Black Light and Enlightenment: Fred Wilson’s No Way But This by Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D.
Shakespeare’s tragic drama Othello, set in Venice in the sixteenth to Blackness. At the same time Wilson, a consummate wordsmith, century, is one of the few major works of European literature to depict specifies the sculpture as a memorial by placing it in the art historical a Black man with nuance and ambiguity. In fact, accomplished and lineage of a memento mori, the trope of northern European painting worldly Black men like Othello, whom Shakespeare casts as general that reminded the viewer of the inevitability of death through in the Venetian army married to a European noblewoman, were a such symbols as a skull, dying flowers or an hourglass. Wilson significant presence in Venice and other European cities before and substitutes the morbid Latin expression (literally, remember that during the Renaissance. In the centuries that followed, however, you will die) with the gentler chandelier mori, his title drawing out the presence of Africans in Europe was often dropped from the the double meaning of mori as “death’ and “Black”. Additionally, historical record. the nomenclature of chandelier, which is a word coined in France in When American artist Fred Wilson was chosen to represent the eighteenth century, retrieves a long and specifically European the United States at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 he turned to association between light, knowledge and whiteness exemplified Othello, using Renaissance literature and painting to research what in the ideals and imagery of the Siècle des Lumières, that is, the turned out to be a robust—but largely erased—history of Africans in Enlightenment. 3 Venice, a storied juncture between east and west where for centuries In No Way But This, Wilson uses glass, a fragile yet incredibly a cosmopolitan and racially diverse culture thrived. As a memorial durable material long associated in the Western tradition with gesture to these Black communities, Wilson light and transparency, as the means to collaborated with glassmakers on the In No Way But This, Wilson uses interrogate the metaphor of light as truth, Venetian island of Murano to produce one of alongside the harmful obverse symbolism it glass, a fragile yet incredibly the island’s signature, baroque Ca’Rezzonico depends on: darkness as duplicity and death. chandeliers. The Redwood’s chandelier No durable material long associated These metaphors, the enduring legacy of Way But This (fig. 1) is titled after Othello’s in the Western tradition with light the Judeo-Christian tradition, continued to very last line in the play when, having and transparency, as the means to dominate eighteenth-century New England, stabbed himself, he declares: “No way but interrogate the metaphor of light which modeled itself on European culture. this/ Killing myself, To die upon a kiss.” The as truth, alongside the harmful Note how the two institutions of learning quote Wilson selected encapsulates Othello’s that preceded the Redwood in the triad of obverse symbolism it depends on: desperate sense of entrapment, both by Colonial learning both seized upon these the events which provoked his murder of darkness as duplicity and death. ideas. Harvard claimed as its motto the Desdemona and by a world circumscribed snappy “Lux (Light),” and Yale followed by rigid hierarchies in which being Black was as precarious as it with the clarificatory addition “Lux et Veritas” (Light and Truth). is today.1 Moreover, in the carceral state of the present Othello’s Wilson’s No Way But This challenges these powerful visual and words, and the condition of being ensnared or confined, resonate epistemological campaigns by creating an object of black light: a beyond Shakespeare’s text, portending histories of Black people in gorgeously ornate and luxurious artwork that celebrates opacity and the centuries that followed. tenebrous reflection. In this way, the artist retools the longstanding Wilson titled his first chandelier, the one exhibited as the equation of light with whiteness and truth, and along with it, the centerpiece of the U.S. Pavilion in Venice Chandelier Mori: Speak arbitrary and unwarranted linkage of Blackness with falsehood. of Me as I Am. As in the Redwood version, the latter part of this The Redwood, chartered in 1747, is America’s Enlightenment title is drawn from Othello’s final speech, where the dying man institution par excellence: it is the sole secular cultural institution in appeals for truth and fair representation.2 Through this signal quote, this country with an unsevered link between the eighteenth century the artist highlighted Othello’s terminal request to be portrayed and the present. As such, given this extraordinary but complicated as he was, neither heroically burnished nor maliciously falsified; history, the Redwood Contemporary Art Initiative (RCAI) seeks nor, presumably, simply deleted. In concert with this notion, the to explore the double history of the Enlightenment, that is, the monumental chandelier of black glass—an unprecedented color way in which the most laudable ideals of democracy and liberty cofor a Ca’Rezzonico light fixture—works to “bring to light” buried existed with—or, more cynically, were a rhetoric aimed at diverting histories of Blackness in Venice. The work’s subtitle, Chandelier attention from—the brutal material realities of the slave trade and Mori, referring to how in Renaissance Venice Africans were called abject unfreedom. Rhode Island occupied a central place in this “mori” meaning “dark” in Italian, emphasizes the work as a homage history, and the Redwood was founded with funds donated by a 10 etc. S u m m er 2 02 3