Invisible men: race, representation and exhibition(ism).

Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, "When I grow up I will go there." . . . But there was one yet - the biggest, the most blank, so to speak - that I had a hankering after.

- Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1910)(1)

I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and scene upon which and within which the action unfolds. If we examine the beginning of the Colonies, the application of this view is not, in its economic connotation at least, too far-fetched or too difficult to see. For then the Negro's body was exploited as amorally as the soil and climate.

- Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1964)(2)

Part and parcel of the enduring colonial imagination has been to fathom no territorial limits in its hankering after the unknown and the unconquered, imperially and intellectually. "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art," organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, ranged across the seductively topical terrain of a neo-colonial fascination and mapping: that of so-called black masculinity.

In the exhibition catalog, curator Thelma Golden cites some thoughts by British cultural critic Kobena Mercer that articulate a conceptual premise for the show. Mercer states, extending a metaphor that recalls writer Ralph Ellison's own (above), that "black masculinity is not merely a social identity in crisis. It is also a key site of ideological representation, a site upon which the nation's crisis comes to be dramatized, demonized, and dealt with." The next sentence offers Golden's approbation, "This statement puts us at the heart of 'Black Male's' terrain."(3) She goes on to state, "I wanted to produce a project that would examine the black male as body and political icon" [emphases mine]. In Ellison's metaphor, the personification of a national drama still frames, some 30 years later, the social context within which to speak not only about the objectification of the black male body but also the sensationalized phenomenon that became the "Black Male" exhibition.

The exhibition garnered fervent responses, many denunciatory. A core issue stirring this bluster of controversy surrounding the show involved the question of what it means to organize an exhibition on such thematic specificity: on a "racial," gendered subject-type. Given the context of our social climate, including recent media spectacles of black sexuality and excoriation (a "high-tech lynching," in the words of one self-proclaimed victim), the platforms of judiciary proceedings that have served as another theater of public debate; the mounting attacks on affirmative action and other legislation affecting black families, concurrent with the corporate capitalization of black sports icons, and so on - Can a procession of national spectacles be redressed by a sensationalized exhibition that was ipso facto another spectacle? And without "trussed up" implied in the very send-up of the national drama? Without, that is, simulating the drama? Without dissimulating, unwittingly or not, a complicity?

Complicity in this case turned out to be systemic, unavoidable. It was engendered in the particular set of demands required of museum exhibitions, on the one hand, and required of the thematically controversial nature of "Black Male," on the other. This combination of demands - to embrace artwork and to regard it critically as representations - negotiated an institutional compromise in "Black Male."

An interesting implication in Ellison's metaphor is that there may be a commutability between the situation (or body) of the "benevolent" white explorer, Gulliver, and that of the Negro giant; that the trussings that bind them stem from an arresting, objectifying tendency elicited through both the exploration of the other and self-exploration - and by extension, through both the exploratory museum pursuit and the (presumed) project of self-representation by artist or theme. The metaphor, in this extension, recognizes the (colonial) ideology of desiring to "go there" on the map as potentially a commutation between explored and explorer, represented and representer - "upon which and within which the action unfolds" - for the objectification of the black experience. There are no innocents, as Frantz Fanon would say, and surely no innocent vantage point from which to conduct exploratory ventures.

In this sense, "Black Male," like Ellison's Negro giant, did not succeed in untangling itself from the fetters of black objectification: the process, that is, of rendering objects of people, or the social construction of subjects and the reproduction of its social forms. What then becomes most paradoxical about the exhibition is the way in which its function and effect, contrary to its didactic aims, proved congruent with the project of neo-colonial intrigue by replicating the preconditions for the objectification and commodification (packaging) of black masculinity. As an exhibition, "Black Male" was a representation not only of what American artists have represented as black masculinity, but was itself a representation of such. It actively contributed to the contemporary social construction of the black male subject: that is, one of its current (re)inventors, refabricators and redeployers. It is this museum-representational effect or construct, and what made it objectionable, that must be examined and that I read through the exhibition narratives. I do so in part to understand the negative response to the exhibit and in part because the questions it raised demand further scrutinization; my comments and readings here are correspondingly critical. I nevertheless regard the exhibition as a significant cultural event, and in conflicting ways, even monumental. The strength of its artwork, programs, films and catalog essays numbered among its rewards.

The Museum Experience and the Production of Meaning

A text read critically usually reveals something secretive about itself, something not written into the narrative. Exhibitions, as texts, likewise preview their otherwise nocturnal epiphanies through the effects they produce on the itinerant viewer. Reading an assemblage of artworks produces only a partial understanding of the complexities that comprise an exhibition as, in this case, an expositionary event. The effects of the Whitney exhibition on its visitors generated another set of constitutive moments in the production of meaning.

On one of my visits to the Whitney, I lingered in front of Fred Wilson's contribution to the show, Guarded View, in which four black, headless mannequins fleshed out distinct museum guard uniforms. It was the first piece intended for viewers to encounter upon entering the Whitney's third floor from the elevator. While taking note of the uniforms, I also noticed how so many visitors walked passed the piece without seeing it - and despite my frontal positioning as a visual prompt! This behavior seemed to confirm Wilson's statement about black invisibility in white, mainstream museums. To consummate the irony, visitors walked onward to the introductory wall text topped with this quote from Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man (1952):

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe, nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind.(4)

As one group stood quietly reading the wall text, I noticed a tall, broad-shouldered man in a bone-white sweater standing near an adjacent wall that bore funding credits to the Norton Family Foundation. His arms were folded across his chest as he stood stoically (like a centurion to the Norton's credit), staring in contemplation over and perhaps beyond the group. I turned back to inspect the uniforms' identifying labels (the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, the Metropolitan Museum). A moment later, I heard a woman jump, startled by something. The woman muttered something and in an apologetic tone said to the stoic man, "I thought you were part of the exhibit; you were standing so still."

She had mistaken him for an object in the exhibition. The moment offered an epiphany of confirmation, embarrassing yet predictable. It was embarrassing enough for the woman who was startled by the man's (living) presence, but to have publicly stated her reason for surprise displayed a level of self-divulgement that intersected with the recrimination of an innocent bystander. The man said nothing, and then floated around the room a while, not daring, perhaps, to stand still. When the next elevator arrived, he stared at its open doors and ducked in just before they closed.

It is unnecessary to state who was white and who was black because these effective roles, the viewers' positions, were structurally determined before visitors ever walked into the museum galleries. Whatever exhibition organizers may have intended - intention about challenging stereotypes becoming a nostalgic or anachronistic kind of concern - the big shingle was out. Black men were on display.

The Ellison quote found on the museum wall and reprinted in the exhibition catalog illustrates not only the ostensible subject of the exhibition's investigation (the paradox of black invisibility and typecasting), but also the ostensible object of its manufacture. The woman in question, I realized, did not really see the man. She did however assume his role was expository. She had apperceived the role of the man without having to recognize him. This is the very principle of social invisibility, reenacted and reinscribed here in the museum experience, and at the requisite expense of a human being.

I noticed that this sort of confusion was less likely to occur on busier days at the museum. But on slow days like the one described, any time a black man was caught standing still would constitute sufficient occasion to snap an instant tableau vivant. Potential dioramas were everywhere waiting to congeal. All one had to do, effectively, was stumble in - and fit a simple profile.

The Mirror of Social History

In its organization, the exhibition took the year 1968 as its starting point for two reasons. First, it represented a perceived "transition from the civil rights movement to the fury of Black power." Second, "the image of the African-American in American art through the middle part of this century has been so ably investigated by the late art historian Guy C. McElroy in his 1990 exhibition Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710-1940."(5) Leaving aside the question of a fury-starved civil rights movement, "Black Male" was thus conceived to be, in a way, an extension of the "ground-breaking" Facing History project, in spite of both the almost 30-year gap it thereby created, and the unprecedented disavowal from consideration of representations of women. By (invited) comparison, McElroy's introduction frames the project in the broader scope of "race and representation":

Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710-1940 documents comprehensively the variety of ways artists created a visual record of African-Americans that reinforced a number of largely restrictive stereotypes of black identity. The aim of Facing History is to provide a panorama that illustrates the shifting, surprisingly cyclical nature of the images white men and women created to view their black counterparts.(6)

McElroy's premise lies in the proposition that the "turbulent history of this country is accurately reflected in the ways that visual artists have chosen to represent black people in their art."(7) The politics of race and representation were to be examined not only in the producers' depictions but in the social attitudes reflected in the choices they made. This proposition directly revives the conceptual basis of the 1941 study by Alain Locke, The Negro in Art:

For the art portrayal of the Negro reveals even more reliably than historical tradition the way in which he has been regarded from one period to another, and reflects quite more sensitively than formal history the changes from one generation to another in the social and cultural attitudes toward the Negro. Set in proper perspective, this unimpeachably direct evidence can be made to epitomize the Negro's social and cultural history.(8)

Locke was looking at artwork on the theme of black subject matter as a type of ideological evidence, and for the way in which the artist "has indirectly and unintentionally played the role of social historian" - hence reflecting social attitudes. Locke's was certainly a critical form of reading, with a healthy disregard for good intentions.

Although "Black Male" similarly gathered albeit limited amounts of evidence, it neglected to extract something like a social history based on a critical reading of the artwork. Instead, it sustained an uncritical acquiescence and boosterism for the artwork as a homogenized whole, despite crucial differences among the various pieces. The exhibit suffered from a universal practice that functions as institutional mandate: the museum tradition of regarding art affirmatively. Even McElroy's project strove for an overall affirmation by weighing the exhibit in favor of works that could transcend negativity through aesthetic mastery.(9)

Still, there are grave differences between "Black Male" and the two preceding projects. The most glaring difference is that neither of the former projects omitted the representation of women in their visual testimony to, in one case, a "turbulent history in this country," nor in the other case, to recreating a "social and cultural history" of "attitudes toward the Negro." Not only did they not conceptually segregate men from women in the consideration of representation, they did not hone in on such an exclusive aspect of their social construction, such as their femininity or masculinity. For an exhibition concerned with "invisibility," its execution came at the cost of redoubling invisibility: reenacting, that is, the double jeopardy that has been the experience of black women in America.(10)

Secondly, "Black Male" took for granted that its artwork challenged stereotypes and thereby offered de facto forms of social critique. This kind of uncritical acceptance of subject matter reads more as promotional than investigatory - in a way that Facing History and The Negro in Art did not. These projects looked at art as the telling of a social history; that is, they looked from a position of critical distance. They were about looking back: looking at white artists' production of black representations. "Black Male" had a celebratory look. There was no interventionary position taken toward the problematic works of white artists. This approach in turn introduced another set of obfuscations. One, unexamined were those instances in which white artists arguably indulged in stereotypical representation; two, unexplained was the problematic handling of stereotypical imagery reworked (with varying degrees of success) by black artists; the first two obfuscations depended in part on this third: the work of black and non-black artists were not distinguished. Such distinction is usually not warranted, except when the specified subject is "race" and gender. To dissemble these differences is to imply an art-for-art's-sake contextual void. The blurring of differences among image producers constituted an analytical indifference to the differences that matter: not essentially, but experientially, with the day to day hurdles of institutionalized inequality. (The dream of a universal producer is but a mirror of the universal consumer in the postmodern global village - a Nike generation kumbaya.)

Radical Chic and the Commodification of Black Masculinity

In his foreword to the catalog, Whitney director David Ross introduces the exhibition with these words: "There are probably few more timely and contentious topics that could be explored by an exhibition of contemporary art than the representation, and often conflicted presence, of African-American men."(11) What a difference it makes to speak of "African American men" in contrast to what the stone-chiseled typeface on the title page stamps out in heavy tone: "BLACK MALE." It is the difference between correctly invoking a subject of culture (man) and invoking racial-sexual difference. In the history of Western art, representations of the latter type have enjoyed a traditional function as relay code for the transference of repressed white sexuality, and its projection onto the black subject.(12) Against this psycho-ideological baggage (and in contrast to Mercer's apt claim that black masculinity is "a key site of ideological representation"), Ross maintains that "the exhibition does not argue from or promote a specific ideology or perspective," nor does it "accord with any essentialist dogma." I take for granted the earnestness of these claims but beg to differ upon reading the effective nature of this kind of exhibition. It is precisely in the interstices of confusion between the concepts of man, male and masculinity (and in political disclaimers), that the exhibition nurtures its ideologies and essentialism.

Beginning with its opening words, any text will encode its ideology - its own brand of organizing logic. Having recommended its own form of critique in the parlance of ideology, we find that the exhibition catalog has already pronounced one of its forms in the Foreword's first sentence. Framing the exhibit is the concern for "timeliness," for "contentiousness" and of course "topicality." (Admittedly, these may be hallmark concerns for a museum showcasing contemporary art, so the admission here also regards, more broadly, this segment of the culture industry.) Linked together, these are the pronouncements of an ideology of stylistic engagement, an ideology consistent with what Fredric Jameson (after Ernest Mandel) has called the "cultural logic of late capitalism." According to this cultural logic, contemporary aesthetic production "has become integrated into commodity production generally."(13) Integrated with the arts are fashion and advertising-photography providing a shared medium.

An example of this kind of integration is nowhere better articulated than in the photograph Moses (1985), by Jeff Koons. "An actual 6 x 4-foot poster advertising Nike athletic equipment, the work pictures the pro basketball player Moses Malone. Koons makes the crucial association between class, desire, and consumer objects. He makes clear, by heightening the irony of what is being sold by whom . . ."(14) Of course this is also the set of "crucial associations" upon which advertising, too, defines and markets a product. If there is any irony in Koons's purported commentary on American consumerism, it is the fact that the piece never ceased to function as advertising, particularly to the thousands of sneaker-shod students who toured the exhibit.

A related example was found in a concurrent New York Times article about Polo Sport's black model Tyson Beckford. It opened by identifying Golden and the Whitney exhibit. Golden was asked to comment on Beckford's good looks. "He's phenomenally gorgeous," she said. She continued with her approval of an ad showing Beckford wearing a "USA" Polo sweatshirt, saying, "nothing has ever been as daringly black as that Polo ad . . . What's important about him [Beckford] is that he is so masculine."(15) That Ralph Lauren is also a Times advertising client pushes ideological concerns beyond the envelope of "integration," as the fact that Beckford and Malone both model athletic sportswear pushes the question of representation beyond typecasting.(16) If Malone had been more gorgeous, more masculine, more "exotic" (Beckford is distinguished by facial features attributed to his Chinese grandmother) or simply younger, would the spin on the Koons piece have been more ascendant? Or conversely, what kind of consumer commentary would a Koons poster of Beckford make? The irony that ran through the course of "Black Male" in many ways cut like a double-edged sword.

That these points of integration would converge is not coincidental; art, fashion and marketing all tend to inform and reform one another. In this case the nexus of art, advertising, journalism and fashion provided the best insight into the cultural-logical organization of the exhibition. Richard Phibbs, senior art director for the advertising firm that pulled together the Polo Sport campaign, "recognized that using Mr. Beckford was verging on radical chic. 'We took a bit of a chance with him,' Mr. Phibbs said. 'He's such a strong looking guy. He looks like nobody else.'"(17)

Polo Sport, and by thematic implication the Whitney, strove for and achieved the sensation of radical chic through the representation of icons of black masculinity. It would be misguided to assume black men have here been ceded some power. Beckford does not represent Polo Sport; it represents him (as an operative symbol of masculinity), in and through its latest stylistic shift; and it will cease to represent him with the next shift. "Black Male" shared a similar set of (fashionable) coordinates; it produced, in effect, a stylistic phenomenon. A criticism attending the cultural economy of style is that an event like the "Black Male" show is a momentary occurrence designed to produce a shock effect (of modernist nostalgia) as a stylistic device. Expressed in the catalog preface as "an intervention in the politics of race and gender,"(18) the effect could also be seen, as it was by many, as a setback in the politics of culture and identity, or at best, merely an interruption, or noise, in the politics of "race" and gender. As such it functions symbolically, and serves to replace transformative activity and committed critical challenges; ultimately it severs itself from the drive of progressive cultural politics. Such transformative activity, it may be said, fails outside the purview of the museum. But the occasional and temporal concerns for timeliness and contentiousness are the very components that describe "radical chic."

Aftershocks and the L.A. Response

At the Whitney, it may be said, sensation is seasonal. Controversy tends to revisit Whitney exhibitions like humidity in August. It's what makes the museum ambiance at the same time passionate and sticky. (Its critics should pay tithing to the Whitney for providing steady work.) "Black Male" was, however, pre-packaged as a controversial show. It pursued and garnered tremendous publicity guaranteeing, like a threat, its polemic before it ever opened in New York and again in Los Angeles. Two months before the show opened, for example, New York magazine ran an article entitled "Black Like Them? The Controversial New Show at the Whitney." that contained the terms "shock," "shocking," "shockingly" and "caused a sensation," to describe aspects of, and works in, the exhibition.(19)

The promise of sensation was fulfilled when criticisms began to shock back. In Los Angeles, where people don't take controversy lying down, artists and cultural activists organized a group called the Coalition for the Cultural Survival of Community Arts.(20) The organizational act alone was a form of critical intervention. As its name clearly states, the group positioned itself in terms of self-representation and the persistent need for it; that is, as a corrective to the perceived external representation offered by the Whitney. Indeed, program notes provided by the Coalition stated, "we believe it is about time that the African American male spoke for himself and his relationship in today's society."(21)

At the core of that debate was not only the importance of reclaiming control in the battle over representation, but of exercising community-based valuation. According to Cecil Fergerson, a founder of the Coalition, "Many times, we fail to adequately weigh or question the information accompanying the visual impressions we see. . . . For example, if one is constantly hearing or seeing black male youths portrayed as members of gangs, one begins to subconsciously believe all or most black males are involved with deviant behavior."(22) The Coalition organized three exhibitions and a lecture series under the rubric, "African American Representations of Masculinity," in direct response to, and concurrent with, the exhibition of "Black Male" at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.

Despite the Coalition's intentions, the series title was hopelessly reactionary in its terminology, and seemed to suggest the same about the series itself. However, after reviewing some of the international press on "Black Male," I was reminded of the continuing need to respond with counter-balancing representations. Take, for example, two reviews that appeared in Dagens Nyheter ("Daily News"), Sweden's largest newspaper. One, a short gallery walk blurb, is cynical in tone. The reviewer points out the concern reflected in the exhibition over the association of black men with "Sport, sex och skjutvapen [and guns]," then confesses, "Has the exhibition changed that? I reflect, and remember just sports, sex and guns."(23) However straightforward, the shortness of the blurb, without positing a case, makes it sound reductive of complicated issues.

The second is the more interesting case. It is a long, glowing article, passionately sympathetic with the project of "Black Male" and with the plight of black men - which is where the article trips up in the confusion between representations and the complexities of human beings beyond delimiting representations. The article stumbles into the fault line between plight and representation. it reviews, for example, Andres Serrano's photograph Homeless men . . . less loaded with misery; Kevin Everson's Mansfield prison piece, Most of the prisoners are black. The guards, also black . . . ; Carl Pope's installation of trophies to police brutality, "With that, boyhood dreams are crushed"; and from Carrie Mae Weems's "Kitchen Table Series," the photograph, she has work but not he. . . . It's often [the black woman] who supports the family, and on and on. The reviewer understands the "scapegoating" of black men in American society, but goes on to assume: "It makes them defenseless, and in the long run, without legal rights. They don't even expect to know/control the language."(24) For all its compassion, the portrait it paints of African American men is dismal and demoralizing. It is written in the nomenclature of classic, white liberalism, familiar to us in the U.S. It also goes a long way in answering detractors of the L.A. response who deemed it "retro nationalism," and who yet fail to recognize the nineteenth-century conceptual underpinnings binding the genre noir presentation of "Black Male."(25)

Representation and the Ethnographic Enterprise

When an exhibition deliberately poses the question of representation we may expect that it provide an explanation of the forms of representation under examination, as well as those forms employed in structuring the process of exhibition. Exhibitions are themselves, it should be remembered, interpretations and cultural constructions. An exhibition's narrative structure becomes the "meta-representation" of the artist's initial representation. The point about representations is that they are (re)constructions of a presumed reality regarding the subject in question. The advantage of this model is that it allows us to ask what the representation is constructed to tell us. Thence begins the readerly activity of its critique, its deconstruction (or decoding).

When we consider two specific works in "Black Male" we realize the difficulty in looking for and assessing representations of masculinity. Both works included basketball sneakers. Gary Simmons's Lineup (1993), for example, was proposed in the exhibition narrative "as an embodiment of urban masculinity," and Mel Chin's Impotent Victory (1994), was described as a "testicular sneaker."(26) The sneakers stand metonymically for the athlete: one of the social pigeonholes for the typecasting of black men. How can one come to accept basketball sneakers as illustrative or representative of black masculinity without stumbling into the trap of accepting the very premise of the stereotype being challenged? The artists propose sneakers as representations of "urban" stereotypes, not masculinity. Surely this perceptual blurring was not the aim of the exhibition, but it is inevitable given its organization. The issue of looking for black masculinity must have served another code or alibi.

Ultimately the show proved to be neither about representation nor masculinity; nor was it about the representation of masculinity, which would have constituted a third theoretical category. It was, upon reviewing the artwork and museum didactics, preeminently about racism and stereotypes, and the representation of these issues as investigated or indulged by exhibition artists. In this sense, when "Black Male" touted itself as an exhibition about the representation of black masculinity, it may be said to have misrepresented its own subject matter, or worse, to have exploited (mythologized) it to achieve its desired effect. What became evident in the narratives was a form of slippage between looking for masculinity itself and representations of masculinity. The slippage between the two forms of looking indicate that the issues of representation had become an alibi for the act of looking itself.

When a museum probes for the subject of a gendered and "racial" specificity, it too tests the uncertain depths of representational quagmires. These include, in this case, the "salvage paradigm" and "scopophilia." The first is a term borrowed from the "salvage ethnography" of the Franz Boas era and deals with old-style, anthropological pursuits - an ideological inheritance from the age of high colonialism.(27) The second concerns the ageless desire for looking and the pleasures of the voyeur. But here it is framed with a view from an institutional position of power: the synergistic look of dominance, pleasure and possession, all from the safe distance that characterizes quintessentially the colonizing gaze.

In the paradigm of "salvage," the museum arrogates the role of sovereign representing institution - with all imperial tendencies attending its deployments toward rescue. There is a parallel between the hierarchical logic of traditional ethnographic enterprises and the museum's (institutional) relations of power within its terms of discourse. The parallel obtains, in this case, between the Whitney as a cultural, educational institution for a predominantly white, mainstream American audience, with its pedagogically-directed narratives of black masculinity, and the institution of academic anthropology, with its exoticized "other." The ethnological subject was traditionally investigated and documented often because his culture was perceived to be on the brink of vanishing, or because the subject himself was endangered in some way. Paradoxically, the subject of this kind of examination is always estranged even as it is brought into focus.(29)

An example from popular ethnography inspired by, and married to, classic anthropology - and that also crosses the investigatory intersection of "race" and gender - is the story of Ishi, "the last wild Indian in North America," by Theodora Kroeber.(29) Three of her sympathetic studies of the "copper-colored" Ishi examined, among other things, his terrain, geographically ("his old haunts"), and bodily (e.g., his "clinical history"). They also establish his iconic role: his symbolic status as "the last of his tribe." His story became another instance in the tale of "the vanishing red man," or in more contemporary parlance, another instance of the "extinction" and "endangered species" syndrome. (The museum's implication in the maintenance of this syndrome - call it the "museumification" of the subject - is again exemplified in the story of Ishi. As a living specimen, toward the end of his life, he lived and died in a museum.)

Liberalism and Endangerment

The Black Man Is In Terrible Trouble. Whose Problem Is That?

- New York Times Magazine (December 4, 1994)

Paradoxes of reformist liberalism are inevitably going to arise with any show that attempts to traverse the land-mined territory of popular ethnography. "Black Male" inevitably was not an exception. Another leg of its conceptual framework is stated in the catalog:

The third [historic] signpost is the ongoing debate about the endangered black male. . . . Drugs, disease, unemployment, crime, despair are all aspects (causes?) of this "endangered" status. At the most despairing level, "extinction" is discussed.(30)

While the second term of the well-known phrase has been lopped off, we read in its absence the danger of its current usage. "Endangered species" comes from a phraseology that finds its zoological application to exotic and rare animals like the spotted owl, the white tiger or gray whale (note how each is identified as surface color + species). This phraseology when applied to humans creates more than a subtle connection to the language of dehumanization and its traces to the legacy of racist and racializing reductionism. Because "species," like "male," is a biological category, its tacit application here tends to contribute to the biologizing impulse already implicit in conceptual subcategorizations such as "black male"; it contributes and lends a phrase to the racializing of difference: separating black men as if they constituted a subspecies to be brought into special focus for the consideration of the rest of humanity.

"Who Will Help the Black Man?" was the title of an article - posed rhetorically not only in consummate condescension, but in ironic reflection of this salvage paradigm - that appeared in the New York Times Magazine during the exhibition's New York run.(31) From the symptomatologies of classic white liberalism, colonization and redemption, these terms of endangerment create a subject in need, a subject for patronization.

The problem with "Black Male" was just that. It presented itself as a show about black maleness as subject matter. Witnessed by the fact that the show was inclusive of artists representing a range of ethnicities, gender and sexual orientation, it was not about black men as producers, but again as subjects of consideration from disparate viewpoints. (It was an example of the institutional recoding of multiculturalism, or the bending of inclusionism, wherein black themes can create opportunities for non-black artists to show, for example, during Black History month, as they did - or in venues "commit[ted] to projects that introduce the work of underrepresented artists," such as the Armand Hammer Museum.)

The representational paradigm of salvage evoked in "Black Male" constitutes something of a regressive bent in the hitherto progress of cultural politics. Regressive in that it invokes the patronizing structures of representation that pertain to the legacy of ethnographic enterprises during the era of colonialism. Regressive in confirming (rather than challenging) the relations of power that define Western institutions vis-a-vis their constitutive subjects; i.e., in re-exacting relations of hegemony. This was the symbolic order restructured, if paradoxically, in "Black Male."

The show, in other words, echoed the rule of the symbolic realm over the pre-symbolic. Which is to say that the symbolic order of civilization (represented here by the Whitney and the Times) can bestow a knowing look at the subject it defines as falling further away from order (the endangered subject), and who is therefore in need of being recuperated by civilization. The pre-symbolic covers the realms of nature, (unrestrained) sexuality, the unconscious, the body, carnal desire - the "maleness" of the subject.(32)

The Formaldehyde of Racism

It's not trespassing when you cross your own Boundaries. There's More To Explore In Black.

- Advertisement for Johnnie Walker, Black Label

The expressed desire to "examine" the representation of black, gendered sexuality - especially when the veil of representation tends to slip away - is not without precedent. Stephen Jay Gould has written about the tour he took of the collection at the Musee de l'Homme in Paris. He was shown the brains of white male scientists floating in bell jars of formalin. (These were retained, no doubt, as the free-floating signifiers of white male intelligence.) Anatomical parts were also collected, but of a different type of subject. Gould noted, ". . . on a shelf just above the brains, I saw a little exhibit that provided an immediate and chilling insight into nineteenth-century mentalite and the history of racism: in three smaller jars, I saw the dissected genitalia of three Third-World women."(33) One of them is labeled la Venus Hottentotte.

The Hottentot Venus was a woman of the Khoi-San peoples of southern Africa who fascinated Europeans with her physical features. Nineteenth-century Europe had indulged itself with exhibitions of "unusual" humans - recall the Elephant Man, another subject in the exhibition(ism) of human excesses. Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, was exhibited in Europe, where she "caused a great sensation" for five years, from 1810 until her death in 1815:

Yet Saartjie's hold over well-bred Europe did not arise from her racial status alone. She was not simply the Hottentot or the Hottentot woman, but the Hottentot Venus. Under all official words lay the great and largely unsaid reason for her popularity. Khoi-San women do exaggerate two features of their sexual anatomy (or at least of body parts that excite sexual feelings in most men). The Hottentot Venus won her fame as a sexual object, and her combination of supposed bestiality and lascivious fascination focused the attention of men who could thus obtain both vicarious pleasure and a smug reassurance of superiority.(34)

The two "exaggerated" features of interest and focus were the (protruding) buttocks, that Baartman revealed during exhibitions, and the genitalia (the enlarged labia minora), that she did not reveal.

This particular expositionary intersection, where the two vectors of race and sexuality meet, is often trained on excess. Because excesses, it has been argued,(35) in the combination of these areas suggest to the white, sexually repressed psyche a site/sight for the projection of a greater prowess or intensiveness and a greater bestiality or primitiveness of sexuality, their projected focus can slake the twin pleasures of visual consumption and reassuring superiority. Similarly, an exhibition that focuses not on the representations of blacks, generally, or black men, culturally, but on black maleness (a phallic distinction) or manhood (a double entendre for sexual competence), runs the risk of revisiting that old crossroads - where the devil is known to win.(36)

The inclusion in "Black Male" of Robert Mapplethorpe's images of black men ensured a meeting at that intersection as certainly as it ensured controversy and "caused a sensation" for the show. While the photographs are indeed beautiful, as Golden claims, their aesthetic merits and place in the history of American art cannot preclude a reading of the "social and cultural attitudes" they encode (Locke), or of the "restrictive stereotypes of black identity" they redeploy (McElroy). Mapplethorpe's photographs of black male porn stars often highlight or reveal the buttocks and genitals. If there is a postulated chain of (mythic) signification forged in the bell jar and linking the scientist's brain to hyper-intellectual productivity, there is a homologous chain forged in photography linking the porn star's phallus and hyper-sexual productivity - both forms containing, in the trope of synecdoche, the dismembered embodiments of symbolic excesses. Mapplethorpe's "nudes," a term here applied to steer the viewer toward categorical sublimation by the attribution of genre,(37) share in many instances, as photographic details, a greater if regrettable affinity to bell jar snippets - not unlike derrieres and genitalia suspended in the medium of a silver gelatin formaldehyde.

The markers of "race" and "primitive" sexual appetite, superimposed and reinscribed here as double stigmata, are granted in "Black Male" a dubious if discursive zone from which to signify from behind the crepe de Chine curtain of postmodern "ambivalence." Ambivalence is presumed to hold or warrant the no-commitment-required (lack of) location from which to safely espy the cultural field (identify blank spaces on the map), and deploy risk taking adventures. It also characterizes, by the endorsement of Mapplethorpe's work, the exhibition's own lack of location. Mercer's writings that attempt a rehabilitation of these photographs argue from the same stated position of ambivalence. Ambivalence, the both here and there of it, the luxury of vacillation, it should be noted, is also the modus operandi and the reconstitution of colonial discourse; it is the tactical exercise of colonial power.

Epilogue

Though its expressed intention was to not essentialize, the rhetorical effect of "Black Male" was to the contrary. It achieved its essentialism by default, through the ambivalence that allowed investigatory slippage between the concepts of masculinity, its cultural construction, its visual representation and biological man, and through its conceptual commitment to sex and "race" in ways that bore certain precedents.

To organize a show on the specific theme of a "racial," gendered subject-type is sufficiently problematical - invariably tempting the forced individuation or social abstraction that typifies "bourgeois" ideology. To see it develop without the exercise of critical liberties is to invite its absorption into the drama of the problematic: to watch it wake up in trusses, like Ellison's giant. The problem with a show organized around such thematic specificity is further exasperated in the present nexus between the museum custom of positive valuation (of its artwork) and socially charged (contentious) subject matter. Locke and McElroy's methodology of examination with critical distance remains a valid one for similar projects.

If an exhibition is to challenge the fallout of a national spectacle, it must be allowed reflexive criticality. In this sense, "Black Male" didn't go far enough in critically examining the artworks it brought to bear on the issues of representation, and in examining its own framework for that investigation. Instead, "Black Male" looked like most exhibitions, manifesting the extent to which museums (generally) endorse works of art in ways tantamount to the certification of commodities. The promotional mandate within exhibition(ism) - i.e., museum-field practices and ideology - conflicted in "Black Male," with the critical dimension it postulated and would therefore not realize. One way out of this trap is to challenge the strictures of exhibition(ism). It remains imperative, therefore, that the Whitney and other museums, and that Golden and other curators who would investigate sensitive subject matter, continue their investigations not simply without trepidation, but with added bravura against institutional strictures that bind the intellectual freedom of investigation.

NOTES

1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), pp. 10-11.

2. Ralph Ellison, "Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," Shadow and Act, (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 28.

3. Thelma Golden, "My Brother," Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art, (New York: Whitney/Abrams, 1994), p. 19.

4. Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 3.

5. Golden, p. 20.

6. Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710-1940, (San Francisco/Washington, D.C.: Bedford Arts/Corcoran Gallery, 1990), p. xi.

7. Ibid, p. xi.

8. Alain Locke, The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art, 2nd Ed., (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1969), p. 138.

9. In her commentary on the exhibition "Facing History," Michele Wallace in "Defacing History," Art in America (December 1990), pp. 120-129, criticized the realism-vs.-stereotype terms in which debates about the exhibition were being discussed. They included the idea that the more successful art was that which was more realistic, exhibiting aesthetic mastery or sublimity, thereby enabling it to transcend bigotry. "Even the show's black curator, Guy McElroy, seemed to agree that esthetic mastery is capable of canceling out the pervasive racism of the images. 'When you look at this show, you won't feel subjected to a negative experience,' McElroy said. 'The paintings are too beautiful and the points they make are too strong in presenting the complexities of African-American life.'" Wallace quotes here from Grace Glueck, "images of Blacks Refracted in a White Mirror," New York Times (Jan. 7, 1990), pp. H1, H37. Wallace also invokes Ellison's concept of "invisibility" in conceptualizing the black presence and absence of both genders in American art.

10. For a title that is itself an entire critique see All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, a collection of black feminist writings edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell and Barbara Smith, (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982).

11. Golden, p. 7.

12. See Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness, (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 1985).

13. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, No 146 (July/August 1984), p. 56.

14. Golden, p. 36.

15. Dan Shaw, "Black, Male and, Yes, a Supermodel," New York Times (November 20, 1994), p. 61.

16. In the fall of 1994 Ralph Lauren Polo ran a concurrent campaign advertising "the Polo Pinstripe Suit" that featured a white, sandy-haired, blue-eyed model. The Beckford type, we are made to presume, is better suited to sportswear than to pinstripe suits.

17. Shaw, p. 63. The ad recalls the structure of signification analyzed by Roland Barthes in Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957) regarding a photograph in which a "young Negro in a French uniform is saluting" (p. 116). Similarly, one could read in the rhetoric of the image that American ("U.S.") consumerism is healthy ("strong looking") and without color discrimination. But beyond the ahistorical nationalism invoked in the French photo, this ad situates American nationalism in the course of fashion - international sports competition in fashion, Team USA identification - which is an encoding more consistent with the multinational nature of global capitalism today than was true in Barthes's day.

18. Golden, p. 14.

19. Mark Stevens, "Black Like Them? The Controversial New Show at the Whitney," New York (September 12, 1994), p. 52. Similar terms are found in other pre-opening publications including Norman MacAfee, "The Hardest Thing," Museums New York (November/December 1994), pp. 63-66; Sandra Hernandez, "Approaching 'Black Male' Agitates L.A.," LA Weekly (January 6-12, 1995), p. 10 [the LA Weekly additionally devoted an issue - cover and three feature articles - to the show the week before it opened, sight unseen]; Greg Tale, "Golden Rules," Vibe (November 1994), p. 34, "The curator expects controversy," states Tale with a disclaimer, "but isn't solely motivated by muckraking"; Veronica Chambers, "Thelma Golden: Conscious Curator," Essence (November 1994), p. 64, "Today Golden . . . is simultaneously getting kudos and catching hell for her 'adventurous' taste"; and so on.

20. Lynell George, "The 'Black Male' Debate," Los Angeles Times (February 22, 1995), p. F1.

21. Cecil Fergerson, "African American Representations of Masculinity," printed by The City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, April 1995.

22. Ibid.

23. Daniel Birnbaum, "Rahet och mangfald harskar," Dagens Nyheter (December 2, 1994), p. B3. Translations by Madeleine Vestin.

24. Peter Borgstrom, "Svart manlighet utmanar fegheten," Dagens Nyheter (December 28, 1994). Translations by Madeleine Vestin.

25. For example, see Kristol Brent Zook, "Painted Black," UCLA Magazine (Spring 1995), p. 20; and Zook, "Longing for Tribe: The Storm Over 'Black Male' and the Persistence of Nationalist Desire," LA Weekly (April 21, 1995).

26. Golden, p. 29 and p. 28.

27. James Clifford makes this point in "Of Other Peoples: Beyond the 'Salvage Paradigm,'" Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Hal Foster, ed. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), p. 121. My use of this term extends, however, the meaning of the original.

28. Contemporary ethnography has become increasingly aware of its "crisis in representation": see James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

29. Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild indian in North America, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Ishi, Last of His Tribe, (Toronto, New York: Bantam, 1973); Ishi, the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

30. Golden, pp 21-22.

31. Bob Herbert, moderator, New York Times Magazine (December 4, 1994), pp. 72-73.

32. See Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism," The Anti-Aesthetic, Hal Foster, ed., (Seattle: Bay Press, 1993).

33. Stephen Jay Gould, "The Hottentot Venus," The Flamingo's Smile: Reflection in Natural History, (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 292; see also, Sander L. Gilman, "The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality," in Difference and Pathology.

34. Gould, p. 296.

35. See Paul Hoch, "Masculinity as the Competition for Women," in White Hero Black Beast, (London: Pluto Press, 1979).

36. For essays also dealing with race and gender, see Pearl Cleage, Deals With the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot, (Ballantine, 1994).

37. Student visitors to the museum standing in front of Mapplethorpe's work, for example, were goaded toward sublimation: "Their teachers encouraged them to think of Roman marble sculptures or even Adam and Eve, just in a different color. Some students giggled, while others squirmed and looked away." Lynda Richardson, "Black Images Stir Up Strong Emotions," New York Times (December 12, 1994), p. C13.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Rhetoric of Typographical Kinship

The title itself had already foretold of its rhetorical excesses. It's phraseological brimming and spillage invited critical readings. All of "Black Male"'s fables, its contradictions and confusion were inscribed in the exhibitions name. "Black Male: Representation of Masculinity in Contemporary Art," as such, had foreshadowed the conceptual slippage between maleness and masculinity between a biological construct of clinical subcategorization and a construct of gender consideration. The overmapping of the two prophesied how the exhibit would beg the question of the representation of masculinity through categorical hi jinx.

"Black Male" is stark: two monosyllables with stone-like consonants. Black on a white backdrop, it is a morality play as well as a homophobic threat. Its context, "American Art." Its intellectual container, "Contemporary." The application, "Male," is scientific, forensic, biological. Its appearance is in the clinic, the crime lab; between the covers of a biology primer, at the top of an anatomy chart, police chart, morgue; scientifically a specimen (species-man) to be examined. A medical blueprint lies among the baggage "maleness" undertakes.

Through its title, the exhibition had guaranteed its controversy before it opened in New York and Los Angeles. People in and outside the arts community responded to something though unseen, certainly well-named. Would-be critics, from artists to community leaders, responded to the information at hand: the title, press blurbs, some knowledge of the artists' work to be included, they directed a critical reading on the level of the exhibition's permitted rhetoric. this involved linking references connected to the title; not the references made by the title, but the references that make the title; the connecting links (unilateral traces) that render its multivalent legibility and that preceded and predetermined the conceptual space in which the show took up residence. A literal and lateral reading.

Titles usually describe what an exhibition is about or contains. "Black Male," on the other hand, boldly inscribed what it is about and how it conceived its contents. Recalling the nineteenth-century spirit of commodification, "Black Male" is set in Memphis Medium, a typeface with heavy, overdetermined shoulders (serifs). In graphic design, this typeface is related to the family known as "square serifs" that became popular in the nineteenth-century for purposes of display. The Industrial Revolution brought not only mass-produced consumer goods but an increase in demand for advertising and packaging. Square serifs were designed to answer the display needs of a hastened commodification. They also became popular through their "eye-catching design" on posters and store fronts (assailant combination reincarnated in the front windows of the Armband Hammer Museum overlooking Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards in Los Angeles).

The early nineteenth-century square serifs were commonly called "Egyptians,"presumably because their blocky forms reminded people of the heavy, slabby architecture of the Nile Valley."(1) The connection here is that the then recent Napoleonic raids into Northern Africa turned up the Rosetta stone among the shiploads of booty, and an ensuing interest in Egyptian archeology. In this linkage, even the title, for all its boldness, redoubles its debt to the legacy of colonial fascination and enterprise.

The design tendency to overweigh the serifs met its logical excess with "reverse-weight square serifs," that make the serifs even thicker than the stems. This is the typeface of Wild West shows and three-ring circuses (to this day); it also announces the typographical kin of "Black Male." It bears the same kinship to the "Wanted: Dead or Alive" poster, and returns us to its deliberate association with transgression; that is, as a kind of outlaw exhibition, a frontier exhibition; a walk up main street of an old Western town, the Hardy gang is there, six-shooters off the hip - posted to the tee in Dawn DeDeaux's installation. Combining the implication of danger, and the sexiness of criminality, the title emblematizes its lore of the frontier.

1. Sean Morrison, A Guide to Type Design, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1986), p. 74.

JORGE DANIEL VENECIANO is a curator, writer and senior editor for the Red Nations Movement newspaper.