Art and Narrative

ART AND NARRATIVES

Relief from the assaults of American politics, from progressive erosion of integrity, and from the infantile appeals of American commerce ---designed to capture people who are in their second or third recycling of childhood ---is rare in the Age of Trump.  Trump has signed an odd contract with an unknown Supreme Being to ensure that his tribe and his detractors shall  suffer.   One can, however, momentarily escape the noose , the inevitable suffering, by turning to Marxist or liberal arguments regarding the necessity of art.  This action provides a modicum of relief, but a more powerful relief can be gained from real-time contemplation of art, a pondering that inserts one into a series of narratives.  One has to view exhibitions in a museum or an allied site of memory and remembering.  If one is lucky, as I was on October 5, 2018, one can hear the artist explain methods and motives.

A rare calm, a near catharsis , ensued from my viewing of Lina Iris Viktor's exhibit "A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred" at the New Orleans Museum of Art and from my asking Viktor, before she presented her noontime talk ,  a question generated by looking at her powerful images of the female: "Are you familiar with Ben Jonson's 'The Masque of Blacknesse ' (1605)?"  Her reply was reassuring.  No, she was not familiar with Jonson's theatre piece for the royal court, but she did seem to grasp what I was asking about the theatricality of her art.  Viktor's placing a black mask on the faces and/or breasts of her women figures links her work with the 19th and  20th century histories of blackface and the older history of inventing/stereotyping the African evidenced by Jonson's masque.  Let not the pun implicit in the word "masque" be lost. And Viktor does not allow us to forget the ambiguity implicit in the use of the Libyan Sybil in abolitionist discourses.

In " A Conversation with Lina Iris Viktor" [ NOMA Magazine, September -December 2018):  17 ], Viktor makes a brief explanation of the research and contemplation involved in her effort to excavate the "lost narratives" which pertain to the founding of Liberia.  She is very clear about her objectives. " I have chosen not to focus on the nation's recent history, but rather to explore the root:  the ties that bind Liberia so explicitly to America.  This story is fascinating, unique, and grossly under-documented."  Viktor connects her work with New Orleans by way of what she discovered about John McDonogh and his membership in the American Colonization Society,  the group responsible for the founding of Liberia in 1822 as a haven, a hell, and a deferred dream and for sponsoring a reverse Middle Passage for  a small number of Americanized, freed from enslavement people to the continent of origin.

 According to Viktor and historical documents, many of McDonogh's "former slaves were among the first to migrate and settle in Liberia."  In this narrative lies a capital example of Euro-American pathology: infect West Africa with a negative, black imaginary and New Jerusalem of freedom and possibility.  We should hasten to reassess  Melvin B. Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) in light of Viktor's painterly references to the Libyan Sibyl of classical antiquity, especially to what Euripides mentions about the mythological figure in his prologue for the Lamia. For Viktor, that figure "would serve as a perfect conduit between the narratives in this series [ the paintings in the exhibit ]: the Liberian Sibyl unites these interwoven histories, and represents a timeless emblem of feminine intuition, foresight, and knowing."  Yes, the Sibyl was good at foretelling cursed futures, and Euripides, contrary to the belief of some classical scholars, was a better tragic poet than Sophocles.  Viktor keeps it real (compared to what).

I listened most attentively as Viktor spoke of "black" as the dark matter of the universe, of the subversive use of "black," and of why she used 24k gold in the paintings as the mythological and magical material to evoke spiritual cultures.  The European quest for gold in the Americas and the traffic of black gold in the Atlantic slave trade cast a special light on how Viktor controls the global history of the gaze upon the black female body as erotic object. Viktor's exhibit maximizes our opportunities to ponder the nature of art and narratives and the wearing of the mask in African American, African, and American interpretive times.  How clever the artist was in alluding in the exhibit's title to Langston Hughes and the possibility that art allows us to make raisins or explosions.  I left the exhibit with a feeling of great relief that it had implanted a weapon of massive construction in my mind, an opportunity to retell pre-future narratives.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            October 6, 2018