LINE TAN (detail)
Last year I produced my first figurative work - if you can call a paint tube figurative. LINE TAN references Pop painter Tom Wesselmann, whose signature works typically include a female nude with tan lines.
I didn’t get to enjoy the piece for very long - a few days after it was finished a collector visiting the studio snapped it up. <sigh> Don’t get me wrong, sales are good as they allow me to keep making things, and making things makes me happy. But I do like to enjoy the things I make, too, at least for a bit. Especially in a case like this, where the piece breaks into new territory (the human figure).
So damn you BG for running off with this … and thank you for your support!
In developing these works I often start with a color idiom that I then reference to an artist. One that had been in mind for while was ‘brown sugar’. Sugar led to sweet, sweet led to Marvin Gaye’s How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You), a celebration of love. It also led to a more controversial song written by Mick Jagger and his girlfriend of the time, Marsha Hunt (who is black), to a street name for heroin, and to Jackie Gleason’s character Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners.
work in process, paint drip for Sugar Brown
Multiple references makes Brown Sugar a delightful pun. The one I chose to highlight - with a quote on the label - was Marvin Gaye’s love song.
Reworking the original digital model, I 3D printed a new paint drip. Using Golden Paint’s virtual color mixing tool I mixed up a nice chocolaty brown and began painting the model. It was at this point that things took a hard left (right?) turn.
My daughter - an intelligent, articulate, politically engaged, and righteous 25 - was less than happy when she saw the work in process. “You can’t do that,” she said. “You’re a privileged white male, you’re going to commit career suicide!”
Whoa. A bit taken aback, I described the piece as a celebration. To no effect, as I don’t have the right to ‘appropriate black culture’. “It’s not appropriation, it’s appreciation,” I said. “I like to think that I’m colorblind” (obviously in a racial sense, as the irony of the paint tubes is … well, you understand).
“That word is a trigger and there are a list of automatic responses to it.” Responses based on my race: privileged white male.
“So I can make a white girl dripping out of a paint tube but I can’t make a black girl dripping out of a paint tube? Now that’s racist.”
“No, you can’t. Women are sexualized in art, especially black women.”
For the purpose of this essay I’m going to leave the issue of sexualization and several millennia of the history of art out of this and focus on the issue of race.
I had to consider the very real issue here: a world of insanely over-the-top political correctness that can only be described as intolerant absolutism. [As an aside I have watched this building up for decades with the practice of scorched-earth politics and monopolized, sensationalized, profit-hungry corporate media.] I also remembered my idealistic youth and a tendency to see things as extremes rather than shades of grey.
I discussed this with an artist friend (white male, and it annoys me to no end that I have to qualify race for the purpose of this essay). His immediate response was “you can’t do that” and he reminded me of (white) painter Dana Schutz, who had been severely criticized for the exhibition of an abstract painting of Emmett Til at the Whitney Biennial. Reactions to Schutz’s work ranged from “It is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun” (somebody please tell me where the ‘fun’ is in this) to “A white person showing empathy toward blacks is now racist?”.
Another (white male) friend related the story of artist Donald Newman, who in 1979 abruptly ended an otherwise promising career with a poorly chosen title for a series of work. It looks to me like he chose the title to get attention, and that it worked a bit better than he anticipated. The title was grossly inappropriate and will not be repeated here.
A (white male) art dealer in NYC loved the idea of Sugar Brown until I told him of my daughter’s reaction. Then he said, “I hadn’t thought about it like that at all. But if a young person has that kind of response maybe you should put it off for a year until things settle down.” Another (white male) art dealer, high level secondary market, just shook his head, and then showed me pieces by Alexander Calder that he had removed from display.
Another friend (black male) said he loved the concept and was shocked by my daughter’s reaction. “Brown sugar, brown sugar, that’s sweet! Marvin Gaye! I’ve never heard that used in a negative way.”
Banksy via Instagram
So now I am at an impasse.
This is dangerous territory - especially in the current political climate. While I am really excited about this new work and think it would be a great piece - a celebration of love, beauty, and black culture, I am concerned that it will provoke an intolerant response.
Am I not allowed to be influenced by Soul, Funk, Jazz, or the beauty of a woman without regard for the color of her skin? Am I being overcautious and forsaking my responsibility to address the issues of my time? Am I being politically correct to the point of being intolerant of my own work?
Banksy, attached to a piece posted on Instagram, wrote:
“People of colour are being failed by the system. The White system. Like a broken pipe flooding the apartment of people living downstairs. This faulty system is making their life misery, but it's not their job to fix it. They can't, no-one will let them in the apartment upstairs. This is a white problem. And if white people don’t fix it, someone will have to come upstairs and kick the door in.”
addendum: Banksy bought a retired French naval ship and repurposed it to rescue immigrants at sea that the EU ignores and leaves to drown.
