Learning from "Black Male." - Whitney Museum, New York, New York

The "Black Male" show at the Whitney Museum is one of the liveliest and most visually engaging exhibitions to have appeared in New York this season. Richly disparate in its offerings, ranging from traditional painting to pure textuality, from photography to the altered object, from video to installation, the show (which will open at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in April) reaches out to the viewer's eye and intellect at once. It is a multicultural event in the best, and strictest, sense of the term. Although the show's title succinctly announces its unifying theme, the representations of the subject are as varied as the artistic imaginations involved, and the artists themselves include both people of color and whites, women as well as men, gay and straight people. The visions of black manhood they articulate are variously negative and positive, stereotypical and questioning, ambiguous and interestingly ambivalent, realistic and abstract. In general, the imagery on view speaks also of sophistication and visual inventiveness. The show challenges preconceptions even as it works, often poignantly, sometimes angrily and painfully, with misconceptions.

Of course, this is a highly political art, with all the attendant felicities. And perhaps because it makes no attempt to conceal its social engagement, the show has received an unwarranted share of dismissive or less-than-serious reviews from the mainstream press. Somehow, the notion that art might be concerned with representation, stereotype, truth and justice while at the same time maintaining a highly inventive formal and esthetic standard has, in recent years, been pushed aside by the flood of cheap anti-"political correctness" rhetoric spewed out by the popular media. This flood has now apparently crept up to higher levels of criticism as well. Whatever one makes of the current jihad against political art, the fact remains that the great Western tradition of art has always included questions of identity, of ethnicity, of national and ethnic representation, and, indeed, of outright political debate within its capacious embrace. Only very recently has Western art been distilled--or reduced--to an essence of pure form, in which any tincture of social comment is considered a taint.

Before going on to a more detailed consideration of the "Black Male" exhibition, I should like to make my own position clear. Yes, I am a believer in multiculturalism; yes, I feel that politics and social issues play an important role in both art and criticism. Why else would I be teaching David, Goya, Manet and Daumier these many years? I believe in inclusiveness--in openness to other visions and articulations besides the mainstream ones approved by the purity police. But I am also totally immersed in the great historical tradition of Western high art. And I am an esthetic creature to my very fingertips. I, like my feminist art-historical friends, swoon over Cezanne and Manet, Fragonard and Watteau, at the same time that I vibrate to Cindy Sherman or Kiki Smith or Adrian Piper. Not for nothing did I title my most recent public lecture "Why the 1860s Is the Best Decade of the 19th Century--Or Any Other." The "Black Male" show could not have come into being outside the Western tradition, which of course includes within it, as part of its very nature, a legacy of protest and violent negation of its own values.

My first look at the "Black Male" show took place on the eve of my departure for Paris to see the great Poussin exhibition at the Grand Palais. From Paris I went on to South Africa, where, amid the unfolding of a new multicultural world, I gave a lecture on Mary Cassatt. Seeing Poussin with the "Black Male" show still on my mind made me look at this brilliant, classical but quirky artist differently. I was struck by how preternaturally white all of Poussin's figures are--obvious, of course, but for that very reason, unnoticed before. Not just white, but different shades of white, ranging from chalky matte pallor to rosy, ivory tones. But then again, not quite all. Alerted by the Whitney show, I noticed that the figures in Poussin's largest painting, The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier, 1641, are not white at all, but yellow. For depicting this incident, which had taken place when the saint was a missionary in Japan, Poussin used contemporary prints delineating Japanese physiognomy as the basis for his characters, who represent the different stages of understanding that accompanied the miraculous resurrection of a young girl in Kagoshima--astonishment, surprise, gratitude, despair.

But the shifts in my perception of Poussin weren't limited to matters of skin color. The "Black Male" show also emphasizes the role of gender--the ambiguous status of maleness itself--and it made me realize the remarkable extent to which Poussin's work involves gender issues. Mapplethorpe's startlingly estheticized photographs of black male models, as well as Lyle Ashton Harris's witty "Constructs" (1989), nude and seminude self-portraits, deliberate in their anti-estheticism, stayed with me, as did Dawn Ader DeDeaux's gold-leafed Rambo (1991) and Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning (1990). Together they shed new light on paintings like Poussin's Narcissus, in which the title character offers up his lovely, doomed body to the spectator like a gift on the surface of the picture plane. They also made me think differently about paintings like Renaldo and Armida, Tancred and Herminia or Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedes, in which sex-role reversal is involved: men are in drag, or a powerful woman gazes down amorously at a beautiful, sleeping, available man.