The Art of Obits + Harold Cruse, RIP
I have long been fascinated by obituaries; I usually don't conclude a reading of either a print or online newspaper without having glanced at the obituary page or section. And I do mean obituaries, rather than death notices, which are usually very brief and say almost nothing beyond listing information on the funeral, surviving relatives, and so on. Although this is a macabre enthusiasm, I love to read about the lives people have led, especially lives very different from my own, whatever the quotient of joy or tragedy, and I find that the best obituaries are really bonsaized biographies or potted histories that reveal not only something about the people they're memorializing, but about the world they lived in.
I even considered at one time of pursuing obituary-writing as a side-profession, though I had no idea of how you went about it; I wasn't sure if one applied specifically to a given news bureau's obituary division or section, or whether all the reporters or writers on staff tried their hands (pens, keys) at it, or when some famous outside person is asked to pen something appropriate and summary. I subsequently read a few online and published articles on how different newspapers prepare obituaries, and I did scan Porter Shreve's novel on this topic as well, so now I have a better sense of the process, but questions remain.
One is, when do ertain major papers or news bureaus (like the AP, Reuters or AFP), at the behest of the editor of the obituary or another bureau, decide toprepare the obituaries of the famous (but not always moribund) people?
Is it after the first burst of fame or notoriety? Or at the sign of a major health crisis? And is it true that in some cases the editors will request that these famous people indicate whom the staff might contact for updates, information, and so on?
This strikes me as even more creepy (though also flattering)--will the obit prep become prophetic? Take the case of Susan Sontag, for example: the Times may have begun writing her obituary well before her first serious bout with cancer in 1973 or 1974; but certainly after it they had some draft text in place to epitaphize her. (And even then, it became clear the "newspaper of record" didn't know exactly how to write her epitaph or what was appropriate and what excessive, as it edited down one of the most mesmerizing descriptions of a creative person I've ever read to much more inert prose in a later edition, and left out the fact that her longtime lover was--her lover!
) Here, in fact, is Margalit Fox's amazing passage that someone edited down:
Over four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, trendy, iconoclastic, captivating, hollow, rhapsodic, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, abrasive, aloof, attention-seeking, charming, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, mannered, formidable, brilliant, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, challenging, ambivalent, accessible, lofty, erudite, lucid, inscrutable, solipsistic, intellectual, visceral, reasoned, pretentious, portentous, maddening, lyrical, abstract, narrative, acerbic, opportunistic, chilly, effusive, careerist, sober, gimmicky, relevant, passé, facile, illogical, ambivalent, polemical, didactic, tenacious, slippery, celebratory, banal, untenable, doctrinaire, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, aloof, glib, cantankerous and clever.Also, what do obituary writers decide to focus on, or omit (beyond the required date and place of birth, occupation, surviving relatives, etc.), and why?No one ever called her dull.
Are there things they're required to leave out, along the lines of "not speaking ill of the dead?" What do the emphasized facts (or in some cases, lies) and those silences mean? Who are they geared towards, and how (much) do these contribute, especially in the cases of obituaries of notable public figures (or even unknowns) in major publications or the leading newswire services, to shaping popular, public perceptions of the deceased persons?
In the case of Johnnie Cochran's LA Times obit, the author focused a great deal on Cochran's pre-O.J. civil rights legal practice in Los Angeles, which was the city of his upbringing, and mentioned the fact that he was the first black law clerk in the city attorney's office, a significant historical achievement, yet did not broach the Bruce trial.
It also gave far more information about his personal life, though it drew somewhat of a veil over large portions of it. The NY Times cited far less about this earlier work and naturally focused extensively on his New York highlights. There was no mention of his being the first black law clerk or one of the first black assistant city attorneys, though it probably would have noted this about the person holding a similar distinction in New York.
Or maybe not.
Related to this is the language and forms that obituary writers (and the editors who scrutinize) employ. I've studied them closely for tips on narrative concision, and have always said I would assign a fictional obituary as an exercise in one of my creative writing classes, but haven't done so--yet.
It's obvious what the plot and climax are, and outside of fiction works, truth must be central (verifiable truth, no less)--so characterization, tone, voice, structure and narrative weight, pacing, and the process of narration become key. There are certain linguistic formulas or phrases that crop up in smaller papers, such as "baptized into the Hope of Christ's Resurrection" or "received the Sacrament of the Holy Mother Church" (both used for Roman Catholics), as well as structural formulas. In fact, the obituaries in smaller papers are utterly formulaic; my local paper, the Jersey Journal, usually has a page or two of obituaries that follow the formula "Services for X, age, [where, when, etc.
]--X died [where], X was born [where], X worked [job, where, how long], X has the following survivors [names, order=spouse, children, parents, siblings, grandchildren, great grandchildren, friends]." If there's a divergence from this pattern, I immediately take note. I used to read the black-owned newspapers in St.
Louis (one of which is owned by a distant relative) when I was growing up, and I found their obituaries to be fairly formulaic too, but always full of extraordinary details; they often were like little history lessons, on the early post-slavery era, the Great Migration, and so on. But even larger papers like the Chicago Tribune or Boston Globe follow formulas of this sort for all except designated prominent people. At times these obits read like microfictions or short-shorts, though of course they're about real people who've died.
They are, in effect, gravemarkers--so we return to the macabre--yet they're also, at a certain level mnemonics. I can recall details in some obituaries that I may never forget, and it is these shorthands, like details in works of fiction, that keep the deceased alive.
And what about the people who've died?
What would they think about some of these write ups? Some, of course, would be furious, while others, like Sontag, I think, might have been quite charmed at the NY Times's exuberant, elliptical initial piece, though I can only imagine she'd have been annoyed by ex-NY Times Book Review editor-in-chief Charles McGrath's subsequent, inexact, inept attempt at a memento mori.
***
Speaking of the deceased, Harold Cruse, the African-American studies pioneer and intellectual pathblazer who wrote The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a trenchant, often brilliant and infuriating critique of black intellectual life and agency, and Plural but Equal: A Critical Study of Blacks and Minorities and America's Plural Society, as well as other important works, just passed.
I first read this book while an undergraduate, and found it both appealing in its scorching analysis of black intellectuals' dependence upon European models and their pro-integrationist stance, particularly at a critical moment during the Civil Rights era, and also deeply troubling in its problematization of what seemed to me to be every option other than a separatist nationalist approach, which I knew even then would have little place for my cosmopolitan affinities and liberal ideological leanings. I also found his racial essentialism troubling too. I did, however, take to heart his emphasis on the creation of self-defining black cultural identities (vis-à-vis America in general), on striving for autonomy (in all forms), and on economic and social solidarity, and his concept of the "triple front" (political, cultural, and economic) as a means of measuring the success of black political and revolutionary movements.
Some of his criticisms, such as of cultural appropriation, have lost some, but not all, of their salience. Ironically, though he co-created the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School in Harlem with Amiri Baraka to foster black creativity and agency, Cruse ended up in a majoritarian institution, the University of Michigan; his own career trajectory has become the standard for many--and one might say most--black American intellectuals, and it remains a point of contention, especially given the indifference and disdain, on every level, with which such institutions treat the issues and concerns of black people. Cruse created a crucial and necessary space for contemplating and enacting resistance.
Paulo José Miranda's Hijinks (Lead to My Web Mention!) Until a few days ago, , a Portuguese author (poet, playwright, and novelist, and winner of the 1999 José Saramago Prize [?
]), didn't register on my radar. To tell the truth, I know
quase nada about contemporary Portuguese literature beyond the big names: José Saramago, the Nobel Laureate novelist; Antonio Lobo Antunes, the acclaimed fiction writer and frequent Nobel candidate who'd served in and written about the Angolan War of liberation and whom my only Portuguese teacher, an Azorean woman, peremptorily dismissed as a hack ("the great writers don't need to have a war to write about"); Fernando Namora, the country doctor whose simple prose remains among the most difficult I've ever tried to translate; and a few others, like the gay poet Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, or writers I struggled through in my lessons, like the surrealist Agustina Bessa Luis, the poet Sophia de Mello Breyner, and the deceased earlier writers Vergílio Ferreira, Jorge de Sena and José Cardoso Pires. (Pessoa, Castelo Branco and Camões aren't of recent vintage.) Most of the literature in Portuguese that I know a little about comes from Brazil; I've said I'm going to familiarize myself with contemporary African Lusophone literature, which a colleague extolled, but I haven't gotten beyond a few authors (Luandino Vieira, etc.).
In fact, I'd never even heard of until I read Jan Herman's arts and politics blog on Arts Journal.
(Greg Sandow's infrequently updated music blog is the other one I always scan on that site.) Herman was calling attention to a bombastic flash site set up by Miranda and several friends, called "America Is," which Herman described as "
." On first glance, it appears to be so.The site asks you to click on a box that will give you Miranda's "ontological proof of America in 99 points." You only get 17 (the rest you have to pay for! ha ha), which read as if one of the "sleepwalkers" (cf.
Musil, Broch or Mabuse) had snapped them off, between claps and Bible glances, at this past summer's Republican National Convention. For example, No. 4: "America keeps growing.
America keeps welcoming the world." Or No. 18, which begins, "Iraq is not invaded.
Iraq is being updated...
." Or No. 19: "The product Coca Cola is more widely known than the Eiffel Tower, the tower of Pisa or the Vatican.
America makes things the world understands. America makes things for its people." Or most simplistically, No.
41, "America is it."
Now, my first response was, I think these Portuguese folks are having a bit of fun at our expense. And why not?
Hell, 51% (or so we've been conned into believing, or accepting, or both) of the voting electorate put W back in office just last fall. His main order of business has been to destroy (under the Orwellian description "reform") Social Security, the best US government program created in the 20th century, and one of the few remaining corners of a nation-wide safety net. He's got his Republibots to ram through an awful "tort-reform" (cf.
above) bill (a gift to insurance companies and megacorporations), and an even worse "bankruptcy" reform bill (a gift to the credit card companies), and he's further weakened laws that prevent environmental degradation. As a sop to his anti-gay base, he wasted precious minutes of his State of the Union Address to again call for the hateful anti-gay FMA. The self-admitted doper (finally!
), who supposedly found "Christ" at the age of 40, burns news paths of anti-Christian behavior by pushing for making his tax cuts permanent while calling for draconian cuts to a range of programs geared to help the poor and working-classes. He elevated an inept, incompetent, serial dissembler, and a bad one at that, to be Secretary of State. He made the legalistic enabler of torture our Attorney General.
He nominated anti-UN ranter John Bolton to be...
Secretary to the UN. He has nominated neoconservative liar and adulterer Paul Wolfowitz..
.to head the World Bank. He named John Negroponte, who still has blood on his hands from his years in Central America, to be.
..first Ambassador to Iraq and then head of the National Intelligence Office.
And let's not even get started on Iraq, or the rest of the Middle East, which remains in turmoil though he's taking (and being given) credit for unleashing "freedom" (cf. ibid, Orwell, etc.).
Then there's the steadily increasing theocratic cast of his party, which has even got some GOPers up in arms--he actually flew back from his ranch to grandstand on the Terri Schiavo tragedy, even though he and the rest of his racket claim to stand up for the "sanctity of marriage" and he signed a law in Texas allowing the ending of life support, and a black baby just last...
oh, why even go on? I'm sure the Taliban are feeling pretty envious right about now..
..
At any rate, I didn't need to consider even ONE of the W Unltd.
administration's actions to realize what Miranda and company are up to. Why? Because although I can be obtuse at times (pronouncing "gimlet" like "gym-lit" and forgetting the Pythagorean Theorem),
I do get paid to read critically, and I could see through this bit of jollity--irony-steeped jollity at that--as if I were peering through the Grand Canyon.So I wrote Senhor Herman a little e-mail, and...
. As you see, I give him his props, because I was raised that way and I really like his blog, especially when he quotes his white friend, Bill Osborne, who loves to go off about "honky myopia" (no, he's actually making sharp critiques, not being a self-hating racist). But I was very surprised that he didn't see through Miranda's funning.I mean, Europe does have
authentic right-wing fanatics and nutjobs. Lots of them. They actually are running Italy, were (are?) running Austria, and are quite strong in Germany, the Netherlands, France (remember Chirac's LePen scare, and he's a corrupt rightist himself), Spain, etc. Portugal, by the way, was ruled by a right-wing dictator for much of the 20th century. Europe also has lots of left-leaning folks who are also quite racist and anti-Semitic.
And lots of casual racism (cf. Spanish soccer fans).
But Miranda e seus amigos (or os amigos dele, as some Brazilians might say), I think, is sticking a poniard (that's what did in Marlowe, right?
) into America's eye. In the case of João Felino, a
(cf. !). Look at the "More America" links he lists on
: Anal Philosopher, Andrew Sullivan.... Let's see how long it takes for others to figure this out.
Or maybe not.
[WARNING: Clicking on Nuno Miguel Alves's or Rui Parada's links caused my Mozilla browser to freeze!] I really want to read one of his novels.Swerve #13 + Max Gordon on Oprah Presents: Their Eyes..
."
Tonight I ventured over to Brooklyn to attend a launch party for the literary journal 's issue #13, which features original hand-painted covers by a friend and collaborator on a book project, artist Christopher Stackhouse. Images of some of them are available on Swerve's Website; unfortunately for art-lovers (but fortunately for Swerve), the issue has completely sold out, but they are always accepting new subscriptions (and the poetry they publish is quite good; this issue includes poems by m.(Mike) loncar, author of
).
Christopher's covers truly are works of art, and I don't use that term lightly, or just to roll logs on his behalf; these tight pieces, which form the first, outer panel of the z-folded periodical, span a range of styles, some of them redolent of Japanese rice-paper paintings, while others recall in miniature form such painters as William T. Williams, Sam Gilliam, Richard Diebenkorn, Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Gerhard Richter; yet they are evidently Christopher's own creations and follow from other larger works on canvas and paper that he's done.
They're neither echoes nor knock-offs. Viewing the covers up close reveals many details like the speed, intricacy and delicacy of the brushwork; the screen-like layering on many of them; the richness of the covers, and the tinier touches, such as the splatters, grisailling and subtle geometric patterns. They're like visual versions of piano studies, of considerable melodic and harmonic range and color--études diverses.
I hope Christopher decides to issue prints of many of them, and to produce larger works (he's said that many of these are studies) in this vein. He'll have a winner of a show.***
Tisa B.
called my attention to
trenchant analysis of Oprah Winfrey's ABC version of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. I missed it (no TiVo, didn't videotape or DVR), because I went to see Lydia Diamond's fine stage adaptation of Toni Morrison's at Chicago's . Hallie Gordon was the director. (I was weary of how a staged version of Morrison's first novel might turn out, but the outstanding acting, the inventive sets and lighting, the condensation of the narrative, and parceling out of Morrison's third person narration, both the exposition and the more lyrical, interior sections, to the various characters, sometimes in varying chorus-like groups, all succeeded).
As for
At any rate, if you saw the TV movie and want one writer's astute and acerbic take, read Gordon's commentary. I especially took to heart the passages on the differences between witnessing and watching, particularly in light of the truly f*cked up society (and world) we're living in now. Zora was a witness; Gordon, as I read his review, is saying that instead of her powerful, challenging and beautiful art and testimony, we got something quite different, lacking, mangled, therapeutic: something geared primarily for us to watch (and soon forget).
Here are fifteen novels by black authors I'd like to see adapted--adroitly, of course--into films: Calixthe Béyala's Loukoum: The Little Prince of Belleville; Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here; Octavia Butler's Kindred; Cyrus Colter's The Catacombs; Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions; Louis Edwards's Ten Seconds; E. Lynn Harris's Invisible Life; Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; Gayl Jones's Corregidora; Andrea Lee's Sarah Phillips; Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness; Ishmael Reed's Reckless Eyeballing; Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá's The Renunciation; Sherley Ann Williams's Dessa Rose; and Shay Youngblood's Black Girl in Paris.
+++
Easter = Redemption.
Frida Kahlo, the Love Affair All Over Again When I was in my early 20s, I came across Hayden Herrera's biography of Mexican artist (1907-1954), and immediately became obsessed with Kahlo. Obsessed to the point of drawing badly derivative pieces of myself splayed out nude on a white background, with umbilical cords or wires or ropes or cualquier sabe solamente el Díos extending from my body--from stigmata?
I can't recall--out into the foreground (or negative space, what have you). In one drawing I do recall, the cords/wires/ropes were tethered to books, and I actually created little books (cut the covers and pages, sewed them together, penned in tiny texts, etc.) which I planned to attach to the (unrealized) oil paintings that, like Kahlo's, were going to be my modest but ultimately epoch-shattering contributions to the visual arts.
-John Perse and none other than Pablo Neruda, whose lines like redwoods have rooted in my consciousness forever: " Ah vastedad de pinos, rumor de olas quebrándose...
."
But back to Kahlo--I shook off my thrall eventually, but not after pig-earing and breaking the spine of that Herrera volume and hunting down anything I could find about her in every bookstore and library within a 5-mile radius of Boston. At the time, my friend Kevin K.
and I imagined, maybe even vowed that we would live lives like those of the artists we admired (Kahlo! Basquiat! Klein!
Warhol! García Márquez! Genet!
etc.), and for me, Kahlo's rebelliousness, her bisexuality (or polysexuality), her endless physical and emotional suffering, her Catholic and mixed heritages, her leftist political allegiances, and her passionate and undying love (for a difficult but amazing man) were things I totally identified with. She nearly died for love--more than once!
She hosted and slept with Trosky and Noguchi! She seduced Breton's wife (or maybe that was just a rumor) and countless other women! She had her loyal acolytes come to her house in Coayacán, where she liberated their minds and aesthetics, while sometimes running around in the nude.
She was an artist who was fêted in other countries (the United States, France!) yet didn't have an exhibit of her work in her home country until she could no longer get out of bed--and so, being the diva she was, she had her bed brought by ambulance to the gallery! I also loved those images, which she ginned up in her head but which drew upon a wealth of traditions, stunning even the Surrealists.
For me her artwork was the main thing, and those images remain indelible.
But as I said, the thrall broke, and I found new artists to worship--Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys, Wilfredo Lam, Dana C. Chandler Jr.
, Meret Oppenheim, David Hammons, nearly all the Russian Constructivists, and almost anyone who happened to be exhibiting at , which for me became one of the cutting edge places to see (new) art, especially from beyond the U.S.'s shores, and then babble about it with people like Kevin and the (more sophisticated, it seemed) Dark Room writers, some of whom were watching Tarkovsky films at the Harvard Film archives and hobnobbing with the likes of Richard Leacock.
The thrall broke, and soon it seemed everyone was latching onto . Including Madonna. Supposedly a movie was in the works.
..a Hollywood movie, no less!
...
which of course is basically a death knell...
and then it appeared in 2002, starring , which led me to stifle a scream, because at the very least, she is Mexican (but was it just me, or were all the tan and dark-skinned Mexicans who populate Mexico's capital city and its suburbs somehow overlooked [erased?] during the filming of that biopic?), and she produced it.
The movie was colorful and entertaining and included some charming mimicry by Hayek and Alfred Molina, but it and the industry that had developed around her led me to cross Frida Kahlo off my list, at least for the foreseeable future.
But tonight, like a good bourgeois spectator, I was watching TV, and after surfing between "America's Next Top Model," which I'd managed to avoid so far, and "Survivor: Palau," which I'd also managed to ignore until Ryan C. urged me to check out Ibrehem ("the lips," etc.
), I decided I'd stay glued to the couch and watch the PBS special on Kahlo, "The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo," which I'd also read about in Anita Gates's in the increasing irrelevant New York Times. And lo and behold..
.Kahlo cast her spell over me all over again. By the end of the hour and a half I didn't want the narrative to end.
I wanted more images, anecdotes--more Frida! I restrained myself from pointing out to my partner C. that one of my former professors, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, was one of the talking heads, or from giving a potted history of who Carlos Monsiváis or Elena Poniatowska was, even from rushing upstairs and fishing out my copy of Herrera's biography--I was satisfied simply to sit and listen, watch, start my mental tape and enjoy being in Kahlo's company again.
I understood why I'd fallen in awe before, and why people will continue to do so; she was and remains an extraordinary figure, an utter original.
"VIVA LA VIDA"--Frida Kahlo
, and many others have posted important commentary on Rashawn Brazell's murder, the Sakia Gunn memorial, and related issues.
has provided a list of five excellent ways to make your voice heard. For those who can make it, there's a on Blackfunk's site.
On Sunday, March 13th, 2pm-7pm, Black Funk will be the site of a community gathering and ritual to (re)member Rashawn, offer healing and comfort to the spirit of Rashawn given the violence of his transition and the desecration of his body, offer healing to each other as we acknowledge the pain this murder has caused in the community, pray for justice, and discuss community action.
Please contact us at Black Funk for more information via email at or via phone at (718)636-0345. Bring candles (white, blue, and yellow), sage, jasmine and myrrh incense, music to sing, drums, florida water, A STONE (about palm-sized), flowers, and any other ritual item you feel appropriate for the purpose of the ritual (see above). Of course you may bring food and drink as well.
Adrian Piper's Out of Order, Out of Sight This past weekend, I went on one of my now increasingly rare book-browsing excursions in Chicago. (Abe.
com and similar sites have gradually replaced those gas-burning, hour-devouring jaunts.) At one of my favorite bookstores, a short walk from Wrigley Field, I came across a book that my friend Jerry W. had mentioned to me right around the time it was under preparation, the philosopher and artist
's (MIT Press, 1996).Like a kid spotting choice candy beneath a freshly burst piñata, as soon as I eyed it I raced over and snatched it up. No one else was leaving the store with this book, at least not without my arm attached!
Piper is one of the artists I most revere, and it was a delight to find this book, which I'd wanted so badly but couldn't afford back when I caught a retrospective of her work at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art back in 2000, I believe, with my friend Reggie H.
Who is Adrian Piper, you might be asking?
One of the most important artists of the last 40 years.
After studying painting, she began her in the late 1960s as a rigorous abstract conceptualist before pushing her work in a range of different, though linked, directions: performance, drawing and collage, installation, videos, photography, sound art, cross-genre works, and many other forms.Since the mid-1970s, much of her work has turned on the themes of gender, race, racism, xenophobia, and ethics, to varying degrees, and has also drawn heavily on Piper's autobiography and personal experiences, though central to all of her artwork is her exploration of concepts and ideas.
Around the time that she began her conceptual art practices, she undertook the formal study of , and in due time received an undergraduate and doctorate in this field, her thesis focusing on rationality. She has gone on two maintain multiples careers, as an artist and art critic, and as an academic philosopher, specializing in ethics and metaethics, with particular emphasis on Kant (one of my favorite philosophers).
She also started studying
while still in her teens, and is an authority on that vast subject as well. The stress of juggling so many careers, as well as the hostility she has encountered, for numerous reasons, has taken an extraordinary toll, and in recent years Piper has been quite ill.In describing Piper thus far, I have attempted to talk about her in a way , which is to say without emphasizing two key facts about her, one of which is by now quite evident: that she is a woman; the other is that she's an African American.
In fact, Piper is one the key female figures in 1970s conceptual art, and the first African-American to gain recognition (and lose it, for a while) for her work in this area. She also was, I believe, the first black woman to receive a Ph.D.
in philosophy from Harvard, and later, the first tenured black woman at the institution where she still teaches, Wellesley College (that experience, however, has been
for Piper, as she makes clear on her Website).
She is also one of the few African-American female academic philosophers, and one of the most distinguished. And yet, while Piper has repeatedly and enthusiastically articulated her recognition of these facts, she has also been very wary of labels, in part of their arbitrary and oppressive nature, particularly with regard to racial minorities.In fact, she could (and can)
pass, and in fact has utilized this attribute (of physiognomy and external, social perception) as the ground (tropos) of a number of her artworks. (She also joined a Puerto Rican gang in her youth. I am wondering now how another artist or theorist might use some of Piper's practice to explore identity--particularly that of latinos, particularly afrolatinos, and other mixed peoples in the U.S.--more deeply.)
Her artistic practice has, in fact, grappled with the concepts of language and naming, identity and identification, marginality, and the socialization and social formation of perception, not simply from the female and black perspectives, but within the broader frameworks of ethics as they bear upon gender and feminism, and racism and racialization, which she has powerfully and relentlessly critiqued.
(Subsequent artists, such as
, for example, have riffed on some of her artworks, such as her "Drawing Exaggerating My Negroid Features.")Her famous cards from the 1980s are indicative, to some degree, of her work: when she would overhear white people making racist remarks in her presence without realizing she was black (and she didn't follow one of several detailed strategies, such as reprimanding without "racing" herself; announcing she was black; announcing in advance that she was black; etc.), she would had them calling cards that read:
Dear Friend,Just imagine the response! I look forward to exploring this book, and urge all to explore Piper's artwork (and if you have philosophical training, her difficult but revelatory texts on ethics) if and when you can. Now, I have to find Volume 2, which features her art criticism.
I am black.
I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially in appropriate.Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe that there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do.
I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.
Sincerely yours,
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper.
A little of this, a little of that. We'll have a real viewing--i.
e., theater in the oldest sense--with the gods and orisas, the muses, and the ancestors all working their magic!
A writer and artist who professes, a lover of books and all the arts, I thought I'd try out some fragments of thinking here.
Join in as you will.
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