Artistic cross-culturalism: hard to pull off (who'da thunk it?)

In our class last week, Rebecca introduced us to a few artists via the Art:21 series.  The one who most struck me was Kerry James Marshall.

Kerry James Marshall's "Watts 1963," 1995

Marshall's work deals directly with his identity as an African American, while also directly engaging his position as a figurative 'narrative images on canvas' painter, working in a tradition that is directly linked to European painters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and El Greco (along with African American artists such as Charles White and American folk artists of many ethnicities).

At the end of the 20-minute video on Marshall and his work, our class briefly discussed Marshall's use of imagery and compositions from European culture, and Rebecca asked the class why we thought it was that it's so much more common for minority artists to work within the hegemony's forms of art, rather than the other way around - Europeans looking for, and acknowledging, influence from non-Western/non-hegemonic cultures.  Jackson Pollock (whose exposure to Navajo sand painting early in his life likely affected his signature period of 1947-1950 or so) and Pablo Picasso (whose break from the 19th Century makes a lot more sense if you've seen African and Oceanic masks) were brought up as rare exceptions to the rule that cultural influence trickles downward more often than upward.

Part of the problem, I think, stems from the typical distinction that Western culture makes between "art" and "non-art" (which I address a bit in the first substantive post to this blog).  Artists tend to want their work to be tied into that great big millenia-long conversation that traces a long, convoluted line between the cave paintings in Altamira and whatever's happening in Chelsea galleries this month.  As such, it behooves them to explicitly draw from high art so as to say "My art belongs in this history."

Warhol put a Byzantine-style gold background on a modern-day icon. 

This graffiti, at 5 Pointz in Queens, refers to Rembrandt to say "I'm a High Art painter, too."

By comparison, explicitly referring to folk art, popular culture and/or 'non-art' in one's work may make it harder to be taken seriously by the art establishment.  Sure, the gallery scene may love you, and you may have a great couple of years of sales, but don't bet your paychecks on getting into the Art History canon.

Takeshi Murakami's pop-culture appropriations are probably not going to be in the equivalent of a Janson textbook in 100 years.

Another issue that I see deals with culture outside of the art world.  When someone related to the hegemony ("The Man") appropriates aspects of a non-hegemonic culture (even Picasso), there's often a feeling of, if not paternalism, at least noblesse oblige - like a representative from High Culture is deigning to give a nod to Low Culture's masses.  It's like seeing a white undergrad in a dashiki and cowry shells in his hair, whose knowledge of colonial-and-post-colonial African history comes mainly from listening to Fela Kuti records while stoned.

Maybe I'm just being grumpy, but I find Marshall's connection to The School of Athens to be much more interesting, and much gutsier as a statement of identity, than a contemporary painter in London attempting to draw a connection between his work and, say, Ellis Ruley.

Or, even worse, there's the condescending version of "acknowledging another culture," like this statue by Erastus Dow Palmer, Indian Girl, or the Dawn of Christianity, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

 

This is colonialist condescension at its finest:  a statue of a topless, ostensibly "Indian" woman, gazing thoughtfully and lovingly at the cross in her right hand, while getting ready to drop the feathers (representing her primitive, pagan religion, of course) in her left hand.  According to the Met's description, the allegorical sculpture symbolizes ""the Dawn of Christianity Upon the Aborigines … [and would] symbolize the first impression of civilization upon the native of this country."

Holy crap, wow!

And for what it's worth, I'm not so sure that Paul Simon's Graceland is free of condescension, either.