BLACK MODELS

HOW IS THE BLACK BODY REPRESENTED IN ART? HOW CAN WE GO BEYOND AN ART HISTORY WRITTEN BY WHITES? A HOST OF ARTISTS AND TWO PARISIAN EXHIBITIONS – THEASTER GATES AT THE PALAIS DE TOKYO AND LE MODÈLE NOIR AT THE MUSÉE D’ORSAY – ARE ATTEMPTING TO PROVIDE SOME ANSWERS.

“There is no absolute, no purity. There never has been,” exclaimed 46-year-old American artist Theaster Gates at the opening of his first exhibition in France, at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, which he describes as an exercise in “cultural, ethnic and sculptural blending” around the idea of a fundamental diversity. Gates is the man behind the Dorchester Projects, the rehabilitation enterprise he’s been leading since 2009 in Chicago’s South Side, a project through which he has proved the credentials of “social practice” – the direct involvement of artists in a reality in need of repair, improvement or embellishment. At the Gagosian gallery, which now represents him, his Black Madonna (2017) takes pride of place, a sculpture covered with a layer of tar (his father was a roofer). But this Madonna seems to mock our desire to recognize an African-american representation of community. For if Gates speaks in the name of African-americans, it is to remind the rest of humanity that history is built on a falsehood, a hegemonic narrative invented by a part of the population, a story that denies this primordial diversity in order to write its own version of what happened.

Gates’s work resonates with a generation of artists that in the late 90s the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Thelma Golden, described as “post- black,” a term she co-invented with the artist Glenn Ligon. “They’re at once post-basquiat and post-biggie”, she explained in 2001 in the catalogue for the exhibition Freestyle. “What they have

in common is not wanting to be labelled ‘black artists,’ even though their work is profoundly attached to redefining the complex notions of ‘blackness.’” The 28 artists she brought together for Freestyle were all African-american, but this wasn’t enough to establish a common link between them. For some, the exploration of African-american identity and experience was more about transversal intersections with contemporary currents than the continuity of a historic community heritage, and rather than the question of representation, they looked at symbols and structures – something they inherited from figures like Adrian Piper or David Hammons, who, from the 60s onwards, have been using a conceptual vocabulary to explore, respectively, the social construction of race and the rituals of the black community. Today, however, the representation of the black, or non-white, body is back. What form should this take? Should it reappropriate the dominant vocabulary or invent a new language? Infiltrate the established system or create its own arena?

The Musée d’orsay exhibition, Black Models – from Géricault to Matisse, is precisely about this visibility of bodies. It grew out of Columbia graduate Denise Murrell’s 2013 doctoral thesis on the subject of the representation of the black female body. In its first iteration in New York, the exhibition centred on the case study of Manet’s Olympia (1863), a work that, due to its realism and refusal to idealize its subject, is considered a milestone in the history of modern painting. But for Murrell, it was also a turning point in the treatment of the black figure. Far from the sexualized and orientalizing clichés of the fetishized body, Laure, the model who posed as Olympia’s servant, at last emerges as an individualized figure. This approach can also be seen in the work of contemporary artists like Martine Syms, Sondra Perry and Jacolby Satterwhite in the digital sphere, Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi and Paul Mpagi Sepuya among the photographers, and Awol Erizku and Nina Chanel Abney where the painters are concerned. Their forms flirt with video games, 3D, hyperrealism and the mural tradition, while their subjects include pop culture and the everyday. Rather than thinking about diversity or practising recontextualization, the trend seems to be for the invention of new modes of representation and identification, which are waking up the Western tradition from its Postmodern slumber.