Lecture 003

Walker Evans and James Agee

• Depression-era photojournalism

• set new standards for the evidentiary integrity expected of art informed by social awareness and political activism.

Bearden: travel march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

• founding member of the Harlem-based art group known as The Spiral

• songwriter, known as co-writer of the jazz classic "Sea Breeze"

Article

• working for racial equality

• work with Charles Alston, Emma Amos, Norman Lewis, Merton Simpson

• "Mississippi 1964": murder by KKK. ( -> collage: not too much political)

• "The Street": challenge media's record (distorted) of African Americas

  • photograph (as a documentary) can speak for itself
  • depth and diversity of the subject
  • "Walls of Jericho" (figure 9): liberated surpressed race
  • "In That Number": characterize African American's history
  • red, green color - recalibrate color
  • photography: as a tool for protests

Andy Warhol Charles Moore (architect) William Majors

Collage: started Picasso's Cubist composition, newsletter and picture talk politics

Rauschenberg Whitten: turn to dog, policeman

Who's Afraid of the Black Fantastic

Black Arts Movement (BAM)

Playing with blackness

• "surface versus death" problem: passing isn't black

• limit the word "black"

• "passing for black" controversy: a black person under white unzipped jacket (black surface lacking depth)

  • offence many black people by claiming people who passing feel black

BAM's relation to popular culture

• protest white use of flat, white, commercial, oppressive use of surface.

• "black fantastic": black cultural nationalism (black pride)

• black will no longer be politicized as "black hairstyle is only a hairstyle (but blackness is not only black body)

• "black beauty": a way to de-colonize mind and body. (worry distortion of black beauty created by antiblack racism)

Mahogany (1975, the film)

• Diana Ross's performance: freedom

• ability to appreciate blackness of themselves

• black fantasy vs. natural beauty

• BAM: fighting for people hate their own natural (processed) hair

Link: China's shoping center - American White Consumerism

• Went back last year, shocking: shopping mall, poster of european man, women fashion. (not just one, but ALL white faces!)

• The salesman could not speak english, and costomers are all Chinese local people.

• Colonizing of ideology so entrenched.

Amiri Baraka: natural / un-nature mix

• "unnatural" must be a sign of racial self-hatred

Badu, Iton: unclothed body. Red, black, green color.

• Badu: along young black people to claim their right to be individuals (not only a part of black collective)

• "Badu's assassination": 2010 (What kills her?) Assassination of black women. "Strip" him naked to the world!

(Cardboard) Surface vs. Skin

Mingering Mike: black green, red

Glenn Ligon's Play with Commercial Surface

• "I sell the shadow to support the substance

Black light: white denial of the possibility of black light. (black light hard to imagine due to glare of white light)