The Kehinde Wiley Experience: "White"
Susan Ross
Kehinde Wiley, Madonna of the Rosary, 2005, oil, enamel and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 40 in.
"White," the title of the new series of paintings by Kehinde Wiley, is bound to catch the attention of the 27-year-old artist’s legion of fans. With this single, supercharged word, the painter insinuates that he has turned away from they’ve come to expect of him in his brief but immensely successful career: monumental portraits of handsome young black men in hip hop gear.
No, the artist hasn’t started painting pretty white suburban boys. As with his previous work, the new series features black males in poses taken from Old Master paintings. But Wiley has introduced whiteness into his work, bleaching out the bombastic colors he has used in the past and, in doing so, raising increasingly complex questions about the construction of race in America today.
"White" builds on "Passing/Posing," Wiley?s 2004 show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. "Passing/Posing," a forceful group of portraits of black men demonstrating postures and gestures drawn from the work of Titian and Tiepolo, addressed the absence of black subjects in the Western canon. Or at least that is how the series of works was received. Wiley contends that the purpose of the series wasn’t solely moralistic. "If I were going to be entirely redemptive" he told me on a recent visit to his 23rd Street studio, "I should really start criticizing the very enterprise of easel painting itself."
Wiley, however, loves to paint. So, rather than turning his back on the medium, he decided to adopt a stance he describes as "both critical and complicit." Simultaneously drawing upon tradition and sabotaging it by laying its tricks bare, Wiley has produced a body of work that is as much about dissimulation as display. The "passing" in the Brooklyn Museum show was meant to connote "passing for," a reference to the fantasy of blending into mainstream, white American society, an action encoded in such little spoken of traditions as the paper bag test. As much reifying black men by giving them a place in the history of Western art, Wiley contends he wanted to "embrace the irony of the absence of black bodies in public space and to mock it and take delight in it."
Wiley’s fascination with the construction of racial identity led him to focus on hip-hop gear, which he likens to a kind of drag. Like the black and Latino gay men in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, which Wiley cites as an inspiration, his portraits question "realness." In Livingston’s film, costume was a way for otherwise disenfranchised men to inhabit worlds from which they are generally excluded. By hanging outsized images of black men in a museum, Wiley wanted to achieve a similar goal. Yet while that empowered his subjects, Wiley’s bright colors, hyper-realistic costumes and blinding gold frames also called attention to the fantasy of belonging with which the project engaged.
This air of disingenuousness explains much of the force behind Wiley’s work. The portraits are, to his mind, "acts of displacement and rupture." Their structure, particularly their high finish and slick surfaces, allows the viewer "to see these young men as passing, but in the end [they don’t] feel authentic, they feel like posers." In this sense, "Passing/Posing" deconstructed racial identities and demonstrated how hide bound they are.
With "White," Wiley extends that theme further and deepens its impact by literally posing black against white. In the new series, a neutral field enhanced by pink, silver and blue decorative motifs has replaced the flamboyant colors of his earlier work. But as it did in "Passing/Posing," the background in the "White" paintings simply refuses to behave: tendrils and curlicues snake out from behind and surround Wiley’s subjects, willfully disobeying the traditions of the figure/ground relationship.
For Wiley, this interplay between the most basic elements of painting is a metaphor for the construction of race as Other. Blackness is defined against whiteness; figure is defined against ground. In each case, ‘white’ and ‘ground’ are unquestioned constants and notions of ‘black’ and ‘figure’ arise only in contradistinction to them.
"When I decided to make this show with the title ‘White’, I didn’t want to look at whiteness as a construction," Wiley says. "The background coming to the fore and competing with the figure is a kind of strategy that involves some of my ideas concerning whiteness itself. Once you start looking at whiteness as a construction, you realize it?s everywhere and nowhere. It’s defined by its ineffable ubiquity."
In this new series, then, whiteness is a device for testing the basic structure of Wiley’s project. The white, however, also introduces new questions into his work. His Rococo palette is unavoidably gendered. Moreover, the poses now are daintier and more feminine. In Madonna of the Rosary, for example, slender fingers delicately holding prayer beads have replaced the strong hand gripping a crosier in Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia No. 2. Placing these feminine elements against the hyper-masculine hubris of hip-hop culture ultimately marks the "White" paintings with a productive tension, deepening the impact of Wiley’s deconstruction of blackness by pointing to assumptions about black male sexuality.
Wiley’s flirtation with questions of gender and sex in the "White" paintings is limited to a passing glance, and one hopes that in future work the artist will address them more fully. Still, what demonstrates the strength of Wiley’s project is that despite their ornate surfaces, beautiful subjects and pretty colors, the "White" paintings resist becoming decorative. Instead, Wiley skillfully balances a complex range of issues in them–race, gender, class, power and the role of representation in each of these are all addressed, yet none dominates the others. At no point does Wiley preach. Instead, he appears to be an artist who respects his viewer.
The goal, Wiley has said, is not to moralize, but rather to create situations that raise questions. He strives to avoid the pressure of identity politics even if, as he points out, critics generally refer to him as "black artist Kehinde Wiley." That role, Wiley insists, doesn’t interest him because it’s simply not productive.
"It’s not necessarily something I believe in," Wiley says, "because for me, as a young black man, I don’t necessarily feel I am bound in that sense. The struggle for me is to try and create work that is as complex as I believe we are capable of being."
