Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, and Black Cherokee
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COUNTER-STRATEGIES AND SELF-CURATION: JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, DAVID HAMMONS, AND BLACK CHEROKEE by CHLOÉ PULIDO Professor Catherine Newman Howe, Advisor Professor C. Ondine Chavoya, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Art History WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts May 23, 2016 Table of Contents Acknowledgements… 1 Introduction… 2 It All Depends on Who You Are on What Street… 5 But Nothing Was for Sale… 19 They Want Me to Be Dull, Don’t Want Me to Use What’s in My Skull… 24 Conclusion… 34 Notes… 36 Works Cited… 40 Illustrations… 43 This thesis is dedicated to Otis Houston, Jr., AKA Black Cherokee Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the help of my brilliant thesis classmates. I will be forever grateful for the help and careful attention they gave to me and my project during this process, and, more importantly, for the much-needed friendship and support over the past several months. I also owe the success of this project to Professors C. Ondine Chavoya and Catherine Newman Howe, who each routinely flattered me with their investment in my work, and impressed me with the wealth of knowledge they generously offered to me during this process. Their willingness to support my project, and the genuine enthusiasm and aptitude with which they have done so, has meant so much to me, and has been a truly special part of my Williams experience. I would also like to thank the incredible educators I have had the privilege of working with over the course of my education. From the wonderful arts educators at my New York City public schools who nurtured in me a love of and appreciation for art— Carlos Nuñez, William Jung, Andrew Stehle, and most of all, Carolanna Parlato—to the exceptional Williams professors who have enriched my academic experience beyond words, whether they are aware of it or not—Michael Lewis, Guy Hedreen, Kasumi Yamamoto, Jinhwa Chang, Gail Newman, Margaux Cowden, Christian Thorne, and Eva Grudin—I am so grateful for the role they have all played in my intellectual development and formative school years. Lastly, I could not have successfully completed my Williams education without the love and support of my family. Thank you to my grandparents, Roz and Bob Fields, for always being proud of me even when I felt I didn’t deserve it. Thank you to my sister, Emma Pulido, for showing me the importance of being brave. And thank you infinitely to my mother, Shari Fields, who taught me everything I know, who gave me everything I have, and without whom I would be nothing. “I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to return.” – Frida Kahlo 1 Introduction In November 2015, the New York Times ran an article titled, “Black Artists and the March Into the Museum,”1 which described the unfortunately familiar plight of the black American artist: “spotty acquisitions, undernourished scholarship and token exhibitions.”2 The article makes apparent both United States art institutions’ historic underrepresentation of black artists, and the disregard of the people who run these institutions for black artists and the work that they do. Only recently have the canon of U.S. museums begun to work towards acquiring the work of black artists for their permanent collections – “not [as] a special initiative, or a fad, but [as] a fundamental part of museums’ missions.”3 However, the underrepresentation (or total failure to represent) of black and nonwhite artists, without whom any history of American art is grossly incomplete, persists. This in turn alienates and inevitably excludes nonwhite people from the art audience. Artist Daniel Buren’s influential essay, “Function of the Museum” (1970), provides a helpful conceptual portrait of the significations of the modern (Western) art museum, which are necessary to lay out before moving forward with my analysis of the artist-art institution relationship. Buren describes the museum as performing in three essential capacities: aesthetic (“the centre in which the action takes place and the single (topographical and cultural) viewpoint for the work”); economic (“The Museum gives a sales value to what it exhibits, has privileged/selected”); and mystical (“The Museum/Gallery instantly promotes to ‘Art’ status whatever it exhibits with conviction”).4 In short, the institution of the museum is one that has considerable authority, both in the economic and cultural realities of places where they exist, and in 2 the cultural imaginations of those who have ever encountered one. Accordingly, the museum “becomes the single viewpoint (cultural and visual) from which works can be considered.”5 Under such circumstances, one can understand why David Hammons, one of the few very successful black American artists working today, would be repelled by the prospect of participating in this structure even if the people in control of it deem his work aesthetically, conceptually, and commercially viable. Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist who would have been a generation younger than Hammons, also enjoyed a level of success and celebrity in the 1980s that was largely unprecedented for a black American. Although Basquiat’s painting career was short (c.1979-1988), and he died at the age of twenty- seven of a heroin overdose, his celebrity persists today—a celebrity that paradoxically seems both hard-won and inevitable for the enigmatic, untrained ‘genius child.’ Hammons and Basquiat each embody their own particular relationship to their position within the larger structure of art institutions. Although the contemporary art world is predicated on the viewpoint that institutional recognition—via gallery representation, auction prices, and market demand—bolster the legitimacy of one’s work, Hammons’ resistance to involvement with museums, galleries, and the contemporary art market, and Basquiat’s fascination with them, raise important questions about the implications of commodifying one’s labor and capitalizing on one’s image. Any New Yorker who drives along the F.D.R. Drive on Manhattan’s east side will know to keep an eye out for two things: Keith Haring’s 1986 Crack is Wack mural (Fig. 1), and Black Cherokee (Fig. 2). Black Cherokee, an artist whose real name is Otis Houston, Jr., began his roadside installations and performances in 1997, and has since 3 become a New York City institution. It is helpful to trace Houston’s work to the legacies of Hammons and Basquiat. Like David Hammons, Houston has chosen to site his often performative installation pieces, with intention, in Harlem, on the side of the highway where hundreds of passersby can see what he’s doing each day. While the site-specificity and collection of culturally coded materials as his chosen medium ring of Hammons’ own program, the enigmatic and self-promoting (Fig. 3) messages he scrawls on bed sheets and pieces of cardboard have an undeniable Basquiatian quality about them. Like both Hammons and Basquiat, Houston’s works address themes that, when framed by the identities with which he clearly identifies, are given added layers of significance. All three of these artists have had to navigate being outsiders in the New York art scene, and have consequently developed strategies – perhaps more appropriately called counter- strategies – in order to achieve what they wanted within a framework wherein artists of color are inherently disadvantaged. In thinking specifically about Hammons and Basquiat, it is critical to consider the sociopolitical environs in which their careers developed. It goes without saying that the art world was (and still is) overwhelmingly, and almost exclusively, the domain of white males. Based on something as immutable as their race and appearance, these artists are thus rendered outsiders. The insider/outsider dichotomy as it applies to art can refer to artists working in or outside of big cities as well as to “a sociological opposition between legitimate (or dominant) positions in the artistic field,” as in the case of Hammons’ and Basquiat’s race, to “cognitive (or mental) structuring of what is inside or outside the boundary definition of art as opposed to non-art, of who is or is not an artist,” and to the “mere physical opposition between art shown inside or outside the walls of museums and 4 galleries.”6 Taking this description into account, it becomes more complicated to place these artists along this spectrum because we see that in this framework, Basquiat and Hammons (and Houston) all display varying degrees of relative insider- and-outsiderness. As artists, living and working in New York City automatically puts them in a privileged position. Even living in the United States (and, furthermore, the West) could be seen as elements of art world insiderness. The point, “who is or is not an artist,” is typically, and most quantifiably, an issue of formal training. Hammons received formal training at both the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Chouinard Art Institute, which is now Cal Arts.7 Basquiat received none. This factor plays a particularly interesting role in each of their identities as artists: while Hammons devotes himself to subverting the conventions of the art world that he was presumably taught to value in art school, Basquiat actively, almost desperately, strove to insert himself into that world that he knew did not exist for people like him. It All Depends on Who You Are on What Street8 Miwon Kwon, a curator and art historian whose work deals extensively with site- specific art, writes, “More than just the museum, the site comes to encompass a relay of several interrelated but different spaces and economies, including the studio, gallery, museum, art criticism, art history, the art market, that together constitute a system of practices that is not separable from but open to social, economic, and political pressures.”9 Although Kwon identifies a shift from physical site specificity to more discursive site specificity over the last several decades, physical, place-specific sitings are more relevant to this paper.