Jason Toney

Wonder #reverb10

"Underneath it there is a secret that nobody can reveal." - Jimmy Cliff, Wonderful World, Beautiful People

December 4 – Wonder.
How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?
(Author: Jeffrey Davis)

I thought a lot about this prompt as the same day it came up, I tumblred this quote:

I realize with a sense of dread that one grows numb with regard to even the most wonderful things when they become part of one’s daily interactions and surroundings. - Rainer Maria Rilke 

I was convinced all weekend that I was going to write something contrarian that would get into the semantics of "wonder" and whether or not it should be cultivated but as I sat down to write, I realized that was all...mishigas.

Straight bullshit.

I saw a giant cherry on a spoon in Minnesota this year. I saw statues from an ancient time at LACMA this year. I was inspired by the use of hip hop in visual art this year.

Every time I went to a museum, particularly contemporary ones, I was awed and inspired. I'm always amazed by the creativity and crazy of the artists of the last century. My mind is set ablaze by what's possible in the world when I consider what kind of skill and determination it must've taken to create amazing works prior to the industrial revolution.

Louis C.K. has a joke about time travel and Black people and how we'd never want to go back before 1980 and while that's true, if all things were equal, I'd love to go back and see the kind of dedication, passion, and commitment it must've taken a Mayan to carve stone without the benefit of paper to sketch out a plan before hand or precision tools. I'd love to see an ancient Indian sculpt an intricate Ganesha. I'd love to eavesdrop on an Andy Warhol conversation about pop art.

I cultivated wonder this year by being cultured. I visited and supported institutions of Art history, archival, curation, and collection whenever I could.

More of that in 2011 for sure. Perhaps in a different country, too. That would be nice.

Night at the Museum

"Your smile reminds me of one shining soul sincere." - Kira Neris, Un Été Sans Fins

Photo by Melissa Acedera

As we walked into The Resnick Pavilion on opening night, Melle talked about wanting to know more about the people who endowed and supported The Arts and charities in such great financial ways. Locally, those are the Annenbergs, the Chandlers, and, now, the Resnicks (amongst others). These people with their names on the sides of buildings or whose names are spoken at every sponsor break on our favorite public radio stations.

I know a little. The Chandlers owned the Los Angeles Times and are, really, one of LAs founding families. The Resnicks, as we were informed upon entering the new building named after them, own, amongst other things, Fiji Water and POM Wonderful. And we are grateful for their support of the Arts.

The Resnick features some very old Olmec era stone work that sparked a conversation about what the craft must've been like at that time. How does one keep the vision of what they are making in their head and accurate in an age before paper? What types of tools were used? Who commissioned pieces of such size and grandeur? The placards associated with the pieces provide just a hint of the history there.

That sense of wonderment continued into the Fashioning Fashion exhibit. There, though, I was less concerned with how the clothes were made and more interested in what the lives were like of the people wearing them. We mock those who wear flashy suits today but these outfits showcase that flossing and peacocking aren't new inventions and aren't reflective of low culture but of high. It's the elite that are most likely to be funky fresh dressed to impress ready to party in these luxurious frocks.

And, so, yes, we are very grateful for all those who provide their ample resources to allow us to see these things affordably. Access to art and history ignites my mind.

But.

I'm also mindful, though, that in New York, the great patron of The Arts is David H. Koch who counters his great altruism there with aggressive spending in causes and politics that aren't aligned with mine. A man whose business ethics are regularly called into question is also the backer of Opera Houses and The Met.

Thankfully, in this case, the Resnicks, Lynda especially, has politics after my own heart. She was an anti-war activist during Vietnam and has been under great scrutiny by our government for her activism.

My kind of woman.

So, you know, thanks. It's nice to know that I can spend less of my time having my eye on you and more having it focused on the art.

The Post-Souls of Black Folk

"Where ever you are (shine!). Who ever you are (shine!)" - Swizz Beatz, Top Down

I highly recommend you go read Tiffany's Krista Thompson "Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels" and thoughts on Class and Aesthetics before you dig in here. She's going to make much more sense of things than I will in what follows.

I've spent the last day trying to process all of the thought storms that this lecture sparked. I haven't even come close to making a dent or form clear theories about the myriad of topics this one hour of Art History brought up. Well, there's one thing: Krista Thompson puts form to a nagging sensation I've had for years but couldn't place -- this feeling that we don't take hip hop and it's creative outpouring seriously.

I was reminded of this today, as I read about the Texas Board of Education's recent nonsense around Social Studies education and their shooting down of the inclusion of Hip Hop as a significant sociocultural movement.

I was reminded yesterday, when the first question after the lecture tried to simplify what Dr. Thompson clearly stated was a complex and nuanced view, into a common and wrong-headed hypothesis "Isn't hip hop ruining our young people and, by extension, Black America, by focusing on bling? By all this conspicuous and gross consumption?"

Thompson had, obviously, heard this kind of thing before. She immediately referenced Dave Chappelle's Block Party. She noted that while Chappelle is seeking to invoke the spirit of Wattstax, he's aware of the world he's living in. It's a world beyond the Civil Rights movement, one where neither the people who will come to the event nor the artists who would perform have common issues, common enemies, or even common backgrounds. They might align under the umbrella of hip hop, they might have a similar creative spirit, but, well, it's just so much more complicated than that.

Complicated because The Civil Rights Movement--the Soul Era--was very much about the Black Middle Class and the Black Bourgoisie gaining access to the aspects of the American Dream that had been denied them. The Civil Rights Movement was about the righteous and respectable getting what they deserved because they were righteous and respectable. So, we celebrate education and piety, integration and an honest day's work, non-violence and community.

Hip Hop imagery and arts turns all of this on it's head, right? Hip hop is a celebration of individualism, of the battle, of getting ahead by any means necessary, and by letting everybody know you made it.

Huh, which one of those is truly a reflection of what America truly is?

In this Post-Soul era, there's this obvious tension between the ideals of the Black Middle Class and the realities of the streets with which our pop cultural outpouring comes. And, so, as with most cultural issues that go along class lines, the wealthier among us tend to marginalize and belittle the power of those images and sounds. Hip hop isn't music. Graffiti isn't art. Breakdancing isn't dancing. MCs aren't poets. These are low arts if they are art at all and not deserving our respect or any critical thought so when Dr. Thompson spends much time delving into the technical choices of Hip Hop visual artists, it's jarring to those of us who don't want to take Hip hop seriously.

And while she spent much of this hour focusing on a recognized and generally respected artist like Kehinde Wiley, I was more interested in the works of Hank Willis Thomas.

Thomas's work looks explicitly at how we brand ourselves, how brands seek to take advantage of that, and the relationship between the two. In a cultural phenomenon where visual displays of wealth and success get more ostentatious by the day, in a world where logos are commodity and artists are a key part of the puzzle, where does art live?

And this is but one of the things to think about. There's so much more if we give up following the narrative that hip hop isn't really art and give it a more critical and academic eye. Community vs. individualization. A new exploration of objectification. A view of the American Dream through the prism of the street. A different perspective on wealth, on masculinity, on Blackness.

Yes, even that.

Fuck a Post-Racial America, Black people are still trying to figure out who we are in the age after we supposedly found our Soul.