ART REVIEW : Another Way of Picturing Black Men

“African American Representations of Masculinity,” a three-venue exhibition curated by Cecil Fergerson for the Coalition for Cultural Survival of Community Arts, rejects the insular discourse that informs the “cutting edge” of the art world. In so doing, it serves as a reminder that there is not one art world but many, each with its own discourse, ideology, aesthetic criteria and cultural politics.

In fact, cultural politics is at the heart of the distinct, but consistent shows at the William Grant Still Art Center, Museum of African American Art and Watts Towers Art Center. According to Fergerson, the prodigious number of paintings, photographs and documents on view at these institutions have been mobilized “to celebrate the life and legacy of the strong, prolific, productive, creative genius of the African American male.”

This aggressively upbeat vision is designed to counter the disparate and sometimes difficult images of black masculinity presented in the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum’s controversial “Black Male” show, in which black men are depicted in drag (Lyle Ashton Harris); as the stuff of the white establishment’s nightmares (Adrian Piper); as eroticized bodies (Robert Mapplethorpe); and as street criminals (Carl Pope).

Who controls the image of the African American male--and who should? “Black Male” curator Thelma Golden insists that the African American male is, in fact, an invention. Quoting Kobena Mercer, she notes that black masculinity is “a key site of ideological representation, a site upon which the nation’s crisis comes to be dramatized, demonized, and dealt with. . . .” The strategy of the artists in her show is thus to take apart the dominant media ideology and to interrogate the stakes of white America in promulgating particular images of black men.

For Fergerson, such a postmodernist position is untenable: It elides the “real” experiences of “real” African Americans and disallows the positive images that might redress the media’s excesses. Thus, at the Museum of African American Art, one is inundated with images of black men nurturing their babies; as musicians, reaching states of exaltation; as teachers; as brothers; as martyrs.

One is struck by the sincerity of these works of art--especially in an art world climate in which irony is the norm. The authenticity of Willie Middlebrook’s photo-collage of his young children is impossible to deny. So, too, is the affirmative nature of Cedric Adams’ drawings of three stages in the life of a father.

Yet, at the same time, it is difficult not to be skeptical about the political efficacy of endlessly reframing the everyday heroism of the African American male. Such a strategy is problematic not least because it risks oversimplifying the tangled realities the African American male must confront.

Take Richard Wyatt’s painting of a middle-class black man. Titled “Endangered Species,” it wants to suggest that within contemporary media culture, the image of an African American male who is not a gangbanger or a crack user is “endangered.” Yet the painting--at least in this context--fails to acknowledge the prevalence of black-on-black crime. Along with the insidious cultural, economic and political realities, it is other black males who threaten to transform this figure from Everyman into victim.

At the William Grant Still Arts Center are two different role models for the African American male struggling against compulsory victimhood. Here, memorabilia relating to the life and work of the remarkable Paul Robeson is juxtaposed with documents relating to the history of the Black Panthers. These include vintage “By Any Means Necessary” posters, Angela Davis’ 1970 “Wanted” poster, and first editions by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton.

The work of Emory Douglas, the Panthers’ minister of culture, is especially fascinating, although its didacticism (at least in retrospect) is over-the-top. Douglas joined the party in 1966 and began designing its weekly journal, illustrating it with his own brand of agitprop. His collage aesthetic--melding archival photographs, appropriated texts and original drawings--recalls the work of German artist John Heartfield, although it lacks the latter’s sarcastic wit and dazzling sleight-of-hand.

One of Douglas’ obvious mandates was to soften the popular perception of the Panthers with sentimental renditions of their food and education programs. Yet even he falls prey to the seductions of their image--black leather jackets, dark glasses and protuberant guns. This raises the issue of the black male body--as threat and as fetish--that the “Black Male” show is at pains to deconstruct.

This body is also the focus of many of the photographs at the Watts Towers Art Center--and interestingly enough here, there are significant areas of overlap. Aaron Birt’s soft-focus nudes pasteurize homo-eroticism such that it is almost unrecognizable. And yet it is present--if lacking the wild and woolly frisson of Ashton Harris’ work in “Black Male.” Here, as compulsory heterosexuality begins to detach itself from concepts of black masculinity, the diversity of African American experience is acknowledged.

Calvin Hicks’ heavily aestheticized images of black men owe a significant debt to another “Black Male” artist--Robert Mapplethorpe. So, too, do Len Wilkerson’s photographs of a black man tied up with white rope. Here, however, the minimal aesthetic overrides the sexual content; like Ashton Harris, Wilkerson has found a way around Mapplethorpe’s idealizing tendencies.

If everyone has something to say about Mapplethorpe, Roland Charles’ gloss is the most biting. His image of a black man’s body, clad in a suit and cropped between waist and thigh, conjures a similar photograph by Mapplethorpe. Yet whereas Mapplethorpe bares his subject’s penis to suggest the black male’s “uncontainable” sexuality, Charles focuses on his subject’s hands, which are clenched and ready. Here is at least one image that encapsulates the African American male’s power, beauty, pride, wit and--most clearly--his exhaustion with those recalcitrant stereotypes that this important series of shows seeks with such hope to undermine.

* “African American Representations of Masculinity,” at the William Grant Still Art Center, 2520 South West View St., (213) 734-1164, through May 31. Open daily; the Museum of African American Art, 4005 Crenshaw Blvd., Robinson-May, Third Floor, (213) 298-7541, through June 3. Closed Sunday; and the Watts Towers Art Center, 1727 E. 107th St., (213) 847-4646, through June 17. Open Saturday and Sunday.