EVERYBODY LOVES A NIGGER GENIUS
AT LEAST THAT’S WHATS ALWAYS SAID
THE ONLY PROBLEM WITH A NIGGER GENIUS
IS THAT THEY ONLY LOVE A NIGGER GENIUS
WHEN HE’S DEAD
Exerpt form the poem “28” by Kevin Sipp
I have been the curator at the Hammonds House Museum for seven years now and an artist all my life, and it is my belief that the biggest obstacles to the ongoing sustainability of all artists in relation to social responsibility are the hopes and unresolved fears of the communities they reside in. These hopes and fears come with political and apolitical agendas as well as an endless host of social taboos that free up or restricts artists and dictates funding or patronage. Many artists in the loosely defined African American community are often socially, politically, spiritually or aesthetically naive and dare I say outright ignorant of the basic world models (art or otherwise) they often thrive in or complain about. Many so-called progressive thinkers in the African American community(?) believe progress to be a matter of letting go of the old narratives for the new as if they actual know what the old narrative is outside of their limited perspective.. What is often telling is what they let go of and run from in a quest for artistic ascendancy other racial groups gather and thrive on. I won’t rehash all the past examples and will assume we all know the drill. I grew up going to church reluctantly, the comic book store religiously, and sci-fi and fantasy movies devoutly. By the time I came of age and went off to college I was primed for a world of new wonder. I did not see my upbringing as a burden but a grounding I could leap from. I was always seeking magic and wonder, no matter what the cultural or racial group. I realized it was up to me and my peers to push this ongoing freedom dream forward. Along the way I discovered Sun Ra, A.R.Kane , Bad Brains ( anomoly or prophecy?), Renee Stout, and a host of others who sought to change from the inside the perception of what it meant to be creatively of African descendant in the Diaspora. I was not looking for validation from the system I came from or the system I was being educated in. I was looking for the freedom to explore. The poetry of Rumi, the movies of Matthew Barney etc. were all in the mix. Anything that let me seek for that elusive magic, abstractly or figuratively was welcome. What I rebeled against was not just the restrictions of one spiritual world view but that of the homogenized Greater American culture we were all being razed in. I went to school with Kara Walker and Radcliffe Bailey and have written articles about the works of both. Although they may supposedly sit at opposite end of aesthetic debate about representation and blackness I find both their works necessary. We need Agent provocateurs as much as we need praise singers. We also need those who slip past all these social issues for moments of abstract contemplation. What we don’t need are individuals
and institutions denouncing some for being too in love with their own divine being. The act of creating an Africanized image should not be considered a restriction to ones talent no more than the abandonment of such images be considered progress in their own right.
The continuing influence of the Judeo-Christian (and Islamic) mindset on the African American community(?), coupled with reactions to it make even our most innovative thinkers and doers limited in their response. Those who do break from these material and mental restrictions and find success often do so at a high price, not always monetarily. I won’t presume this is just a problem within the African – American community since every categorized group has its creative casualties, but I must look at what the elite supporters of African American art and the general public consider aesthetically necessary. Having done my stint as a punk rock singer, a proto-rapper, a spoken word burn out, and continuing underground Congo- goth dreamer it has become abundantly clear that the majority of the institutions that fund us are at least 20 years behind the futurist dreams our artists and children are having and as long as we pretend that the pop africana of uninspired music and high budget low brow urban movies, music and visual representations can satisfy our souls we are truly doomed to repeat and regurgitate that hate that bred us.
The social experiments called the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movements of the Sixties showed us the highs and lows of manifestoes created for positive uplift. Who’s positivity is it anyway? The creative response to being human has never been nor will ever be an either/ or experience but a both/ and experience. Being political or non-political depends on the urge or issue. Sometimes I feel like a nut sometimes I don’t. Being a figurative or abstract artist is not a determinant of my sophistication or intellect as some artist and collectors would have us believe.
And for the love of Orishas and Dark Magi let us move beyond the endless debates of authenticated blackness, Africaness, etc. Raymond Saunders and Ishmael Reed as well as many others have had this debate. What both of these artist sought and continue to seek is freedom. What tripped up Reed is his insistence that his personal spirit quest of neo-hoodoo post-colonial writing and art be the banner and revolutionary railroad all would escape through.
I am the child of loas, liars, angels, devils, menstrual singing shamans, griots, , human cargo, field hollers, scholars and scoundrels, pastors and supposed perverts ( who’s perversion is it any way?) and have little time to reduce myself or my culture (?) to a neat package for a media machine that postures itself as the moral or aesthetic status quo. That many self described Afro-progressives think the abandonment of a certain cultural groups signifiers makes them special is a joke in and of itself. I am ready to walk without acceptance on this journey of art. Years back I sat on a panel with one of the founding editors of Art Forum Magazine and listened to him talk about the death of art. What became clear is that he was not talking about the death of art but about the death of his generation’s perception of art. EVERY GENERATION HAS ITS APOCYLYPSE and ITS PROMISE LAND. I have moments in my history that I will always uphold as transcendent and creative souls that I will always look to in order to help me remember those moments. Every work of art is an altar to ones own self and beliefs that, if done with the right skill and insight, can move others. That is what I ask of the art I make and the art I see made by others. Simply put, move me.
Power to the people.
Kevin Sipp
“When you stop doing you other folk do you. When other folk do you they do you wrong!” Anthropologist will tell their students and other anthropologists that they are too close to the subject matter and therefore this invalidates their objectivity. I later found that my research was being covered by that very same individual. I will never surrender my voice to the other. My emic perspective will always be better that anothers ethic perspective of me. There is an underlying “racialist” patronizing voice that wishes to drown me out obviously.
My mentor the late Dr. Asa G. history said “ racism is a mental illness it has the following symptoms.
Perceptual distrotion
Denial of reality
Delusions of grandeur and Phobia for differences.”
I would like the thinking world to know that he who defines you confines you. It would be better for me to do me then.
Robert Belcher M.A. Anthropologist
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