The sound of light: Reflections on art history in the visual culture of hip-hop

Art Bulletin

Volumn 91, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 481-505

  Thompson, Krista ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950211398     PISSN: 00043079     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2009.10786149     Document Type: Article

References (174)

1. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Modern Library, 1952), 6
2. and Malik Gaines, "Kehinde Wiley: Pieces of a Man," in Ironic/Iconic, Artists in Residence, by Christine Kim, exh. cat. (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2002), n.p
3. Darren A. Nichols, "Look Like a Million Bucks," Detroit News, May 10, 2008, C3
4. "Destiny's Child, Alicia Keys and Nelly Win at MTV Video Music Awards," Jet, September 24, 2001
5. and Robin Leach, "Diddy to Make a Nightclub Entrance from a Helicopter 53 Stories above Vegas," Vegas Pop, February 2, 2007, http://www.vegaspopular.com/2007/02/16/
6. For a newspaper description of this entrance, see Erica Wells, "Nowadays, Prom Means Big Bucks," Tribune (Nassau), June 28, 2004, 2C
7. The observations here stem from my research and work on a documentary on the proms in Nassau between 2005 through 2008
8. Eartha Hanna, interview by author, Nassau, New Providence, June 30, 2006
9. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Rout-ledge, 1993), 148
10. Interviews by author in Nassau, New Providence, of Sandra Ferguson, June 17, 2006
11. Tabatha Griffin, June 22, 2006
12. Cisco McKay, June 21, 2006
13. Nadia Miller, June 22, 2006
14. Jaime Taylor, June 21, 2006
15. Lydia Yee and Franklin Sirmans, One Planet under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art (Bronx, N.Y.: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2001)
16. and Sirmans, Mass Appeal: The Art Object and Hip Hop Culture (Ottawa: Gallery 101, 2002)
17. Many art historians and art critics make such musical analogies. See Lydia Yee, "Breaking and Entering," in Yee and Sirmans, One Planet under a Groove, 19
18. Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 122
19. Sirmans, Mass Appeal, 1
20. idem, "In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip-Hop Culture," in Basquiat, ed. Marc Mayer (London: Merrell; Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 2005), 94
21. Derek Conrad Murray, "Kehinde Wiley: Splendid Bodies," Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no.21 (Fall 2007), 92. Here, I do not take issue with these readings, but rather suggest how such interpretations may be further expanded by looking at approaches to visuality in hip-hop
22. Curiously, few appraisals of the contemporary art of hip-hop use graffiti as a model of visual aesthetics. As Sirmans puts it (Mass Appeal, 1),"Although graffiti can be looked upon as a crucial element of expression in hip hop culture, the conceptual strategies of hip hop - sampling and appropriation, a cannibalist's penchant for mixing and remixing to make the new - have become the hallmark of a new generation of contemporary artists."
23. Michele Wallace, "Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture," in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 40
24. One Planet under a Groove, Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2001, exh. cat by Yee and Sirmans
25. Ironic/Iconic, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 2002, exh. cat. by Christine Kim
26. Black Romantic: Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 2002, exh. cat. by Thelma Golden
27. Neo Baroque! Byblos Art Gallery, Verona, 2005-2006, exh. cat, by Micaela Giovannotti and Joyce B. Korotkin (Milan: Charta, 2006)
28. Kehinde Wiley: Columbus, Columbus Museum of Art and Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles, 2006, exh. cat. exh. cat. by Joe Houston et al
29. Recognize! Hop Hip and Contemporary Portraiture, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.G., 2008, exh. cat. by Brandon Brame Fortune et al
30. Thelma Golden, "Kehinde Wiley (Interview): The Painter Who Is Doing for Hip-Hop Culture What Artists Once Did for the Aristocracy," Interview 35, no.9 (October 2005): 161
31. More recently, Wiley has used posters and public sculptures as the basis for paintings created in China, West Africa (Dakar and Senegal), and Brazil, respectively. The World Stage: China/Kehinde Wiley (Sheboygan, Wis.: John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2007)
32. Christine Kim, The World Stage: Africa, Lagos-Dakar, Kehinde Wiley (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2008)
33. Roberto Tejada, ed., Luis Gispert: Loud Image (Hanover, N.H.: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2004)
34. This interpretation pervades much of the literature on Wiley, Gispert, and hip-hop in contemporary art more generally. A few examples are Sarah Lewis, "De(i)fying the Masters," Art in America 93, no.4 (April 2005): 121
35. Yee, "Breaking and Entering"; and Fortune et al., Recognize! 5
36. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988)
37. idem, Nelson George, Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 1992)
38. Michael Eric Dyson, Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
39. Todd Boyd, The New H.N.I.C. (Head Niggas in Charge), the Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (New York: New York University Press, 2002)
40. idem, Todd Boyd, Young Black, Rich, and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2003)
41. George, Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and before That Negroes) (New York: Viking Press, 2004)
42. Jamel Shabazz, Charlie Ahearn, and Terrence Jennings, A Time before Crack (New York: powerHouse Books, 2005)
43. and Dyson, Know What I Meant Reflections on Hip-Hop (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007)
44. Several curators explicidy refer to hip-hop's earliest days, before the "postsoul" era, in their formulations of hip-hop studio aesthetics. See Oguibe, The Culture Game, 121-22
45. Derek Conrad Murray, "Kehinde Wiley: Splendid Bodies," Nka: fournal of Contemporary African Art, no.21 (Fall 2007)
46. See also Franklin Sirman's description of the One Planet exhibition in Mia Fineman, "The History of Art, in Baggy Jeans and Bomber Jackets," New York Times, December 19, 2004, 39
47. George, Post-Soul Nation
48. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2000)
49. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1994)
50. and Cornel West, "On Afro-American Popular Music: From Bebop to Rap," in Prophetic Fragments (Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, 1988)
51. For accounts of the long and complex relationship of hip-hop artists to capitalism from its beginnings, see Davarian Baldwin, "Black Empires, White Desires: The Spatial Politics of Identity in the Age of Hip Hop," in That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Mark Anthony Neal and Murray Forman (New York: Routledge, 2004), 161
52. See also Robin D. G. Kelley, "Playing for Keeps: Pleasure and Profit on the Postindustrial Playground," in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema H. Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997)
53. and Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1994)
54. Rose, Black Noise
55. Baldwin, "Black Empires, White Desires"
56. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)
57. idem, Paul Gilroy, Paul Gilroy Against Race;, 1993
58. S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
59. and Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002)
60. See S. Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005)
61. and Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 101-130
62. MTV, the major forum for the distribution of music videos, was founded in 1981
63. Watkins, Hip Hop Matters, 55-58
64. Roni Sarig, Third Coast: Outkast, Timbaland, and How Hip-Hop Became a Southern Thing (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2007)
65. Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), s.v. "bling."
66. Lee Bok, The Little Book of Bling (Bath, U.K.: Crombie Jardine, 2006), 5. Or, as a reporter for the New York Times put it, B.G.'s onomatopoeia mimicked "the imaginary sound of light hitting diamonds"
67. Kelefa Sanneh, "Loving, Rapping, Snuggling and ⋯," New York Times, January 3, 2005
68. El. See also the definition of "bling, bling" by Nicole Hodges Persley in Icons of Hip Hop, ed. Mickey Hess (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007), 468
69. B.G., "Bling, Bling," in Chopper City in the Ghetto, compact disk (Universal Records, 1998)
70. Roger Beebe, "Paradoxes of Pastiche: Spike Jonze, Hype Williams, and the Race of the Postmodern Auteur," in Medium Cool Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, ed. Beebe and Jason Middleton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 316
71. "Believe the Hype," Guardian (Manchester), June 29, 1999, 10
72. In a video for the song "Drive Slow" (2006) by the Chicago rapper Kanye West, Williams actually used the luminous surface of a shiny car as the site on which much of the video was shot. The video takes viewers on a tour of a brightly illuminated cityscape at night through its reflection in a shiny vehicle. West, "Drive Slow" (New York: Roc-A-Fella Records, Asylum Records, and Atlantic, 2006)
73. My use of "surfacism" derives from Christopher Pinney, "Notes on the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism and Vernacular Modernism," in Photography's Other Histories, ed. Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 204
74. The quotation comes from a description of these practices in Dutch seventeenth-century paintings from Simon Schama, "Perishable Commodities: Dutch Still-Life Painting and the 'Empire of Things,' " in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 478
75. Roland Barthes describes "sheen" in Dutch painting as a "kind of glaze.... [which] always render[ed] matter's most superficial quality"
76. Barthes, "The World as Object," in Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, ed. Norman Bryson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 107
77. Schama, "Perishable Commodities," 478
78. While oil painting was first used in the fifteenth century, John Berger maintains that "oil painting did not fully establish its own norms, its own way of seeing, until the sixteenth century"
79. Berger, Ways of Seeing, (London: British Broadcasting Corporation; New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 84
80. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xxv
81. Alpers, ibid., Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century 1983, 34, cites the work of seventeenth-century astronomer and visual theorist Johannes Kepler here
82. For a discussion of the gaze as it relates to Dutch painting, see Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 111-117
83. Hal Foster, "The Art of Fetishism: Notes on Dutch Still Life," in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily S. Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 252
84. Barthes, "The World as Object."
85. Foster, "The Art of Fetishism," 260-262
86. In this regard, the use of shine in the Dutch still life paintings recalls Karl Marx's arguments about conceptions of value in capitalism, which, incidentally, centered on the diamond and pearl. Marx argued against the idea that commodities possessed any material properties that endowed them with value. "No chemist," he charged, "has discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond." Rather, "if commodities could speak they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us objects." Shine, however, made value appear to belong to objects
87. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol.1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1990), 176-77. 52. Barthes, "The World as Object," 110
88. Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 7
89. Alpers, The Art of Describing
90. Jay "Scopic Regimes of Modernity"
91. Clem ent Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol.1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)
92. Pinney, "Notes on the surface of the image"
93. and Alejo Carpentier, "The Baroque and the Marvelous Real," in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995)
94. The designation "Baroque" derived etymologically from the Portuguese word for an oddly shaped pearl
95. it sought to characterize a style that, even more so than the Dutch art of "describing," made irregularity the norm, embellished surfaces in proliferating ornamentation, composed work from multiple viewpoints, used light as a medium, and aimed not so much to describe the world faithfully as to represent its illegibility and excesses
96. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, trans, in ibid, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," 17
97. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 87
98. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 19
99. For a small sample of this literature, see T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modem Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984)
100. Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"
101. Frederic Jameson, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 1-54
102. David Joselit, "Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness," Art History 23, no.1 (March 2000). There is also a notable history of shine in African American art and letters. A group of African American artists, AfriCobra (founded in 1968), for instance, defined "shine" as a "major quality" in their artistic philosophies. Africobra 1 (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists)
103. "Afri-Cobra 1: 10 in Search of a Nation," Black World, October 1970, 85
104. Afri-Cobra III (Amherst: University Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1973). A related concept of "black light" was also central to the Black Arts Movement more generally in Chicago."
105. See Margo Natalie Crawford; "Black Light on the Wall of Respect: The Chicago Black Arts Movement," in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, ed. Lisa Gail Collins and Crawford (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006)
106. This is perhaps a fitting appellation for a ruler whose "vigorous and imposing bulk [was] fairly lost beneath the sheer mass of stuff - Jewels, feathers, yards of rich cloths - with which he bedecked himself" and who wore, as a contemporary ambassador marveled, "one mass of jeweled rings" on his fingers and "around his neck he wore a gold collar from which hung a diamond as big as a walnut"; Greenblatt
107. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 28-29
108. Wallace, "Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Problem of the Visual," 45, uses the term "negative scene of instruction."
109. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 96
110. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 109
111. Charles Ford, "People as Property," Oxford Art Journal 25, no.1 (2002): 8. Dirk Valkenburg created paintings of slave plantations in Dutch Surinam at the beginning of the eighteenth century
112. Plechtigheid onder de Neegers (Negro Celebration), as Ford discusses, is one such painting in which slaves are rendered as shiny objects
113. Moses Roper, A Narrative of His Adventures and Escape from American Slavery (Philadelphia, 1838), 119
114. For other slave narratives and oral histories about shine and the greasing of slaves, see Henry Watson, Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1848), 12
115. Katie Rowe, "Interview," 368
116. and William Hutson, "Interview," 20
117. in The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives, ed. T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996)
118. Henry Bibb, "Narrative of the Life of Henry Bibb an American Slave," in Put-tin' on Old Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Welles Brown, and Solomon Northup, ed. Gilbert Osofsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 115
119. and Sarah Ashley, "Ex-Slave Stories (Texas)," in Bom in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938, vol.16, pt. 1
120. of Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Federal Writer's Project of the Work Projects Administration (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1941), 75-77
121. For a scholarly consideration of this practice, see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 118-134
122. Historian Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul, 145, explains that polished bodies hid rebellious pasts: "As the slaves removed their coats and frocks and shirts, buyers inspected their naked bodies minutely, looking for what they called 'clear' or 'smooth' skin, skin unmarked by signs of illness and injury.... More than anything, however, they were looking for scars from whipping. As Solomon Northup explained, 'scars upon a slave's back were considered evidence of a rebellious or unruly spirit, and hurt his sale. ⋯ The buyers thought they could read slaves' backs as encodings of their history." Former slave William Hutson, "Interview," 209, viewed greasing as a practice aimed at disguising scars. "Some of them was well greased and that grease covered up many a scar they'd earned for some foolishment or other
123. " The term "the hieroglyphics of the flesh" is from Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," in Black, While, and in Color Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 67
124. As Johnson, Soul by Soul, 133-34, puts it, "In the pens the traders medicated and fed and shined and shaved and plucked and smoothed and dressed and sexualized and racialized and narrated people until even the appearance of singularity had been saturated with the representations of salability."
125. See also James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 24
126. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 109
127. A notable exception to this is joselit, "Notes on Surface."
128. Kanye West, Au Falls Down (Roc-A-Fella Records, 2004)
129. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 1
130. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
131. Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 50
132. This curatorial position reflects more than benign neglect. At least one curator, Franklin Sirmans, whose insights have been so formative in considerations of hip-hop and contemporary art, insisted in an interview about the inaugural One Planet exhibition that hip-hop studio practice should not be seen in light of popular expressions of post-soul hip-hop, which he deemed "this bling, bling thing that has developed." Sirmans, "An Interview with Franklin Sirmans," by Merrily Kerr, NY Arts Magazine, January 2002, 20-22
133. One rare exhibition that highlighted surface aesthetics and reflection in black and Latino youth cultures was The Superfly Effect, curated by Rocio Aranda, for the Jersey City Museum in 2005
134. Kehinde Wiley, interview with Christine Kim, quoted in Fineman, "The History of Art, in Baggy Jeans," 39
135. Golden, "Kehinde Wiley (Interview)."
136. Fineman, "The History of Art, in Baggy Jeans."
137. See Giovannotti and Korotkin, Neo Baroque!
138. See Giovannotti and Korotkin, Neo Baroque!; and Golden, "Kehinde Wiley (Interview)," 162. See also Derrick Cartwright, "Subwoofers, Subcultures, Subversions: A Conversation with Luis Gispert," in Luis Gispert, Loud Image, ed. Roberto Tejada (Hanover, N.H.: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2004)
139. Kehinde Wiley, telephone interview with author, June 22, 2008
140. Wiley, interview with author
141. One of the techniques Wiley studied was chiaroscuro. The method, first popular in the sixteenth century, involves first a detailed drawing, followed by layers of brown underpainting, and a full-color overpainting. In essence, the technique created the illusion of depth, through light and shadow, using the successive laying on of surfaces
142. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 14
143. This was particularly the case with a series of photographs, the Black Light series, that the artist produced in 2008. Kehinde Wiley, interview with the author, January 8, 2009
144. Wiley, telephone interview with the author, June 22, 2008
145. Ibid
146. Bryson, Vision and Painting, 111-17, notes how Jan Vermeer, for instance, in his paintings combined an interest in visually transcribing the adorned surface with notation, representing the "accidental history of the ⋯ physical surface striated by light."
147. See also an advertisement for rapper Snoop Dogg, "Snoop Dogg Top Dogg," in Vibe, May 1999, or, for an example of the use of the frame in music videos, see the beginning of a 1996 Hype Williams video for Busta Rhymes. The video begins with a portrayal of Rhymes walking through the frame of a painting of himself
148. Williams, Woo-Hah! Got You All in Check, video for Busta Rhymes (New York: Elektra/Flipmode, 1996)
149. Wiley's interrogation of the frame, this exploration of the meaning of being represented, has a longer history in American art. African American artists in particular have used the frame as a pictorial device to circumscribe black vernacular performances of public visibility. In her performance piece Art Is ⋯ (1983), for example, performance artist Lorraine O'Grady (in collaboration with George Mingo and Richard DeGussi) created a float consisting entirely of a giant gilt frame mounted upright on gold fabric. The float appeared in the Afro-American Day Parade in Harlem (the same streets from which Wiley would eventually draw his first subjects). Costumed performers, clothed entirely in white and bearing ornate gold frames, ran up to onlookers, allowing them to pose, to inhabit, however momentarily, the frame of art. Similarly, the New York-based artist Hank Willis Thomas in his Frames series of 1997 and 1998 asked people he encountered on the streets and at private and public gatherings, such as the Million Woman March, to position themselves within small metallic frames; he then photographed his subjects framing their pictorial preferences. While these projects are in part about a representational inclusion, a claiming of the frame for the historically unrepresented, Wiley and, before him, O'Grady and Thomas highlight "the institutional work assigned to the frame as that which brings the world for ward through its reification," as art historian Huey Copeland insightfully notes about Thomas's Frame series. See Lucy
150. R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: New Press, 2000), 90-91
151. Lorraine O'Grady et al., Lorraine O'Grady, Photomontages (New York: INTAR Gallery, 1991), 9
152. and Copeland, "Being in the Picture: Hank Willis Thomas's Frames Series," Qui Parle 13, no.2 (Spring-Summer 2003): 139
153. Martin Heidegger used the term "enframing" to characterize how historically the natural world has been ordered within frames of understanding, like a landscape circumscribed in a frame. Enframing, the philosopher cautions, forestalls "every other possibility of revealing. Above all, Enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiesis [truth], sets what presences come forth into appearance." Heidegger makes the case that society often loses sight of enframing and how it closes off other forms of revealing, appearances, and truth. Wiley's frames, I want to suggest, call attention to how understandings of art result in a similar process of ordering and occlusion
154. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 27
155. Houston et al., Kehinde Wiley: Columbus, 6; and Wiley, interview with author, June 22, 2008
156. Williams has observed, "Rap artists were talented, but I made them look much more talented than they actually were. The mastering and manipulation of technical qualities like sound, camera angles and lighting have a way of creating presence, and that impacts the consumer"
157. Williams quoted in Watkins, Hip Hop Matters, 214
158. Franklin Sirmans, "Barkley Hendricks, Ordinary People," in Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, ed. Trevor Schoonmaker (Durham, N.C.: Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, 2008), 87
159. The "spermatozoa" first appeared in the Diamond series in 2001-2002. Wiley (interview with author) noted that at the time he produced the paintings he had been examining military portraits and was thinking specifically about the visual production of masculinity in this genre of painting. He explained that the swirls of light that look like sperm were patterned after specific aerial views of the American Revolutionary War
160. Greg D. Tate, "Kehinde Wiley's Cipher Syntax," in The World Stage: China/Kehinde Wiley, 11-12
161. Fred Moten, who begins his book with a description of Frederick Douglass's narrative about listening to the screams of his Aunt Hester, a slave, being whipped is compelled to revisit volume1 in Marx's Capital, where Marx makes the point that "if commodities could speak they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us objects." Moten takes issue with Marx's underlying argument about the inability and impossibility of the commodity's speech, "the impossible material substance of the commodity's impossible speech." The idea that commodities can speak is placed in "an unachievable future." Marx, by discounting the commodity that speaks, neglects, returning to Douglass's aunt's screams, the "trace of a subjectivity structure born in objection."
162. Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 9-13
163. Kehinde Wiley, quoted in Paul Young, "The Re-Masters," Daily Variety Magazine, June 2, 2006, 33
164. Kobena Mercer, "Diaspora Aesthetics and Visual Culture," in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, ed. Harry Justin Elam and Kennell A. Jackson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005)
165. and Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for "Blackness" (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995)
166. Such efforts to render black subjectivity legible were epitomized in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, written in 1952
167. Luis Gispert, interview with author, Brooklyn, N.Y., April 25, 2007
168. Cartwright, "Subwoofers, Subcultures, Subversions," 27
169. Michel de Certeau, "The Gaze: Nicholas of Cusa," Diacritics 17, no.3 (Fall 1987): 2-38
170. Gray, Watching Race
171. Cartwright, "Subwoofers, Subcultures, Subversions," 25
172. The sports channel ESPN features sports highlights
173. Anthony Pinn, "Sweaty Bodies in a Circle: Thoughts on the Subtle Dimensions of Black Religion as Protest," Black Theology: An International Journal 4, no.1 (January 2006)
174. Loud Image was the title of Gispert's solo show at the Hood Museum in 2004