Although the explosion of creative energy was overwhelming in the sixties, its criticism did not, perhaps could not, refuse to wrestle with the eternal and eternally irrelevant argument about how and whether the art of a black artist could be, should be considered “universal,” meaning “mainstream,” “race transcendent,” “agenda-free,” and so on. The heart of the argument implied that if what was produced was merely political it was not art; if it was merely beautiful it was not relevant. Thus the critiques focused on the accuracy of the sociology and/or the inspirational, “self-help” value of the work. Some work was championed as representative, authentic; other was deemed unacceptable if it was less than uplifting; other work was dismissed as crude protest or propaganda. Virtually every African American writer in the near and distant past—James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Phillis Wheatley—has been called upon or felt called upon to explain what it meant to be a Negro or black artist. The sheer idiocy of that call has been enough to force artists (angrily, or with annoyance, I suspect) to respond to it. Romare Bearden was working long before the sixties and had traveled widely, studied carefully the ancient and the new. His homes included the South, the North, Europe, the Caribbean, country landscapes, porches, urban streets, clubs, churches. So it was with some delight that I read a comment by him on the subject of race or social factors in his work.
“I am afraid,” he said, “despite my intentions, that in some instances commentators have tended to overemphasize what they believed to be the social elements in my work. But while my response to certain human elements is as obvious as it is inevitable, I am also pleased to note that upon reflection many persons have found that they were as much concerned with the aesthetic implications of my paintings as with, what may possibly be, my human compassion.”
The operative words, for me, are “my response to certain human elements is as obvious as it is inevitable.” How, he is asking, can a human artist not be responsive to human things, which are by their nature social things? He takes for granted the humanity of his subject matter, and as has been said, this in itself is a radical act in a country with a history of purposefully and consistently dehumanizing the black population. Bearden is also pleased to refer to “aesthetic implications.” That is to say, there is information, truth, power, and beauty in his choice of color, form, in the structural and structured placement of images, in fragments built up from flat surfaces, rhythm implicit in repetition and in the medium itself—each move determining subsequent ones, enabling the look and fact of spontaneity, improvisation. This is the appropriate language employed to delineate his work, and to suggest its relationship to another genre—music. Which is very interesting since whatever the view of aesthetics in criticism, it has traditionally confined itself to explorations with an art form, not among them. It is odd, considering how affected artists are by other disciplines, that this approach, which so closely resembles traditional critique, maintains in spite of the insistence of the art itself on its wider sources and its far more interdisciplinary dialogue. The cross-fertilization among artists within a genre is a subject well examined. Less so are instances where the lines between genres are implicit.
The influence and representation of African American music is a mainstay in commentary on Romare Bearden’s work as is the relationship between the plays and sensibility of August Wilson. The influence of and alignment with music is also a common observation in criticism of my own work—as well as my own acknowledgments on the subject. What I want to describe this evening are other ways in which artists of disparate disciplines fold into, energize, and transfer the aesthetics of one another.
Let me linger for a moment on some aspects of my own process that are, indeed, responsive to the work of Romare Bearden. I must say I have been generous to myself in getting ideas from painters other than Bearden, although they are usually scenes or figurative arrangements on canvas. With Bearden I am struck by the tactile sensuality of his work, the purity of gesture, and especially the subtext of the aggressive, large-as-life humanity of his subject matter. This latter is no small thing when the urgency of destereotyping is so strong it can push one easily into sentimentality. The edge of the razor embedded in Bearden’s work prevents or ought to prevent easy, self-satisfying evaluations of his subject matter. Among the aspects of his work that appeal to me, that one is primary: lack of condescension.
Another aspect of my own process involves the composition of the text. A layered exercise that I consistently undergo that has more elements in common with painting than literature.
I need three kinds of information to complete, sometimes even start, a narrative. Once I’ve settled on an idea and the story through which to examine it, I need the structure, the sound, the palette. Not necessarily in that order. The sound of a text clearly involves the musical quality of the dialogue and the language chosen to contextualize it. Elsewhere I have written about my choices for the opening of Beloved, and I repeat those comments here: in reference to that opening—“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”—I was careful to illustrate the rhythm I thought necessary, and the quality of a spoken text: “There is something about numerals that makes them spoken, heard, in this context, because one expects words to read in a book, not numbers to say, or hear. And the sound of the novel, sometimes cacophonous, sometimes harmonious, must be an inner-ear sound or a sound just beyond hearing, infusing the text with a musical emphasis that words can do sometimes even better than music can.” I go on to explain why the second sentence is not one—is instead a dependent clause given the status of a sentence just to mandate a stress on the world “full.” In an effort to understate the strangeness of an infant ghost so the reader will understand its presence as normal as the household does. The remarkable thing being its power (“full”) rather than its existence. In describing at such length the crucial nature of sound to my work, I hoped to focus attention not on a kind of forced poetry or lyricism, but rather on what meaning can be gleaned and communicated from sound, from the aural quality of the text. I only want to suggest that this is more than being influenced by blues or jazz. It is plumbing the music for the meaning that it contains. In other words, the “aesthetic implications” of which Romare Bearden spoke ought to include what is usually absent from aesthetic analysis. Most often the analysis is about how successful the technique is in summoning pleasure, a shocking or moving or satisfying emotional response.
Seldom does it center on the information, the meaning the artist is communicating by his style, via his aesthetics. It can be said, has been said, that the collage techniques, employed by several modernist artists (Matisse, for example) were taken to new levels by Bearden and reflect the “fractured” life he depicts—an intervention into the flat surface that repudiates as it builds on the cubism of earlier periods. And that collage was representative of the modernist thrust of African American life as well as its insurgency. Both structure and improvisation inform this choice—the essence of African American music. The attraction to me in this technique is how abrupt stops and unexpected liquidity enhance the narrative in ways that a linear “beginning, middle, and end” cannot. Thus I recognize that my own abandonment of traditional time sequence (and then, and then) is an effort to capitalize on these modernist trends. And to say something about the layered life—not the fractured or fragmented life of black society, but the layered life of the mind, the imagination, and the way reality is actually perceived and experienced.