Michael Williams _WIL13401365 MAFA PT_20/07/15 Critical Research Paper_Chelsea UAL
“Investigating methods of narrative in Black sculptural artists.”
01_Title 02_Table of Contents 03_Table of Images 04 - 34_Critical Research Paper 35 -36_Citations 37 - 41_Bibliography
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03_Table of Images_ [fig 01.] Kara Walker ‘A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.’ courtesy of Creative Time, New York. (Jason Wyche) [fig 02.] Kara Walker 'A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby' (Sara Krulwich/ The New York Times) [fig 03.] Kara Walker ‘A Subtlety,’ (courtesy of Creative Time) [fig 04.] Kara Walker ‘A Subtlety,’ (Andrew Burton/Getty Images) [fig 05.] Kara Walker ‘A Subtlety,’ (courtesy lainad/Laina Dawes) [fig 06.] Kara Walker 'A Subtlety,' Brooklyn, New York, 2014. (courtesy Eric Konon) [fig 07.] Kara Walker ‘A Subtlety,’ (courtesy wendieatsandreads) [fig 08.] Kara Walker ‘A Subtlety,’ (courtesy of nealmaffei/Instagram) [fig 09.] Kara Walker ‘A Subtlety,’ (courtesy Greg Tate/Facebook) [fig 010.] Michael Williams ‘Weaponized Concrete’ development work (M.Williams) [fig 011.] Michael Williams ‘Weaponized Concrete’ development work (M.Williams) [fig 12.] El Anatsui ‘TSIATSIA - searching for connection’ (2013, Royal Academy) [fig 13.] El Anatsui ‘detail’ (January 2013, Libby Kirwin ‘Love Where You Live’ [fig 14.] El Anatsui 'Zebra Crossing' (October Gallery) [fig 15.] Risen wreck of the Costa Concordia (Wikimedia/Rvongher) [fig 16.] David Hammon 'In The Hood' (1993 Connie and Jack Tilton, NY) [fig 17.] Trayvon Martin’s hoodie shown as a piece of evidence by the prosecution at George Zimmerman’s trial 2013 ( Jacob Langston-Pool/Getty Images) [fig 18.] Nick Cave 'Soundsuit', Mixed Media, 100 x 25 x 14 inches (Meet Me at the Center of the Earth. 2007) [fig 19.] Nick Cave 'Soundsuit', Mixed Media (Meet Me at the Center of the Earth. 2007) [fig 20.] 'Yaie Masquerade', Bansie Village, Burkina Faso, (Phyllis Galembo 2006) [fig 21.] Man, Asaro River Valley, New Guinea (National Geographic July 1969) [fig 22.] Kanye West in Maison Martin-Margiela Spring 2013 (Tommy-Ton) [fig 23.] Lady Gaga in Charlie Le Mindu Fall/Winter 2013 (Getty Images) [fig 24.] Dogon mask, Mali, C19th (National Museum of African Art) [fig 25.] Tom Price 'Network' 2012 (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, puffin11k) [fig 26.] Tom Price 'Network' 2012 (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Artribune) [fig 27.] Nkonde. Lower Zaire. Yombe (Musee Barbier-Mueller, Geneva.) [fig 28.] Figure, British Museum (M.Williams 2013) [fig 29.] Michael Williams ‘Stay Woke’, Mask I, still from short film 2015 (M.Williams) [fig 30.] Michael Williams ‘Stay Woke’, still from short film 2015 (M.Williams)
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“Investigating methods of narrative in Black sculptural artists.�
Kara Walker's sculptural installation inhabits an empty, soon to be demolished, Brooklyn sugar factory dating back to 1856. As an integral part of this site-specific work you could say the building is a 'ready made', it comes drenched in a history that the work has as its foundation. The space packs a historical and sensory payload, the sugar industry rose on the consumption of black slaves, the warehouse still drips with decaying molasses and pungent age old rotting sugar fills the air. Walker's work involves a giant 75ft sculpture of a sphinx, the face has the stylized African features of the 'mammie' stereotype of 50's America, she is made of sparkling white sugar. Attendant to this are several smaller works (which function as part of the whole) small figures of baby black boys and girls working in the factory, again cartoonish, they are made of black translucent candy. The piece for me holds aloft a complex nuanced narrative, weaving American history with gender politics, racial satire and representation, with a clever mastering of materiality as part of the artist's comment on the hollow celebration unfolding around you (the work was commissioned by the factory owner Domino's). So I'm trying to work out the mechanics, how the artist harnesses these threads, how well the piece explores them, how much is suggestion versus explicit depiction.
A brief note on the artist, Walker's body of work conjures the horrors of slavery in an antebellum era American south, using the playful whimsy of children's illustrations and characters, her most noted series utilizes 2D silhouettes either as a frieze or rudimentary animation, her narratives have always looked at American history and female relationships to power.
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A bold commission for the Domino Sugar Company, to choose Walker to commemorate their building's demolition?
To start with Walker takes the sugar industry’s slave trade roots as her jumping off point, a distinctly opposite reality to the aspirational ideas of purity and innocence the product was historically sold under. The building rose to power on the backs of men, women and children kept in servitude through violence, Walker wants to see them usher out its demise. In contemplating its life-span the artist chooses or 'inherits' a deep historical narrative which solidifies the work's position, opening her aesthetic choices to more surreal possibilities.
On a sensory level the warehouse is caked in molasses and decaying sugar, leftovers from a production process long since ended, as such the inside is dark black, the air hangs heavy with a rotten mechanical sweetness. This presence of decay is what allows Walker's work to blossom in its pristine whiteness, the bold heroism of the sphinx defies the industrial (moral?) rot around her, the Egyptian reference tying it to a proud African past while also being caged, enslaved in the 'new world' of the building. But the almost cartoonish face mocks the serenity, I'm not sure I agree with this choice by the artist it seems too convenient a nod to the audience's sensibilities, a belittling gesture to make the implications of the piece more palatable. It veers into a Jeff Koons type clowning of commercial aesthetics, which has its place but I wonder if the work would be lessened by rendering her with a more unflinching observational eye.
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The conceit however does find a counterpoint at the rear of the sphinx where her vagina is on display in an unapologetic, goading yet benign way. Here I think the object's size comes into play, viewers can see her private parts without ‘her’ seeing them, it invites an interestingly uncomfortable position for the audience (that some have objected to, while others have overcome by taking a selfie next to it (fig.8+9). This provocation is part of Walker's language, her assertion of femininity, "well there's enough phallic symbols in the world already" she joked with Hilton Als at her recent Hammer Museum lecture (Hammer Conversations, 2012) and a willingness to play in the cesspool of historical racial representation without the need for permission or a reason to explain.
My question though remains, what is the subversive act here, is re-appropriation effective as a position? Doesn't regurgitating reinforce accepted narratives? Is it enough that an informed few will get its irony while most will lap up the familiar? In an age of problematic female representation (stand up internet darlings Kim Kardashian and Nicki Minaj) does the artist really swim in such different waters? Though in Walker's choice of the mythic sphinx figure we sexualise the work at our own subjective peril.
For me the key is the rest of the piece, the candy ‘worker children' dotted around the factory floor. Here the artist executes a powerful critique of the moral universe her story takes place in. At 6 feet high, these outsize infants are cast in dark translucent sugar like boiled sweets. This specific choice of fragile material (sugarwater resin) and duration (the show's 8 week run) is one of the cleverest decisions here.
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The show ran through a warm New York spring and these children's blackened bodies intentionally melt and bleed out onto the floor. Like Mark Quinn’s ‘Self’ (1989) in a power-cut, the robustly cheery models degenerate and fall apart, some melt from within, others slake off a thick skin, others fall and splinter, their animated toil is frantic and doomed, a hellish eagerness at the expense of their bodies, they serve and cower under a white master (the sphinx, who in a double-bind is racially 'black') she looks over their heads to anywhere but them. They are beautifully resonant, the disregard is heartbreaking, they are like a Disney movie of a lynching, charred victims of capitalism, wrenched apart despite their efforts. Strange Fruit.
The title is the other weapon of the artist seeking to inject narrative. A 'subtlety' dates back to the Middle Ages (Costello Jr, 2014) it was a sugar figurine served between courses, a candy shape depicting some totem of wealth. Sugar was at the time a product attainable only by the rich elite, it was a symbol of the host's wealth, allowing guests to both share in and reinforce his implied social status. The obvious understatement is Walker's first game (a giant 75ft sugar mammie sphinx complete with exposed vagina is anything but subtle), but it also asks us to reflect on power, who has it and the inverse relationship with its consequences (exacted here upon black Africans). The light touch in the naming of the piece is I feel one of its strongest components, it defers the glare of the object, and indicates to the audience to look across its flanks at the footnotes for real meaning. Its restraint and academic depth takes Walker away from the pop-art seduction of the physical work and pulls the audience back into history, so that we absorb the idea of consequence and the ruthless damage of a much-lauded industrial age.
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It’s a futile gesture, a poetic leap from the jaws of a trade that will continue to devour it, as it devours the building (being replacing by lucrative apartments). As I struggle with how to make sculpture that speaks as richly as the written word I find in Walker's piece an incredibly effective combination of methodologies. She has managed to harness diverse strategies into a concise but nuanced narrative position.
A bigger question with Walker however is do the works only resonate as they mirror the social construct we inhabit? Does 'A Subtlety' which appears to skewer race, actually reaffirm its constructs? The work as its own enemy, instead of condensing the social experience (historically speaking) of blackness in America into an instructive form, becomes condensing for who? and under what subconscious conditions?
Now this bind would be true of all art, if not human endeavour, no one creates in a bubble, "man is not simply a product of subjective circumstances." (Zizek, 2010). Commissioned works such as ‘A Subtlety,' do not happen out of time, is therefore the narrative that Walker is 'allowed' (commissioned) to tell actually a safe/sanitised version of the dominant one? To borrow from bell hooks a "White Supremacist Capitalist Patriachy - the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality." (hooks, 2014).
Walker through use of scale intentionally has the power position as white, massively dominating the tiny black slave children. Here's where it becomes precarious, she's factually accurate about power structures but is also by lavishly displaying them, reinforcing them. The audience see the familiar, feel reassured, a balance of power known, a racialised order to the universe that matches the same poisonous narrative Fox News
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seeped into them on the drive over, that the billboard on the way out will reaffirm and so on and so on.
So what is the 'job' of the black artist? Tricky waters to navigate. Accurately depict the status quo in bold terms but get misread by a broader audience who skip the irony? Or create a bold new language devoid of classifications that outstrips manmade (ie. 'racial') constrains? Hip-hop versus Jazz? and we all know how that one went! Art now more than ever is a marketplace, subject to the same whims of capitalism, branding, marketability as most any other commodity, galleries curators and writers are the gatekeepers to this kingdom, none exist out of time, they shape who succeeds but their judgement is governed by the same social conditions the world operates under.
Walker is smart, this would not be news to her, but the 'performance' of race as rewarded by the marketplace is as true for her as much as it is for 50 Cent. If the works deal with racial history, or what curator Thelma Golden calls 'the trauma narrative' of slavery (Golden, 1985) the danger is that in striving for accuracy you anchor in the present the worst of that damaged past.
The fault is not entirely that of the artist, hooks's use of the term 'white supremacy' is not a provocation, it describes white as a defended central position, as a positioned ‘normal’ (there is no term 'white art', or as journalist Gary Younge put it "There’s a reason why there’s not a mass movement with the hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter." (Younge, 2015). So the black artist has to A be aware of and B fight what Greg Tate calls 'The Burden' (Tate, 2003) a life pinned by the structures of dominance.
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Her choice was to chisel a stereotypically 'black' face onto this monolithic sugary whiteness, it is a hollow ownership, a pantomime face that seems to undermine any conviction to the sphinx's actual power. Again a historically accurate position, but regurgitated for an instagram generation? dangerous.
This idea of 'who is your audience' is a slippery proposition, the PhD student who will loving comb over your every subtle inflection? or a selfie stick owner? Walker speaks smartly to the former but wantonly to the latter. A discussion I had with Dr. Stephen Wilson regarding art as the 'materialization of our social relations' is an important question when looking at black art as a whole (or any grouping). How can we not be and speak as, products of our environment? Impossible really and when that social environment positions you as 'other' you are not as in control of your visual vocabulary, as the centre is held by whiteness, you are always speaking outside of this invisibly perceived 'norm' as 'other', assessed by its rules, and defined by its measure.
It’s the world we live in you might argue, too true, I just feel its important my work takes a position aware of these power structures and operates despite them, better yet uses their circuitry to power an unaffected communication of a/my truth. Zizek calls this space a "margin of freedom" (Zizek, 2013) the slim area outside our subjective circumstances where we can choose to see/handle/construct our response. It’s a hopeful and precious space for an artist to carve out and breathe in.
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My piece ‘Weaponized Concrete’ (fig. 10) is trying to grapple with these questions, this 'burden', finding "the divide between celebration and combat" (Powell, 1997) while harnessing some of the strategies learnt from the artists in this essay. In the work concrete casts of a male bust fracture with colour crystalizing out of their hollow interior spaces. Each is named after an endless list of recent black victims of white violence, from Trayvon Martin, to Mike Brown and Eric Garner, but also after the activists galvanized by these deaths into creating the #blacklivesmatter movement: DeRay Mckesson, Alicia Garza, Phillip Agnew etc. The eruption of material symbolises life, the bust is a black 'Everyman' (the fact it is Obama is intentional but obliterated, the roots of this current violence precedes him by some 400 years).
The title is a triggering term used by Zimmerman’s (the man who shot dead Trayvon Martin) attorney as an alleged cause of the murder. I wanted to audience to be positively triggered by their associations with the classical form of a bust. But they are fragile gestures of hope, indicators of life escaping, growing, like the acts themselves, ugly fractured tragic, but in this work refuting that blunt fact as an end. Like Walker I tread a thin line, you could argue the works are yet more images of broken black bodies? at that of our Black President, and here's the struggle. The facts I am trying to engage with are bloody and violent, somewhere in the work this truth has to be manifest, but I realize I veer into the territory I accuse Walker of, reinforcing by depiction. The social activists names are there to counter this danger, from the chrysalis of Obama’s tenure springs young direct action, digitally engaged, multiply lead, defiantly vocal. My narrative aim is one of hope.
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So if figurative work is so fraught with trapdoors for the ‘black’ artist, how might the abstract form be a way of sidestepping those pitfalls to engage in a more nuanced, opaque conversation? In Africa the idea of a 'black' artist is as ridiculous as someone being called a 'white artist' in the west. A Nigerian friend of mine said he didn’t know he was black until he came to Europe in his twenties. As a majority it is the norm. Race as we know is not a fact but a man made construct:
"We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people or anyone. This is not a hippy ideal, it’s a fact. There are genetic characteristics that associate with certain populations, but none of these is exclusive, nor correspond uniquely with any one group that might fit a racial epithet. Regional adaptations are real, but these tend to express difference within so-called races, not between them." (Rutherford, 2015) The Guardian/Nature
As a Ghanaian man El Anatsui doesn't make work from the projected space of how the west sees him. His vein of abstraction is unburdened by tropes. Instead he physically weaves his work from the industrial detritus of his country, much like African-American painter Mark Bradford the found object is the physical building block. His team sources scrap from the yards, streets and warehouses of west Africa, working under his direction the tiny pieces of junk metal are woven together to produce large-scale draped hangings. His light touch and complete ease with colossal scale is one of his strongest weapons. ‘TSIATSIA’ which covered Burlington House (fig. 12) couples an aesthetic swagger with an ideological cloaking device, masking this architectural glory of a colonial age with
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the litter of its former colony. This covert but transgressive sleight of hand is important to recognize. Context as with Walker’s ‘A Subtlety’ performing a vital role in the artist’s storytelling methodology.
Visually the works are a slippery proposition for one looking at narrative, but they have a latent power. The source material is the by-products of commercial excess, rusted beer caps in their 1000’s, they are the familiar, they speak in the global language of industrial waste, of capitalism, environmentalism, minimalism, working against our expectations of “African Art”. But zoom out, combined they become fish scales, interrupting their own decay to become shimmering skins of imperfection. Raised aloft their weight causes them to drape, triggering another aesthetic memory, the clothing on a marble statue, echoes of Klimt, classical forms sweeping and gathering in elegant flow, they have a biblical weight, the hem of if His garment. This shadow of figurative form is part of the work's arsenal, it tells of grace and power while the materiality presents other interpretations of these themes.
It is a challenge, a defiant gracious riposte to the west who farm out their manufacturing to the cheap labour and natural resources of developing economies, he returns this decay, baroque veils of dessicated refinement. Violently beautiful, metallic dinosaur skins, shanty-town solar panels, sci-fi but rudimentary. From a distance subtle and iridescent, up close raw wire and twisted metal compete in a fragile grapple, bottle cap logos broken and repeated flake paint and rust. Industrial in scale, they echo the local weaving traditions, a link to his heritage immune to the clumsy apparatus a western ‘black’ artist has to wade through. They are walls, chainmail, sails, camoflage, topographies, flags,
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they speak of motion, they speak as artefact, macro detail on a galactic scale, a fragment reclaimed. He invites us to a new Africa, using the landfill of these battered economies to weave forms of a regal beauty. They writhe and buckle like science fiction Kente cloth, the artist steers a clear line from his country's artistic heritage to tell a nuanced story of modernism, colonialism, environmental awareness and what Yale Professor Robert Farris Thompson calls the “indomitable drive of culture”. (Thompson, 2007)
Narrative as lineage, as a conduit to existing histories. This evasion isn’t political, the western associations with his skin colour is just not the lens through which El Anatsui makes his work. A position to envied. And though I’m deciding if abandoning race seems like the most radical proposition for an artist of colour to take, how do you communicate it isn’t there, it is an apparition? ignoring it isn’t a solution. So what can I learn from his position?
For one, first be an artist. Last weekend I saw this written on the wall of the Bilbao Guggenheim "I am not a black artist, I am an artist."- Jean-Michel Basquiat. Overthinking and playing to an audience are counterweights to pure expression. As examined above El Anatsui’s work has different narrative strands, riffs on meanings, flirts with how it is intended to be read but as non-figurative it escapes a weight of prejudice, crystalizing into a beautiful evocation of form that is the engine to its international success.
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Referring to his painting practice Kerry James Marshall calls it work with ‘a long reading time.’ (Marshall, 2012) ambiguous narratives that take reflection and repeated viewings to seep in and reveal themselves. I recently saw El Anatsui’s piece ‘Versatility’ at the Fowler Museum UCLA which then later jumped out at me when looking at this press clipping of a disaster (fig .15). The collapsing architecture of his work a perfect foil for the risen wreck. These themes of scale and quiet grandeur, of industry and decline is an inspiring narrative position for an artist of colour to hold. A feeding back of aesthetics into social context is I feel an important role of an artist's work.
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David Hammon’s 'In The Hood' was made 20 years before the #blacklivesmatter movement but it could not be more prescient. Shown here alongside Trayvon Martin’s bullet hole ridden hoodie framed in a glass case, though decades apart, the parallels are unmistakable.
Hammon's piece only illustrates how constant the violence against black lives has been in America since the country’s birth. The ripped hood hangs open, an empty vessel for the projections of fear generated by the object's social symbolism. Like a Nike-funded grim reaper it arrives latent with meaning, yet as a benign domestic object, opaque enough to hold a mirror up to its viewer, in its simplicity it says what you believe it should.
The artist’s main intervention is the tear, beheaded, disembodied, a simple but devastating act. Hidden wires hold it out in 3D space so it is 'worn' by a ghost, nothing, everyone. Its relatively easy read is deceptive, its resonance lies in its perfectly judged dance between a suggestive object and the politics that surround and inform it, sculptureas-performance (Leiris & Delange, 1968) reimagined for the 20th Century? Any attempts to impose race or gender slide off its back leaving the viewer holding those cards and the thoughts of who originally dealt them.
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African American artist Nick Cave's works contemporise a long-standing African tradition of sculpture-as-performance. His forms elaborate from the human body which becomes lost, indecipherable, explosive abstract forms jut and layer, distortions in scale and seething with texture, the forms vibrate with the unconventional. His works speak the narrative of lineage, from the Atiya of Nigeria, to the Egungun of Benin and the Gwarama of Burkina Faso (Galembo, 2010) the classical roots of his work can be seen across the continent (fig. 20).
What Cave does is successfully continue a lineage without falling into mimicry (a fine line artist’s ie. Zak Ove fall foul of). His work bridges a timeline from ancient Africa to the digital now (fig. 21-24). Narrative here loops back to that original intent, physical story, though less directly informative as his African forebears, Cave's works still tell us of the possibility of a reimagined universe outside of western norms, outlandish figures and forms, a non-western vocabulary of scale, ‘Dreamtime’ spirits, they have an entirely uncomfortable gravity.
Made as a response to the beating of Rodney King, Cave takes the site of a reimagined 'other' not as a projection screen for fears but as an invitation to extend the horizon, open the night, engage with a broader sense of self. They share DNA with the afrofuturist novels of Octavia Butler and Samuel R Delaney, 'black' narratives that couple the ancient to the sci-fi, loose of the weight of current social strategies.
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In my quest for narrative Tom Price has an advantage, figurative to my abstract, but I find important lessons in our shared mixed-race black British identity's and how this perspective informs and finds expression his work. I want to focus on 'Network' with its provocation of tradition practice subtly subverted by his contemporary voice. A 7ft bronze figure stands holding a mobile phone, a young man of African descent, he patiently stares at the phone's screen, waiting.
So how does it work and what does it communicate? It lures you in with convention, any large bronze instantly trips the switch of power, of respect, of seriousness. The language of the material has a historical weight, it is the palette of the war memorial, the public art shorthand for a social consensus of importance. We are at its mercy before we even know who he is. So Price (like Walker) taps in to a pre-existing narrative, using what would be baggage to serve his end. He then contradicts this knee-jerk reading by choosing a socially marginalized subject: the young black male. The figure's contemporary streetwear and trainers demarcate an economic class rarely immortalized in bronze. His gaze is not for us, with commanding patience he looks not to some heroic horizon but to the digital content on his phone.
The socially engineered depiction of the black man in this Trayvon Martin era is to say the least, poisonous. From rampant 'stop and search' discrimination to the media's fixed narrative of the thug hoodie, and the hypermasculine stereotype of the rapper (as funded and therefore constructed by its largely white audience) the black male body is almost unique in its rigorously defined and imposed reading (a social invention sociologist Collete Guillaumin describes as an "immediate given" (Guillaumin, 1995).
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These tropes ghost Price's work. His game as an artist is to weave the two strands into a third way, another thread, the associations the material and the subject bring to the work are carried by the audience themselves, rich cross-currents that bounce off each other setting us the challenge of what we want the piece to mean.
So what else can the sculptor do with his storytelling? In physical space the scale of the figure just exceeds life size, an important reinforcing of threat while offering us a reversed perspective of being forced to look up to the marginalized figure. Its dark metal gleams like skin but with a deadness inherent in the material, he is benign, he is safe to approach. However the artist punctures this quiet in a discreetly powerful way.
The focal point is the phone, a vessel for meaning, be it factual or emotional, the subject’s dependance on the screen links us to his intellect and/or heart, who is he waiting to hear from? what fact has he just learnt? what place has he gone to in his mind to leave his face with such reflection? This deflecting of our gaze off the black male body to the workings of his mind is a rare position to take, it quietly fights the narrative of the dominant culture, it invites us to understand the black youth as fully human, to look past the media coverage and see a man, introspective and present, he doesn't need us nor does he perform for us.
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Price offers us a description of contemporary black male identity from the inside out, an invitation to a new narrative. Less expansive in scope than Walker's poetic surrealism but in its context standing alongside the Henry Moore's in Yorkshire's Sculpture Park, no less an inviting a provocation to a story untold. It is this position as a black artist that I can apply to my practice, treading that fine line of representation and explanation.
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To come full circle we must engage with the foundation of narrative in black sculpture; classical African works. To encompass art practices that stretch to the dawn of mankind is here impossible, but here's an interesting distinction to the European 'white cube' model. In traditional African societies a sculpture is not displayed, it is performed (Leiris & Delange, 1968).
Sculptural works (historically speaking) from across the continent existed in a social context through the telling of histories, their 'purpose' was aesthetics at the service of a message, be it a belief, a totem figure, a moral compass, the scaffolding of a society. Classical traditions as wide ranging as the Dogon to the Afante (Laude, 1973) share this positioning of art in their societies. The sculpture would be worn or carried in a performance of a story to the community. Intertwined with, costume, dance, music the sculpture was a tool to communicate an idea, never to be put on a plinth in a white space with reverential hush.
Museums and collectors in a colonial rush have stripped these works of their context, new language has been created to describe or dismiss them, 'fetishes' being the most barbed, racist and dehumanising of them all. While much has already been written on African sculpture as the springboard for Picasso, Braque, etc. it is important not to let western terminology disconnect me from fully engaging with a rich artistic continuum laid down in these classical works. Connecting with my own African heritage this idea of my sense of narrative in sculpture surely stems from this place in history.
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Of specific interest is the body studded with nails, a recurring figure across the continent. What is most interesting though is that this artefact is actually a court of law (Thompson, 2007). When a crime was commited the community would come together pass judgement, at the verdict the plaintiff would drive a spike into this wooden figure as an acknowledgement of the passing of justice, to the lawyer each nail is a case history. At the end of their social life, the human form is almost entirely obliterated by these metal spikes. Now collected as artefacts, time and ageing has blackened them to a monotone rust, the beautiful symbolism of them as repositories of robust effective social harmony and vessels for a hundred narratives, lives and resolutions is to me what makes their evident aesthetic strength even more powerful.
This strategy of containing social histories informed the process of making 'Weaponized Concrete' (fig. 10+11). The almost weekly list of black people being killed in the US by police lately is to me sickening and terrifying. As Obama said about the racist murders in the AME church of 9 people “I refuse to act as if this is the new normal� (Obama, 2015). So their names, these people these lives, I wanted to say matter, they’re not just yesterday's headline, its not ok. Naming each cast after one of the dead is a simple gesture, but the cumulative weight of these works (I aim to make one every time these incidents happen) the weight of all those names, will for me like the nailed figure, mark their existence in time.
Regarding the African idea of 'performing a sculpture' I incorporated some of my earlier works into the film piece 'Stay Woke' (fig. 29+30) intercutting a masked bust with the internal thoughts of a character, the piece takes on a narrative life, it feels like a much
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richer way to experience the work than marooned in a gallery context. This dialogue between my research and practice, often reading more than making has been the key to my process at Chelsea and forms the foundation of my now ongoing studio and exhibition work.
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As explored above the terms ‘narrtive’ and ‘Black’ in my essay title are subjective, the artists and research here looks to circle their meanings, using their works as windows, vantage points on the idea of story or heritage. This ongoing investigation is the spine to my practice, as I walk the line of educated instinct other’s works act as sonar devices bouncing back affirmation of a path chosen, refracted echoes for sure but contextualizing my aims and dreams.
It comes down to the idea of the lens, what an audience receives from your work is too subjective to control but to remain cognizant of the range of differing “realities” is key for my work to sustain its own relevance. In my goal to make an inanimate object engage enough to effectively trigger a range of responses that make the viewer both author and vessel, my aim is to neither preach or console, but to find a way to work outside of conventional hierarchies, to choose another metric. To place stories from the marginalized in equal light of the sun.
_Michael Williams 20/07/15
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