"Dark Matter in the White Cube"
Essay for Dark Matter, York College Galleries, October 21–November 20, 2014
 
Jefferson Pinder knows that a white cube can be a forbidding place for a Black artist. Pinder’s performances, videos, and sculptures often sample familiar music, literature, and film, tweaking popular culture in order to comment on perceptions of race and identity in America. But the Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist also carefully designs his work to respond to the white-walled contemporary gallery—an ideologically loaded environment that originally evolved to serve triumphalist white male views of culture.
 
In his seminal collection of essays, Inside the White Cube, artist and critic Brian O’Doherty famously described this space’s aesthetic as combining “the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory,” and representing a “closed system of values.” Those values reflect a mid-twentieth-century modernist belief that art objects should be self-sufficient, embodying universal truths by eschewing narrative and figuration.
 
The white walls of the gallery enforce a sense of placelessness, suggesting that artworks are best understood in isolation. Works like Pinder’s—culturally promiscuous by nature, referencing everything from Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” to the Soviet space program, to the trope of the Magical Negro in contemporary Hollywood films—fill that space with the noise of the world and the thorny histories of those who historically have been on the margins of Western art discourse.
 
Certainly Pinder is not the first artist of color whose work has grappled with the problems of operating within the great white void. In her best-known works from the 1990s, New York-based artist Kara Walker created panoramas directly on white gallery walls, scenes in which the black silhouettes of antebellum slaves and masters engaged in scenes of appalling sexual violence. As curator and critic Robert Storr wrote in the catalog for the artist’s 2007 retrospective at the Walker Art Center, Blackness has often been cast by the Eurocentric history of art as “the warped shadow of essentialized whiteness.” Walker’s pieces mark the walls of the sanctified gallery space with the traces of that warped shadow—and highlight how whites in America have historically portrayed Blacks as sexually non-normative and depraved.
 
Bronx-born artist Glenn Ligon first became known for his black and white oilstick paintings incorporating stenciled text, often referencing literary works like James Baldwin’s 1953 essay, “Stranger in the Village,” or John Howard Griffin’s 1961 memoir, Black Like Me. While these works superficially resemble stylish minimalist or early conceptualist artworks from the 1960s—and therefore look entirely at home displayed in a sleek modern space—they often bring writing into the gallery that comments on the unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement.
 
A number of Ligon’s paintings from the early 1990s borrow from the prologue to Ralph Ellison’s landmark 1952 novel, Invisible Man. Ellison was profoundly aware of the contradictions of being a Black American and an American novelist simultaneously. As he wrote in his 1964 collection of essays, Shadow and Act: “More important…was the necessity of determining my true relationship to that body of American literature to which I was most attracted and through which…I would find my own voice…and to whose composite picture of reality I was obligated to offer some necessary modifications.”
 
Chicago-based painter Kerry James Marshall employs his own “necessary modifications” to the historical treatment of Black figures in Western art as exotic others: The artist offers a strange new archetype for Blackness, rendering the skin of African-Americans in his representational paintings in pure black pigment, indicating facial features with thin white lines and grey accents. His Black protagonists appear like alien or supernatural beings as they navigate curious mash-up landscapes featuring elements of classical painting, folk art, and cartoon kitsch. He further underscores his uneasy relationship with traditional painting by foregoing frames or even stretcher bars for his work—instead, he screws grommeted, unstretched canvas directly to gallery walls.
 
Like all three of these artists, Pinder employs stark contrasts between darkness and light as an expression of the paradox confronted by Black contemporary artists: That they must measure themselves against a tradition rooted in colonialist Western European values. Thanks to those roots, a Black artist inside the white cube largely continues to be perceived as an anomaly requiring additional explanation. As art historian Bridget Cooks notes in the conclusion of her 2011 book, Exhibiting Blackness, “…the creator of a work of art is presumed to be white. Because whiteness is pervasive and constructed as normal in the art museum, only the races of people of color are often indicated on wall labels and in wall texts.”
 
Like Ligon, Pinder has also drawn inspiration from Ralph Ellison. In his early 2005 performance video, “Invisible Man,” Pinder stages a dramatic recreation of the novel’s prologue. In it, the narrator, an activist in a political group called The Brotherhood, describes filling his basement hideout with blinding white light via 1,369 separate light fixtures—all illegally wired into the Monopolated Light and Power Company’s grid. The narrator realizes that he depends upon the dominant culture for his sense of himself: “Without light,” he remarks, “I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.”
 
The power of Pinder’s video comes entirely from the action of white light on a Black body. At first, the artist stands immobile, dimly visible in the shadows of a small, damp, brick-walled room, surrounded by hundreds of large glass bulbs. Slowly, a few at a time, the bulbs spring to life around him, revealing his clothing, his face, and water dripping from the ceiling around him. As the light gathers heat and intensity, the video becomes overexposed; ultimately, the full strength of the fixtures consumes Pinder entirely, eradicating any trace of his body. Gradually the light fades and plunges him into darkness again. This light is threatening; it may even be an enemy—but without it, the artist is lost.
 
Two subsequent video projects, “Juke” (2006) and “Revival” (2013), combine light, space, and cultural code switching. In “Juke,” eleven Black participants were individually filmed in a brightly lit, featureless white space, lip-synching popular music by an array of white artists. As viewers watch each performance it becomes painfully clear that pop hits with ostensibly universal, boundary-crossing appeal often only speak to white audiences. Further, the jarring sense of disjunction that the piece creates demonstrates how an audience’s expectations for the narratives and identities of people of color in media are often woefully constrained.
 
“Revival” revisits the trick, but changes the setting and the tone: Instead of hovering in a sterile white nowhere, the Black performers are shot outdoors, emerging from the near-darkness of a city at night, lip-synching on shadowy street corners. In one part of the multi-channel, multi-chapter piece, artist Chukwumaa prowls in a dimly lit parking garage, pretending to sing “Helter Skelter,” the Beatles song interpreted by murderous cult leader Charles Manson as a description of a coming race war. As cult member Gregg Jakobson explained it in Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 book on the Tate murders in the Hollywood Hills: “It would begin with the black man going into white people’s homes and ripping off the white people, physically destroying them, until there was open revolution in the streets, until they finally won and took over…He would then be the establishment.” The Manson family murdered Sharon Tate as a sort of bloody hoax—because they wanted the world to think that war between whites and Blacks had begun.
 
Unlike “Juke,” “Revival” brings echoes of recent history on city streets into the gallery: the 2012 fatal shooting of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida; the 2014 fatal shooting of unarmed teen Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Young Black men in America are frequently the victims of racial profiling, determining whether or not an individual poses a threat based solely on the color of her or his skin. Racial profiling has a long history: In Ellison’s Invisible Man, the narrator gets into a violent fight with a blonde-haired blue-eyed man who calls him a racial epithet—until he realizes that he is, in effect, invisible to this man, only a walking stereotype with no personal identity of his own: “He lay there, moaning on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom. It unnerved me…then I was amused. Something in this man's thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life.” Decades after Ellison wrote these words, men with guns in the streets of America are still chasing phantoms.
 
Pinder’s work has long embraced Afrofuturism, the use of science fiction tropes by Black artists, writers, and musicians to critique history via fantasy, or to posit new relations between races in a technologically advanced, post-human future. Pinder’s 2014 piece, “Stellar Mass,” is a sparkling slab of light-eating darkness, appearing like a portal to alien worlds. Pinder created the piece as an homage to the black rectangular monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the novels by Arthur C. Clark on which the film is based. Made of black ink and glitter, the piece offers formal delectation while paradoxically being constructed with impoverished craft store materials.
 
“Stellar Mass” also reveals the artist’s interest in dark matter—which, in addition to being the name of an influential African Diaspora sci-fi anthology, also happens to be the invisible, nearly undetectable cosmic substance that makes up most of the mass of the known universe. Dark matter is required for any workable model of the cosmos, yet it has never been observed and is still poorly understood by scientists. In a sense, it offers a perfect metaphor for the relationship between contemporary Black art and the white cube: It is the invisible, unknowable other; yet without it or its energy, nothing we see could exist.
 
In his work, Pinder attempts to take all of the invisible darkness around him and materialize it within the contemporary gallery space. His ongoing projects bridge gaps between the disciplines of performance, object-making, and video; between high art and popular music and film; and between white Eurocentric institutions and the narratives they still inadequately represent. The art world may desperately need a new culture of display, but Pinder successfully navigates the white cube’s paradoxes, delivering work that is formally compelling, historically savvy, and rhetorically charged—all within a hostile environment.