responses to SWEAT from BLUE or Cherryl Floyd-Miller, friend and poet

Cherryl wrote:

wow ... i am absolutely intrigued now with sutapa biswas. some part of me wants to say it is the revolutionary thing to deal with white images in the context of a black art conference ... that what feels like a gesture that begins to rethink the definition of "black art" is amazing in/on the heels of a time when black artists have been told what they can and cannot "art" about. redrives a central question for me: what determines black art ... the ethnicity of the artist as determined by the artist or the subject matter of the work? or both? or neither? very charged questions. .... but i haven't seen biswas' installation or how she dealt with those white images. hmmm ...

you completely stole my breath with the image of her repeating herself on the panel. quite powerful!

fyi: bentham was considered a philosophic radical during his time. he turned away from what he was qualified to do (law) and was an intense writer, often writing for 12 hours a day on politics and his sundy philosophies. he emphasized his belief that every action should be focused on pursuing the "greatest happiness" always, and if it didn't, it was wrong. at his death in London, on 6 June 1832, he left literally tens of thousands of manuscript pages--some of which was work only sketched out, but all of which he hoped would be prepared for publication. he also left a large estate--used to finance the newly-established university college, london (for people excluded from university education--i.e., non-conformists, catholics and jews) ...

and his cadaver which, per his instructions, was dissected, embalmed, dressed, and placed in a chair, and resides in a cabinet in a corridor of the main building of university college to this day. the bentham project, set up in the early 1960s at university college, has, as its aim, the publishing of a definitive, scholarly edition of bentham's works and correspondence. (from the internet encyclopedia of philosophy)

(i wanna see, i wanna see!)
~BLUE
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my response:

--- BLUE wrote:
> wow ... i am absolutely intrigued now with sutapa > biswas. some part > of me wants to say it is the revolutionary thing to> deal with white > images in the context of a black art conference ...

Yeah. For me, Too.

I was conflicted.

And in a way, I really appreciated her move, you know? The power in saying, "I can make with these tools." "I will." and "I want to." It is especially powerful to hear her say it twice, in exactly the same way.

> that what feels > like a gesture that begins to rethink the definition > of "black art" > is amazing in/on the heels of a time when black > artists have been > told what they can and cannot "art" about. redrives> a central > question for me: what determines black art ... the> ethnicity of the > artist as determined by the artist or the subject > matter of the work?

Yeah. Totally. I mean, there is even the question of how can we read the subject matter of the work. I don't think I did a good enough job in dealing with that. But I'm thinking of the way in which Biswas' use of materials (her use of these white bodies) is a Black thing. I want to think about how her use of Bentham or Krishna or Mickey Baker or the white woman crying says something about Black Britishness.

Everytime I start to go down that road, though, I have to ask myself, am I refusing to read the technique? I mean, the physical labor in this work? Am I only obsessed with whether a black body can work with white bodies? Or does it matter, you know, that I am struck by the blueness of the woman's blue shirt? (And it does, in fact, make me think of the lighting in Vermeer's work. I have always liked his blues. How strange to feel that feeling accessed through video art.) And, what about her crying, how it eventually affects me?

I guess part of the difficulty of talking about it is that with something like this kind of video art, it is hard to say what Biswas is doing. She instructed the woman to cry. She cried. It is hard for me to think of what is effective about that crying as what Biswas is doing. Yet, we don't have that kind of reaction to the work when we think of the Mona Lisa, do we? we don't say "Well, Mona Lisa was doing the smiling, what did Leonardo Da Vinci have to do with that?" And part of that is because video art is new, and we don't always know how to think about what the art is in it. And part of it is because we trust that dead white men masters knew best. We praise him for finding Mona Lisa, for capturing her mysterious ways, and then, just for being. Sutapa Biswas doesn't get the same leeway.

So I start to think again about the choice of this blue. About the decision to have her cry over a cup of tea. About the way that actually does affect me. Especially the fact that she is projected as a very tiny square on the glass of the case where Jeremy Bentham's body is, in a hallway many people come down in their everyday lives. Something about a very tiny image of a woman crying in a hallway is so moving to me. But it's difficult to talk about. What is she doing? What does this mean to her? I don't know.