A Colescott Soundtrack

I heard someone say Colescott's work is reminiscent of Jacob Lawrence. Here is a Jacob Lawrence owned by the Portland Art Museum,titled Bootleg Whiskey, done in 1943.

In an article I was reading about Sanford Biggers (thank you Barbara) Jacob Lawrence was mentioned again as an influence on the artist.
Jacob Lawrence is one of the most well known African American artists of the 20th century, his influence must be everywhere. The fact that he came up twice in two days speaks to the current wave of change to Portland Art Museum galleries. Biggers is the artist responsible for the installation in the Miller Meigs of the CMCA which opened a few days ago. Blossom, seen here includes a rendition of Billie Holiday's anthem Strange Fruit, playing on a loop in the gallery.

It is a different experience to incorporate sound into the visual arts. I wonder what Colescott would have wanted us to hear as we view his work. It sounds like a lot of laughter, sighs, and breaths of surprise. The lobby soundtrack, as well as the work, makes me smile a little more each time I see it. Maybe that is what he wanted, to make us look at things that are initially uncomfortable until we have seen it enough that we can appreciate something about it, that we may even grow to like it.

Robert Colescott ~ A Taste of Gumbo

In 1997, Robert Colescott represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, the first American artist since Jasper Johns did so in 1986. One of the 19 acrylic paintings shown at that exhibition was A Taste of Gumbo seen above. Looking at the image the scale of the painting is clear, large as well as bold. Tackling race again, there's something in this painting to offend most people. The white woman at center has decided to partake of the food created by blacks. What's in that gumbo though includes all of the other aspects of racial stereotypes in America. Look around the painting and you'll find the signs of poverty, slavery, garbage, jazz, card playing.

The five paintings currently hanging just inside the front lobby of the Portland Art Museum will probably be going off view soon. However, for those of us who live in Portland, Robert Colescott's Knowledge of the Past is the Key to the Future: Upside-Down Jesus and the Politics of Survival hangs on the third floor of the museum's Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. Colescott is so well thought of that there's at least one piece of his work on view at most museums in the United States. Looking intently at his work can provoke much conversation and thought about art and life. Yesterday Amy mentioned that we might never know what Colescott really meant when he makes his paintings. That's true. But we'll enjoy the process of trying.

While writing this week's posts, I found this poem by Quincy Troupe. He wrote it specifically for the occasion of the Venice Biennale. Here's a link to read "One-Two Punch" it in it's entirety and see an insight into Robert Colescott and his work,

before anything else, at the first crack of day
light, prowling around your studio,
during the hush hours after midnight, in the dry air
surrounding the desert where you live, a stone's throw
outside of tucson--obelisks of cactus standing tall
guarding the entrance to your sanctuary--
the first thing you do when you approach the white canvas,
stretched four-corner-square before you on a huge white wall,
is paint the surface bright red after thinking about it for days--
...
painted bright red, your adrenaline flowing now, colescott,
flowing onto the surface through your refiguring brain
birthing the idea, layer after layer of colors swirling through
the snapshot you have taken inside your head of what
you are about to do here, whatever comes to you,
like improvised music, will find its way up there,
stroked as images upon your sea of red primer,
where what the viewer first see will provoke "humor,"
then "pleasure," before fast becoming a "problem"

Colescott's on Every Wall

This is the piece kiddy corner to Beauty. Britney and I sat talking about it for fifteen minutes, trying to figure out what it was all about, before we read the title. We decided it was interesting that Colescott would go as far as to have a constellation of a head giving a blow job, yet he wouldn't do the simple phallic gesture of adding the banana to the banana split- that would just be too easy. Before we read the title we contemplated the scene as a dream, the dream color is purple, the clock reads 2 a.m.- the hour the bars close down, the six card hand of a gambler or a cheater, the seemingly same blonde woman with red fingernail polish as the one in Beauty here smokes and masturbates, Britney asked, why is she a cyclops? What is the black girl drinking? Who is the roughneck white guy with the black eye and the bandaids?
Maybe we'll never know what this is really about, I thought, but we enjoyed the examination. Britney said, go see what the title is.
Bad Habits, I told her.
Aha, she said.

Robert Colescott ~ Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder and Carrie Mae Weems

Recently I watched a group stand in front of Robert Colescott's Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder. It's huge, probably five by six - perhaps the height of the woman we're all beholding. Who is she? One said a model undressing for the artist. Another commented that's usually something that takes place before the painting session starts. Others took a look at her clothing – the garter belt and stockings, the bare buttocks. And then another person said. What if she's really putting her clothes back on? What is she doing there? Is she a model, is she a prostitute? Questions that Robert Colescott most assuredly wants us to ask and then answer them ourselves. How do we view the female model? Have we objectified the female body? What happens when the model is male? Do we have the same thoughts? What if the male is nude? Is that why men are usually so uncomfortable around paintings like the Portland Art Museum's Gary by Ann Gale. There he is sitting slumped in his chair, the chair where he sat for hours, full frontal. How is that different from paintings of women, either naked or half dressed? The woman in Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder is certainly more provocative. How would she be considered really more different than the women who were Matisse's models? All questions that bring me back to the post about Carrie Mae Weems' portrait of Robert Colescott during Week 9.


It's almost impossible for me to look at the blond in Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder and not think of Weems' portrait of Colescott. What has he done? Why is he standing with his face covered? How is that different than the blond? What role does the artist play? Why is Weems naked in her portrait of Colescott? Is she the artist or is she the model or is she both? What role do we the viewers play in this? Both Colescott and Weems challenge us to think about the female body. Colescott does it with more satire, more humor. But we are expected to think.

Colescott and Guston

Last week we focused on John McCracken's Black Box, being one of two pieces artist and writer Pat Boas would focus on at the museum's monthly artist talk. The other piece, untitled, by Philip Guston, we haven't shown you yet.
The essence of Boas' talk boiled down McCracken as the eternal optimist always looking to create a pure form (ie. something that beings from another planet might leave on earth) and Guston the eternal pessimist, who's work is a reflection of living with racism, the vietnam war and the struggles and abuses man does to man. Guston's style is cartoon like, at one point Boas quoted someone else who said Guston painted "satanic with a smile".
In the descriptions of Colescott's work I am coming across the words "cartoon" and "personal narrative" and "satire", these descriptives remind me of Guston, the light blue background, the hooded figure with the red speckles on his cape and also on the bed-like figure behind him, the giant red wound in the middle of the piece and the oversized cartoon hand whose finger is pointing at it. Take a look at this Guston:

The figures are not that different from the one in the painting at the art museum. The cartoon nature of Colescott and Guston's figures and the social commentary they wish to share, the sick sadness behind the myth, the bright colors they choose to paint them in, these things hold these two artists together. Look at these two images, one is Colescott the other is Guston, I'm sure you can tell which is which. They are like two rooms in the same building.

Robert Colescott ~ Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder and Appropriations

Robert Colescott's Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder (1979) was given to the Portland Art Museum in 2007 by Arlene and Harold Schnitzer. The presentation was made in honor of the appointment of Brian J. Ferriso, The Marilyn H. and Dr. Robert B. Pamplin, Jr. Director of the Portland Art Museum! Painted in the seventies, it's not surprising to see Colescott use Matisse's La Danse as one of the themes of the painting. During that period Colescott was appropriating masterpieces of art history and combining them with his own racial, sexual and political themes. As Amy mentioned about the four other works being shown at this time at the Portland Art Museum, Robert Colescott's paintings are provocative. David Lefkowitz commented about Colescott's work with his own provocative statement... "There is something in this work to piss off nearly everyone, regardless of race, sex, and class, and attitude to the history and craft of painting. It's no coincidence that those categories are the primary subjects of his art."

Take a look at this very short video on Robert Colescott. In it you'll get to see Colescott himself talk about Eat Dem Taters. Taters was painted in 1975 and is a riff on van Gogh's The Potato Eaters, 1885.

Beauty is in The Eye of the Beholder

Robert Colescott was born in 1925 in Oakland California. This painting was done in 1979, it currently graces the lobby of the Portland Art Museum with four other highly provocative pieces by Colescott. The title of the painting, also the title of this post, is written on a little piece of paper at the bottom left, and in the painter's eye is you, the viewer. The painting within the painting is a reference to The Dance by Matisse.
Matisse's piece is Fauvist, primative, and was done in 1910. Colescott uses irony to expose his personal narratives. Take the half nude white woman as she dresses, with her stockings and her black bra. All her parts hanging out, in her red high heels and her dyed blonde hair. She too, is in the eye of the artist, the one who beholds you as you behold him, and all this to expose some beauty in the world....to make me ask myself what beauty is.
These paintings grab you, shake you out of your thoughts, beckon you to get closer, then open up like that long black coat on a flasher in the park that you'll never forget.