13

yourself in performance in ways so that you
are at one with a certain flow of things. By
"one" I do not mean any romantic kind of
unity between subject and object or pantheistic
unification with nature, but at one with
the craft and task at hand. It is also to risk
something. Baraka has spoken of the African,
deification of accident, by which he
indicated the acknowledgement of risk and
contingency: to be able to walk a tightrope,
to be able to do the dangerous and to do it
well. But it is a form of risk-ridden execution
which is self-imposed.
AS: Among the various black modes of
cultural expression, pictorial art has not
been much in evidence. The black middle
class seems uninterested and so does the
underclass: art as a practice is esoteric and
largely without rewards.
CW: The access to the kinds of education
and subcultural circles is much less available
to potential black artists. It is not so
much that the avant-garde world is racist
but that it is too far removed from what
black artists would be exposed or even
open to. You are talking about extreme
marginality for the few blacks involved.
AS: Beyond impediments of entry, is there
not also some indigenous cultural element
at work here? There are after all many
black writers and dancers.
CW: The strong, puritanical Protestantism
of black religion has not been conducive to
the production of pictures. For the same
reason, there is a great belief in the power of
the word, in literate acumen. Painters, consequently,
have no status in the black
community and writers do. In fact, writers
are sometimes given too much status and
become "spokesmen" for the race. Yet
there is an openness, diversity, multiplicity
of artistic sensibility when developed and
cultivated in the black community. Realist
modes of representation are for example
not inherently linked to Afro-American
culture.
AS: It is a cliche to say that we live in a
society of images, but we obviously do.
Blacks watch more television than the
average. Do they appropriate these images
differently?
CW: There is an element of scrutiny
involved. The images have been so pervasively
negative, so degrading and devaluing
of black people--especially of black women
--that the process has always been one
tied to some scepticism and suspicion.
AS: Images are seen through a sceptical
racial grid?
CW: A racial grid as transmitted from one
generation to the next. This does not mean
it is always critical. Think for example of all
the Italian pictures of Jesus that hang in
black churches at this very moment, pictures
of Michelangelo's uncles when the
man was actually a dark Palestinian Jew.
Suck images are widely accepted. But that
particular one is, of course, different
because it is sacred and therefore much
more difficult to question. There is a much
more critical attitude towards television.
With the exception of the new phenomenon
of the Cosby Show, black fold are
still usually depicted there as buffoons,
black women as silly.
AS: Images of blacks are sometimes produced
by blacks as in the case of a lot of
music videos. Those I have watched tend
either to be sentimental ones about people
yearning for the Right One or highly
charged ones featuring minutely choreographed
movement.
CW: You also find a lot of conspicuous
consumption: a lot of very expensive cars,
and furs, and suits and so forth. The American
dream of wealth and prosperity
remains a powerful carrot because television
producers know the reality that the
black audience cannot not know. Another
big problem is the relation between black
men and women. Different kinds of
women are projected as objects of desire
and quest, but they are either downright
white women, or blacks who look entirely
white, or very lightskinned black women.
Rarely do you find any longing for the
really dark woman. And when a black
woman is the star, she is usually yearning
for a black man who is light--never a white
man, but a black man who is light.
AS: Black culture is of course as sexist as
the rest.
CW: In a different way. The pressure on
blacks as a people has forced the black man
to be closer to the black women in some
sense, even though the relation is often
internally mediated by violence. They are
in the same boat, even as they are at each
other's throat.
AS: There has been an extreme destruction
of the family within the black underclass.
Aside from the obvious causes, why is this?
CW: Aside from the changes is society as a
whole, developments like hedonistic consumerism
and the constant need of stimulation
of the body which make any qualitative
human relationships hard to maintain,
it is a question of a breakdown in cultural
resources, what Raymond Williams calls
structures of meaning. It is the imposing of
closure on the human organism, intentionally,
by that organism itself. This is what I
mean by "walking nihilism". Except for the
church, there is no longer any potent tradition
on which one can fall back in dealing
with hopelessness and meaninglesness.
There used to be a set of stories which could
convince people that their absurd situation
was one worth coping with, but the passivity
is now overwhelming. Drug addiction is
only one manifestation of this: to live a life
of living death, of slower death, rather than
killing yourself immediately. I just spoke at
a high school in one of the worst parts of
Brooklyn, and the figures were staggering:
almost thirty per cent attempted suicide,
seventy per cent deeply linked to drugs.
This kind of nihilism is not cute. We are not
dancing on Nietzsche's texts here and talking
about nihilism, we are in a nihilism that
is lived. We are talking about real obstacles
to the sustaining of a people.
AS: Which is not quite how Nietzschean
nihilism is normally conceived.
CW: There are a variety of nihilisms in
Nietzsche, and this is not so much one
where meaning is elusive, certainly not one
with a surplus of meaning. What we have,
on the contrary, is not at all elusive; meaninglessness,
a meaningless so well understood
that it can result in the taking of one's
own life.

[Advertisement for Marian Goodman Gallery]

FlashArt 55