BLACK BODIES, WHITE CUBES: THE PROBLEM WITH CONTEMPORARY ART’S APPROPRIATION OF RACE
By Taylor Renee Aldridge — In December 2015, while at Art Basel Miami Beach, I was scrolling through my Instagram feed when I found a video of a large inflated object. The object was a body, lying face down, on its stomach. It was a black subject, male, and large. The sculpture, I learned, was called Laocoön , by artist Sanford Biggers, and was part of a solo exhibition at the David Castillo Gallery in a wealthy neighborhood of Miami Beach. The work depicts Fat Albert, from Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and so it was dressed in a red shirt and blue pants. I watched the video for a moment and saw that the body was inflating and deflating slowly, like a person who was having trouble breathing, or perhaps experiencing his last breaths. I thought of Michael Brown. I thought of black lives. I thought of death. Then I noticed that in the video, the body was surrounded by a festive group of gallery goers, sipping wine, taking pictures of the panting body. The scene was grotesque. I thought, Not again.
Many contemporary artists respond to instances of police brutality, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia through their creative practices. In the wake of the recent attack on the LGBT community in Orlando, for instance, the art community rallied around the victims. Pioneer Works in Brooklyn held a vigil concert.Terence Koh recited the names of the Orlando victims in a meditative performance at Andrew Edlin gallery. Hank Willis Thomas posted a photo on his Instagram of an enormous flag he’d made featuring some 13,000 stars—one for every victim of gun violence in the U.S. in 2015.
As new political movements like Black Lives Matter have gained influence in recent years, social practice has risen in stature and popularity in the art world. This has contributed to the hypervisibility of cultures that have, for a long time, operated along the margins—consider how integral the work of Theaster Gates has become to at risk communities in the South Side of Chicago, or how Project Row Houses by Rick Lowe, taking inspiration from Joseph Beuys, has helped revitalize a section of Houston’s Third Ward. But there is a new wave of contemporary work influenced by racial injustices, one that has arisen in the last two years and is decidedly more sensational, predominantly focusing on pain and trauma inflicted upon the black body. Artists have made systemic racism look sexy; galleries have made it desirable for collectors. It has, in other words, gone mainstream. With this paradoxical commercial focus, political art that responds to issues surrounding race is in danger of becoming mere spectacle, a provocation marketed for consumption, rather than a catalyst for social change. (full article here)