A radical communion of painting and writing, Art on the Frontline: A Mandate for a Popular Culture account with the left political potential of black visual and expressive culture. The book stages an open dialogue between a 1985 essay by researcher-activist Angela Davis and a series of recent paintings by artist Tschabalala Self. Davis published “Art on the Frontline” for a Marxist audience 35 years ago. In this reprint, his pithy indictment of bourgeois aesthetics is followed by Self’s paintings, which respond to the essay.
Davis’ essay was originally published as “For Popular Culture” in a 1985 issue of political affairs, a monthly Marxist magazine run by the Communist Party of America. A poignant question underlies the essay: “How do we collectively recognize our popular cultural heritage and communicate it to the masses of our people, most of whom have been denied access to social spaces reserved for art and culture? In dealing with this investigation, Davis recounts a litany of moments in which art pushed for radical social transformation, fleeting songs composed by enslaved Africans in Motown Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday”, which strengthened the movement to make Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. is a national holiday. Most of her named examples, like hip hop, blues, and the “freedom songs” of the civil rights movement, are musical, but she also references visual mediums. She credits the WPA Artists for the unprecedented success of bringing art to the people through public murals, theater and sculpture. Other collaborations across music, visual arts and literature, such as the “Art Against Apartheid” programming in 1984 and 1985, mobilized solidarity for the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the liberation of all South Africans. black. In the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, Davis recognizes the incredible reach of initiatives such as the national movement of “Appeal by artists against intervention in Central America.”
The second half of the book consists of over 30 paintings made by Tschabalala Self over 30 years after Davis’s essay was published for a Marxist audience. This time, the public moved to After all, a magazine and publishing house focused on contemporary art and cultural criticism. After all‘s “Two Works” book series, in which visual artists respond to iconic essays, encourages an engagement between art and text. Self’s paintings are untitled and undated in the book itself, allowing the images to be the sole artistic language of his section. The series of portraits, sketched and painted in acrylics and colored pencils, may at first appear a bit far-fetched. Their chaotic, colorful swirls and brushstrokes make still subjects appear dynamic, as if paused in the middle of expression. Highlighter blonde hair, massive bowling ball-shaped breasts, turquoise eyebrows, polka-dotted tongues and huge teeth are among the exaggerated features.
Each figure conveys a different mix of emotions: confusion, pleasure, joy, indifference. These illustrations reflect an astute assertion of Davis’s essay: although she focuses on the overtly sociopolitical meanings of art, she acknowledges that “…not all progressive art needs to concern itself with explicitly political issues,” because “a love song can be progressive if it incorporates sensitivity to the lives of working-class women and men….” In other words, art does not need to be didactic or dedicated to social realism to deliver a radical political message or build an oppositional consciousness among marginalized people. What makes black women, for example, feel celebrated in our complexity plays an important role in left-wing visual and expressive culture.
Building on this point, Self’s work depicts ordinary workers, black women in particular, through a mode that is both playful and erotic while being deep and authentic – delving into celebrations of forms of embodiment and representation often denigrated by the politics of classist respectability. The characters, tongue out, evoke joyful associations with rappers like Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion who, sticking out their tongues for photographs and videos, exude a carefree play and free sexuality often divorced from portrayals of black women. The figures in That Self are almost always curvaceous and bonded tap into a distinct black feminist politics centered on abundance: that is, plump bodies and infinite selves.
Such a juxtaposition – Self’s exuberant paintings and Davis’ fiercely anti-capitalist writing – is as relevant in 2023 as it was in 2020, when Self painted these works against the backdrop of racial uprisings following the murder of George Floyd. I write this in the wake of the murder of homeless performance artist Jordan Neely on the New York City subway. Those of us who hate the circulation of anti-black violence have chosen to share videos of Neely’s spectacular spectacle. Imitations of Michael Jackson to honor him as opposed to images of his brutal murder. That Neely once entertained New York workers on their commute reminds me a lot of Davis’ “pop culture” that is accessible to the masses rather than confined to elite institutions. While reading Art on the Frontline: A Mandate for a Popular Culture is deeply about our moment, in which contemporary art is entangled in racial capitalism, but frontline artists themselves are resisting.
Art on the Frontline: A Mandate for a Popular Culture is part of Afterall’s Two Works book series and is published by Walther König Verlag.
