Appendx 1 : Black on Black with Light Gray Interior : Ila Berman

Black on Black with
Light Gray Interior :
Ila Berman
text | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | notes

Consider, for example, its promotion in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition and catalog entitled "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin (New York: MOMA, 1984), as well as its critique: "The 'Primitive' Unconscious of Modern Art, or White Skin Black Masks," by Hal Foster, first printed in October 34 Fall 1985) and reprinted in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985). Although I am not interested in taking up this issue in detail, it should be noted that whether one considers the concept of "primitivism" to be truly embodied within African art, or believes that this is simply a construction of the modern art world about Africa, is not important here. It is not a system of values that I am trying to surface as much as a simple recognition of the intersection that took place between European art and the objects of tribal ritual in Africa. How the work was translated (or "colonialized" and domesticated as some would have it) is secondary to the fact of African tribal art's power of influence over a modern artistic consciousness. The argument of appropriation too often continues its logic of concealment in the discourse meant to reveal it, and what is ultimately masked is the power that the "other" has over the colonial mind-- a power that, by eliciting fear, is what motivates this mind to attempt to domesticate it in the first place.

Cornel West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference," Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 27.

Johnathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 50.

In spite of the traditions of Saussurian semiology and its poststructural developments that refuse any "positivity" to the sign, I am proposing (especially beyond the restrained linguistic sign) that all signs are always both positively constructed and differentially perceived and compared. If this were not the case, we would have difficulty supporting any claim of true difference that did not simply rely on conditions of constructed opposition.

This inference is constructed out of simple logic. That their work would be shown (and included in a book on architecture) because it attains a high standard is placed against the fact that they are not architects. Thus the opposition architecture/not-architecture is maintained in parallel with the opposition higher standard/lower (or mean) standard.

Reference made to Patricia H. Collins, "The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought," Signs (summer 1989): 759.

Quoted from J. L. Gwaltney, Drylongso: A Self Portrait of Black America (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 147.

Although Scully notes that "It would he uniust for black architects to be subiected to special pressure to conform... to some preconceived standard of blackness," he later states that despite the "rich heritage of African and African-American architecture [black architects] still ought to be as subject as any others to the context ... in which they work" (p.11). If Scully considers the first type of pressure "unjust" (liberating blacks from the pressure to produce an African-American architecture), I would doubt from his statements that he would find the second type of subjugation-- to the "context" of existing (nonblack) architectural traditions-- equally unjust.

I am here referring to the review that concentrates on a surface reading of the content of the writings contained within the text without considering the nature of the assumptions that govern both the reading and the writing (even the most obvious presupposition that the "meaning" or content of the work would only be given through the writings--an assumption that privileges language above all else, while further implying that language's value resides in its capacity for transparency). While recognizing that any review is necessarily partial, my own approach toward this book aims to reveal that in this context a "typical review" could only be complicitous with the forces I am calling into question.

I am indebted to Muhammad Abdus-Sabur for bringing this to my attention, for it is an extremely critical issue.