Notes on Critical Black U.S. Performance Art and Artists

Clifford Owens

William Pope.L, "black performance art laureate," to borrow a phrase from Lowery Stokes Sims, is the most significant black U.S. artists working today. He has been a formidable presence on the national and international visual and performance art scene for over 20 years, but has come to greater prominence since the National Endowment for the Arts revoked funding for his 2002-2003 retrospective, eRacism. Pope.L, "the friendliest black artist in America," is a provocateur of the highest order. His performances, installations, and texts penetrate the fissure of race and class matters with critical mass. His cerebral performance piece eRacism, presented to a large audience at Thread Waxing Space in New York City in 2001 (in fact, for over 10 years, variations of this work have been performed in a number of venues across the U.S.) is no exception. The performance involved many elements, including a spoken text about a racist encounter at the supermarket, slide projections of his family members, 3 blocks of ice, and the artist's body as conveyor of meaning beyond its physical presence, his ripe body odor. Pope.L, donned in a salmon-colored cocktail dress and distressed work boots (work boots and jock strap are signature apparel in many of his performances), delivered a highly discursive, critically convivial performance about racial identity, social expectations, sexuality, and his familial genealogy. At one point during the performance, after he removed the cocktail dress to reveal a half-full, plastic gallon milk container that was grafted on to a jock strap, he invited me onstage to move a heavy block of ice from on location to another. I willingly followed his direction, unaware at the time that he was, in fact, indicting me in a critique of the ways in which class matters inform and deform relationships in the black (African American) community (if there is a black community). He was asking me, as poor black people jokingly ask each other when it comes to supporting black owned businesses instead of white owned businesses, and as David Hammons asked viewers in his 1990 installation: Whose Ice is Colder? William Pope.L made this point more explicit in a text banner he created last year that, despite all efforts to resist the temptation, Race Becomes You.

I first saw Charles McGill stepping out of his two door sedan parked in front of Gallery M on 135th Street in Harlem. He was wearing golf argyles, a black Kangol cap, and dark sunglasses. His persona was a Black Panther/yuppie golf aficionado hybrid. He became race. McGill is a protean artist; he is an ardent golfer and golf instructor who has managed to integrate that activity into his art practice in a remarkably fluid way. I was at Gallery M for the occasion of a panel discussion about black (African American) performance art, held in conjunction with his solo exhibition Black Baggage. The exhibition included fabrications of a fictional line of golf products displayed in a glass case and on shelves: golf balls emblazoned with Nigger 2000, photographic images of black historical figures affixed to Titleist golf ball boxes, a golf club festooned with the artist's hacked dreadlocks, and a golf bag collaged with images of Huey P. Newton, Colin Powell, and African slaves. The public performance component to Black Baggage involved McGill (assisted by a white caddy named "Leroy") hitting golf balls from various locations in Harlem; from the hood of a discarded, charred automobile, from a pile of whole watermelons placed in the gutter. A cleverly negotiated dialectic of race situated in a geopolitical context, McGill transplanted a presumably white male sport spectacle to the "heart of darkness": Harlem. This gesture draws attention to the class exclusivity and entitlement in golf culture, and deflects attention away from monolithic notions of black male "genius" in other sport events, particularly basketball. (The futures of too many young black males living in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods are holding fast to "hoop dreams" for class mobility). Of course, Tiger Woods has supposedly broken racial barriers in golf culture; but unlike Woods, McGill does not repudiate his blackness as a burden to his representation, he embraces its contradictions and complexities.

The panel organized by Gallery M director Todd Roulette included Charles McGill, Desiree Wallace, Wayne Northcross, Anthony Meyers, and me. For McGill, the panel discussion was an extension of his street performance. None of us were quite sure what we were suppose to say about black (African American) performance art, because no one knew what to say about black artists who make performance art. Of course, blacks in the "performing arts" (song, dance, theatre, spoken word, cinema, and television) have never suffered a crisis of meaning in the culture: we have always and will always be expected to sing and dance. As panel participants stumbled over a few under-defined decades of black performance art (our scattered conversation kept defaulting to the usual suspects, David Hammons and Adrian Piper) Charles McGill sporadically, disruptively in fact, announced through a small megaphone: "My name was never Uncle Tom," "I have never been a runaway slave," "I have never used a hot comb," "I have never been an invisible man," "I have never had a dream," "I have never done anything by any means necessary." If you consider the fact that McGill's greatest influence as a performance artist is Malcolm X, it is no surprise that he issued such confrontational proclamations in such a deft oratory style.