[A radical communion of painting and writing, Art on the Frontline
reckons with the leftist political potential of Black visual and
expressive culture. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BLACK RESISTANCE ACCORDING TO ANGELA DAVIS AND TSCHABALALA SELF  
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Alexandra M. Thomas
May 30, 2023
Hyperallergic
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_ A radical communion of painting and writing, Art on the Frontline
reckons with the leftist political potential of Black visual and
expressive culture. _

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_Angela Y. Davis and Tschabalala Self, Art on the Frontline: Mandate
for a People's Culture_
Walther König, Köln/Afterall Books
ISBN-13: 978-3960989011

A radical communion of painting and writing, _Art on the Frontline:
Mandate for a People’s Culture _
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with the leftist political potential of Black visual and expressive
culture. The book stages an open-ended dialogue between a 1985 essay
penned by the scholar-activist Angela Davis and a series of recent
paintings by the artist Tschabalala Self. Davis published “Art on
the Frontline” for a Marxist audience 35 years ago. In this reprint,
her concise indictment of bourgeois aesthetics is followed by Self’s
paintings, which respond to the essay. 

Davis’s essay was originally published as “For a People’s
Culture” in a 1985 issue of _Political Affairs, _a monthly Marxist
magazine run by the Communist Party USA. A poignant question
undergirds the essay: “How do we collectively acknowledge our
popular cultural legacy and communicate it to the masses of our
people, most of whom have been denied access to the social spaces
reserved for art and culture?” In processing this inquiry, Davis
narrates a litany of moments in which art has pushed for radical
social transformation, from the fugitive songs composed by enslaved
Africans to Stevie Wonder’s Motown “Happy Birthday,” which
strengthened the movement to make Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s
birthday a national holiday. Most of her named examples, like hip hop,
the blues, and the “freedom songs” of the Civil Rights Movement,
are musical, but she references visual mediums as well. She credits
the WPA artists
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unparalleled success of bringing art to the people through public
murals, theater, and sculpture. Other collaborations across music,
visual art, and literature, like “Art Against Apartheid”
programming in 1984 and 1985, mobilized solidarity for Nelson
Mandela’s release from prison and liberation for all Black South
Africans. In the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, Davis recognizes
the incredible reach of initiatives such as the national movement of
“Artists’ Call Against Intervention in Central America
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The book’s second half consists of over 30 paintings made by
Tschabalala Self more than 30 years after Davis’s essay was
published for a Marxist audience. This time, the audience has shifted
to _Afterall, _a journal and publishing house focused on contemporary
art and cultural criticism. _Afterall_’s “Two Works” book
series, for 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 for images to be the only
artistic language in her section. The series of portraits, sketched
and painted with acrylic and colored pencils, can come across at first
glance as a bit wacky. Their chaotic and colorful swirls and
brushstrokes make the still subjects appear dynamic, as if paused
mid-expression. Highlighter-blond hair, massive bowling-ball-shaped
breasts, turquoise eyebrows, polka-dotted tongues, and enormous teeth
are among the exaggerated features.

Each figure relays a different blend of emotions: confusion, pleasure,
joy, indifference. These illustrations reflect an astute claim in
Davis’s essay: while she focuses on overtly sociopolitical meanings
in art, she acknowledges that “… not all progressive art need be
concerned with explicitly political problems,” because “a love
song can be progressive if it incorporates a sensitivity toward the
lives of working-class women and men….” Put another way, art is
not required to be didactic or dedicated to social realism to deliver
a radical political message or strengthen an oppositional
consciousness among marginalized people. That which makes Black women,
for example, feel celebrated in our complexity, plays an important
role in leftist visual and expressive culture.

Drawing on this point, Self’s work represents everyday working
people, Black women in particular, through a mode that is both playful
and erotic while also profound and authentic — diving into
celebrations of forms of embodiment and representation often
denigrated by classist respectability politics. The figures, with
their tongues out, conjure joyous associations with rappers like Cardi
B and Megan Thee Stallion
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tongues out for photographs and videos, exude carefree playfulness and
free sexuality often divorced from representations of Black women.
That Self’s figures are nearly always curvaceous and collaged taps
into a distinct Black feminist politic centered on abundance: that is,
fleshy bodies and infinite selves. 

Such a juxtaposition — Self’s exuberant paintings and Davis’s
fiercely anti-capitalist writing — is as pertinent in 2023 as it was
in 2020, when Self painted these works within the context of racial
uprisings after the murder of George Floyd
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I am writing this in the wake of the murder of unhoused performance
artist Jordan Neely on the subway in New York City. Those of us who
detest the circulation of anti-Black violence have opted to share
videos of Neely’s spectacular Michael Jackson impersonations
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to the footage of his brutal killing. That Neely once entertained
working New Yorkers on their commutes home reminds me a great deal of
Davis’s “people’s culture” that is accessible to the masses as
opposed to confined within elitist institutions. Reading _Art on the
Frontline: Mandate for a People’s Culture _is deeply apropos to our
moment, in which contemporary art is entangled with racial capitalism,
but frontlines artists themselves are resisting. 

Alexandra M. Thomas is a PhD student in History of Art, African
American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale
University. Her research interests include: global modern and
contemporary art, film, and performance; African and African diasporic
arts and expressive cultures; and feminist and queer theory.

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* Black women in art
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