Art and its Empire
Gallerist/Curator Susanne Fredricks joins the SO team today to underscore the popular Fox Network series Empire’s ingenious mobilisation of visual culture and its artefacts… “We too,”, she opines “must innovate new ways in which to platform the work of our talented artists…”
No doubt you have seen or heard of Empire, the hugely popular US television series, currently airing its second season on Fox in the US and locally on TVJ. Dubbed a “hip- hop soap opera”, of the ilk of Dynasty in the 1980s, the success of Empire has surpassed all commercial expectations. Despite accusations of “minstrelising” black culture, and playing on negative stereotypes and black dysfunctionality in ways which support the racist societal apparatus, its second season continues on an upward trajectory.
Conceptualised and created by Lee Daniels (of The Butler and Precious), and writer Danny Strong (The Butler, Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1), partnered with the expert musical production and direction of infamous producer and artiste Timbaland, this dream team of Black American talent has broken the mould in Soap Opera Land. Empire is a delirious fantasy of capitalism and power in which millions of dollars are tossed around like salad, and murders and mergers go hand in hand. Front and centre is the phenomenally successful family-owned hip-hop record company, aptly named Empire. The family in question is African-American.
Starring Terence Howard as ‘thug’ turned music mogul Lucious Lyon, and Taraji P Henson as his ex-con, ex-wife Cookie, Empire Records is subject to a constant power struggle, both between them and amongst their three sons Andre, Jamal and Hakeem. Full of fast-paced plot twists and unrelenting shocking moments, Season 1 gained a viewership of over six million, a Billboard chart-topping soundtrack, and cameo appearances with the likes of Al Sharpton, Oprah Winfrey, Naomi Campbell and Chris Rock, to name just a few. Conceptualised, written and produced by a predominantly African-American creative team, Empire lives and breathes African-American culture on its own terms, and in its own context. The success of the show is due in no small part to its ingenious mobilisation of visual culture and its artefacts. This strategic intention adds new layers of depth and meaning to character development in ways that the central musical tenet of hip-hop simply cannot do. It is on this plane that Empire succeeds so spectacularly as a game-changer.
Art is visual culture. It brims with cultural narrative and functions as cultural text with enormous social, historical and cultural power. Meaning for the viewer is negotiated through culturally learned lenses, socio-cultural contexts and embodied experiences. How artwork is curated in a space also creates new conversations and can give new perspectives. Visual art does, however, often function outside of the mainstream cultural experience. So to platform art in the purposeful way Empire does has given a whole new mass audience the opportunity to experience it.
Works of art saturate the public and private spaces in which the Empire characters live and work. And the curatorial placement of the works operate as esoteric allusion to the identity politics the producers want to elaborate on and deepen. Lucious’ home, for instance, is a reflection of his social and cultural place, and the politics that he negotiates in these landscapes. His home is palatial. The foyer and hallways are filled with works by long-dead European men — the likes of Monet, Seurat, Klimt, Van Gogh, and Rodin, are all present, along with one large African-American piece, hanging above all the others. Naomi and Her Daughters by Kehinde Wiley dominates the space.
Wiley’s works are scattered throughout the house. He is an artist known for his subversion of traditional European works by replacing white subjects with non-white, often African-American ones. In doing so he renegotiates historical and cultural meaning, reclaims historical place, and reignites this place with a new politic. Essentially, this is a declaration of who Lucious is, and what he represents. He is in power. Now. Here. He has renegotiated the terms and subverted the system to his advantage, and emerged victorious. And as we move deeper into his home, into the living room and bedrooms, works by African-American artists adorn every wall giving his character an overwhelming sense of presence and complexity.
Perhaps the richest and most interesting layering of visual identity politics is in the second son’s Jamal’s loft apartment. By juxtaposing traditional African art, painted calabashes, carved doors, and several Dogon ladders, with works by contemporary African-American artists, Jamal’s Africanness is reclaimed, and integrated into his American blackness. The curatorial positioning of these works suggest his importance in family succession, acknowledge his homosexuality, and present him as a much richer character than his elder brother Andre, the Ivy League-educated intellectual, married to a white woman, who lives in a generic townhouse with a muted tonal range, filled with dull landscape paintings. Andre’s internal and external isolation from the family and the disfavour he is held in by his father is gestured to by the whole set, but it is the art that drives home the sense of loss and emptiness.
Barkley Hendricks, Jean Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, Fahama Pecou, Jamea Richmond Edwards, Michael Sevoie, Mickalene Thomas, and more, are all African-American artists whose works have appeared in Empire. All black, all American-born, and all with their own personal narratives, which feed into the politics of what it means to be black in America. Season 2 has seen the introduction of works by Nigerian-born Toyin Adutola and Jamaican-born Ebony G Patterson, whose work focuses on identity and sexuality in non-American black cultural contexts. The art of Empire, then, works powerfully to reflect and amplify the contemporary blackness at the show’s core.
It makes you wonder about the capacity of Jamaicans to do something similar. How can our creative industries work together in more meaningful, constructive and mutually beneficial ways? The visual arts locally is afflicted with an isolation of sorts. The most obvious reasons are twofold: the constraints of physical access to art spaces, and the consequent inability to be ‘seen’, experienced and understood by the masses, and secondly, the high price point, the implied elitism and the financial unattainability of the works themselves. It can also be said that rarely has our visual arts engaged with popular culture in a way that enables any kind of meaningful partnership, and that the current economic downturn has pressured the local scene into less activity due to economic constraints. But our art movement has always been strong. From the indigenous Taino and 17th century to today, we have an art history that is reflective of significant historical periods, culturally explorative, genre-based, and which has given birth to its own narratives.
We have the indigenous artefacts, the colonial representations, the relics of, and conversations around slavery, the pre- and post-Independence movement, the intuitive/self-taught genre articulating the African collective consciousness. We have the Nationalist movement, the Modernist movement and the Contemporary. The contemporary art scene today is bubbling with talent and forging new ways of engaging with more diverse audiences and wider regional and global discourses in new as well as traditional media. Artists such as Ebony G Patterson, Laura Facey, Amy Laskin and Phillip Thomas are breaking new commercial ground in the US and UK art worlds to critical acclaim. Camille Cheddha and Leasho Johnson have both engaged with art residencies in the region and are participating in international shows. Cosmo Whyte, Greg Bailey, Monique Gilpin, and AvaGay Osbourne are the rising stars in our present universe, with others launching closely behind. And there are so many more.
Visual literacy in the scene is growing. The excitement is at times palpable. Our artists are hard-working and driven and we have to innovate new ways in which to platform their work to a wider and more commercial audience, just as Empire has so brilliantly done. Imagine Matthew McArthy’s politically satirical ‘street’ work, Peter Dean Rickards’ Guns like Dirt series, Ebony G Patterson’s Dead Treez, or Michael Thompson’s powerful graphics in Betta Mus’ Come or Ghett’a Life. Imagine Leasho Johnson’s mural and sculptural work in an Assassin video, or Jaevon Puran’s and Ranford Christie’s iconic portraits in a Jah 9 or Chronixx video. The possibilities are endless.
Acknowledgement: Everything we know about art in Empire by Becky Chung, March 17, 2015