>>Its been a long time since I'd encountered a hostile audience and this was an audience at a museum of art, the last place one would expect to find rampant jingoism. << Maybe the following essay is not strictly about 'rampant jingoism' but it is about things that one sometimes finds in art museums. It comes from the book "Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures" edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Glever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West, published by MIT Press 1990. I quote, (and edit where indicated).
It is by John Yau and discusses the Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam. "Wilfredo Lam's 'The Jungle' hangs in the hallway leading to the coatrooms of the Museum of Modern Art. Its location is telling. The artist has been allowed into the museum's lobby, but, like the delivery boy, has been made to wait in an inauspicious passageway near the front door. By denying Lam the possibility of going upstairs and conversing with Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Frank Stella . the museum relegates 'The Jungle' to a secondary status. This action is the result of numerous assumptions nearly everyone in today's mainstream art world takes for granted. In fact, such assumptions are an integral part of the art world's institutions (museums, galleries, and magazines) as well as of its individuals (curators, editors, critics, dealers, and collectors)." Lam was the son of a Chinese father and Afro-Cuban mother, ancestor of a runaway slave and godson of a Yoruba priestess. While imprisoned on the island of Martinique he formed a lasting relationship with Aime Cesaire, one of the founders of the negritude movement. When he returned to Cuba in the 1940s he rejected the idea of painting 'for tourists' because ".it had nothing to do with an exploited people, with a society that crushed and humiliated its slaves. No, I decided that my painting would never be the equivalent of that pseudo-Cuban music for nightclubs. I refused to paint cha-cha-cha. I wanted to work with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic arts of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters. I knew I was running the risk of not being understood by either the man in the street or by the others. But a true painter has the power to set the imagination to work, even if it takes time." Yau claims that Lam's picture's placement is based on (MOMA Director) William Rubin's estimation of Lam's achievement. This estimation, according to Yau, is misleading and insensitive, and Rubin considers Lam to be 'a minor artist who belonged to a minor group' (the Surrealists). He described Lam's paintings: "Such paintings as Lam's 'Antillean Parade' contain a fusion of influence as diverse as Haitian voodoo figures and African masks. From the penumbra of bamboo and palm frond forests that form Lam's primal landscapes, emerge hybrid personages whose presences seem to be discovered in the very defining of the flora." This 'forest' misrepresented Lam's intentions. As Lam said "In any case the title has nothing to do with the real countryside of Cuba, where there is no jungle but woods, hills and open country, and the background of the picture is a sugar-cane plantation. My painting was intended to communicate a psychic state." Yau continues: ". in their concern with aesthetic issues, the art world's institutions have consistently ignored and suppressed how American artists have transplanted the polymorphous process of their cross-cultural experience into visual evidence. Although Wilfredo Lam was a black artist from the Americas who addressed this issue, Rubin's colour blind response is typical of the art world's insensitivity." "For Lam, Surrealism was an aid to recovering his African heritage. Certainly Cesaire was as important an influence as Breton and Picasso. Rubin's writings reverse Lam's intentions. They place him back in the disapora. This reversal is doubled by the museum's placement of 'The Jungle' in the lobby." The essay is called 'Please Wait By The Cloakroom' mike in barcelona.
