Kehinde Wiley @ Conner Contemporary

Today I published a DCist review of the Kehinde Wiley show at Conner Contemporary. Check it out here.

Comments

[wwc]

Good review JT, and very similar to my take on his work, though I think you're too charitable - they aren't painted well at all....

[J.T. Kirkland]

W -

I couldn't go quite that far because I don't consider myself to be anything close to a painting technique expert. I don't THINK they are painted well but I don't know. Maybe he wanted to paint them poorly? I think a lot of painters would like to hide behind that excuse!

[Hans Heiner Buhr]

Dear Mr. Kirkland, can you put a link on my blog ? It is mainly about my own art, a German in the Caucasus. Best regards, I check your Blog every day. Hans

http://www.newimages.blogspot.com/

[wwc]

Have more courage JT - if you think they arent painted well, they aint. Does the clothing look like clothing? No. Do the faces seem alive? No. Does he not even bother to erase the guides he sets down from the projector? No.

A friend advanced the idea that they are half-ass painted on purpose. I say that's BS. He got into the ring with the Old Masters for conceptual reasons, but couldn't hold his own. He's really good at making images, but is still learning to make paintings. He's good at the game...

I've been meaning to review this over at drawer and will soon... though you beat me to the punch!

[wwc]

off-topic - but that German guy's blog rocks....

[Martin]

I just checked out the German blogger - he's good!

[James W. Bailey]

TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH KEHINDE WILEY

WARNING! THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SENSITIVE MATERIAL THAT SOME MAY FIND OFFENSIVE. YOU ARE ADVISED TO NOT READ THE TRANSCRIPT IF OPEN DISCOURSE AMONG AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN ARTIST AND THREE RACIST WHITE ART CRITICS ON THE SUBJECT OF HIPHOP CULTURE OFFENDS YOU.

The following is a transcript of an interview with artist Kehinde Wiley that was conducted in a Homicide Department Interrogation Room at the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. in early April of 2005. This interview was conducted by three avowed racist white art critics as part of a unique live simulcast that appeared on cable television, broadcast television, AM radio, satellite radio and on the Internet.

Late last year I was approached by respected African-American cultural critic Greg Tate (critic for the Village Voice) for the purpose of trying to arrange one of the first interviews of its kind. The proposition was that Mr. Tate and I would solicit the participation of African-American artist Kehinde Wiley and three virulently racist white art critics who review for alternative media for a frank and open interview with the artist on the subject of hiphop culture. Mr. Tate approached Mr. Wiley and secured his reluctant agreement after protracted negotiations with his attorney. Being that I’m white and from Mississippi, it was mutually decided among Mr. Tate, Mr. Wiley and myself that I would attempt to approach and engage the participation of the racist white art critics. Surprisingly to all of us, the art critics I solicited enthusiastically endorsed the negotiated framework for the interview.

Mr. Wiley agreed to be interviewed in advance of his opening for “White Paintings” at Conner Contemporary Art. The following art critics participated in the interview:

CON HAMMERSKIN: chief art critic for the Aryan Nation Socialist News Network.

JUKE L. JENKINS: featured art critic on the “Redneck Culture Power Hour”, hosted by NASCAR Online.

REVEREND JIMMY RAY JONES: art and literary critic and co-host of “Imperial Mystic Knights”, produced by TRIPLE-K Radio Network and syndicated through All White/All Right Satellite Communications.

The following ground rules for the interview were negotiated by Mr. Wiley’s attorney and accepted by the art critics:

All parties present during the interview agreed to be hand searched by both an African-American and a white uniformed police officer for weapons prior entering the interrogation room. Mr. Hammerskin, Mr. Jenkins, Reverend Jones, Mr. Wiley and two anonymous African-American Nation of Islam body guards chosen by Mr. Wiley and approved by The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan were the only parties allowed in the interrogation room during the interview.

Each art critic was allowed to ask Mr. Wiley one question with one follow-up question. Mr. Wiley agreed to answer all questions with either a “Yes”, “No” or “Pass” response.

All parties to the interview agreed to be respectful in their demeanor and to not personally address any other party with a derogatory term.

Mr. Taylor and I waited outside of the interrogation room during the course of the interview.

SPECIAL NOTE: Mr. Wiley, apparently impressed with the cultural dexterity of the art critics during the course of the interview, graciously consented to allowing the interview to continue beyond the stipulated one question and one follow-up question format.

By mutual agreement among the three art critics, Mr. Hammerskin started the interview:

CON HAMMERSKIN: Mr. Wiley, thank you for this opportunity to interview you as part of this unique simulcast. Needless to say, this is a cultural first for the many listeners of my program, as well as for the large audiences represented by Mr. Jenkins and Reverend Jones. All three of us are tremendously excited that you have agreed to this challenging interview. I also hope that your courage to speak with us will help to stimulate future provocative discussions that step out of the box of the conventional expectations from our respective audiences.

We are now winding down the anniversary of hiphop's 30th year of existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom and the like. As those digitized hiphop shout-outs get packed back into their binary folders, however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What the heck are we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that one is, mate. One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less, my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism. Hooray.

Given that what we call hiphop is now inseparable from what we call the hiphop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer, some say there's really nothing to celebrate about hiphop right now but the moneyshakers and the moneymakers—who got bank and who got more.

Do you agree?

KEHINDE WILEY: Yes.

CON HAMMERSKIN: Hard to argue with that line of thinking since, hell, globally speaking, hiphop is money at this point, a valued form of currency where brothers are offered stock options in exchange for letting some corporate entity stand next to their fire.

True hiphop headz tend to get mad when you don't separate so-called hiphop culture from the commercial rap industry, but at this stage of the game that's like trying to separate the culture of urban basketball from the NBA, the pro game from the players it puts on the floor.

Hiphop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. And have no doubt, before hiphop had a name it was a folk culture—literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South Bronx of the '80s, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz's photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment "Rapper's Delight" went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American entertainment-industry sideshow.

Do you agree?

KEHINDE WILEY: Yes.

JUKE L. JENKINS: First, let me also echo Mr. Hammerskin and say how much I appreciate being part of this unique cultural exchange. Many among my audience no doubt think that this type of interview could, and probably should, never take place. I think we will prove to many tonight why future interviews like this one must take place.

No doubt it transformed the entertainment industry, and all kinds of people's notions of entertainment, style, and politics in the process. So let's be real. If hiphop were only some static and rigid folk tradition preserved in amber, it would never have been such a site for radical change or corporate exploitation in the first place. This being America, where as my man A.J.'s basketball coach dad likes to say, "They don't pay niggas to sit on the bench," hiphop was never going to not go for the gold as more gold got laid out on the table for the goods that hiphop brought to the market. Problem today is that where hiphop was once a buyer's market in which we, the elite hiphop audience, decided what was street legit, it has now become a seller's market, in which what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the masses is whatever the boardroom approves.

The bitter trick is that hiphop, which may or may not include the NBA, is the face of Black America in the world today. It also still represents Black culture and Black creative license in unique ways to the global marketplace, no matter how commodified it becomes. No doubt, there's still more creative autonomy for Black artists and audiences in hiphop than in almost any other electronic mass-cultural medium we have. You for damn sure can't say that about radio, movies, or television. The fact that hiphop does connect so many Black folk worldwide, whatever one might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable to anyone coming from a Pan-African state of mind. Hiphop's ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide. This is why mainstream hiphop as a capitalist tool, as a market force isn't easily discounted: The dialogue it has already set in motion between Long Beach and Cape Town is a crucial one, whether Long Beach acknowledges it or not. What do we do with that information, that communication, that transatlantic mass-Black telepathic link? From the looks of things, we ain't about to do a goddamn thing other than send more CDs and T-shirts across the water.

Do you agree?

KEHINDE WILEY: Yes.

JUKE L. JENKINS: But the Negro art form we call hiphop wouldn't even exist if African Americans of whatever socioeconomic caste weren't still niggers and not just the more benign, congenial "niggas." By which I mean if we weren't all understood by the people who run this purple-mountain loony bin as both subhuman and superhuman, as sexy beasts on the order of King Kong. Or as George Clinton once observed, without the humps there ain't no getting over. Meaning that only Africans could have survived slavery in America, been branded lazy bums, and decided to overcompensate by turning every sporting contest that matters into a glorified battle royal.

Like King Kong had his island, we had the Bronx in the '70s, out of which came the only significant artistic movement of the 20th century produced by born-and-bred New Yorkers, rather than Southwestern transients or Jersey transplants. It's equally significant that hiphop came out of New York at the time it did, because hiphop is Black America's Ellis Island. It's our Delancey Street and our Fulton Fish Market and garment district and Hollywoodian ethnic enclave/empowerment zone that has served as a foothold for the poorest among us to get a grip on the land of the prosperous.

Only because this convergence of ex-slaves and ch-ching finally happened in the '80s because hey, African Americans weren't allowed to function in the real economic and educational system of these United States like first-generation immigrants until the 1980s—roughly four centuries after they first got here, 'case you forgot. Hiphoppers weren't the first generation who ever thought of just doing the damn thang entrepreneurially speaking, they were the first ones with legal remedies on the books when it came to getting a cut of the action. And the first generation for whom acquiring those legal remedies so they could just do the damn thang wasn't a priority requiring the energies of the race's best and brightest.

Do you agree?

KEHINDE WILEY: Yes.

REVEREND JIMMY RAY JONES: Mr. Wiley, I’m also very honored to be interviewing you along with my esteemed colleagues, Mr. Hammerskin and Mr. Jenkins. All of us are breaking cutting edge historic ground this evening. This is indeed a rare cultural moment in our country’s history.

If we woke up tomorrow and there was no hiphop on the radio or on television, if there was no money in hiphop, then we could see what kind of culture it was, because my bet is that hiphop as we know it would cease to exist, except as nostalgia. It might resurrect itself as a people's protest music if we were lucky, might actually once again reflect a disenchantment with, rather than a reinforcement of, the have and have-not status quo we cherish like breast milk here in the land of the status-fiending. But I won't be holding my breath waiting to see.

Because the moment hiphop disappeared from the air and marketplace might be the moment when we'd discover whether hiphop truly was a cultural force or a manufacturing plant, a way of being or a way of selling porn DVDs, Crunk juice, and S. Carter signature sneakers, blessed be the retired.

That might also be the moment at which poor Black communities began contesting the reality of their surroundings, their life opportunities. An interesting question arises: If enough folk from the 'hood get rich, does that suffice for all the rest who will die tryin'? And where does hiphop wealth leave the question of race politics? And racial identity?

Do you agree?

KEHINDE WILEY: Yes.

REVEREND JUKE L. JENKINS: Picking up where Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement left off, George Clinton realized that anything Black folk do could be abstracted and repackaged for capital gain. This has of late led to one mediocre comedy after another about Negroes frolicking at hair shows, funerals, family reunions, and backyard barbecues, but it has also given us Biz Markie and OutKast.

Oh, the selling power of the Black Vernacular. Ralph Ellison only hoped we'd translate it in such a way as to gain entry into the hallowed house of art. How could he know that Ralph Lauren and the House of Polo would one day pray to broker that vernacular's cool marketing prowess into a worldwide licensing deal for bedsheets writ large with Jay-Z's John Hancock? Or that the vernacular's seductive powers would drive Estée Lauder to propose a union with the House of P. Diddy? Or send Hewlett-Packard to come knocking under record exec Steve Stoute's shingle in search of a hiphop-legit cool marketer?

Do you agree?

KEHINDE WILEY: Yes. Please, gentlemen, let’s continue the interview. Mr. Hammerskin, the question is yours.

CON HAMMERSKIN: Thank you, Mr. Wiley. That’s very generous of you.

Hiphop's effervescent and novel place in the global economy is further proof of that good old Marxian axiom that under the abstracting powers of capitalism, "All that is solid melts into air" (or the Ethernet, as the case might be). So that hiphop floats through the virtual marketplace of branded icons as another consumable ghost, parasitically feeding off the host of the real world's people—urbanized and institutionalized—whom it will claim till its dying day to "represent." And since those people just might need nothing more from hiphop in their geopolitically circumscribed lives than the escapism, glamour, and voyeurism of hiphop, why would they ever chasten hiphop for not steady ringing the alarm about the African American community's AIDS crisis, or for romanticizing incarceration more than attacking the prison-industrial complex, or for throwing a lyrical bone at issues of intimacy or literacy or, heaven forbid, debt relief in Africa and the evils perpetuated by the World Bank and the IMF on the motherland?

Do you agree?

KEHINDE WILEY: Yes.

JUKE L. JENKINS: I also appreciate the opportunity to continue this important dialogue.

All of which is not to say "Vote or Die" wasn't a wonderful attempt to at least bring the phantasm of Black politics into the 24-hour nonstop booty, blunts, and bling frame that now has the hiphop industry on lock. Or to devalue by any degree Russell Simmons's valiant efforts to educate, agitate, and organize around the Rockefeller drug-sentencing laws. Because at heart, hiphop remains a radical, revolutionary enterprise for no other reason than its rendering people of African descent anything but invisible, forgettable, and dismissible in the consensual hallucination-simulacrum twilight zone of digitized mass distractions we call our lives in the matrixized, conservative-Christianized, Goebbelsized-by-Fox 21st century. And because, for the first time in our lives, race was nowhere to be found as a campaign issue in presidential politics and because hiphop is the only place we can see large numbers of Black people being anything other than sitcom window dressing, it maintains the potential to break out of the box at the flip of the next lyrical genius who can articulate her people's suffering with the right doses of rhythm and noise to reach the bourgeois and still rock the boulevard.

Call me an unreconstructed Pan-African cultural nationalist, African-fer-the-Africans-at-home-and-abroad-type rock and roll nigga and I won't be mad at ya: I remember the Afrocentric dream of hiphop's becoming an agent of social change rather than elevating a few ex-drug dealers' bank accounts. Against my better judgment, I still count myself among that faithful. To the extent that hiphop was a part of the great Black cultural nationalist reawakening of the 1980s and early '90s, it was because there was also an anti-apartheid struggle and anti-crack struggle, and Minister Louis Farrakhan and Reverend Jesse Jackson were at the height of their rhetorical powers, recruitment ambitions, and media access, and a generation of Ivy League Black Public Intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic had come to the fore to raise the philosophical stakes in African American debate, and speaking locally, there were protests organized around the police/White Citizens Council lynchings of Bumpurs, Griffiths, Hawkins, Diallo, Dorismond, etc. etc. etc. Point being that hiphop wasn't born in a vacuum but as part of a political dynamo that seems to have been largely dissipated by the time we arrived at the Million Man March, best described by one friend as the largest gathering in history of a people come to protest themselves, given its bizarre theme of atonement in the face of the goddamn White House.

Do you agree?

KEHINDE WILEY: Yes.

REVEREND JIMMY RAY JONES: I’m very grateful to you, Mr. Wiley, for entertaining our additional questions.

The problem with a politics that theoretically stops thinking at the limit of civil rights reform and appeals to white guilt and Black consciousness was utterly revealed at that moment—a point underscored by the fact that the two most charged and memorable Black political events of the 1990s were the MMM and the hollow victory of the O.J. trial. Meaning, OK, a page had been turned in the book of African American economic and political life—clearly because we showed up in Washington en masse demanding absolutely nothing but atonement for our sins—and we did victory dances when a doofus ex-athlete turned Hertz spokesmodel bought his way out of lethal injection. Put another way, hiphop sucks because modern Black populist politics sucks. Ishmael Reed has a poem that goes: "I am outside of history . . . it looks hungry . . . I am inside of history it's hungrier than I thot." The problem with progressive Black political organizing isn't hiphop but that the No. 1 issue on the table needs to be poverty, and nobody knows how to make poverty sexy. Real poverty, that is, as opposed to studio-gangsta poverty, newly-inked-MC-with-a-story-to-sell poverty.

You could argue that we're past the days of needing a Black agenda. But only if you could argue that we're past the days of there being poor Black people and Driving While Black and structural, institutionalized poverty. And those who argue that we don't need leaders must mean Bush is their leader too, since there are no people on the face of this earth who aren't being led by some of their own to hell or high water. People who say that mean this: Who needs leadership when you've got 24-hour cable and PlayStations. And perhaps they're partly right, since what people can name and claim their own leaders when they don't have their own nation-state? And maybe in a virtual America like the one we inhabit today, the only Black culture that matters is the one that can be downloaded and perhaps needs only business leaders at that. Certainly it's easier to speak of hiphop hoop dreams than of structural racism and poverty, because for hiphop America to not just desire wealth but demand power with a capital P would require thinking way outside the idiot box.

Do you agree?

KEHINDE WILEY: Yes. Mr. Hammerskin, I’ll take one more from you.

CON HAMMERSKIN: I’m honored, sir.

Consider, if you will, this "as above, so below" doomsday scenario: Twenty years from now we'll be able to tell our grandchildren and great-grandchildren how we witnessed cultural genocide: the systematic destruction of a people's folkways.

We'll tell them how fools thought they were celebrating the 30th anniversary of hiphop the year Bush came back with a gangbang, when they were really presiding over a funeral. We'll tell them how once upon a time there was this marvelous art form where the Negro could finally say in public whatever was on his or her mind in rhyme and how the Negro hiphop artist, staring down minimum wage slavery, Iraq, or the freedom of the incarcerated chose to take his emancipated motor mouth and stuck it up a stripper's ass because it turned out there really was gold in them thar hills.

Do you agree?

KEHINDE WILEY: Yes. Gentlemen, do any of you have any questions that specifically address my work in my upcoming exhibition, “White Paintings”?

CON HAMMERSKIN: No.

JUKE L. JENKINS: No.

REVEREND JIMMY RAY JONES: No.

KEHINDE WILEY: Then I thank all three of you for your courtesy and I think we’re finished. My bodyguards and I bid you good evening and farewell.

BODY GUARD #1: All three of you dudes need to sit back down right now and hold up. Mr. Wiley exits the room first. My partner will escort him to his automobile and page me when they’re in the car with the doors locked and have pulled away from the police station. You can leave the room when I get the word that they have cleared the premises.

Understood?

ALL: Yes.

[J.T. Kirkland]

3,500 words! Where does he find the time???

Great story, James! Thanks for posting it. I only hope that people will take the time to read it...

[James W. Bailey]

J.T.,

I honestly can't take all the credit. There's a twist to this piece. I'm anxious to see if anyone figures it out. I also want to congratulate you on reviewing Wiley's show. There's a spirited debate going on over at DCist. I wanted to lay my cards on the table here though.

James

P.S. I went back by the UOP yesterday to see your work again. My review of "Studies in Organic Minimalism" is up to 4,200 words - I added 200 more words yesterday! Oh, Dear...

As a teaser, I'll let all know that this review of your work contains what I believe to be a first in the world of art reviews. I hope to have it in print(deeply edited, unfortunately) and/or online by the end of the first week of June. The review has the potential to make one or both of us Rock Stars - you may want to arrange an public relations agent before fame/infamy strikes. I've already got mine lined up! Forget Gopnik, man, I'm going after Kimmelman next!