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Gabriel Coxhead
David Blandy, W & B M (mirror-faceoff). Courtesy of the artist.Blandy’s film trilogy, The Way of the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim, presents popular culture as something Janus-faced – as both an offer of potential liberation, but simultaneously a solipsistic prison. In the films, Blandy plays the role of a questing, wandering monk – in the mold of David Carradine from ‘70s TV series Kung Fu – as he attempts to navigate his way through a forest of pop-cultural references in order to reach his destiny. Sometimes, he uses these references as sorts of spiritual markers, signposts on the way to the soul: as in the first instalment, The Five Boroughs of the Soul (2004), where, dressed in red monastic robes and carrying a wooden staff and portable record-player, he visits various music-related landmarks in New York – James Brown’s palatial former residence; the mortuary where Notorious B.I.G. was interred – or else plays geographically-themed songs in appropriate locations – Bobby Womak’s Across 110th Street; Boogie Down Productions’ South Bronx; Mos Def’s Brooklyn.
Subsequently, however, in The Soul of the Lakes (2005), set in the Lake District in the North of England, and especially in The Soul of London (2006), the nature of his quest becomes more elusive and chimeral, threatening to collapse in on itself. “What is real?,” runs a sample from David Carradine in the latter film; “knowledge of myself”, raps KRS-One on the soundtrack, as if in answer. And yet, as Blandy contemplates his reflection in a mirror, he also recalls Bruce Lee’s instructions that “there is no ‘I’… only illusions and images”; until finally, a giant explosion – sampled from Star Wars and Akira – engulfs the entire planet, as if all of reality has simply been incinerated by this one irresolvable, existential paradox: the idea that selfhood itself is a fantasy.
And yet, it’s in this very idea that a kind of liberation can perhaps ultimately be found. In his most recent video, The White and Black Minstrel Show (2007), Blandy revisits Syl Johnson’s lament about racial oppression, ‘Is It Because I’m Black?’, here performing it on an ornate and elaborate stage. It’s a much more overtly theatrical production that his previous appropriations of the song, as Blandy – with his top hat and cane, his comically oversize jacket, and his hideously ‘blacked-up’ features – explicitly evokes the cavorting caricatures of blackface minstrelsy. And as such, the essentialist notions of truth and fantasy, mimicry and authenticity slowly start to unravel – for the history of minstrelsy simply doesn’t permit such absolute distinctions: certainly not the antebellum, white minstrel tradition, whose blackface imitations of African-American ‘Jim Crow’ dances were intended partly as racial parodies, but also partly as ethnographic homages, a way of authenticating such transgressive, cross-cultural entertainment; nor, for that matter, the subsequent African-American minstrels, many of whom expanded their repertoire by adopting blackface precisely when the craze was at its savagely racist peak.
Given this tangled choreography of white and black, this regression of masquerade and mimicry, we have to ask ourselves what role here Blandy is performing. Whose soul is he channelling – the original ‘Jim Crow’?; blackface minstrels, of whichever race?; ‘70s soul singers?; contemporary wiggas? An answer, perhaps, lies with his own particular shade of camouflage: not just blacked-up, he’s also ‘whited-up’. With his sad-clown mouth of black set in a chalk-white face, he seems to enact a melancholic parody of his own white-skinned, black-voiced performances; an impersonation, essentially, of himself. And as he finishes his show and shuffles offstage it feels, finally, like some kind of settlement has been reached, some form of conclusion: a recognition that identity is, precisely, a kind of minstrelsy – a series of quotations-within-quotations, fictions-within-fictions. And that it’s our perpetual, restless search for soul, rather than our ever actually locating it, that makes us who we are.
Adapted from What is Soul? by Gabriel Coxhead, 2008
