NEW WORLD PORTRAITURE

KEHINDE WILEY

By Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Depicting young African-American men swathed in the accoutrements of nobility and power—excerpted from great European paintings—Kehinde Wiley shows us a vision of history juxtaposed with contemporary art’s unstable relationship to realism. Wiley’s grandiose portraits create a crisis of categories by providing a new context for traditional portraiture, as he works with the vernacular of hip-hop, sampling, collage and quotation, only to pull viewers through a dizzying world of historical references: El Greco’s response to Titian in the 16th century cross-faded with Ingres’ infamous Portrait of Napoleon 1 as Jupiter Enthroned (1806). His American forerunners include Aaron Douglas, who made portraits of African-Americans rising from the industrial world of boom-time America in 1920s Harlem, and Romare Bearden, whose sly portrayals featured individuals already living in a collage-based culture. Wiley’s paintings reflect America’s unceasing search for new meanings in the ruins of the old worlds of Europe and Africa, while also fanning the flames of a certain kind of hysteria about the role of the African-American male in a medium dominated by the politics of aesthetics. What we see in Wiley’s work transforms our perceptions of old and new, race and masculinity. Above all, his paintings express the generous soul of an artist saying: another world is possible.

After graduating form Yale’s MFA program in 2001, the Los Angeles-born artist was tapped as an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Breakout exhibitions at New York’s Deitch Projects and Los Angeles’ Roberts & Tilton quickly followed. And Wiley, like his most ambitious peers, is a media darling. The cable music channel VH1 commissioned him to paint portraits of recording artists celebrated by the 2005 Hip-Hop Honors show, including Ice T, Notorious BIG and Grand Master Flash. Illustrating Wiley’s massive crossover appeal, House and Garden magazine lauded him as one of the “Tastemakers of 2007.”

But in the past year Wiley has turned from the decorative flourishes of the European rococo and neo-classical Empire periods to the iconography of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Beijing is the first stop in the artist’s heady “World Stage” project, which began when Wiley was sifting through spam emails and developed a desire to make art about the international market. Wiley decided to set up studios around the world, fusing local cultural imagery with his young African-American male subjects.

Beginning in August 2006, Wiley established a temporary atelier in Beijing, staying for three two-month stints. He employed and trained students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, who masterfully executed his designs, and had his subjects model poses from 1950s and 1960s Maoist propaganda. Previous series’ fleur-de-lys patterns are replaced with Ming dynasty porcelain and silk designs, and the works bear titles lifted from Cultural Revolution mantras.

The resulting paintings create an incongruous tension between context and content; revolutions happen the same way, pulling a society apart and putting it back together again. The Chinese emulated the role posters played in the Russian Revolution by remixing them for the Cultural Revolution. Wiley’s paintings are in turn tools for unpacking the clichés that constitute reality, reminding us that propaganda sends mixed messages to the public. Whether the revolution took place in Russia or China or in the early Dada posters of Zurich and Berlin, the same process occurs: the utilization of public space for tactical reasons.

Susan Sontag, in her essay “Posters: Advertisement, Political Artifact, Commodity” (1970), addressed posters, role in educating young Cubans after the Cuban Revolution: “The relation posters have to visual fashion is that of ‘quotation.’ Thus the poster artist is usually a plagiarist (whether of himself or others), and plagiarism is one main feature of the history of poster aesthetics.” Similarly, Wiley’s paintings, as posters, quote pre-existing visual sources, calling out the discontinuity of subjects from their contexts while creating a realm where the two co-exist. As propaganda, perhaps they question America’s own need for a cultural revolution.

Wiley’s cycle of appropriation—of taking and “repurposing” the elements of style—challenges historical paradigms on another level. The remix is global and Wiley’s re-purposing of communist China prompts reflection on culture’s collision with ideology and commerce. The paintings provide a sense of history’s place in the PRC’s current post-socialist consumer economy. The last century’s traumatic ideological struggles have exhausted all desire to derive meaningful lessons from the past—both in America, where history is a scarce resource, and in China, where history was torn apart by the radical events of the Cultural Revolution, awaiting reconstruction from scratch. Whether it appears now in theme parks, period tele-dramas or urban renewal, China’s recent history has been transformed into a mode of leisure edu-tainment in which questions of authenticity and accuracy give way to an aestheticized postmodern pastiche of signs and commodification.

As Wiley discovered in China, establishing an overseas studio is tricky. The artist can afford to pay his workers generous wages—reputedly twice the Beijing standard—but has to import quality paints, mediums and canvases. Plans for Mumbai fell through for logistical reasons, and a crate of small paintings and sketches Wiley made there remains lodged in a customs dispute.

Yet whatever the context, the “re-valuations” Wiley paints of African-American males are emblems of progress and reclamation—not destruction. Whatever your agenda, you need the right imagery. When asked about the role “power” plays in his work, Wiley replied casually: “It’s all a charade.”

Wiley’s appropriation of Chinese themes furthers a sense of duality – his paintings are icons from someone else’s revolution, like Mao’s appropriation of Stalin’s version of Marxism-Leninism.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid is a DJ, artist and writer living in New York. He is included in the Africa Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale through November 21 and his book, Rhythm Science, was published my MIT Press in 2004

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