things that make u go "hmm..."

So I've been thinking a lot about the body, femininity, and black female sexuality...and the wheels in my head are constantly turning. Apparently, the black female body is on a lot of people's (and company's) minds, including Old Navy, and painter/photographer extraordinaire Mickalene Thomas.

While sitting at the dinner table, my partner and I were watching Family Guy's satire of Fox News (how ironic?), when the scene ended and a spanking new 30-second commercial from Old Navy appeared on the screen. In this particular episode entitled "Mid-Town Flash with the Supermodelquins", a dialogue between three multicultural female and anthropomorphized mannequins and their male counterparts goes a little something like this:

Black Male Mannequin: "Look Buddy! Doesn't mom look pretty in her new midtown gown!?"
Son Mannequin: "You go, Mom!"

White Female Mannequin: "These Midtown gowns are so cute!"
Latina Mannequin: "Especially if I had your legs!" [Looks over at a random pair of white female legs in a box in a corner]

White Female Mannequin: "There's an extra pair in the back room..."
Latina Mannequin: "At $15 these dresses are gonna fly!"

[Live white little girl snatches the dress off of the black Mannequin, named Michelle] [WTF!!!??]

White Female Mannequin: [expresses shock]
Dog barks.
White Male Mannequin: "Sweet!"

Black Father to White Male Mannequin: "Hey man, keep your painted on eyes off my wife!" [puts hand up to White Male Mannequin's face]

White Male Mannequin: "I can't! Your fingers don't close."
Michelle: [with prototypical black girl attitude] "Oh what! Like you've never seen plastic before!"

END SCENE.

As I sit here at the breakfast bar in my partner's kitchen, I'm at a complete loss for words. Okay...not really but seriously... I don't know what to say first. So below I've posted a picture of some of the comments that the commercial has garnered.

Has Michelle Obama's ubiquitous celebrity and visibility made advertisers and the industry, mostly dominated by white men, mad? What does it mean for an image or representation of a black woman, vis-a-vis a mannequin, to be normalized, or even, humorized, as a naked derivative of sexual pleasure and voyeurism with "attitude" a la mode?

The Youtube comments from the video speak volumes to the ways in which tidbits of popular culture and consumerism become conduits for propagating racialized and misogynistic fantasy within the American public imagination and consciousness. Yes, this commercial bares undertones of racializing stereotypes. Yes, it was probably intended to be lighthearted, contemporary, and humorous. And Yes, by participating in the dialogue that the Supermodelquins have started, I am reproducing the effects that this commercial garners.

However, as a black woman, I also understand that even though publicly, access to my own body and my own sexuality may be usurped from me and plastered all over TV and magazines and the internet, through every medium from Old Navy commercials to Smooth Magazine to Manet's Olympia, I determine when and where I enter. Which is why I admire such projects like those of artist Mickalene Thomas.

Her large scale photographs, prints, and paintings picturing black female subjects are the perfect segue way to engage in a dialogue about reclaiming and complicating so-called representations of black women, their bodies, and sexuality. Her first solo-exhibition, entitled Mickalene Thomas: She's Come UnDone! will debut at Lehmann Maupin gallery in New York City this Thursday, and will run until May 2, 2009.

Thomas's work is far from the panecea for distasteful and demode depictions of black women. In fact, it beckons us as viewers to ponder notions of celebrity, control, lust, exploitation, and emulation. Pieces like "Put something on it" remind us that there is no "right" or "wrong" representation of black women, but it is the way in which black female bodies are framed, in nuance, that reify the notion that well, presentation is everything.

Image: Mickalene Thomas, Put something down on it, mounted c-print, 30 x 24 inches, 76.2 x 61 cm, 2009. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin gallery.

intruder alert

Okay, I can deal with Paris Fashion Week. I can even deal with the Metropolitan Opera's 125th Anniversary Gala. But if Kanye West and Amber Rose continue to infiltrate my most sacred place of refuge, le monde du l'art, I am going to give up my aspirations of becoming an art historian and apply for a job at American Apparel selling spandex disco pants. Image courtesy of Scene and Heard, ArtForum.com.

Top: Jeffrey Deitch, renowned international art dealer, and Amber Rose, former exotic dancer and video vixen. Bottom: Kanye West and artist Vanessa Beescroft.

afro-pop swag?

Today's artist highlight is that of South African artist Mustafa Maluka. His wall-sized portraits of anonymous yet intriguingly beautiful subjects have been seen most recently in the exhibition Flow at the Studio Museum in Harlem this past summer, which explored what it means to be an "afropolitan," globe-trotting artist.

Critic Rose Oluronke Ojo writes:

"Maluka sees [his figures] as "invented heroes." His goal was to create people he would like to look up to. Each member of Maluka's multiethnic, multihued and multi-textured ensemble may seem familiar to some at first because of the manner in which they are posed, the emphasis on style and fashion, and the titles of the portraits."

Nonetheless, Ojo continues on to describe the artist's process:

"How I produce these paintings, the portraits especially, is that I collect images with a particular gaze. They need to exude a particular strength and pride."

While Ojo suggests that Maluka is taking cues from Pop Art, given his use of textures, bright colors, and mixed mediums, I would like to suggest that Maluka's fresh-faced portraits could indicate the essence youth as the arbiters of contemporary pop culture. Clearly Maluka himself is articulating the quite dreadful and overworked term "swag" here...but nonetheless his imagery is striking, vivid, and indeed captivating.

Image: Mustafa Maluka, I can't believe you think that of me, 2007.

crossing color lines

The paintings and works on paper of artist Iona Rozeal Brown have captured my attention for quite some time. Brown remixes "pictures of the floating world" or Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), with contemporary exaggerated portraits of Japanese B-girl style, a sartorial gesture that many would deem an appropriation of mediated blackness. Though Brown's work might evidence the complications of cultural globalization and the performativity of identity, she is not the only artist consuming/producing new representations of the global visual world. I am thinking here of Nikki S. Lee's cross-racial/sub-cultural performances, Gwen Stefani's dancing "Harajuku girls" in her solo debut video Hollaback Girl, and even Busta Rhymes as evidenced in Dangerous. How do we begin to navigate the dynamics of race and performance in the visual field when meaning is constantly made and re-made?

celebrité

Andy Warhol. Elizabeth Peyton. Prow. Even Kehinde Wiley. What exactly is the connection between art, celebrity, and popular culture? How exactly do icons of popular culture become visual tools for contemporary artists? What I find even more interesting is that the process of capturing celebrity through photography and painting often reproduces imagery of pop culture icons while inadvertently making artists themselves apart of celebrity circles. The paparazzi aren't the only forces feeding into the mass public obsession with the stars...

You can check out Elizabeth Peyton's retrospective Live Forever at the New Museum in New York City, as well as Andy Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.