Strange things are known to happen to people after they’re wrongfully arrested in their own homes.
In the case of the somewhat stodgy Henry Louis Gates Jr., it seems to have loosened the old chap right up.
At the fifth annual Eva Holtby Lecture at the ROM November 8, Gates, a Harvard prof with a trail of publications to his credit, played the almost full hall like a virtuoso, alternately dispensing professorial wisdom on all things black American (which was to be expected) – and then dropping unexpected barbershop-?worthy shit.
For instance: “My grandfather was so white we called him Casper behind his back,” and “My father makes Redd Foxx look like an undertaker.”
He also took a swipe at the genetic ancestry testing (something near and dear to his heart, with his DNA-?related PBS miniseries African American Lives and Faces Of America) that infamously came back indicating that Oprah is a Zulu. The Zulu Nation was having none of it either.
He also brought the house down when he explicitly excluded Clarence Thomas from the unique “40 million ways to be black.”
Jocularity aside, Gates’s subject was The Image Of The African In Western Art, and on that matter things were decidedly more sombre, even august.
He spoke of the need to “restructure the image of the race,” given the usual depiction of blacks as “deracinated individuals, primitive, dirty and naked.”
To that end, Gates has amassed an archive of 26,000 “noble images of Africans” that are to be catalogued and released in 10 volumes. (Four are already available through Harvard University Press.)
No wonder, then, that Gates blasted through a PowerPoint presentation like, well, a mad professor, often racing ahead with the verbiage faster than he could flip the images.
His enthusiasm was infectious, and the scholarship spoke for itself.
The images were many and varied – some dating back to the 1300s and showing positive depictions of blacks cavorting with the aristocracy.
He was quick to make the distinction between what he was presenting and the “Sambo art” that, ironically, has its biggest following among middle-class black American collectors, whether for its kitsch ?value or as a reminder of just how openly despised they were not too long ago.
“There has never been a time when there weren’t negative images of black people in the Western world,” said Gates.
But shockingly, Gates, a board member of New York’s Whitney Museum, didn’t let blacks entirely off the hook either.
“Africa has always been hard work for African Americans,” he opined. He then lambasted those who go back to the motherland only to stay in five-?star hotels and go on safaris.
“Very few African American artists have been able to see the world through African eyes,” he said, and implored them to “return to African influences in their sources.”
It puts one in mind of Nigerian author T. Obinkaram Echewa, who long ago lamented to NOW that “there is a lot in traditional Africa that has not been explored or given the intellectual status it ought to have. Even Westernized African students look at issues in North America and then go searching Africa for similar examples.”
It shouldn’t have been a shocker, then – but it still was to the crowd – that Gates pointed to Picasso as “most original” in his appropriation of African art, saying no other artist has done it as “boldly.”
Gates fully understands the controversial nature of this assertion.
But case in point – up on the giant screen was Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, which was directly influenced by African masks. Gates said, “Africa showed Picasso a new way to represent the human form” and was therefore instrumental in the birth of cubism.
It was all a lot to absorb, and not everyone was entirely on board with his postulates. No matter to Gates he’s an academic rock star on tour.
As the Q&A decomposed into irrelevant jabber – as it always does at these types of things – Gates groused aloud about being hungry and going out for – dig this – “Indian food.”
This is one different cat….
sigcino@nowtoronto.com
