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"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight."
— Walter Benjamin
Historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses has argued that the term "New Negro," used to describe the political and literary glam set of 1920s Harlem, creates a combative distancing from the old Negroes of the past. While the New Negro stood pressed and proud with a take-no-prisoners militancy, the Old Negroes cowered in the sloughs of history: slothful coonish sellouts imbued with an obsequious yessuh! accomodationist attitude.
The same thing could be said of the term "post-Black," the moniker attached to the stable of generation next artists crowded into the Studio Museum’s recent self-consciously epoch-defining Freestyle exhibition. Curated by Thelma Golden, Freestyle was an ambitious project marked by flashes of brilliance, general unevenness and a ridiculous amount of hype, most of it generated by the giddy euphoria of the post-Black. The work in Freestyle was supposed to represent the final hurdle to freedom for African-American artists; the overcoming of Langston Hughes’ "racial mountain" and the arrival at some utopian place where black artists are just making art instead of being, on the one hand, representatives of the race, and on the other hand, white.
But exulting the post means dissing the past. The new school’s old school—the so-called identity art of the eighties and nineties with its capital-P Political aesthetics—viewed as outmoded, ineffective, ham-fisted and down right corny, was unceremoniously kicked to the curb. Of course, every generation needs to engage in a symbolic slaughter of its predecessors to find itself and undoubtedly the burden of the grand old era of identity politics weighs down any person of colour who tries to speak in the present. Yet the idea of the post-Black seems to be filled with a kind of Oedipal rage directed more at the people writing, curating, and producing art from an insurgent margin than the institutions marginalizing them in the first place. Furthermore, it’s debatable whether the post-Black even made it up to Harlem. A number of pieces in the exhibit displayed that same old inert afro-realism whose literal, prescriptive evocations of the black body don’t suggest much of a shift from pre- to post-anything.
The work of Atlanta-based painter Kojo Griffin was among the few that did signify such a shift. The handful of Griffin’s pieces in Freestyle, as well as his recent solo show of new work at New York City’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash, made me reserve some of my skepticism about the post-Black and its dubious historicity. Griffin’s work doesn’t suggest that the post-Black is some new articulation of blackness—a new New Negro—in some bogus ontological form. Instead, the post-Black appears as a strategic way of thinking through a representational field dominated by the overdetermined figure of the black body and the normative assumptions of race, protest, and identity articulated through it.
Griffin creates a parallel universe inhabited by rag dolls and phenotypically ambiguous stuffed animals painted in the comfy, chunky tones of Crayola and Berol. Floating against translucent, patterned backdrops of gears, cutout flowers, circuit boards, molecular structures, and Kabalistic symbols they appear caught frozen on the thresholds of an apparently inevitable violence. One image, Untitled (man handing candy to a girl) (2001), shows a young female bear reaching towards a bon-bon proffered by an older purple elephant. Her companion tugs at her arm in an attempt to pull her away. In another, Untitled (man w/gun, man on knees, man checking watch…) (2001), a baleful donkey-like figure points a revolver at the back of a tense, crouching orange bear. A rag dog stands a few feet away checking his watch and scratching his head. Behind him, a bear lights a cigarette. In Untitled (children playing) (2001) a young, pig-tailed lioness in loafers and a plaid skirt points at the crotch of a green boy animal. His shoulders are slumped and his head lowered. Another bear also points at him and at the same time calls to some of his off-frame mates.
My first instinct was to read Griffin’s paintings in terms of some kind of easy, allegorical representation of racial oppression but the ambiguity of these imaginary creatures doesn’t throw up race as some kind of easy solution. Some of his images work through the primordial and debased pleasure of seeing cute animals corrupted. After all, Griffin’s figures are more closely related to Paddington than Fritz the Cat. While this quality is in all of his images, the weakest among them remain at that level. For instance, Untitled (man w/camera, woman on man’s lap) (2001), where a green bear, taut with a professional intensity, films what appears to be either a lap dance or an amateur porn shoot probably can’t be read as anything other than the filming of a lap dance or an amateur porn shoot.
However, the best of Griffin’s images develop a narrative tension from the awful possibilities of a mistaken witnessing. Since we’re not given enough information to know how these scenarios came to be, or how they will be concluded, we’re forced to suspend our immediate moral judgments. Can we assume that the elephant’s bon-bons are rocks of crack cocaine? That the little bear is on the threshold of an enduring small-dick complex? That the donkey is pulling the trigger on the final scene of a gangland execution and not, perhaps, simply training relay? And what do these assumptions tell us about ourselves?
Griffin’s images are probably best read through what might be thought of as a hurricane of determinations where chemical imbalances, four hundred years of oppression, the sadistic exigencies of patriarchy, or an accumulation of bad days, all act with the causal power of the proverbial butterfly’s wing. On another level, however, perhaps divination is a better term than determination. At least for me, in the wake of September 11th, the absurd arbitrariness and, at this point, seeming inevitability of events, seems to make sense only in relationship to some kind of cosmologically ordained, serendipitous principle.
One image has a particular relevance in this sense. Untitled (man w/explosive device) (2001), depicts a panicked female creature gesturing towards a blue bear. The bear wears loafers and a long flasher’s trench coat. He holds open the coat with one hand. The other fingers the detonator on a cluster of explosives strapped to his body. His expression is one of mourning, apology, and bewilderment—not quite what we’d expect from a suicide bomber–as if his actions were somehow part of a moment in history of which he had little control. The image seems to suggest that if fate is our millennial angel of history, any implicitly progressivist vision of history, with its epochal transitions from Old Negro to New, Black to post-Black, suddenly loses whatever critical valence it may have once had and we’re left to the whims of the apocalyptic calculus of providence and the prophetic discourses of dread.
KOJO GRIFFIN: NEW WORK
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York City
September 7 through October 13, 2001
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