Rachel Hunter Himes’ incredible essay for Triple Canopy, Black Block, sat in my tabs for weeks, but after hearing her talk about it with Helen Molesworth on the DZ podcast, I realized it’s not the kind of thing to be sleeping on. It ended up changing the essay I’d been so stuck on in crucial ways.
Working back from the shiny, happy, BTS artist lifestyle genre of art writing, Himes traces out a historic and ongoing failure of critics and institutions to engage substantively with the work of Black artists. It’s thorough and incisive, both then and now, and kind of devastating. But there’s a liberation in the realizations she prompts, even if there’s also a sting of complicity.
It’s her account of the most recent past, where urgency and relevance and representation have dominated, that hit me the hardest right now, as I’ve tried to figure out what difference art, artists, and art institutions can make in the fascistic world we’re inhabiting. The tl;mr [too long; must read], though, is that we’re not gonna get out of this by buying a painting or putting on a show:
Today, critics—and maybe the art-viewing public, too—are still unable to prevent themselves from understanding blackness as, in the first order, political. This phenomenon has been exacerbated by writing that overstates the political significance and social power of art, and of the work of black artists in particular. In the past decade, the absence, and moreover the failure, of progressive and leftist political formations—membership organizations, political parties, mass-mobilization campaigns—has placed a great deal of pressure on cultural production and consumption. This has generated significant investments in representation as a meaningful and efficacious form of political activity. The work of black artists—and indigenous artists, other artists of color, and queer artists—has been asked to redeem audiences, institutions, and buyers, with its patronage, purchase, and display to serve as reparative gestures. This framework, which suggests that the consumption and assessment of black artists always carries political stakes, is not one that easily accommodates negative judgments.
Artists have increasingly been encouraged to shape their practices to reflect this understanding of art’s role in society. In the past decade, the Ford Foundation has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to artists (visual and otherwise) and organizations seeking to “push back against narratives that undermine fairness,” “disrupt inequality,” and “illuminate the root causes of injustice.” The foundation’s 2017 Art of Change fellowships awarded $50,000 to individuals to support the creation of “powerful works of art that help advance freedom, justice, and inclusion and strengthen our democracy.” Critics have offered similarly outsized claims about art’s political impact, in collusion (however unwittingly) with liberal institutions, from universities and museums to magazines and nonprofits. The increasingly apparent gulf between rhetoric and reality, in the moment of the far right’s resurgence and Trump’s second rise to power, produces skepticism and disillusionment, not only with art but with progressive politics.
Also, Himes has a great examination of the Los Angeles Part Two of RETROaction, Hauser & Wirth’s 30th anniversary revisitation of Charles Gaines’s 1993 show, The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism. A RETROaction symposium held at Hunter in NYC is online. For The Brick, Rhea Anastas edited an updated and expanded version of Gaines’ original catalogue, with contemporary reflections, which is really excellent. I found myself standing and reading it for like 45 minutes when I first saw it.
Black Block, by Rachel Hunter Himes [triple canopy]
Dialogues | The difficulty of critiquing Black artists, with Rachel Hunter Himes [davidzwirner podcast]