logo — the MasterCard name centered between two interlocking circles of red and ocher — to the lower left corner of the image. And he scattered text across the image reading:
3-piece suit: $250
new socks: $2
gold chain: $400
9mm pistol: $79
bullet: ¢60
Picking the perfect casket for your son:
Priceless.
You might feel confronted, or maybe implicated. “Priceless” subverts MasterCard’s campaign, which is supposed to encourage us to use the product to buy experiences and/or time rather than the more mundane consumer goods. MasterCard wants us to think about what it means to live a good life and how their services might facilitate that. (Does the more expensive casket signal more love for the deceased?)
Thomas looked past the ad copy and decided he wasn’t a photographer anymore but a conceptual artist who would privilege ideas over the concrete thing created. In Absolut Power (2003), the iconic shape of an Absolut vodka bottle is transformed into a slave ship. There’s nothing hard about the realization. It’s all in the way you flip the minds of the viewers; how you show them something new in the familiar.
Thomas has said that while race “isn’t real” — that it’s an arbitrary and fluid conceit — racism is. And racism can be seen as a kind of advertising campaign, propaganda that insists on the otherness of dark skin. Blackness was created with an interest in dehumanizing certain groups of people in order to exploit them. A not-quite-human might be privileged to serve humans. Caliban is “not honored with a human shape,” and therefore fit to be a slave.
But top-down oppression isn’t the only issue; when you’re dragged across the ocean to an alien land and forced to work as beasts for people who at best treat you as mascots and pets, who discourage you from reading or retaining any of the old ways in order to assimilate you into a circumscribed role in their civilization, you will be disconnected from your history and traditions. You will be forced to pull together an identity from the scraps that filter down to you, to valorize the examples their media offers, to embrace the proffered stereotypes.
A football player assumes a three-point stance opposite a stooped field hand in The Cotton Bowl (2011). Maybe you resist the idea the image suggests, the equivalency of sharecroppers (and slaves) and modern gladiators performing for scholarships and (in the professional ranks) potentially millions of dollars.
But is the power dynamic of sports that much removed from the old plantation system? Bodies are still traded like chattel, the labor pool still receives a relatively small slice of the revenues. Careers are short and risks are high.
It’s a provocation. Do you feel triggered? That’s the point.
Thomas’ work is witty, but also bitter.
My first inclination on seeing his Guernica (2016), a reimaging of Picasso’s famous anti-war painting as a scrap quilt made from the jerseys of NBA basketball stars, is to laugh. It’s very funny to see the anguished torch-bearing woman in Picasso’s original reconstituted by Moses Malone and Dr. J jerseys. Thomas understands sports as a kind of allegorical warfare, but you can detect an underpinning of affectionate fanship, a playfulness, in this particular work.
Maybe there’s hope too. At least that might be the initial reaction to Thomas’ Raise Up (2014), a bronze and cement sculpture depicting the upraised arms and heads of 10 black men. At first, it seems the arms might be raised in exaltation or triumph, but as soon as that thought occurs, you might think of police ordering suspects to put their hands up.
The sculpture is based on Mine Recruitment, a 1960s-era photograph by South African photographer Ernest Cole of prospective gold miners who had been lined up, naked, against a wall in a grimy restroom for a health inspection. (Cole, a black man who infiltrated the mines and prisons to document the atrocities of apartheid, took the photograph with a camera he had hidden beneath the sandwich he carried in a paper lunch bag, shooting the picture through a rip in the bag.)
As with Cole’s original photograph, which shows the nude bodies of the men from behind, contrasting their beauty with the dehumanizing apparatus of the system, Thomas’ sculpture works as a sober reminder of contemporary police abuse and judicial bias while calling back to the systemic horror of apartheid.
This is smart, often brutal work. A 1978 ad for Blue Bonnet margarine which features then-heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier wearing the brand’s signature bonnet with one fist raised in (mockery of?) a Black Power salute might have passed, in the context of a slick magazine ad, as a groaningly unclever attempt to make flinty, fearsome Smokin’ Joe relatable and cuddly. But with the ad copy removed, Frazier comes off as another flavor of Aunt Jemima, a denatured mammy figure.
Similarly, a series where he has removed the copy blocks of advertisements aimed at white women (or aimed at white men but featuring white women) betray a shocking misogyny hiding in plain sight. Ads that target black folks — that ostensibly supply a population starved of wholesome self-images with ready-made role models, take on a similar malevolence when stripped of their text. This isn’t an example of what Vance Packard identified as subliminal advertising. This is right out in the open.
If we see it.
We miss most things, they say; we perceive a tiny fraction of what is going on around us, our eyes only receive a narrow band of what is possible. It seems Thomas’ mission is to direct our gaze at what we routinely look past — that which we might prefer to look past.
Thomas wants to give the would-be hidden persuaders nowhere to hide. Can you appropriate a swoosh logo for your art?
Just do it.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
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