Artist Noel W. Anderson explores black male identity
From this Friday through January 12, The Hunter Museum of American Art will host a profound critique of cultural images of black masculinity: a solo exhibition by artist Noel W. Anderson.
Anderson’s work is stark, intriguing, and profoundly moving. It’s also occasionally funny in a way that makes you look over your shoulder to see whether that laugh was inappropriate, a reaction he says is entirely what he’s looking for.
Anderson describes the “origin moment” of the exhibition’s title as a philosophical point in time in which blackness comes into existence through the dominant culture’s presupposition of white authority, and the urgent need to interrogate and deconstruct that moment.
“The exhibition is called Blak Origin Moment,” Anderson says. “It’s not to locate the beginning of blackness, but to understand blackness only existed as other forces in the world that define it. To have a black origin moment…part of that moment seems to regulate black and brown bodies, but it seems to me that power is already assumed, and because it’s assumed it’s already there—if someone’s already born into it you already have it. It’s the way philosophy deals with presuppositions of knowledge, the idea of the knowledge is already there, but the philosophical position is we have to break that thinking of a presumed position of a certain kind of white masculinity.”
Anderson takes images you’ve probably already seen—those terrible ones, too common in our history, where white cops intimidate or attack black men—and distorts them, weaves them as jacquard tapestries, and then picks them to bits. In other approaches, he whitewashes pages from Ebony or other magazines, leaving only an eye or mouth peeking out. He uses a variety of media and vectors of approach, all circling around the central theme of representation versus reality.
What does the tapestry tell us that the newspaper photo does not? What does it mean when a taken-in-a-second, realistic camera shot is reproduced by the slow art of hand weaving? What does it mean when a historically feminine art—textiles—is adopted by a male artist to tell stories about men? And who ultimately has control of these representations of black men and their lives? With Anderson, there are no easy answers.
“[Weaving] is a way of playing with the stereotype of woman’s work,” explains Anderson. “And the woman as caregiver and laborer is an attempt to sympathize or empathize in some regards with the plight of men of color. So it’s a way of me as an artist, a maker, producing or challenging the illusion of black men as always aggressive.”
Anderson’s process of weaving is complex, including many hands, though the artistic vision is completely his. The work that goes into the art, he says, is in itself part of the meaning.
“A certain kind of labor needs to occur to right the ship we’re on right now, so I’m trying to…materially do that,” he says. “I work with weaving guilds, I work with archives, I’m constantly adding to it. I manipulate images by analogue and digital means, often using a photocopy machine or digital software. I work with the weavers to plan out the image and explore the limits of the medium.
“It’s not a collective process—I am the artist—but I have found a collective of people who can help me materialize my vision. They weave and send [the tapestry] back to me and then then my labor goes into it, the hand work, repicking, stitching. I am literally picking cotton when I rework the image.”
In other works, especially the reworkings of fashion images, the oddness of some of the juxtapositions or the weird palimpsests may evoke a gasp of shocked laughter. Distortion and departures from the expected, after all, are a very basic source of humor, as is the exposure of uncomfortable truths.
“My mentors are either musicians or comedians and, in my experience of color, black people are good comedians because we have so much charged material to work with,” Anderson says, referring to Richard Pryor as an example. “Comedy works best with making people deal with stuff, and I go for that.”
He elaborates, taking his theory of juxtaposition beyond simple laughter to a larger one of creating deliberate dialectic between images—even within images.
“It’s the same relationship with the beauty of weaving with the charged nature of the image,” he says, referring back to the tapestries based on photos encapsulating a racist history. “It’s putting things together that nobody wants to…that people usually don’t put together. The great comedians do that.”
When he’s putting together an exhibit, Anderson says, he shows up to the space and (“it’s kind of nerdy,” he interjects) puts on some jazz albums and tries to juxtapose the images in the space.
“I believe in a certain kind of spatial logic that informs our emotional responses,” he says. “My sense is if I can get into a space and have time to stare at the objects, I’ll weave together a considered narrative about anything I’m working on. Sometimes I come with a plan; other times I just have the elements and I get there and figure what I can do through [listening to] jazz, improv, my mentors, even though I’ve never met them.”
The exhibition at The Hunter, then, is going to be unique, even if the individual works appear elsewhere in other arrangements. And it’s part of a tradition the museum has already started, one Anderson is glad to continue, of placing newer works by African-American artists beside traditional ones by white artists, especially when themes are similar—plantation life, for instance—and forcing them into dialogue with each other.
Anderson is lecturing at The Hunter Thursday at 6 p.m. at Blak Origin Moment’s opening reception, and that event promises to be one of the most exciting aspects of the exhibition.
He is a professor as well as an artist (he’s currently at NYU, and has held appointments at Vanderbilt University and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris), and even from a short interview I’m eager to hear more of his approach, which is engaging and questioning, like a teacher who creates a space for dialogue rather than simply addressing a crowd.
Anderson describes his dialectic style as call-and-response, a tradition in African-American music in which one phrase both echoes and answers back to the preceding phrase. Guests can expect to be engaged as well as to listen, to be drawn into conversation about the meaning of the art on exhibit. It’s an approach that informs his art, too, as one piece responds to another, adding new layers of meaning. And ultimately, despite the heavy themes, it’s a welcoming approach, inviting every viewer to become part of the dialogue.
“I was raised in the black church—my uncle was a bishop in the black church—so I am familiar with call and response,” he says. “My comedian and musician mentors play the game of call and response. So there will be a lot of that, discussing a few pieces in the show as well as those that led up to it, and requiring the audience to participate. I don’t want to be the authority on stage; I’m not interested in that. I’m someone who has ideas and is interested in others’ ideas so we can grow together.”
Anderson makes one process echo another: the dialectic of conversation resembles the call-and-response in how his works of art both mimic and challenge their originals.
“We don’t progress without a teleological loop,” he explains. “I hope I can open my ideas up to scrutiny, not as a pejorative term, but a creative technique and a collaborative technique. I find ways to negate my ideas or expand on them. That is how philosophical pursuit seems to help.”
Though I don’t ask the question, Anderson raises it: why make art at all? It seems to be a puzzle he’s finding multiple solutions for. For one thing, he wants viewers to realize that the images we see aren’t real; they’re illusions that he’s trying to expose for the collection of molecules they are.
“My Ebony works are hand-erased,” he explains. “I don’t think the image is real. The image is nothing but molecules and ink. They are the ground in which this image is made. We need to question the pre-supposed knowledge of the image, expose the image as a collection of ink dots. The same thing with the tapestries. I pick some threads to challenge the accuracy of the representation.”
This isn’t a nihilistic position, but a creative one. Pulling away threads to reveal the artificiality of one image leaves room to create new meanings.
“I’m advocating changing the reality of the image,” Anderson says. “Instead of having the images define who we are, why don’t we come together one-on-one for conversation? That’s realer! That’s why I open myself to discourse through call and response. The image is just a backdrop…I’m of the opinion that art serves an extremely necessary role in bettering the world.”
That work of betterment, of dialogue, of unweaving and refashioning the images and assumptions we’ve been given, is a process Anderson invites all of us to join.