It's no coincidence
that Michael Ray Charles is mounting an installation about basketball
just as the NCAA Final Four has wrapped up.
"It was
strategic," the 36-year-old artist explains. Last summer, when
gallery owner David Berman approached him about hosting an exhibition,
Charles knew that the basketball buzz of early April would electrify
an artwork that poses tough questions about race and professional
sports.
Charles knows
full well the power of timing and buzz and image. For the past decade,
the Louisiana native and University of Texas art professor has culled
racist, stereotypical images of African Americans -- Aunt Jemima,
Sambo, black-face minstrel performers -- and transformed them into
confrontational works of art. Most of his paintings look like advertisements
or magazine covers or vaudeville-like posters -- artificially aged
so that they look like relics of vintage pop culture.
In "100
A.J.," Aunt Jemima coyly holds down her skirt as it blows up
around her -- just like that iconic image of Marilyn Monroe in "The
Seven Year Itch." In "Beware," a shirtless, shoeless
black child with cartoonishly huge red lips and white gloves dances
and whistles. Then there's the Liberty Bros. Permanent Daily Circus
series he started in the mid-'90s -- paintings that resemble circus
broadsides for a fictitious troupe. Among them is an image of a
rubber-lipped child driving a watermelon car.
"The past
is always present," says Charles. It's a maxim he believes
in so strongly that for a long time he had the phrase emblazoned
on the wall of his studio in his far North Austin home.
To be sure,
Charles' complex artistic tactics have brought him a lot of fame.
Soon after he finished graduate school in 1993, Charles' provocative
paintings catapulted him almost immediately into the upper echelons
of the international contemporary art world, and he has stayed there.
Charles has had a string of successful solo shows at influential
galleries -- some of which sold out -- and prestigious arts venues
in New York and Europe. His works show up in important museum exhibits.
His paintings sell for $25,000 or more, his sculptures up to $75,000.
"Michael's
ongoing project of creating a space and context for a discussion
of racism make him an undeniably important artist," says Don
Bacigalupi, the director of the San Diego Museum of Art, who organized
a traveling retrospective of Charles' paintings in 1997 that showed
at the Austin Museum of Art.
That show at
AMOA was the last solo exhibit Charles had in Austin. And while
in the past few years he has been shifting from painting to creating
sculpture and site-specific installations, he's never created an
installation here. It's not surprising, then, that when "The
Property of . . ." opened Thursday at D. Berman Gallery, some
250 people thronged the high-ceilinged space and spilled out onto
the sidewalk in front. The mood was celebratory, even a little breathless
-- a homecoming of sorts for an Austin artist whose international
career has kept his work far from Austin.
Despite the
popularity in his hometown and around the world, Charles' paintings
have also brought him a lot of flak from some who would just as
soon have those racist images remain in the past. And he's not the
only African American artist whose work has been in the hot seat.
Kara Walker,
who crafts huge silhouette wall cutouts of stereotypical plantation
scenes, came under attack after winning the MacArthur "genius"
grant in 1997. Specifically, African American artist Betye Saar,
who is in her mid-70s, started a public campaign against Walker's
work, calling it "young and foolish." Saar also took aim
at Charles.
"Today
there are young black artists such as Kara Walker and Michael Ray
Charles who claim to be political because they satirize the most
cruelly racist images of black people," Saar told an interviewer
at the time. "Anyone can do what they like as an artist . .
. (but) these two artists are benefiting from work that's not funny,
not satirical, not ironic -- it's a form of betrayal."
It's the kind
of criticism that vexes Charles. "It bothers me that my work
bothers some black people," he says with long sigh. "But
I'm challenging the idea of what black identity is by utilizing
the very language of (racial prejudice) to critique the historical
language of (racial prejudice). I make honorable art -- it's not
malicious."
Then there
was that collaboration with Spike Lee. A few years ago, Charles
served as an artistic adviser for Lee's film "Bamboozled,"
helping to create the film's promotional images, which featured
a smiling black child eating watermelon. African American activists
complained; The New York Times refused to run the ad. Nowadays,
Charles offers a measured response to the controversy: "One
would think that if The New York Times runs 'All the news that's
fit to print' they would have understood the goals and objectives
of the film."
Plenty of people
do understand the gist of Charles' work. "I think some of the
discomfort that comes from viewing Michael's work is the way in
which it forces us to confront the legacy of racist ideologies,"
says Bacigalupi. "Simply because the kind of racist pop culture
images (that Michael uses in his art) might now be invisible in
our current culture, doesn't mean that the ideologies they represent
aren't still there. Michael's work forces (the viewer) toward a
further level of self-examination, and that's unsettling."
A basketball walk-on
Though he's
not critically shy, the bespectacled father of three sons is nevertheless
reserved and soft-spoken at first, and admits that he's sometimes
nervous about being interviewed.
"(Interviewers)
always seem to be interested in what I eat or what kind of car I
drive," he says softly with a smirk as he sits at a shady table
outside the Dog & Duck Pub on a recent Sunday afternoon. Charles
is an extraordinarily busy man, and he's got just enough time between
an hourlong trip to Home Depot to pick up hardware for the installation
and a long night in his studio for an interview, though a constantly
ringing cell phone interrupts.
Indeed, in
talking to Charles, you get a sense that he is in a constant, progressive
dialogue with himself, that his thoughts and ideas are continuously
developing; he just happens to share them out loud when he talks
and paints. And people hear him.
"Despite
his shy personal manner, Michael is not shy about what he wants
his artwork to express," says Kenneth J. Hale, professor of
art and chairman of UT's art department. "He's not afraid of
going straight for the jugular, but he's still doing it in a sensitive
way. He's constantly trying to teach by raising difficult issues."
Charles says
his work "is very much about communication and images."
"I'm interested
in how words and images are manipulated -- how meaning shifts over
time -- by the mass culture. It's something I've been concerned
with for a very long time."
The swirl of
media images and marketing concepts is something Charles has studied
closely. Charles majored in advertising at McNeese State University,
with the hope of channeling his lifelong interest in art (he was
always a compulsive sketcher) into a viable career. After all, his
lifelong love of basketball hadn't panned out. "I was a walk-on
at McNeese," says Charles, who easily towers past 6 feet. "I
might have been able to play in the European leagues after college,
but there was this very real reality of having to make a living,
and I could see the writing on the wall," he says, laughing.
A professional
career in basketball wasn't in the cards for Charles. Neither, it
turned out, was an advertising career.
Graduating
from McNeese in the depths of the '80s recession, Charles had no
luck landing a job in the advertising and public relations fields
in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. So he enrolled in the graduate fine
arts program at the University of Houston -- the only African American
graduate art student at the time and only the second to receive
an MFA. Soon after he graduated in 1993, UT came calling, and he
and his wife, Renee, moved to Austin. After all, the art world can
be fickle; tenure is forever.
Players and profits
One side of
the red velvet stage curtain is held back by a plain twine rope.
Part basketball court, part jazz club and part vaudeville tent,
"The Property of . . .," is a three-dimensional, multisensory
critique of how our culture transforms African American basketball
players into products, marketing them -- their identity, their talents
-- for a profit. And as in his paintings, Charles doesn't mince
matters.
Stepping through
the curtain that is reminiscent of a circus tent, visitors to "The
Property of . . ." find themselves on a worn wooden floor with
a basketball court center circle painted on it. At the far end hangs
an old window positioned like a backboard -- "a window of opportunity
to reach another realm of being," explains Charles. Hanging
from the ceiling are burlap coffee sacks cut like basketball jerseys,
some with numbers painted on, some with startling images like a
grinning child standing on a basketball or a smiling Sambo. One
jersey sports the words "Black Art." More burlap jerseys
are stuffed with cotton and lay against the walls. And some are
joined together so that they are life-size and hang eerily from
the ceiling. A baby grand piano sits at center court. From hidden
speakers, the strains of Etta James, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald
waft through the space.
These are pretty
direct images, according to Charles. As he explains it, the coffee
industry is known for its exploitation of labor (much like the sports
and entertainment industries). Also, teams market cheap sports clothes
at an enormous profit to youths filled with hoop dreams, hence the
worn burlap. And then there's the entertainment industry. Like sports,
it is largely run by whites who benefit from African American performers:
Exhausted bodies, enormous profits, exploited African American talent,
the allure of celebrity. And the hanging body-size burlap jerseys
are a direct reference to the history of lynchings.
"We're
a very visual culture," says Charles. "But the masses
aren't out there deconstructing those images."
What we should
see, Charles maintains, is that black athletes are turned into commodities
-- falsely promised fame and fortune by the entertainment and sports
industries but then used as mere products.
As Charles
explained in an interview a few years ago, "We have too many
African American youths who want to grow up and go into basketball.
. . . This is the only thing that America is telling them they can
do and do well."
S. Craig Watkins,
professor of sociology, African American studies and radio-television-film
at UT, notes that, thanks to the huge expansion of television coverage,
professional sports spiked in popularity in this country in the
'60s and '70s -- the very same time the black consciousness movement
was gaining steam.
"Suddenly,
we saw the black athlete in a much more visible and prominent way,"
says Watkins. "And to the extent that that became the prevailing
image of a successful African American, it's created this false
illusion that all the fame and fortune that comes with being a professional
athlete is easily attainable. We have had two, three generations
now of African American youths who have developed a naive devotion
to athletic prowess (rather than academic prowess)."
The synergy
of hip-hop culture and basketball has made this allure even more
powerful, notes Watkins, who is a friend of Charles. "Most
of the (NBA) is now made of players of what might be called the
hip-hop generation, and that adds even more of an aura of credibility
to the illusion that success, fame and celebrity can be easily achieved
for African American youth."
Charles' biting
artistic critique doesn't interfere with his passion for the game.
"I love the sport," he says, but he nevertheless admits
he didn't watch the final game of NCAA Final Four because his loyalty
to the Longhorns -- and a busy schedule -- left him too disappointed.
"I'm not angry at the people -- the players -- who participate,"
he says. "They don't construct the image that they promote
-- It's constructed for them."
And that's
a furious brew of opportunity and exploitation. But then for Charles,
tackling the tough stuff in a most direct and uncompromising way
is an obligation. "(The problem) is larger than who we are
all," he says. "But we are all responsible for questioning
it."
jvanryzin@statesman.com;
445-3699
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