Three New Titles in Theology and the Arts
by Mark McInroy
Mark McInroy is an assistant professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Thomas, and is the book review editor for ARTS. He has published academic examinations of Origen of Alexandria, Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is the author of Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford University Press, 2014).
David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 5, pt. 2, The Rise of Black Artists (Boston: Belknap Press, 2014).
The Rise of Black Artists is the most recent installment in the highly ambitious, multi-volume The Image of the Black in Western Art, which was originally conceived by Dominique Schlumberger de Menil (1908-1997). In this second part of volume five, editors David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bring the reader into the present day, and, for the first time in the series, treat of Black artists depicting Black subjects. The book is divided into three main sections: Part I: African American Art and Identity; Part II: Identity Politics and the Response to Modernism; and Part III: Worldwide Developments. Part I begins with a chapter by Jacqueline Francis, “After Slavery,” which is occupied with the ways in which Black artists in the early twentieth century “compelled audiences to consider the recognition of Black bodies as human ones” (12). In this effort, Francis looks to artists such as Sargent Claude Johnson, Ernest Crichlow, and George Grosz, among many others. In chapter 2, “New Negroes, Harlem, and Jazz (1900-1950),” Richard J. Powell examines African American images from the early to mid-twentieth century, especially those that focus on Harlem, jazz, and “an ontology of African American newness” (54). The result is a rich set of reflections on exceptionally evocative artists such as Winold Reiss, Edward Burra, Palmer Hayden, Miguel Covarrubias, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., and others. Chapter 3, Deborah Willis’ “Photography (1900-1970s),” depicts African Americans’ alternative photography as a key means of resisting the iconography of racism, especially in the early twentieth century. Especially powerful is Arthur P. Bedou’s Booker T. Washington (1910), in which Washington stands before an enormous crowd in Louisiana. Readers will also be struck by Moneta Sleet, Jr.’s, Coretta Scott King (1968), Gordon Parks’ Malcolm X at Rally, Chicago, Illinois(1963), and Donald L. Robinson’s Muhammad Ali Taunting Sonny Liston (1964). Part II begins with chapter 4, “Activism and the Shaping of Black Identity (1964-1988)” by Adrienne L. Childs. This chapter focuses on art in the civil rights movement and beyond, and works by Wadsworth Jarrell, Emory Douglas, Jeff Donaldson, David Hammons, Joe Overstreet, and others provide the reader with images of the Black during a key period of self-definition. The next chapter, Ruth Fine’s “Abstraction and Identity: Norman Lewis and the ‘Activity of Discovery’,” focuses on the abstract expressionist work of Lewis. Especially important is Fine’s point that Lewis gave permission to subsequent generations of African American painters drawn to abstract art, as those young artists frequently suffered from the judgment that to be abstract was to be irrelevant to Black struggles (179). Part III begins with chapter 6, “Contemporary Photography: [Re]Presenting Art History,” in which Deborah Willis brings many of the inquiries she began in chapter 3 into the contemporary period. Here Willis examines images by photographers such as Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Renée Cox, Awol Erizku, Hank Willis Thomas, and others. She sees in these figures an embrace of beauty, which had been denied in previous generations of artists, and also a transformation of the way in which Black bodies are represented. In chapter 7, “New Practices, New Identities: Hybridity and Globalization,” Kobena Mercer analyzes almost sixty different pieces of modern African American art, many of which support the point that hybridity, always a feature of African American experience, finds artistic expression in the late twentieth century. Readers will find this examination of African American artists to be one of the foremost treatments to date.
Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Huey Copeland’s Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural Americaexamines Black installation artists’ focus on the history of slavery in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Copeland holds that the four artists treated in the volume radically broke from previous conventions for depicting the enslaved in their various pieces of installation art. A brief introduction frames Copeland’s inquiry and observes a somewhat unexpected course of events in the late-twentieth century: namely, that Black artists concentrate on slavery at the very moment when they were touted as having come into their own, even being “free at last,” according to Time magazine (October 10, 1994). Chapter 1, “Fred Wilson and the Rhetoric of Redress,” begins with Wilson’s landmark work, Mining the Museum (1992). This installation juxtaposed various pieces of fine art with the roughly hewn, brutal tools of slavery. The result, to Copeland, is a postmodern anti-aesthetic that attends closely to the domination of Black bodies in the artistic soarings of Western culture. Chapter 2, “Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Transitions,” studies Simpson’s representations of African American women. Chapter 3, “Glenn Ligon and the Matter of Fugitivity,” analyzes Ligon’s treatment of slavery and freedom through such works as To Disembark (1993), Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) (1990-1991), Narratives (Black Rage, Or, How I Got Over) (1993), Runaways, (1993), and others. Runaways riffs on the woodcut handbills used by slave masters to offer rewards for returned runaway slaves. In Ligon’s hands, however, the genre is satirically reconceptualized such that it, to Copeland, “disturbs fantasies of the idyllic antebellum South” (138). Chapter 4, “Renée Green’s Diasporic Imagination,” takes up at the outset Green’s Certain Miscellanies (1996) as an occasion of “anti-portrait” in which the subject of art (in this case, Green herself) is described through the eyes of others. This effort, along with that in works such as Seen (1990) and Mise-en-scéne (1991) functions, to Copeland, “as an attempt to . . . undo the presuppositions of Western history in order to open onto a different set of narrative and conceptual possibilities in which African diasporic subjects might thrive” (158). A brief epilogue examines the provocative work of Kara Walker and Edgar Arceneaux, among others. z
Jennifer González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Boston: MIT Press, 2011).
In Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art, Jennifer González argues that analyses of race discourse (by which she means the complex set of rhetorical strategies that define human beings as racial types) should view installation art as a tool for “metadiscursive critique” of representation (p. 13). González summons to her cause the work of five American installation artists: James Luna, Fred Wilson, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepón Osorio, and Renée Green. In so doing, she makes a robust case for the ability of installation art to perform this critical function. Chapter 1, “James Luna: Artifacts and Fictions,” examines the work of Native American artist James Luna. In his installations, especially The Artifact Piece, Luna juxtaposes an idealized Native American type with a decidedly unglamorous portrait of life on the reservation. González holds that this conjoining “places viewers from both communities at a critical distance from stereotypes inherited from the past” (p. 15). In chapter 2, “Fred Wilson: Material Museology,” González notes the ways in which Fred Wilson’s discomforting insertions of slave figures into symbolic representations of Western civilization uncover forgotten histories of the marginalized. Chapter 3, “Amalia Mesa-Bains: Divine Allegories,” conveys Mesa-Bains’ various innovations on traditional Catholic iconography in her reproductions of boudoirs, harems, gardens, and libraries. To González, this creative reappropriation of traditional imagery contributes to a decolonial imaginary that “repositions the gendered body of the mestiza through a critical transformation of the politics of display” (p. 162). Chapter 4, “Pepón Osorio: No Limits,” examines Osorio’s efforts at exposing the ideologies that structure spaces such as bedrooms, living rooms, barbershops, prison cells, and courtrooms. Pulling from his immigrant experience as a Puerto Rican in New York, Osorio communicates to his viewers the dislocation undergone by himself and other transplants to new cultures. Chapter 5, “Renée Green: Geneaologies of Contact,” explores Green’s minimalist installations and their ability to call to our attention the ways in which history is recorded, power consolidated, and memory constructed. Readers will emerge from González’s volume with a thorough sense of the many ways in which installation art can perform crucial social and cultural work.
Mark McInroy is an assistant professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Thomas, and is the book review editor for ARTS. He has published academic examinations of Origen of Alexandria, Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is the author of Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford University Press, 2014).
David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 5, pt. 2, The Rise of Black Artists (Boston: Belknap Press, 2014).
The Rise of Black Artists is the most recent installment in the highly ambitious, multi-volume The Image of the Black in Western Art, which was originally conceived by Dominique Schlumberger de Menil (1908-1997). In this second part of volume five, editors David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bring the reader into the present day, and, for the first time in the series, treat of Black artists depicting Black subjects. The book is divided into three main sections: Part I: African American Art and Identity; Part II: Identity Politics and the Response to Modernism; and Part III: Worldwide Developments. Part I begins with a chapter by Jacqueline Francis, “After Slavery,” which is occupied with the ways in which Black artists in the early twentieth century “compelled audiences to consider the recognition of Black bodies as human ones” (12). In this effort, Francis looks to artists such as Sargent Claude Johnson, Ernest Crichlow, and George Grosz, among many others. In chapter 2, “New Negroes, Harlem, and Jazz (1900-1950),” Richard J. Powell examines African American images from the early to mid-twentieth century, especially those that focus on Harlem, jazz, and “an ontology of African American newness” (54). The result is a rich set of reflections on exceptionally evocative artists such as Winold Reiss, Edward Burra, Palmer Hayden, Miguel Covarrubias, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., and others. Chapter 3, Deborah Willis’ “Photography (1900-1970s),” depicts African Americans’ alternative photography as a key means of resisting the iconography of racism, especially in the early twentieth century. Especially powerful is Arthur P. Bedou’s Booker T. Washington (1910), in which Washington stands before an enormous crowd in Louisiana. Readers will also be struck by Moneta Sleet, Jr.’s, Coretta Scott King (1968), Gordon Parks’ Malcolm X at Rally, Chicago, Illinois(1963), and Donald L. Robinson’s Muhammad Ali Taunting Sonny Liston (1964). Part II begins with chapter 4, “Activism and the Shaping of Black Identity (1964-1988)” by Adrienne L. Childs. This chapter focuses on art in the civil rights movement and beyond, and works by Wadsworth Jarrell, Emory Douglas, Jeff Donaldson, David Hammons, Joe Overstreet, and others provide the reader with images of the Black during a key period of self-definition. The next chapter, Ruth Fine’s “Abstraction and Identity: Norman Lewis and the ‘Activity of Discovery’,” focuses on the abstract expressionist work of Lewis. Especially important is Fine’s point that Lewis gave permission to subsequent generations of African American painters drawn to abstract art, as those young artists frequently suffered from the judgment that to be abstract was to be irrelevant to Black struggles (179). Part III begins with chapter 6, “Contemporary Photography: [Re]Presenting Art History,” in which Deborah Willis brings many of the inquiries she began in chapter 3 into the contemporary period. Here Willis examines images by photographers such as Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Renée Cox, Awol Erizku, Hank Willis Thomas, and others. She sees in these figures an embrace of beauty, which had been denied in previous generations of artists, and also a transformation of the way in which Black bodies are represented. In chapter 7, “New Practices, New Identities: Hybridity and Globalization,” Kobena Mercer analyzes almost sixty different pieces of modern African American art, many of which support the point that hybridity, always a feature of African American experience, finds artistic expression in the late twentieth century. Readers will find this examination of African American artists to be one of the foremost treatments to date.
Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Huey Copeland’s Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural Americaexamines Black installation artists’ focus on the history of slavery in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Copeland holds that the four artists treated in the volume radically broke from previous conventions for depicting the enslaved in their various pieces of installation art. A brief introduction frames Copeland’s inquiry and observes a somewhat unexpected course of events in the late-twentieth century: namely, that Black artists concentrate on slavery at the very moment when they were touted as having come into their own, even being “free at last,” according to Time magazine (October 10, 1994). Chapter 1, “Fred Wilson and the Rhetoric of Redress,” begins with Wilson’s landmark work, Mining the Museum (1992). This installation juxtaposed various pieces of fine art with the roughly hewn, brutal tools of slavery. The result, to Copeland, is a postmodern anti-aesthetic that attends closely to the domination of Black bodies in the artistic soarings of Western culture. Chapter 2, “Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Transitions,” studies Simpson’s representations of African American women. Chapter 3, “Glenn Ligon and the Matter of Fugitivity,” analyzes Ligon’s treatment of slavery and freedom through such works as To Disembark (1993), Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) (1990-1991), Narratives (Black Rage, Or, How I Got Over) (1993), Runaways, (1993), and others. Runaways riffs on the woodcut handbills used by slave masters to offer rewards for returned runaway slaves. In Ligon’s hands, however, the genre is satirically reconceptualized such that it, to Copeland, “disturbs fantasies of the idyllic antebellum South” (138). Chapter 4, “Renée Green’s Diasporic Imagination,” takes up at the outset Green’s Certain Miscellanies (1996) as an occasion of “anti-portrait” in which the subject of art (in this case, Green herself) is described through the eyes of others. This effort, along with that in works such as Seen (1990) and Mise-en-scéne (1991) functions, to Copeland, “as an attempt to . . . undo the presuppositions of Western history in order to open onto a different set of narrative and conceptual possibilities in which African diasporic subjects might thrive” (158). A brief epilogue examines the provocative work of Kara Walker and Edgar Arceneaux, among others. z
Jennifer González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Boston: MIT Press, 2011).
In Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art, Jennifer González argues that analyses of race discourse (by which she means the complex set of rhetorical strategies that define human beings as racial types) should view installation art as a tool for “metadiscursive critique” of representation (p. 13). González summons to her cause the work of five American installation artists: James Luna, Fred Wilson, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepón Osorio, and Renée Green. In so doing, she makes a robust case for the ability of installation art to perform this critical function. Chapter 1, “James Luna: Artifacts and Fictions,” examines the work of Native American artist James Luna. In his installations, especially The Artifact Piece, Luna juxtaposes an idealized Native American type with a decidedly unglamorous portrait of life on the reservation. González holds that this conjoining “places viewers from both communities at a critical distance from stereotypes inherited from the past” (p. 15). In chapter 2, “Fred Wilson: Material Museology,” González notes the ways in which Fred Wilson’s discomforting insertions of slave figures into symbolic representations of Western civilization uncover forgotten histories of the marginalized. Chapter 3, “Amalia Mesa-Bains: Divine Allegories,” conveys Mesa-Bains’ various innovations on traditional Catholic iconography in her reproductions of boudoirs, harems, gardens, and libraries. To González, this creative reappropriation of traditional imagery contributes to a decolonial imaginary that “repositions the gendered body of the mestiza through a critical transformation of the politics of display” (p. 162). Chapter 4, “Pepón Osorio: No Limits,” examines Osorio’s efforts at exposing the ideologies that structure spaces such as bedrooms, living rooms, barbershops, prison cells, and courtrooms. Pulling from his immigrant experience as a Puerto Rican in New York, Osorio communicates to his viewers the dislocation undergone by himself and other transplants to new cultures. Chapter 5, “Renée Green: Geneaologies of Contact,” explores Green’s minimalist installations and their ability to call to our attention the ways in which history is recorded, power consolidated, and memory constructed. Readers will emerge from González’s volume with a thorough sense of the many ways in which installation art can perform crucial social and cultural work.
