Cornell West had a phrase that I
was really struck by when I first read it. He said, "there are things that you
cannot not know."
When it comes to
history, and in particular to the history of African-Americans,
or Africans in America, there are things that you cannot not know.
Really in order to have a complete understanding of
where you are situated in the present moment
you have to locate yourself in relationship to some parts of
history. That's a lot of what this picture
is kind of about.
If you came to my house and looked through my
library, you would see, my wife and I
have a huge concentration of books that are on African history, African-American
history, American history,
African culture. All of those different aspects of
the history of black people from around the world.
If you look through the titles of the books, you'll see that the range of
subjects that they cover relative to black
history, culture, and also the kinds of stories that black people tell
is really broad. A part of the reason some of those titles are there is to
introduce some of those authors and some of those books to
the art viewing public. The
the painting is as much an invitation to also come to know
as it is demonstration above the kind of conflicts in knowledge that somebody who
has already arrived at this knowledge
might experience.
Our conception of what constitutes the best
that can be done in artwork still revolves around those
paintings that are the foundation the art history.
Those paintings all have a European origin. Our concept of
what's beautiful and what's important
operates within that realm, as well. For me as an
African American or a black person going to the museum
and looking at those works even though I like a lot of things
I might be looking at, there really is a limit to your ability to appreciate
things that don't include you as a fundamental part of their
value system. For me the only way to really come to terms with that is to
introduce images that contain black figure. Not black
figures they were marginal in terms of their position in the narrative, but central to
the narrative. I committed myself to only making
a black figures in my paintings because there are not enough
paintings in museums, anywhere, really
that have black figures as the central subject of
those pictures. One of the devices artists use
to encourage people to think again about the importance of a thing
is to change the scale of the object.
If you have things that we're used to seeing in a really small format
if you double that size or increase it exponentially, then
all the sudden it assumes a lot more importance than it would have if it
remained at the scale that we commonly experience those things at.
I did make the frame.
It's the way of kind of locating it amongst
the kinda common popular vernacular
approach. It seems like something that some more familiar
to people who often think of
museums and art works as really really distant
from their experiences. If you
come up to the thing that has got this really ornate gold frame and
you look at the picture inside and you don't like it,
then that becomes that thing where people say, well I just must not be smart enough.
Those people don't come back to the museum, more times than not.
A part of what I was trying to do was to create
a garmet that didn't have a place in time.
That couldn't be located as I kind of 70s fashion, or 80s fashion,
or 50s fasion. Because there's nothing like that that has ever existed.
It becomes a curious artifact of the picture. It's sort of
ambivalent zone too, so you can't quite place it. You don't quite know what it is.
It's odd, and it's sort of intriguing in a way. So that's a part of
what I was trying to do. This is early on in the process. I had never really sown
a thing before in my life.
I wanted to try to convey
or at least give people access to, was a certain level of ambivalence.
In what the character or the figure was thinking
after having read through and gone through some of those books.
The thought balloons there
and the phrase, sob sob,
Yes, it's on the one hand
a kind of sad,
sad recognition
of some so painful insight, maybe. But on the other side,
of it, it's a fairly powerful
rebuke of
some of the things you might have come to learn in history.
I think that ambivalence that place in between where you have both,
where you experience both a certain sadness and also a certain kind of
anger
about the things that you've discovered. This is really
a part or what the pictures is about. Then the question
becomes after you began to know those things that one cannot not know
then what do you do with that information? What do you do with it? what do
you do about it?
The most important achievement I can make
on the one hand, is first have this work
have arrived at the Smithsonian. The fact that it's here
is a great achievement. Anybody who walks through the building can look at it or
not look at it but if it wasn't there, then they
wouldn't have that option. and then by the extension
from there it becomes as much a part of the narrative what has value in art
history
as anything that had already been there. Those two things
are more important for me then anything else that accompanies
what people call success
in the art world, that matters the most.
When I hear from some
young person that they saw a picture of mine, and that it had an impact on them.
I feel that well, I guess it's a good day
and it's all been worthwhile.