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(In)visibility in New Black Portraiture: Aria Dean and Hamishi Farah in Dialogue

20170317153341-wptir-25 In March 2016, Los Angeles-based artist and writer Aria Dean penned an essay entitled “Closing the Loop” for The New Inquiry about the white monopolization of feminist selfie art. I remember reading the essay and feeling its urgency and necessity at a time when the spotlight on selfie art and culture was (and still is) dominated by white cis-hetero young women. When I think of the canon of feminist art and the “trailblazers” that paved the way for subsequent generations of women artists, I see a very similar process of erasure repeating itself.

Women artists of color from the 1970s were sidelined by white feminism, or what is now known as the Feminist Avant-garde in art history, which is gently nestled under the more general but equally white-dominant umbrella of the women’s liberation movement. Ana Mendieta’s dissatisfaction with the movement, with groups like New York’s white-centric A.I.R. collective, is well documented. As is the exclusion of black artists such as Dindga McCannon, Pat Davis, and Carol Blank from the “official” canon of Feminist Art in America from the 70s. These artists made independent efforts to be visible with the formation of the Where We At (WWA) organization following their 1971 exhibition “Where We At” Black Women Artists: 1971.

What fundamentally separates these groups today remains the same: artists of color have a shared activist focus on intersectional issues while white artists largely continue to prioritize their own privileged ones. There is no room for the “other” in history books and the heavy baggage that the “other” carries makes it difficult for marginalized artists to find the right language to speak it in. In the history of art and otherwise all the words belong to White Supremacy: all the pages of history have been written for and in favor of it. Finding one’s non-white place within this history becomes a dexterous task that often entails feelings of complicity or guilt. When the extant systems for visibility are moderated, co-opted, and monetized by White Supremacy, it’s no surprise that the terrain is difficult to navigate.

Aria Dean and Hamishi Farah, White ppl think I'm radical, Installation View at Arcadia Missa, London Courtesy the Artists & Arcadia Missa. Photo: Tim Bowditch

It is in this vein that Aria Dean and Melbourne-based artist Hamishi Farah have worked somewhat allusively in a prefatory effort that seems to propose a definition for New Black Portraiture in art following Dean’s 2016 posture. Their two-person exhibition, White ppl think I’m radical at London’s Arcadia Missa (through April 29) presents an inclusive, more collective idea of self-portraiture. One where the black artist is simultaneously present and absent from the picture, where the self is at once he, she, and they—an outlook that contradicts western philosophy’s emphasis on the ideologically capitalist individual.

I spoke with Dean and Farah on the occasion of the exhibition regarding the complicated nature of black portraiture today. In both the show and conversation, the two artists pass on proposing any explicit manifestos, instead choosing to work within a cogitative grey area that isn’t as totalizing or burdensome. They give themselves the necessary space to move boundlessly between the intersections and problematics of image and representation.

In the exhibition Dean presents two self-produced photographs: one of herself and the other of a woman named Aallyah Wright with whom she collaborated to make Wata, a video of the Yazoo River in Mississippi, where Dean’s grandfather was from and where Wright currently resides. Dean found, contacted, and commissioned Wright via Facebook to create the video, saying of Wright, “She and I are interchangeable, you can’t see our faces.” She describes them as “blurred out in a way that is a shout out to police footage or CCTV-type surveillance, which perhaps [also] makes us interchangeable with the larger ecosystem of images of black femmes.”

Aria Dean & Aallyah Wright, Wata (Yazoo, MS). Courtesy the Artists & Arcadia Missa. Photo: Tim Bowditch

Dean has a specific interest in “the problems and violences” of portraiture. It is the first time she has ever shown an image of a human body. She is largely against representation in her work, preferring abstraction if she senses her art will be evaluated by placing her identity on a binary or spectrum. “I wanted to do violence to portraiture here, in a rather timid way,” she says, “I guess I’m often trying to find that sweet spot between refusal of the figurative image and an artistic program of representation à la Kerry James Marshall or Mickalene Thomas.” Dean views the video “as a portrait of Aallyah,” but playfully asks: “Can seeing through someone’s eyes become a portrait of them...or myself?”

Situated next to Farah’s self-portraits in the exhibition, a coded visual language begins to emerge with both artists presenting themselves by proxy. None of Farah’s paintings include physical or literal representations of him. In terms of portraiture Farah likes to think about “double consciousness, the white gaze and [Frantz] Fanon’s ontology of blackness.” He doesn’t consider the theories themselves, but “the lived experiences of them.”

He explains:

I approach it this way because my experience of myself in art is very much through how I am seen [by white people]. Even an understanding of my own blackness very much came about through its forced opposition to whiteness. In terms of the portraits, you could think of it as a reclamation [of] my inner ontological life through a black gaze—that is, one that is aware of how it is viewed by whiteness. I think this is very reductive and annoys white people—as it should. I believe white ontological life is entirely rooted in or based on anti-blackness so perhaps I am also contesting Fanon’s own euro-centrism.

Hamishi Farah, Photographer. Courtesy the Artists & Arcadia Missa. Photo: Tim Bowditch

Farah describes a painting he made of a widely circulated photo of Kanye West’s first public appearance after being hospitalized, where he is walking out of Trump Tower after meeting with the then President-elect. The artist differentiates it from his other works:

I am always hesitant to represent black people...I identify a lot with Kanye, especially in his problem-ness and the way he wields it, but also in his misery in white spaces and obsessiveness. I think a lot of black men do. I can’t think of many black men whose audience has such an ubiquitous and violent understanding of the intricacies and contradictions of public black masculinity. His representation might be able to stand in for that alone, and perhaps contextualize some of the other self-portraits.

Both artists expressed difficulty in choosing how to represent themselves while maintaining a certain secrecy about the work in an effort to protect it and themselves. There is an inherent relationship between representation and secrecy when there are so many contradictions and violence in black portraiture. When presenting yourself from a marginalized position, there can be a lot of power in remaining invisible in public. If you make yourself visible, you risk giving yourself away to more violence, exploitation, and nonconsensual erasure, the Arcadia Missa collaboration seems to say. Finding a healthy balance is hard. Marginalized groups have been violated on so many levels and yet often still need to pander to a white market in order to speak to other marginalized groups and survive.

Hamishi Farah, George. Courtesy the Artist & Arcadia Missa. Photo: Tim Bowditch

“The remaining invisible thing is such a conundrum,” says Farah. He continues:

Western art is like a history of blowing off black art as white genius. This makes it interesting to think about why so many black artists gravitate towards performance and music. Sometimes all we have is to use that hypervisibility. A lot of the black artists I know are so much more visible than they get paid for. Same goes with viral blackness. Last year I made a painting of this person, Aallyah, who punched this white girl [who had called her the n-word], hoping that when it sells I can send her a stack or two—kind of as a “blacceleration” or “reparative blackitalism,” trying to use the violent gaze to make sure niggas get paid.

Dean also grapples with the tensions between the power of invisibility and the simultaneous importance of proliferation. She paraphrases New York-based artist and critic Lorraine O’Grady from a conversation she organized between O’Grady and New York-based artist and writer Juliana Huxtable last year:

When your subject matter is so big and cumbersome as blackness then you may feel compelled to attack it from all sides. Black artists have to have the tightest fucking program of attack: writing, performing, making objects, music, etc. I think this is part of why David Hammons is so fucking cool, because somehow he sort of doesn’t give into the compulsion to arrive with a thesis, you know? Like he keeps the mystery.

Lorraine and Juliana both felt like the body was really important because we can’t do away with aberrant bodies before they’ve been come to terms with. They talked about the funny timeline where various western philosophical and theoretical trends arrive to conveniently do away with “the body” or “the author” at moments when marginalized people are making themselves heard more loudly. Which I agree with but I think I’m really preoccupied with the ontology of blackness when it comes to representation—it’s so messy. Blackness doesn’t precede the image really and that seems like a really difficult thing to grapple with when you’re working with images, or yourself as image in performance.

Aria Dean and Hamishi Farah, White ppl think I'm radical, Installation View at Arcadia Missa, London Courtesy the Artists & Arcadia Missa. Photo: Tim Bowditch

Dean laughs and continues:

I think it is important to represent yourself, but my big thing is that politics of representation and theories of representation that were devised, let's say circa 1970, just don’t work when your image can be ripped and bounced across the internet. It stresses me out so much. Because like—and this is what I was whining about in that selfie article—I really don't care very much about selfie artists. A lot of the theories of the body and the image that artists reference just don’t fit; it’s all wonky. And my whole thing is that critically looking at the (non) ontology of blackness, black theory, black art, black everything can teach us so much about confronting a body and a life that is so so entangled with images.

Farah adds:

I think it is important to note something about the politicization of aesthetics and that aesthetics in “the commons” are traditionally an anti-black battleground or colonial frontier. What happens when pro-blackness is subsumed into an aesthetic turnstile? I think the black NFL players who won the Superbowl understand this and I support their boycott [of visiting the White House]. I think black critics of Obama also understand this. This is part of the difficulty of even participating in an art dialogue, whether it be institutional spaces or not. I just got the news that I’m now represented by two amazing galleries, I love the people who run them and this is definitely about my survival. But it’s hard to be happy about it until I actually do something with that survival and those resources. I see contributing to “art” (in opposition to using art and its culture, agency, and resources as a tool) as being a snitch.

White ppl think I’m radical continues at Arcadia Missa, London, through April 29.

—Audrey L. Phillips

Audrey Phillips is a Toronto-based writer. She is a regular contributor to AQNB.

(Image at top: Aria Dean & Aallyah Wright, Wata Proxy (Yazoo, MS). Courtesy the Artists & Arcadia Missa. Photo: Tim Bowditch)

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