Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Jayson Musson: The Language Weapon


*This Thursday, November 10th, 2011, The Visiting Artists Program will be hosting Jayson Musson in the Hamilton Auditorium of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he will speak at 11:45am.  Email visitingartists@pobox.pafa.edu for more information.



"Mastery of language affords remarkable power."

“The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anti-colonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”

“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo.  I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia.  I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.”

These three quotations come from two major texts of psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, and Black Skin, White Masks.  His lifelong searing criticism of colonialism is as relevant today, and we ought to see artist Jayson Musson's project as an illuminated subplot of Fanon's work.

Musson, a.k.a. Hennessy Youngman is, to borrow a colleague's phrase, like the Ali G. of the art world.  Except where Ali G. thrives off the veil of being the stupid guy in a room of 'important' people in order to highlight his victims' prejudice, Musson intersperses an ignoramus 'hood' persona with moments of lucid, shaming intellectual diatribe.  To speak to the first Fanon quote from above, Musson's project grabs hold of language as a weapon to be mastered and controlled.  Language is a subject itself in his performances.  Ali G's is a mastery of social behavior: his comments are the seeds that unleash the clumsy human folly around him.  The domino effect takes its course.  It is a brilliant act of foresight and leaded questioning.  But Musson does not have the same privilege that Sacha Baron Cohen has, for the art world is a subtler beast for a provocateur.  There are very few white supremacist skinhead arts leaders; not many campaigning pro-life gallerists; relatively few extremist evangelical artists and curators.  Musson has to go straight for the throat in his online Youtube channel Art Thoughtz and most recently in his satirical audio tour, titled The Grand Manner in the Historic Landmark Building at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  His comments on certain paintings, many of which depict events or people in early American history, include, "The cross is boss", and "A white man gotta do what a white man gotta do" (on the slave dealings of Governor Morris and Robert Morris).

His most recent public appearance was at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.  This particular comment  made by Hennessy was answered with a fairly icy silence:   

"Museums should heed this trend [of alternative marketing plans] and begin aligning themselves with causes in order to work against decades of bad PR from institutional critique which have painted museums as self - interested institutions, a place where hedge fund managers donate their art collection in order to boost the value of their own collection, and that’s bad, that’s not good…"

In conversation with the second Fanon quotation above, Musson's indictment of the greedy runoff bred within the museum is particularly apropos in light of the ongoing Occupy protests.  One of the problems with these protests, however, is their vague handling of language and message.  At this stage in the game, language is not being used to its maximum, debilitating effect, and neither is action.  Fanon says "no matter how devastating the consequences may be" action must be taken.  His project was filled with irreconcilable rage; he never hid it.  Musson's institutional critique begins to get at that sensibility, but I wonder which end he is after exactly: comedic satire, or foundational change?

Musson is black, and this is the central tension in his project: his exaggerated routines push us to ask the question that embodies the stain of racial exclusion in art: why should the Art World (read upper middle class, educated, white people) trust the art history lessons of a rapping, Ebonics- speaking black man from the hood of Philadelphia?  That we ask this question illuminates our own conditioned prejudice and the inherent racial and socioeconomic inequalities in the commercial and academic quarters of fine art.  Like Fanon, Musson's character is defiantly proud of his blackness, and highlights the gap in understanding between the intellectual white man and black culture; his caricature widens that threshold.  But where Fanon describes the black man in "total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth", Musson seems to say through his alter ego Hennessy that urban black culture is, through most lenses, a complete aberration in the Art World.  We are forced into the opportune position of reexamining where, and from whom, we get our information from, be it a scholar, a text, or a museum label. 

Works Cited
Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
Ibid, Black Skin, White Masks, Editions de Seuil: Paris, 1952
http://www.youtube.com/user/HennesyYoungman


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