SUBJECTIVITY FOR THE SUBJECTED

A peek into the inner psyche of the artist reveals a jumbled menagerie of identities. Part shaman and hustler, part visionary and miscreant. For the artist that actually wants to make a living, the persona soon becomes one of a showman and used car salesman. In the modern age, the artist must maintain more knowledge of SEOs, algorithm metrics and KPIs than a junior level marketer. But this stone-eyed pursuit of commerce is to be frank, part and parcel when it comes to art. The ever-rolling churn of capitalism has only heightened this phenomenon.  The inward gaze of the entire process of creation has always emitted the slight stench of self-absorption. The Creator gazing fondly at their mirrored Creation, a fantasy seducing the dreamer. Egocentric? Perhaps. In the case of the artist that mines their own identity, the evacuation feels vulnerable, almost laudable. Who else can speak the truths of a community than one of their very own? For cultural theorist Stuart Hall the question of cultural identity was complicated. “Perhaps, instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished historical fact, ...we should think, instead, of identity as 'production', which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. But this view problematizes the very authority and authenticity to the term, 'cultural identity’.” 

To tie identity with art creation is dangerous because to create means to both consume and be consumed. The role of an artist in any marginalized community becomes a sort of pallbearer to the death of their own culture. We serve our people’s traumas and joys to the general public on a platter, watch as our pain satiates the capricious appetite of colonialism.

In bell hooks’ 1993 article for Art in America she analyzed the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Stating that his work “hinges on the politics of dehumanization.” His “sacrifice” causes him to “become both native and nonnative at the same time, to assume the blackness defined by the white imagination.”

 Du Bois’ prophetic vision of double consciousness conjured the phantom white gaze, a billowing smoke that chokes the life out of every word, every image the Black artist creates. Its grasp poisons the mind of both audience and artist, causing us to run, eyes swelling, for refuge. For Black artists this refuge is found within cookie cutter archetypes, the type of Black characters that you can take home to mama.

Black mediocrity that neither turns the stomach nor satisfies our hunger for Black Truth. These narrow confinements reduce the Black artist to caricature, our work is flattened to the whims of whatever white society deems as “appropriate”. On the subject author Toni Morrison spoke of this as a “self-censorship” for Black artists that didn’t speak directly to a Black audience. Instead, this “your best foot forward” style of art was only meant for one audience: a non-black one.

For Black artists stuck in the quagmire of wanting to create work exclusively for Black audiences, what is the solution? A necessary first step is the alteration of our view on Blackness. For sociologist Sylvia Winters, the decline of the Black Arts Movement was in part lead by the inability to “revalorize blackness” as the inverse of the negative stereotype of Blackness created by Western forces. According to Afro-pessimists, the “irreconciled distinction between Blackness and humans” is the crux of civil society’s blueprint of humanity. 

For Afro-surrealists, this tension between humanity and Blackness is the more ‘real’ version of the Black experience. Writer Irenosen Okojie says “Afro-surrealism, which couples the bizarre with ideas of black identity and power, allows for more expansive explorations of blackness. If blackness shrinks or feels limited under the crushing, often insidiously damaging weight of western systems of oppression, specifically the endemic tolls of structural racism, then the extraordinary provides space to construct new realities and absurdist visions that reconfigure what blackness as an aesthetic can be.”

Black southern gothic is also another genre that combines the macabre with the mystic. As a Black southerner, what other genre can accurately tell the horrors of the traumas afflicted upon Black people than the gothic? To give language to the trauma, to not “be submerged by a reality we can’t articulate” according to James Baldwin, we create art.  For Black artists we attempt to contort the Black experience to makes sense of the madness. The diversity when it comes to the aesthetics and politics of Black artists expose the plurality of Blackness, not the limitations. According to Hall: “There is, however, a related but different view of cultural identity, Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of 'becom-ing' as well as of 'being'. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. 

For the Black artist the subjective truths of the Black existence form an orchestral thunder that can unlock the lost insights from our collective past while enlightening us to the path for our liberated future.