kagablog

pening: Sunday 29th November, from 15.00 hrs - 17.00 hrs

exhibition from November 29th until December 19th

opening hours: Friday and Saturday 14.00-17.00hrs
and by appointment

Middenweg 22 Amsterdam

phone: 06-444 444 76
phone: 06-131 753 62

KunstruimteNP40@versatel.nl

mary corrigall has started her own blog

read her opinions and insights into the south african art condition here: http://corrigall.blogspot.com/

lALEXIS Preller’s art was due for a re-reading. Or so asserts Clive Kellner in the new box set published to coincide with this retrospective - the last was staged in 1972.

Pegged as sharing close ties with the Symbolism, Surrealism and other western art movements it is suggested that Preller’s art should no longer be viewed through a Modernist (European) lens.

Kellner and Karel Nel, co-author of the book and curator of the exhibition, furthermore suggest that, if anything, Preller was a “pre-postmodernist” because he forged a unique vernacular that rallied against “dominant colonial orthodoxy”.

It all sounds good and in their text Kellner and Nel make a fairly good case, using terms such as “appropriated” and quoting from the likes of Rasheed Araeen, the recalcitrant English artist and writer who has made a habit of challenging western hegemony.

But, unfortunately, Preller’s paintings tell another story. One that, regrettably, appears to confirm a primitivist impulse at work. In other words there isn’t too much difference between his outlook and that of Modernists, such as Pablo Picasso, who also took their cue from African culture.

Without a doubt Preller’s motives for employing an African idiom diverged quite considerably from European Modernists, who were mainly interested in the formal qualities implicit in African cultural products - and, of course, their own projections of what African culture embodied.

Preller’s art also evidences a fixation with the stylistic character of African art and culture but it is suggested that, for him, it provided the means with which to identify himself with an African identity - Nel’s case hinges on this fact.

Of course, this urge only manifested after visiting the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris where Picasso also uncovered the “spirit” of Africa. Ultimately, though, what really counts is what Preller’s idea of what that African identity constituted and how he translated that into his art.

Without a doubt Preller developed an African-inspired aesthetic that drew from the European canon but (re)worked the African elements in quite a different manner.

His vocabulary is the result of an amalgamation of visual references drawn from a variety of ethnicities or cultures on the continent. It is this aspect, perhaps, which has led Nel and Kellner to suggest that Preller might have been a forerunner to the post-modern movement; with a stretch one could think of it as a syncretic language that collapses time and space - iconography from Ancient Egyptian, Greek and traditional African dress are melded into a singular expressive form. Of course, Preller doesn’t do so with any level of irony or self-reflexivity.

With works such as The Kraal II (1948), which shows an array of different African cultures shown to be inhabiting a rural village, one is left with the impression that Preller perceived African expression to be underpinned by a unifying theme, that there was an essence which intrinsically connects all African cultures.

This essence that Preller sought to describe or seek out isn’t predicated on any definable features but rather an intangible “mystique”. In this way his art positions the African as an unknowable and thus exotic other.

This painting is a good example of his brand of magical realism, in which a figurative image is infused with fantasy elements such as a drum that is balanced on the back of a mythical creature. A group of miniature people dance on the drum’s surface around a large candle. The fantasy features allow Preller to give physical expression to the mythical nature of African cultural practices.

It is hard to reconcile this idealised image of black people living in harmony in a rural idyll with what was happening in South Africa in 1948 - when apartheid policies were installed as law - when the painting was completed. Preller appears to have chosen to bury himself - and his viewers - in a fantastical vision of Africa drawn from the past or the imagination rather than face reality. It is within an imagined idea of Africa that he tries to locate his identity so whatever connection he forged couldn’t have felt authentic. His motives may have been genuine but his method was superficial.

Like Picasso et al his art does not evince a heightened interest in African culture per se but rather its external visual manifestations, such as the design and form of African sculpture, dress and patterned fabrics. But he subverts his sources, imbuing designs and patterns of his own making into the African dress of his subjects, consequently claiming ownership of their culture.

But perhaps the most bothersome aspect of his art is the manner in which the object/subject collapse into each other, demonstrating the manner in which he objectified his African subjects. Almost all his subjects parade a rigid deportment but it is only when one views Adam and Eve (1955), which features two large wooden effigies which are seated on a stool supported by a series of smaller wooden figurines, that it becomes obvious that mostly Preller’s African subjects are modelled on statues and not real-life subjects.

It is easy to understand why Nel and Kellner have tried to reframe Preller’s art: if he isn’t a pre-postmodernist, his status within South Africa’s art canon remains problematic.

Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows is showing at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg until December 5.

this article was first published in the sunday independent

Lowave is an independent film label founded in 2002 by Marc Horchler and Silke Schmickl to promote experimental film and contemporary video art and make them accessible beyond the film festival and gallery circuit. Our catalogue features artists with varied backgrounds working with different techniques and multiple modes of expression, and ranges from abstract experimental films to militant documentaries. Alongside historic figures such as Marguerite Duras, Maurice Lemaître, Takahiko Iimura, and Helga Fanderl, Lowave has put forward some of the most important young artists from around the world.

Lowave provides an insight into the vibrant world of contemporary artistic creation. The Lowave catalogue features artists with a background in video art, such as François Guiton, Zineb Sedira, HC Gilje, Mounir Fatmi and Triny Prada, experimental filmmakers such as Massimilian and Nina Breeder and Raqs Media Collective, literary filmmakers such as Francçoise Romand, avant-garde musicians such as Rodolphe Burger and Yoshishiro Hanno, and live performers such as Label Ombres, Yuki Kawamura and Project_Singe. Brought together under the Lowave label, these films resonate with each other. Trends are clearly visible in the skilled creativity which forms the foundation of Lowave’s catalogue: the simultaneous creation of both sound and image; the dissipation of the human form; the work on urban landscapes; political and regional subjects.

In addition to individual, monographic titles, the Lowave catalogue also features an important number of compilations, including Different Cinema, a collection of experimental film co-edited with the Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Hors Pistes, co-produced with the Pompidou Center, Resistance[s] and Re:Frame, two collections of avant-garde Arab and Indian film and video art. A series of documentaries on art, artists at work, as well as portraits complete the label’s editorial selection.

lowave is here

My friend, my collaborator, my partner-in-crime, my inspiration; Miss Mary-Jane is a muse who plays happy-hearted trickery with those around her.

Her bright eyes shine cross-hatched with mischievous secrets as she unravels onto canvas her humble tenacity and conceptual valor. She personifies the feel-good vibe of a Friday afternoon and the energy you feel when blasting Crystal Castles from your car with the windows down.

Hey dark thoughts and even more twisted dreams take on aesthetic form with her various tools, transforming into visual vignettes as hauntingly macabre as they are comical and quirky.

Here’s a slice of Mary and her world…

Tell me about that mish mash of an exhibition you put on a while back….

Mish mash that it was. The idea came over a late night and exhibition came three days later. Pooled together resources between myself and Jene Rene, from advertising to liquor license, from sound equipment and DJs to venue, and of course art and fashion. Took place about 3 years ago, it was an unconventional exhibition but an exhibition in each detail.

Any uncontrollable urges?

Juicy question you ask…. the obvious to draw paint and create, the not so obvious may be a tad inappropriate.

Background vibes & Childhood memories….what can you recall?

I recall my brother telling me that i had a penis but i had broken it of whilst playing with it… i recall having a string of minks tails i took everywhere and called “my precious little dead ones”… and i recall drawing on every surface i could get to, on walls, behind curtains, underneath tables, where ever i could get away with.

What is art to you?

Art to me is an expression of the mood and mindstate that occupies my subconscious

Who are you?

Mary Jane

Life – give me three words.

What the hell

Art – give me one word.

Popcorn

Tell me something you have never told anyone before.

Really? i prefer swimming in cold water than warm, think it stems from when i was a kid and i knew the other ppl were peeing in the pool

Your little gem “ In Insomnia, Entries of an Early Hour Obsession”. Is it a late night inspired memoir of some sort? What can we find hidden inside ?

It could be put that way… its a little book of indulgence where i let my emotions loose write in rhyme and draw what appears on the page.

Thanks Dork

MJ’s a bit of this and a bit of that, neither here nor there…and In an All or Nothing world, she’srocking the All.

So Miss Jane, I wanna shout this out loud to you!

“Don’t wanna live a life
In a world that’s all the same
The crazy little things
That you do are magical

This crazy life
This crazy world
We’re living in is
Magical”

— Goldfrapp “Fly Me Away”

this interview first published on mooks

Bringing It Home

The changes that the Black Panther underwent in the beginning of the 1970s proved relatively minor in comparison to his various transformations throughout the remainder of the decade. In 1973, an up-and-coming young writer, Don McGregor, was unexpectedly handed Marvel’s failing bimonthly series Jungle Action and instructed to give the Black Panther a starring role in the title. Prior to McGregor’s involvement, Jungle Action featured Tharn the Magnificent, a White Tarzan knockoff who battled jungle creatures alongside two beautiful White female sidekicks. In McGregor’s hands, Jungle Action became the Black Panther’s default solo title for the next four years. After transitioning from his role in the Avengers, the Black Panther assumed his new trajectory in issue 6 when McGregor took control and launched readers on his expansive 13-issue epic storyline entitled “Panther’s Rage.” At the outset of “Panther’s Rage,” the Black Panther realized he had lost touch with his native kingdom as his control of Wakanda is challenged by a rival chieftain named Erik Killmonger. The Black Panther’s protracted search to find and defeat Killmonger and his cadre of evil lieutenants gradually assumes the shape of an Odyssean saga, in which the Black Panther not only defeats Killmonger but painfully faces his own responsibility in allowing his country to suffer in his absence and slowly rebuilds his connection to his beloved homeland.

The first letter to appear in the “Jungle Reactions” column was printed in the July 1974 issue of Jungle Action. Responding to “Panther’s Rage,” Gary Frazier of Eugene, Oregon, kicked off the discussion by calling the story “revolutionary,” particularly McGregor’s subtle attention to the differences in language, which suggested more broadly “that Africans in Africa are different from Afro-Americans.”46 In the following issue, Bob Hughes of New Haven, Connecticut, added, “After all those great white fathers (and mothers) we’ve had tromping across Africa, a real bona-fide Black African jungle king was desperately needed.”47 In issue 12 in November 1974, Dean Mullaney of Staten Island, New York, commented “It’s great to see blacks drawn realistically for a change.”48 In the same issue, Meloney M.H. Crawford of Saratoga Springs, New York, remarked, “The interpersonal relationship and character developments reach a sensitivity that is rare in today’s comics,” adding that “The ‘Panther’s Rage’ is an emotional experience, like any great work of art.” Crawford concluded by asserting the importance of Wakanda’s existence as an independent African nation ruled by Blacks: “One final comment: Wakanda must survive! It is encouraging to know it has withstood the onslaught of white hunters, jungle girls, and Tarzan-types, and has remained a settlement of BLACK people in the African jungle.”49 In a similar vein, Ralph Macchio of Cresskill, New Jersey, contended (at considerable length) in the following issue that Don, once again, your characterizations of the entire Panther-cast were so clearly defined, I honestly felt as if I knew them. From the false bravado of Tayete to the overtly indulgent self-pity of Monica, you have unobtrusively helped advance the cause of the Negro far more than the melodramatic “relevancy” of Marvel’s competitors that was big a few years ago…Over the past several months, we have seen the inner workings of an all-Black society, with its customs, conflicts, and yes, prejudices …One other thing: please keep guest stars from other mags out of this series, because as you’ve presented Wakanda to us, it appears to be a self-contained world within a world, and I like that, immensely.50

Having successfully concluded “Panther’s Rage” In November 1975, McGregor and the Jungle Action crew immediately took their engaging vision of Black Superpower on the road by launching the ambitious and controversial “The Panther vs. The Klan!” saga in January 1976. In this storyline, Monica Lynne and T’Challa travel to Monica’s childhood home in rural Georgia to mourn the suspected suicide of Monica’s sister Angela. However, almost immediately upon their arrival in Georgia, Monica and the Black Panther become embroiled in a clash with two secret societies implicated in Angela’s death: the notorious Ku Klux Klan and the fictional Dragon Circle. While most critics agree “The Panther vs. The Klan!” never achieved the same artistic cohesiveness and narrative success as “Panther’s Rage,” the realistic subject matter, highly emotional scripts, and poignant illustrations that comprise the “The Panther vs. The Klan!” furthered readers’ identification with the story and evoked letters of unparalleled empathy from White and Black readers alike, including the following intimate disclosure from a reader identified only as “S.D.W.” situated “On the road”:

I’ve just finished JUNGLE ACTION #21…shaking…It has been months since I left Louisville, but the sights/sounds/smells of my encounters with the Klan and the anti-busers linger on. As I read “A Cross Burning Darkly, Blackening the Night,” all those events came rushing back…Don, your perceptions of character and contemporary myth/reality are so fine, so strong…and I wonder if here, in this oh-so-American drama, we can play the myth through, find the America we started to look for so many years ago.51

Despite the impressive feedback that McGregor and the Jungle Action team enjoyed from its loyal readers, the series suffered an untimely demise. It was cancelled In November 1976, only six issues into the “Panther vs. the Klan!” storyline. While many reasons have been offered for the unexpected cancellation of Jungle Action, most explanations center on business pragmatics and poor sales figures. Jim Shooter has also suggested McGregor’s authorial obduracy led to his dismissal. According to Shooter, McGregor “utterly refused to take direction of any kind, to change a thing he was doing, to take any steps whatsoever to improve sales. There was no way to work with him, no way to help him.52 Not surprisingly, McGregor has offered a counter explanation for his dismissal. While admitting that Jungle Action sales were not what either he or Marvel would have liked, the writer has repeatedly suggested that his decision to create the politically controversial “The Panther vs. The Klan!” story arc was among the primary reasons for both ending the series and eventually dismissing him from Marvel:

The dismissal editor said, and I quote, quite accurately, because some things I don’t forget, “Don, you’re too close to the black experience.” That’s the verbal reason given, I kid you not, as I looked at the back and front of my white hands. To which the editor responded, “You know what I mean.” And that…was the end of my time on the Panther.53

Ironically, it would take the Black Panther’s original co-creator Jack Kirby to reveal the true extent of readers’ personal investment in McGregor’s vision of the Black Panther. Two months after the last issue of Jungle Action, the Black Panther resurfaced in the first issue of his first self-titled series. The entirely new Black Panther series was written, illustrated, and edited by none other than Jack Kirby himself. Kirby, who left Marvel in 1970 after creative differences with Stan Lee, returned to the company in 1975 and, according to Shooter, was looking for titles to satisfy his new contract, which specified Kirby’s writing and penciling four issues a month. In the wake of McGregor’s removal from Jungle Action, Kirby found himself once again in command of the Black Panther. In an editorial comment from Kirby that appeared in the first issue, the new author promised Black Panther fans a “NEW BLACK PANTHER,” pledging “I can only say that you’re due to see the Panther the way he was originally meant to be.54

If readers had any doubts about the sincerity of Kirby’s dramatic predictions for change, they vanished upon reading the first issue. Kirby delivered a new interpretation of the Black Panther—to the extent that the character bore absolutely no relation to his most recent incarnation in Jungle Action. The initial story, “King Solomon’s Frog!,” inaugurated the series by immersing the Black Panther in an intergalactic struggle for an ancient magical artifact—a plot that included nothing less than a brass frog that functioned as an ancient time machine, a midget sidekick, and an eggplant-headed humanoid from the distant future named “Hatch-22.” Not surprisingly, readers immediately responded to Kirby’s radical changes to the Black Panther. The majority of these letters conveyed a pronounced sense of betrayal and personal loss as fans assailed Kirby for tampering with McGregor’s vision of the Black Panther. In issue 3 of the Black Panther, the first letter printed in response to the new series was from Bill Dickenson of Crystal, Minnesota:

I hope that you don’t plan on transforming the Black Panther into just another super-hero. Although this is an integral part of his character, his royal heritage cannot be overlooked. He is a true leader of men, the kind of leader we all look for. I also hope that a delicate balance is struck between the action/adventure hero and the concern he has shown for his race and for men of all creed and colors.55

While Dickenson expressed his desire that the Black Panther not lose the depth of character McGregor gave to the superhero, his comments were relatively mild in comparison to a letter from Jana Hollingsworth of Bellingham, Washington:

I can fully understand and appreciate, though not agree with, your desire for a less controversial storyline than McGregor’s “Panther vs. the Klan.” Listen, I am not one of Don’s coterie of fanatic fans—I quite disliked his LUKE CAGE—but his PANTHER stories were among the finest ever produced. They were relevant not in the cheap chic sense, but truly relevant both to the special problems of today and the eternal condition of mankind. McGregor’s storylines were as complex as the real world, and his characters were genuine human beings. After “The Panther’s Rage” and “The Panther vs. the Klan” there is only one word to describe “King Solomon’s Frog”: obscene…As originally presented in FANTASTIC FOUR #52 and #53, the Panther was not the crazy cosmic character you’ve depicted. He was the chieftain of an African nation which combined its traditional heritage with Western super-science. In “Panther’s Rage” McGregor explored this original premise on a more sophisticated and realistic level…Please, please, don’t abandon this real world to go careening throughout the universe. The real world is what is truly fascinating…I’m not asking for the return of McGregor. I know that won’t happen. I am asking for Kirby’s departure.56

Unfortunately for Kirby, Dickenson and Hollingsworth’s responses were just initial volleys in a long barrage of letters, begging Kirby and Marvel to not “forget what Don McGregor and Billy Graham set out to do with this character in JUNGLE ACTION.”57 In issue after issue, readers bombarded Kirby with protests to restore the “real world” of Black Panther and Wakanda to its previous glory. In doing so, many readers, such as John Judge of Clinton, Idaho, scathingly vilified Kirby, charging: “To take Marvel’s first black character and depersonalize him so severely is criminal.”58

Sadly, Kirby’s awkward attempts to convert his readers to his new vision for the Black Panther only served to fan the flames. In issue 6, Kirby controversially referenced Alex Haley’s 1976 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Roots to justify his perspective: “And, as you may have already noticed, my character is neither a Kunta Kinte nor a Chicken George…”59 In the ninth issue, Kirby revealed “the Black Musketeers” with the cover tagline: “His homeland facing holocaust—T’Challa goes wild!” Tellingly, the same issue also marked the permanent disappearance of the letters pages from the Black Panther. Following the release of his twelfth issue of the Black Panther and the culmination of his second year on the title in November 1978, Kirby quietly handed off the series to Ed Hannigan and Jerry Bingham. Jim Shooter has confirmed that the change was not due to poor sales but was entirely Kirby’s decision.60 Whether from disgruntled fan mail or his growing lack of interest with the Black Panther character, Kirby had washed his hands of the superhero. Only three issues after Kirby’s departure from the title, Marvel discontinued the Black Panther in May 1979.

Reading the Medium

Regardless of how one reads the reader responses to Jungle Action, it is quite obvious that something singular happened to the Black Panther under McGregor’s tenure. In McGregor’s hands, Jungle Action became one of the most intricately conceived and artistically audacious Marvel titles. After Marvel’s brief 2-issue trip to Wakanda in those first issues of Fantastic Four, the country disappeared from view as the Black Panther became an immigrant to America. After years of restless squatting in the margins of more traditionally superheroic titles, the Black Panther regained his homeland—a country so richly imagined and captivatingly vivid that readers became profoundly connected to it. What McGregor and his team understood is precisely what Lee and Kirby seemed to realize when they first created the Black Panther: that the character’s superpowers were mind-numbingly dull but the concept of Wakanda is endlessly compelling. While Lee and Kirby chose not to expand upon Wakanda’s potential, McGregor developed it as fully as possible.

In 1999, Dwayne McDuffie, comic book writer and co-founder of the most successful Black-owned comic book company, Milestone Comics, redolently memorialized his own readership experience of “Panther’s Rage.” In addition to calling the storyline “the most tightly written multipart superhero epic ever,” McDuffie echoed previous sentiments expressed in the letters pages of Jungle Action by stating:

It was 1973…The comic book was JUNGLE ACTION #6. It featured a super hero I’d never heard of called the Black Panther, but then, I’d never heard of the Black Panther political party either…What didn’t escape me was the powerful sense of dignity that the characters in this book possessed…[T]he Black Panther was king of a mythical African country where black people were visible in every position in society, soldier, doctor, philosopher, street sweeper, ambassador— suddenly everything was possible. In the space of 15 pages, black people moved from invisible to inevitable…I’ve spoken ad nauseam about the importance of multiculturalism in fiction, as in life. I’ve preached about the sense of validation a kid feels when they see their image reflected heroically in the mass media. This particular summer afternoon, reading about the dastardly (but nuanced) Eric Killmonger’s villainous plot to usurp the Black Panther’s rightful throne, is precisely when it happened to me. I realized that these stories could be about me, that I could be the hero. Years later writing in my own comic I’d describe that wonderful feeling as “the sudden possibility of flight.”.61

McDuffie’s poignant comments underscore a point implicit in so many reader responses to the Black Panther: that much of the appeal of the Black Panther superhero lay in his ability to transport readers to Wakanda—a utopian, hidden territory within which readers could “gain the perspective to allow you to see the many possibilities open to you.”

Unlike readers of early versions of the Black Panther such as Guy Haughton who wished to abstract the superhero and his Blackness from his African homeland and import him to the U.S., McGregor’s expansive imagination of Wakanda was the source of much of the Black Panther’s power as a cultural icon. For many readers, Wakanda functioned as a surrogate, utopian vision of a powerful, Black organized, and separately determined state—the goal of many groups that fell under the generalized banner of the Black Power movement. Wakanda’s technological and social progress rivaled (or even exceeded) that of the United States and offered a valuable affirmation that successful self-governance and community self-improvement were neither geographically nor culturally dependent. As such, McGregor’s Wakanda provided readers a new frontier for experimentally imagining alternative possibilities for real world Black Power, and readers passionately valued such an opportunity, as evidenced by Meloney Crawford’s insistence that “Wakanda must survive!”62 and Jana Hollingsworth’s desperate plea for Kirby to “Please, please, don’t abandon this real world to go careening throughout the universe. The real world is what is truly fascinating.”63

What emerges from a study of reader responses to Marvel’s Black Panther is that the ability to occupy, explore, and map the magical land of Wakanda was not the exclusive right of the vibrant superheroes framed within the pages of each comic book. Rather, Wakanda existed materially in the medium of the comic book itself. Through the shared interaction between the various groups of writers and readers, the space of the comic book became a fertile ground for surveying the boundaries of sociocultural identity and expression. Instead of functioning solely as a self-indulgent and entirely fanciful distraction for avoiding the racial tensions of the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther offered a public space for actively engaging and collectively imagining new possibilities for representing race and power. In his examination of reader responses to the first gay and lesbian superheroes, Morris E. Franklin III has noticed a similar ability for comic books to function as vehicles for collectively exploring politically contentious territories:

In the case of comic books, the reader has the potential to move from a position as an isolated individual, separate from the text, to part of a discourse community in the form of a letter column; the reader’s ideas become part of the textual product itself. In this way, comic books can serve in the stories they tell and in the discussion of those stories as epistemology, a way of knowing about particular subjects, ideas, and opinions.64

As such, the Black Panther storylines and letters pages became dynamic discursive spaces for authors and readers to safely assay new permutations of emerging African American power within the larger rhetorical context of Cold War superpowers.

In his preface to Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Superman in the 20th Century, Scott Bukatman captured the liberatory powers of superhero comics through his observation that All the fantasied escapes from gravity…[such as] Superman’s flight across the skies of Metropolis, recall our bodies to us by momentarily allowing us to feel them differently. It is a momentary effect, a temporary high: we are always returned to ourselves. These escapes, however, are more than retreats from an intolerable existence, they are escapes into worlds of renewed possibility.65

Superheroes are powerful precisely in their ability to transport their devotees into such “worlds of renewed possibility.” It is through this creative ability to temporarily free their readers from the otherwise intractable material constraints by drawing them into entirely new possibility spaces that the most important superhero comics artfully negotiate the fine line between escapism and hope. As resplendent lodestars on the vast, fluctuating horizon of the American cultural imaginary, superhero comics construct a path from frustrated desire to productive imagination that can most poetically be described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari emancipatory conception of “lines of flight” or Dwayne McDuffie’s equivalent evocation of the “sudden possibility of flight.” It is through such creative escapism that superhero comics empower readers to experience imaginative heights that conventional configurations of social power never allow them to reach. Yet, as McDuffie has so eloquently indicated, the act of reaching can itself be transformative.

arts and culture magazine
issue 12 out now
mail@alookaway.co.za

Heal Me
Hester Scheurwater & Roald de Boer
video 4 min
to be screenend in Vienna :

together with Abramovich, Valie Export, Carolee Schneeman, Jonn Cage, Laurie Anderson, Mona Hatoum and more…!!!

13 Lessons in Performance Art

19. - 28. 11.2009

topkino Rahlgasse 1 1060 Wien

Als künstlerische Ausdrucksform hat Performance-Art derzeit Hochkonjunktur. Die Kunstgattung vereint nicht nur sämtliche Disziplinen von Theater, Tanz, Aktionismus, Malerei bis Popkultur, sie ermöglicht zudem die Zusammenführung von subjektiven Erfahrungen und gesellschaftspolitischen Themen. Trotz zahlreicher Unterschiede zwischen den gegenwärtigen und historischen Aufführungen, die durchaus auch die sich verändernden gesellschaftspolitischen Rahmenbedingungen spiegeln, ist der Performance-Raum bis heute jener Ort, an dem Genderfragen verhandelt, irritiert und neu formuliert werden können. War es in den 1960er-Jahren die erstarkte feministische Bewegung und die damit einhergehenden bewusste Abkehr von den von Männern dominierten Kunstformen und Institutionen, die auf den Bühnen für eine unverhältnismässig starke Präsenz von Frauen sorgte, sind es heute nicht zuletzt die damals aufgeworfenen Themen, die die jüngeren Performerinnen reflektieren und unter neuen Blickwinkeln weiterdenken. In der Reihe 13 Lessons in Performance Art liegt der Fokus der Auswahl auf jenen feministischen Arbeiten ab Mitte der 1960er Jahre, die speziell für das Medium Film und Video kreiert wurden, und die wir nun auch im Kinokontext zeigen, um der inhärenten Transdisziplinarität der Kunstform unter geänderten Rezeptionsbedingungen Rechnung zu tragen. Ein Blick zurück bzw. die Gegenüberstellung historischer und aktueller Positionen erschien uns daher als notwendige Voraussetzung, um Entwicklungslinien der Performance Art sichtbar zu machen, die bekanntlich eng mit dem Medium Video verknüpft ist. Mit Aufkommen von Video in den 1960er Jahren gab es endlich auch ein kostengünstiges Medium, in dem eine grosse Anzahl von Künstlerinnen die Kontrolle über die technischen Mittel und die Dramaturgie behalten konnten: Sie konnten gleichzeitig vor und hinter der Kamera stehen und zugunsten einer Inszenierung des Selbst und/oder einer bewussten Transformation von Rollenbildern den Unterschied zwischen Subjekt und Objekt bzw. Bild und Abbild aufheben, selbst definieren. Von Beginn an galt es nicht nur, den weiblichen Körper als ein Feld der Unterdrückung darzustellen, über den der breitere Umfang von Dominanz sichtbar wird. Auch die Analyse der Medien, ihrer Manipulationsmacht und ihrer Apparatur waren und sind wichtige Themen, um die Prozesse der Wahrnehmung und die Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit zu veranschaulichen. In der Zusammenstellung der dreizehn Programme ging es uns um ein Herauskristallisieren von Schwerpunktthemen, die für die Performance Art bis heute wesentlich sind: Die laufende Reflexion des Mediums, aber auch die Subversion von Geschlechternormen oder die sinnliche Selbstinszenierung, mit denen die Künstlerinnen zwischen Fremd- und Selbstbild vermitteln und unterschiedliche Modelle von Subjektivität befragen. Die Spannbreite der ausgewählten Arbeiten reicht von Meilensteinen der feministischen Performancegeschichte und -gegenwart, experimentellen Sound-Performances bis hin zum dokumentarischen Porträt. (Christa Benzer, Brigitta Burger-Utzer, Dietmar Schwärzler)

With all the pressure against introducing Black heroes at the time, Marvel’s gamble is all the more significant. But what was Marvel’s vision of Black Superpower, as embodied in the character of the Black Panther? The story and art of the character’s first two issues are instructive. As introduced in issue 52 of The Fantastic Four, the Black Panther, also known as T’Challa, is the chieftain of the hidden kingdom of Wakanda, an area deep in the heart of equatorial Africa. Wakanda is the sole global source of an invaluable metal, vibranium, which absorbs vibrations—a quality that makes it fabulously valuable to technological development worldwide.19 T’Challa’s father was killed by a White ivory hunter, Ulysses Klaw, in an attempt to gain control of Wakanda’s vibranium supply. T’Challa drove Klaw and his henchmen from his country, claimed his inheritance as tribal chieftain, and accepted the sacred and mysterious powers of the Black Panther title. Soon after assuming power, the new leader used his own scientific genius to recreate his jungle country as a modern technological fortress by selling “small portions of vibranium to various scientific foundations, enabling [him] to amass a fortune—the equal of any on earth!”20

T’Challa lures the Fantastic Four, Marvel’s crime-fighting quartet, to his country in order to test his fighting prowess in anticipation of a final showdown with Klaw. The Black Panther nearly defeats the Fantastic Four; however, he is foiled by neglecting to account for Wyatt Wingfoot, a Native American non-superhero friend of the of the team whom the Black Panther discounted as a threat but eventually frees the team from their various high-tech traps. Thanks to Wingfoot’s intervention, the Fantastic Four overpower the unsuspecting Black Panther and demand a reason for his attacking them. The Black Panther reveals that he never intended to hurt the American superheroes, but rather only meant to prove himself in battle in anticipation of Klaw’s immanent invasion. Realizing his noble intentions, the Fantastic Four forgive the Black Panther only moments before news that Klaw has breached the Wakandan border. As a symbol of their newfound respect for the Black Panther, the Fantastic Four aid the leader in defeating Klaw and invite him to join them in their global campaign against evil.

Readers were very quick to respond to Marvel’s introduction of its first Black superhero, and the printed reactions were extremely positive. The first letter, from Henry Clay of Detroit, appeared in the November 1966 issue of the Fantastic Four:

It was my intention to write you last month about [the Black Panther], but I waited to see what his origin would be like. I was joyous about your breaking all the precedents of your profession, and introducing a Negro as a hero in the form of Sgt. Fury’s Gabe Jones, and as the man-on-the-street. This subject, before the advent of Marvel, seemed to be an unwritten taboo, but now a real live Negro super-hero!!! This almost had me doing flip-flops and walking around in a daze, saying, “This is good…this is good…” His introduction, origin, and first fight against a real-live-super-villain were all superb! I hope to see him in his own comic soon.21

In the following issue of Fantastic Four, more letters of support occurred in the letters page. Linda Lee Johnson of New Orleans praised Lee and Kirby by stating, “Bravo to you!…you are the first, the very first to create and introduce a Negro super-here…This is truly wonderful.”22 In the same letters column, Edward Koh of New Haven, Connecticut, added, “I’d like to tell you, Stan, how touched and proud I was to see you take a stand on a worthwhile cause…Your high ideals in the field of education and other social and moral issues, make me proud to be a Marvel reader.”23

While these letters lauded Marvel’s bold innovation, perhaps the most eloquent and astute of the initial responses was from Guy Haughton of Bronx, New York, published in the February 1967 issue of Fantastic Four. Haughton’s letter began by underscoring the importance of Marvel’s introduction of a Black superhero to the struggles of African Americans: Believe it or not, you guys really are actually easing the tension of our times. Really, I mean it. It is certainly quite easing for a young Negro as myself – after hearing all day about racial outbursts and riots – to sit down, open a Marvel mag, and on page 2, panel 7 or the like, to see a colored man walking down the street. You, my dear friends, may never understand this, but it is really exhilarating. It is psychological uplifting that – yes, even in something as small as a comic magazine – the existence of the Negro race is acknowledged…Then you came out with the Black Panther…I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but I want to commend your courage, for indeed, it has taken courage to do what you have done…You, my friends, are doing more than entertaining the masses, for you are promoting human respect and bringing about a better world.24

However, despite Haughton’s obvious appreciation of Marvel’s introduction of the Black Panther, he ends his letter with a powerful critique of Marvel’s representation of Black Superpower:

Okay – one mild complaint. [sic] let’s see how I can get this over to you. Alright, so you’ve got a Negro super-hero, but does he have to be an African chieftain and whatnot? Couldn’t he have been a plain American? I mean if you had an Italian super-hero, would you make him the Masked Ferarri??25

Though only a few sentences, Haugton’s closing remarks speak volumes about Marvel’s decision to construct the Panther as an African rather than African American superhero. Such a distinction allowed Marvel to be hip and relevant while at the same time safely distancing Black Superpower from the tumult of the Black Power movement at home. Marvel’s solution to the problem of introducing a marginalized character was not original: it unapologetically replicated the strategy that DC Comics had employed when it introduced Wonder Woman as its first female superhero in December of 1941. As princess of the Amazon nation of Paradise Island, Wonder Woman similarly embodied super-empowerment of an American minority from a discreet political distance.

While it is understandable why Haughton obviously considered such political distancing a copout, it would be a mistake to restrict the symbolic importance of the Black Panther’s homeland of Wakanda to merely a clever device for safely containing the superhero’s Black Superpower. Rather, the lavishly technologized landscape of Wakanda was often the most “super” part of the Black Panther’s personality. Even Lee and Kirby seemed bored by the mendacity of Panther’s feline powers. Rather than inventing an intriguing source for the Black Panther’s superpowers, Lee and Kirby borrowed from traditionally Social Darwinian tropes conflating Blackness and animality and flippantly cloaked the issue in a cloud of pseudoethnographic exoticism by dismissing them as “A secret—handed down from chieftain to chieftain! We eat certain herbs—and undergo rigorous rituals—of which I am forbidden to speak!”26

What did fuel Lee and Kirby’s imagination was the technological oasis they created for the Black Panther. While devoting only the single abovementioned panel to a description of the Black Panther’s superpowers, Kirby filled panel after panel with the snaking, cryptically mechanical limbs of the Wakandan pseudoforest, and Lee stacked the narrative with exclamation of awe after exclamation of awe at the artificial wonderland. Even after aligning with the Black Panther, the Fantastic Four were continuously astounded by the paradox of a primitive and exclusively Black society existing in an advanced technoscientific Shangri-la. In inextricably fusing the figure of the Black Panther with postwar America’s two most nostalgized utopias— the paradisiacal past of Biblical Eden and the space age promise of Disney’s Tomorrowland— Lee and Kirby presented an alluring vision of Black Superpower that enlivened the Black Panther’s otherwise lackluster character.

Black Superpower vs. Black Power

Despite its self-conscious position as the first comic book company to introduce a Black superhero to its lineup, Marvel also made it clear, from its first responses to Black Panther fans’ letters, that while it overwhelmingly supported a “colorblind” approach to equal rights for all peoples in the world, it was not a direct proponent of the Black Power movement, particularly as expressed by such militants as the Black Panther Party. In response to Henry B. Clay’s letter, Marvel first articulated its colorblind position:

We too are fond of the Black Panther—not because he’s a Negro—but because he’s a right Joe! In fact, isn’t this the most important lesson to be learned—we’re still entitled to our likes and dislikes—nobody has to be a Pollyanna—but let’s base our opinion of a fellow human being on his basic qualities and character— not on the color of his birth!27

Shortly after the Black Panther had been added to the Avengers team, in the July 1968 issue of the series, Marvel printed a letter in the Avengers in which Lawrence Isaacson, a teacher from Brooklyn suggested that “As there is never too much that can be done to lessen the tensions between the races, why not introduce a black Avenger in the lineup? The effect upon your youthful (and occasionally more adult) readers could only be beneficial.”28

Consistent with the earlier response to Clay’s letter, Isaacson’s request generated the following response:

By now, Larry, you know that you’ve got your wish, as the Black Panther has become the fourth member of our peerless quartet. However, just for the record, we ought to make it clear that we didn’t have our African Avenger sign up because he was a Negro, any more than we had Captain America originally become an Avenger just because he had blond hair. In our eyes, the important thing is whether or not an individual member adds something to the group, not what color his skin happens to be.29

The company’s colorblind stance on Black Superpower was very different from contemporaneous notions of African American self-determination and cultural separatism as advocated by most proponents of Black Power. Rather, Marvel idealistically envisioned a world in which “race and creed”30 were irrelevant factors. In case readers had missed Marvel’s position on civil rights in the letters pages of Fantastic Four and the Avengers, Marvel also decided to run a Stan’s Soapbox editorial in all Marvel titles appearing in September, 1968, in which Stan Lee reiterated the absence of any definitive political stance at Marvel Comics. “But,” Lee added, “we’d like to go on record about one vital issue – we believe that Man has a divine destiny, and an awesome responsibility – the responsibility of treating all who share this wondrous world of ours with tolerance and respect – judging each fellow human on his own merit, regardless of race, creed, or color. That we agree on – and we’ll never rest until it becomes a fact, rather than just a cherished dream!31

However, stating that Marvel officially remained neutral to the evolving issues of Black Power does not entirely capture the complicated interaction between the Black Power movement and Marvel’s version of Black Superpower. While one could most likely attribute the failure of the various African American presses in noticing the Black Panther’s debut to a necessary focus on the more immediately pressing issues of the Civil Rights movement, Marvel’s intentional omissions concerning the Black Panther’s relation to the Black Power movement are decidedly more relevant and telling. After his initial debut and limited run in the Fantastic Four, which culminated in his appearance in the year-end annual, the Black Panther inexplicably vanished from comics for an entire year. Although it could have been a mere coincidence, the Black Panther’s disappearance roughly corresponds to a dramatic increase in Black Power militancy in 1967. On 2 May 1967, the Black Panther Party received national press attention when thirty heavily armed Party members in black leather jackets and berets staged a protest in front of the California state capitol. Racial tensions continued to heighten throughout the summer as Newark then Detroit erupted in the largest race riots in national history. By the end of July, the Black Power Conference in Newark had called for the permanent partitioning of the United States into Black and White nations. While there are many possible explanations for the Black Panther’s disappearance in comics through 1967, it is likely that the character’s absence reflects Marvel’s desire to avoid associations with the radical political party that shared the character’s name.32

When the Black Panther did finally reemerge in a January 1968 issue of Tales of Suspense, he did so as a very different manifestation of Black Superpower. Not only did Marvel choose to reintroduce the Black Panther alongside its bastions of American patriotism and the military-industrial complex, Captain America and Iron Man, but the first Black superhero also no longer bore the name “the Black Panther.” Instead, he was referred to simply as “the Panther,” a name that followed him in his move to the Avengers, where the team exclusively referred to him either by “the Panther” or simply as “T’Challa.” Once again, Marvel’s political sleight of hand did not go unnoticed by its readers. In August 1968, the Avengers editors printed a letter from Lee Gray of Detroit, Michigan, in which Gray noted, “Just because he is a Negro is no reason to take ‘Black’ out of his name.”33 In response to Gray’s comment, the editors countered with the claim that “we certainly didn’t do it because of his being a Negro! We just did it to cut down on the number of “Black” characters romping through our merry mags – like the Black Knight, the Black Widow, and the Black Marvel to name a few!” 34 Despite this explanation, the editors immediately acquiesced to Gray’s complaint, announcing that “again Marveldom Assembled has voted it down – and you’ve probably already noticed that the Panther is the Black Panther once
more!”

Such maneuverings quietly promoted Marvel’s colorblind position on racial equality while avoiding any direct connections to elements of the Black Power movement. But Marvel’s neutrality regarding the Black Panther’s relationship to Black Power was not sustained. In the March 1970 issue of the Avengers 74 entitled “Pursue The Panther!,” Roy Thomas and John Buscema for the first time involved the Black Panther in a storyline that directly implicated the character in a racially motivated struggle against a White supremacist group, the Sons of the Serpent. At the outset, the Black Panther is captured by his Sons of the Serpent adversaries, who defame him by sending an imposter to rob local businesses and court media attention. To make matters worse, two radical political pundits—Hale, an African American advocate of Black Power, and Dunn, a conservative White supremacist—engage in a violent televised confrontation concerning the recent reports of the Black Panther that threatened to ignite the whole nation in a race riot.

In the end, the Avengers foil the insidious plans of the Sons of the Serpent not only by unmasking the Black Panther imposter on live television, but also by revealing that there are in fact two different Supreme Serpents—none other than Hale and Dunn themselves. Following the Avengers’ capture of Dunn and Hale, Monica Lynne, African American jazz diva and T’Challa’s romantic interest, denounces the unfortunate incident: “If only we could undo the harm which a man like Montague Hale has done to…my people! How many minds can a viper like him poison against our cause?” The Black Panther ringingly assures Monica, “Don’t underrate people, Monica! Most of them know that a cause may be right…though a leader or two be wrong!”35

By portraying Dunn and Hale as the enemies, the moral of Marvel’s story was not an understated one: political extremists and hate-mongers from both sides of racial debates were often more concerned with their own ambitious lust for power than with the welfare of the people they purported to defend. Marvel maintained its colorblind stance on race relations while condemning the more extreme political radicals from both the White Supremacist and Black Power camps. The company had apparently broken its own self-imposed silence on racial issues by sending a very direct message to the nation’s youth, in which it had emphatically denounced any form of racial extremism.

Seven months later, Roy Thomas again employed the Black Panther in a story dealing with racial radicalism. Appearing as a guest star in issue number 69 of Daredevil, “A Life on the Line,” the Black Panther teamed up with the blind superhero to battle a group of Black militants, the Thunderbolts. In the course of the action, the Black Panther proclaims, “Those vermin aren’t interested in Black Power…only in Thunderbolt power.”36 The Thunderbolt leader, for his part, taunts the Black Panther: “Well, well, well, if it ain’t—the Panther! The original establishment Black man himself!” 37

In many ways, Thomas’ portrayal of the Black Panther in “A Life On The Line” marked a turning point in the development of the character. The depiction of the Thunderbolts, clearly a fictionalized version of the real-life Black Panther Party, marked Marvel’s first expressed opposition to the group. “A Life On The Line” was also the first presentation of racially charged terms such as “Black Power,” “the Establishment,” and “Uncle Tom” in relation to the Black Panther. While the Black Panther apparently advocated his own nonviolent, education-based version of Black Power through the efforts of his alter-ego Luke Charles, the storyline portrayed him as directly opposed to any form of Black militancy. Whereas Marvel had initially cast the Black Panther in a relatively disinterested and tangential relationship to American culture and politics, Thomas’ “A Life On The Line” signaled the beginning of a transitional period in which the Black Panther was increasingly depicted as an ideal role model for “appropriate” forms of African American activism.

Marvel’s ambiguities surrounding Thomas’ new use of the Black Panther as a Black figurehead for a non-militant White agenda divided readers more than any other point in the superhero’s history. Readers (most likely White) applauded Thomas’ use of the character as yet another example of Marvel’s desire to always remain progressive and relevant with respect to the most social issues of the time. In response to “A Life on the Line,” Evan P. Katten of Bala-Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, wrote:

I was very much impressed by DAREDEVIL #69… the teamwork of Daredevil and the Black Panther simply shouts for more!…This could be the team that works on social unrest—a blind white man and a black man, both of whom, unfortunately, represent two of the greatest handicaps in today’s world, though neither is to blame for them.38

Though seemingly well-intentioned, Katten’s equation of “Blackness” with a physical handicap ran contrary to nearly everything the Black Power movement stood for. At least for some readers, Marvel seemed to have succeeded in its attempt to engage believably with the uneasy social tensions of the time.

Not all readers were so impressed by Thomas’ attempts at “presenting life as it truly is.”39 In particular, African American readers considered the writer’s characterization of the Black Panther an affront to Black Power as well as an unrealistic presentation of “Blackness” itself. Unlike the other letters which appeared in the same issue, William James of Youngstown, Ohio, evaluated the “A Life on the Line” story as follows:

[L]et me consider DD #69 and Roy Thomas, and the effect the story had on me. Being Black, I, like any other Black Person, is always a bit cynical about a white writer who attempts to write about us. No matter how much he may sympathize with the Black cause, he will never be able to think Black…Thomas’ characterization of Black people, from the type of dialogue he imposes upon his Black characters, seems to depict a bunch of black-skinned white people…What you need to do, Roy Thomas, is to go out and find yourself a crib somewhere in the heart of the Harlem ghetto and try to cop some Ghetto talk.40

James’ criticisms paled in comparison to the only letter printed in response to Thomas’ “Pursue the Panther!” Though it took five months for Marvel to print a response to the story, Marvel devoted the entire letters page of Avengers number 79 to a single detailed letter “in its entirety (except for one deleted expletive)”41 from Philip Mallory Jones of Ithaca, New York, in which the reader upbraided both Stan Lee and Thomas for their biased and overly simplistic attempts in representing the country’s racial problems. Jones opened his letter by identifying himself as “a black writer and long-time reader of your very often sophisticated magazines.”

Jones’ first critique regarded a character’s statement that “T’Challa only hid the fact that he was black because he wanted to be judged as a man…not a racial type!” In response, Jones argued:

“That’s very white of you. This implies that this champion of justice etc. could not be considered as a man if it were known that he was black—that in fact, only if there is a chance that he is white can he be judged as a man.”42 Similarly, regarding another comment from the Avengers on the same page that “The Panther’s bein’ framed…!,” Jones countered with a politically heated claim that, for the first time in the comic’s pages, mentioned either Black Power movements or the Black Panther party itself in relationship to the character. Such a statement, he observed, assumes that the judicial system is legitimate, and that an extra-legal element is pulling a fast one on blind justice—utter garbage. The recent conviction of the Chicago Seven and Bobby Seale, not to mention the national repression of the Black Panther Party and the murders of Hampton and Clark, point a damning finger at the system itself, to say the least.43

Jones added that while the whole story was designed to prove that the Black Panther was not “a marauder” just because he was Black, such a need for justification “implies blackness is criminal” and “assumes that white America is sitting in patient judgement, waiting to be convinced that black is not what they see it as—criminal violence.”44 Echoing James’ letter, Jones also chastised Thomas for portraying the character Montague Hale as though he were a White person in a black body : “HALE=UNCLE TOM (because he is engaged in this ridiculous rhetoric of debate)=AMERICA’S MYTHIC NEGRO (clean, speaks grammarian English, thinks like a white man would imagine he would think if he were black).”45

While James and Jones’ letters raise many compelling points regarding Thomas’ interpretation of the Black Panther, their most salient commonality is an adamant rejection of Thomas’ representation of Blackness itself. Through their related critiques of Thomas’ portrayal of African American characters as “black-skinned white people” who “[think] like a white man would imagine he would think if he were black,” James and Jones actively defended the territory of Blackness from what they believed to be Thomas’ attempts at cultural colonization. As such, the discursive world represented by the Black Panther became an actively contested space in which Marvel and its readers sparred over appropriate configurations of Black Power and Black Superpower.

Today there seems to me huge problem that appears the moment one actually suggests that contemporary Africa, despite all that has gone wrong there, is actually a place where one can really learn something about humanity.

For one thing, today there exists a host of professional idiots who call themselves ‘postcolonial scholars’. These leeches have made their careers based on the fact that contemporary Africa exists only as the bastardized, silent horror that cannot speak of anything but Europe’s ongoing failure to deal with its ‘others’. These so-called theorists have forgotten that postcolonialism actually starts on the street - that it does not only belong to them and their highfalutin, moral ideas and neat categories but to the people who actually live, work, love, laugh, die and generally have to make sense of these contexts in real time.

These so called theorists are a bunch of miserable monks who actually have no love or any real hope for Africa to rise from the ashes and say anything of real value (other than regularly reporting the shitty news from the margins). Stuck as they are in their oh-so postmodern discursive frameworks where everything is relative and ultimately disempowering - like the very halls of dis-empowerment they traverse on a daily basis - they simply cannot allow Africa to speak itself as anything more than this. They base this idea on the certainty that the west has in its failed attempt to find something of universal value exhausted all the avenues whilst consciously shitting all over Africa and its people.

Yup, these fuckers will spend their careers in European art, philosophy or literary departments without ever ’setting foot’ in Africa again. There they will have stellar careers telling westerners how fucked up they all are and how they have fucked up Africa beyond repair. And pity the poor arsehole that dare challenge this depraved, perverse vision of Africa with something positive. For to do so, to think of contemporary Africa in positive terms and discover something of real human value there today, would mean:
1. they lose the moral right to claim this suffering as uniquely theirs.
2. and they lose their miserable fucking jobs.

There are of course people who realize this.
Just take a look at anything the photographer Santu Mofokeng has produced and allow yourself a moment to consider his artworks outside the complacent postcolonial and neo-colonial western framework of Africa-as-godverlate-fuck-all. Mofokeng’s work touches a raw nerve left exposed and under-explored by most contemporary theory. That is to say, it cuts through all the bullshit and reminds you of the simple fact that human beings are fallible, vulnerable, hopeful, surprising material creatures that can on the rare occasion also rise above the limited expectations much contemporary discourse has of them.

To make of these rare occasions something more commonplace would require real hope and commitment to something bigger than your own personal ambitions and misery. Hope is of course the something which I would suggest is exactly what most contemporary postcolonial scholars and African politicians no longer have. In a nutshell they are committed without hope: After all, to have hope is to seriously entertain the notion of change (whereas one may be seriously committed to just keeping your kak, hopeless job).

Exhibition Opening: 4 pm on Sunday 15 November 2009 at the Johannesburg Art Gallery,

To be preceded by a panel discussion at 2:30 pm

Panelists: Andile Mngxitama (keynote), Zethu Matebeni, Lefifi Tladi, Motlhabane Mashiangwako

The exhibition is intended to be a journey through a number of artworks within the holdings of the Johannesburg Art Gallery that were directly or indirectly influenced by the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and works that in some way comment on the politics of race. The BCM was the first political movement in South Africa to recognise the importance of culture in waging the war against Apartheid.

One of the central tenants of the BCM was the elimination of the inferiority complex amongst Black people. As a philosophy that sought not only to liberate Africans politically and economically but also psychologically, encouraged cultural production and intellectual output were an important part of the BCM’s programme of action.

The result was an intense atmosphere of creativity that was fed by writers, musicians, theatre practitioners, artists, poets and political activists that produced an immense corpus of works, often working collaboratively and breaking down barriers between various art forms and genres.

There has been a renewed in the interest around Black Consciousness and its most popular figure Steve Biko. Recently published books include, Biko Lives, edited by Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson as well as We Write What We Like: Celebrating Steve Biko edited by Chris van Wyk.

This exhibition will draw from the collections of the Johannesburg Art Gallery including artists such as Charles Nkosi and John Muafangejo as well as several archival sources. A panel discussion will precede the opening of the exhibition.

Exhibition Closes: February 2010
Exhibition Equiries: Khwezi Gule
(011) 725 3130
khwezig@joburg.org.za

BY CASEY ALT

In July of 1966, only three months before the Black Panther political party was formed in Oakland, California, Marvel Comics introduced the Black Panther as the first Black superhero admitted into the immortal circle of American comic books. Originally conceived by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as the “Coal Tiger,” the Black Panther officially entered the “Marvel Universe” via issue 52 of Marvel’s phenomenally popular title The Fantastic Four. As the hereditary king of the hidden African nation of Wakanda, the Black Panther possessed mystical powers that endowed him with panther-like strength, speed, senses, reflexes, and agility. Though the Black Panther was not the first Black character to appear in American comics, he was the first Black comics character to possess superpowers—an advancement that Marvel would later hail as “nothing short of a revolutionary event.”1 Considering that police from Greenwood, Mississippi, had arrested Stokely Carmichael for inciting a crowd of 3,000 civil rights marchers with a new cry for “Black Power!” only a few weeks prior to the Black Panther’s debut, Marvel could not have chosen a more controversial moment to unveil its new superhero.

At a time in which African American intellectuals had just begun to explore the new concept of Black Power, what did it mean for the almost exclusively White staff at Marvel to introduce the first representation of Black Superpower? How was Black Superpower imagined at the time and how did it differ from emergent definitions of Black Power? The goal of this paper is to investigate how Black Superpower was configured in the popular cultural icon of the Black Panther as well as how the comics community reacted to and interacted with this new possibility for power. Though often dismissed as a seductively puerile and escapist medium, superhero comics have repeatedly served as active public spaces for imagining and contesting the proper relationship between individual Americans and the often invisible forces of contemporary American technoscientific power. Through an analysis of these comics texts and the readers’ letters published in them, this paper explores how the concept of Black Superpower was negotiated by Marvel readers through the symbol of the Black Panther.

Power and Pulp

Carmine Infantino, longtime editorial director of DC Comics, once observed, “The theme of comic books is power.”2 Considering that most comic books traffic in the colorful exploits of superheroes and their superpowers, Infantino’s pronouncement might seem remarkably hollow. Yet Infantino was far from naïve, and his comment reflects a much deeper understanding of the relationship between representations of power in superhero comic book culture and perceptions of political and social power within the larger American cultural imaginary. Superpowers give human form to the often invisible exertions of power than undergird every American historical instant by illustrating exactly which powers their readers cannot possess. In doing so, superheroes provide a human interface to the otherwise unimaginable forces of the 20th century technoscientific sublime.

Tom Wolfe evocatively captured the conflation of comic book superpowers with the equally fantastic realm of modern American technoscience in his 1967 account of the American counterculture movement, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:

But of course!—the feeling—out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing, cruising in the neon glories of the new American night—it was very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the world…with all this Straight-6 and V-8 power underneath and all this neon glamour overhead, which somehow tied in with the technological superheroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, ultrasonics—Postwar American suburbs—glorious world!…the feeling—to be very Superkids! the world’s first generation of the little devils—feeling immune, beyond calamity. One’s parents remembered the sloughing common order, War & Depression—but Superkids knew only the emotional surge of the great payoff, when nothing was common any longer—The Life! A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon Renaissance—And the myths that actually touched you at the time—not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses, and Aeneas—but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Plastic Man, The Flash—but of course! On Perry Lane, what did they think it was—quaint?—when he talked about the comic-book Superheroes as honest American myths? It was a fantasy world already, this electro-pastel world of Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in the suburbs.3

Particularly at a time in which the “technological superheroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, [and] ultrasonics” invisibly subtended the binary logic of US-Soviet superpower rhetoric, comic book superheroes provided an understandable human face to technoscientific power. In considering the relationship between superhero culture and Cold War doctrine, Saul Braun observed in his 1971 New York Times Magazine article on comics and counterculture, “Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant”:

It is not irrelevant to note that the Vietnamese war developed without hindrance— with some few exceptions—from a generation of men flying around the world on a fantasy-power trip, and was resisted in the main by their sons, the generation that began rejecting the comic books of the fifties with their sanitized, censored, surreal images of the world: a world in which “we” were good and “they” were bad, in which lawlessness masqueraded as heroism, in which blacks were invisible…. A world in which no superhero, whatever his excesses, ever doubted that he was using his powers wisely and morally.4

As Bradford S. Wright has demonstrated in Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, superhero comics were one of the major mechanisms by which the young counterculture imagined new configurations of American superpower during the politically turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s. The comics company most responsible for the new upsurge in comics popularity during the 1960s was the brashly innovative team of Marvel Comics. Headed by the prolific powerhouse of Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby, Marvel reinvented comics during the early 1960s by rejecting the model of the classic superhero as a noble savior who stood outside of humanity in favor of a new kind of antihero who was as mired in the existential challenges as the rest of us and for whom superpower was more of an alienating burden than liberating blessing.

As Wright has noted, the appeal of Marvel’s new superheroes to the upper echelons of the American youth movement during the 1960s and 1970s was profound. Within five years of introducing the Fantastic Four in 1961, Marvel’s average sales figures doubled while those of its competitors remained unchanged or declined.5 The September 1965 issue of Esquire Magazine noted that “Spider-Man was as popular in the radical sector of American universities as Che Guevera.”6 In September 1966, Esquire again reported the immense popularity of Marvel Comics among college students across the country and the growth of Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee as one of the most prominent youth icons of the time:

The Princeton Debating Society invited Stan Lee, author of Marvel’s ten superhero comics, to speak in a lecture series that included Hubert Humphrey, William Scranton and Wayne Morse. Other talks were given at Bard (where he drew a bigger audience than President Eisenhower), N.Y.U. and Columbia…As one Ivy Leaguer told Stan Lee, “We think of Marvel Comics as the twentieth-century mythology and you as this generation’s Homer.”7

While superheroes may have offered a familiar friendly face for adjudicating the appropriate use of power among the growing counterculture of the 1960s, the symbol of the superhero carried a decidedly different connotation for youth within the emerging Black Power movement, in which the term “Superman” often was appropriated as a symbol of the selfaggrandizing hubris of the White-dominated power structures of the United States. In one of his infamous outbursts at the Chicago 7 trial in 1969, Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, exclaimed, “This racist administrative government with its Superman notions and comic book politics. We’re hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people.”8 Seale also challenged Judge Julius Hoffman during the trial by declaring, “Black people ain’t supposed to have a mind? That’s what you think. We got a body and a mind. I wonder, did you lose yours in the Superman syndrome comic book stories?”9 In his 1970 book entitled Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton, Seale also applied the term “Superman” to an FBI agent during an August 19, 1969, confrontation with Seale in Oakland: “He looked at me and just grinned. He really thought he was Superman. You can just look at a cat and see how he’s psychologically goofed up with Superman notions, so brainwashed that he thinks he’s defending the so-called ‘free world.’”10 Similarly, the Black Power poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron, creator of the now-famous Black Power anthem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” in 1970, also later released a song entitled “Ain’t No Such Thing as Superman.”11 From Seale and Heron’s rejection of the concept of “Superman” and US comic book culture, it is apparent that within the different camps of the Black Power movement the category of “superhero” represented yet another mythic symbol of exclusively White superpower and was therefore worthy of critical deconstruction.

By the mid-1960s, it had become increasingly difficult for Marvel to neglect the Civil Rights Movement as one of the most powerful forces within the contemporary American landscape, and, continuing in its tradition of embodying current symbols of social power in human form, Marvel introduced the Black Panther in 1966. Prior to the Black Panther’s premiere, Timely Comics (Marvel’s name before May 1963) had already tested the waters of race relations by introducing its first and decidedly non-super African American character in the early 1940s in its World War II title Young Allies. Named Whitewash, the character appeared in blackface and zootsuit and spent a preponderance of his time tied up. Omar Bilal, curator of the online Museum of Black Superheroes, has described Whitewash as “[c]reated for comic effect only, Whitewash was portrayed as a helpless buffoon whose only purpose was to provide laughs as he fell into one dire situation after another.”12 Around the same time, early comics innovator Will Eisner also introduced Ebony as the Spirit’s sidekick in Eisner’s popular series. Like Whitewash, Ebony appeared in blackface, possessed no powers of his own, and served largely as typical Black minstrel-style relief for the Spirit’s more sober heroics.

With such dubious forerunners in the medium, it is perhaps fortunate that mainstream comics were largely devoid of Black characters after Ebony and Whitewash—that is, until 1963 when Marvel introduced its first “positive” Black character, Gabe Jones. Appearing in Lee and Kirby’s World War II war comic Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, which Marvel rebelliously billed as “The War Mag for People Who Hate War Mags,” Jones was a Black soldier in the otherwise all-White squad led by commando-extraordinaire Nick Fury. Though Jones initially did not play a major role in the series, his “Blackness” was an important point for Marvel. When the company in charge of color separation inadvertently assumed Jones was White and colored him pink in the first issue, Lee dispatched a very detailed memo making it clear that Gabe Jones was in fact a Black soldier.13

Perhaps even more significant, considering Gabe Jones’ limited visibility, was the gradual inclusion of Black citizens in the backgrounds of various Marvel street scenes. Wright has noted that “random black bystanders, college students, and policemen” can be seen for the first time in the 1965 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man.14 While such acknowledgements of ethnic diversity were long in coming to the comics industry, they were nonetheless among the first mass media presentations that included African Americans as regular members of society. Such representations took a radical leap when Marvel introduced its first Black superhero, the Black Panther.

Though Marvel has hyped the Black Panther’s arrival as a “revolutionary event,” the upheaval seems to have gone largely unnoticed by everyone except comics readers at the time. A survey of the most popular publications which explicitly targeted an African American audience and were in print during 1966 and 1967, including the Negro Digest, the Liberator, Freedomways, Negro Heritage, Ebony, and the Chicago Daily Defender, reveals that the debut of America’s first Black superhero was ignored all of the African American community’s major publications. The identically named The Black Panther, the official publication of the Black Panther Party first released on April 25, 1967, never once mentioned the new Marvel character. Even more surprisingly, four months after the Black Panther’s debut, Ebony ran an eightpage article by Ponchitta Pierce, “What’s Not Funny about the Funnies: Bias Bans Negros from Popular Comics,” in which the author investigated the conspicuous absence of Black characters in daily comic strips.15 Though also oblivious to the recent introduction of Marvel’s Black Panther, Pierce’s Ebony article underscores the degree to which Marvel’s creation of the character was an unquestionably bold move. As Pierce explained, comics printed during the Civil Rights movement ceased to include Black characters for fear of either inadvertently offending African Americans readers who might consider the characters derogatory or, conversely, offending White readers who might be opposed to overly positive representations of Blacks: “‘Comic characters are a white man’s land,’ admits Alfred Andriola, artist and co-creator of Kerry Drake, ‘Let’s face it. You can’t deal with race or color in comics. A colored maid or porter brings on a flood of letters. And if we show the Negro as a hero we get angry letters from the South.’”16

Charles Hardy has similarly noted in “A Brief History of Ethnicity in Comics” that In 1961 when “On Stage” featured a Black music coach, four papers immediately canceled the strip. The inclusion by creator Dale Messick in 1965 of a Black girl in “Brenda Starr” caused its temporary removal from circulation, in order not to offend readers in the Southern states. In 1970 when Lieutenant Flap joined the gang at Camp Swampee, “Beetle Bailey” was dropped not only by a number of Southern papers but also, for a short while, by Stars and Stripes! 17

According to Jim Shooter, longtime comic book artist and editor-in-chief of Marvel from 1978 to 1987, a reluctance to include Black heroes was not limited to newspaper comic strips but also extended to comic book producers as well. Shooter recalls that during his employment at DC Comics prior to his move to Marvel, “I had tried to introduce a black Legion of Super-Heroes character in 1966. Mort Weisinger, my editor, rejected the idea. He said that with a black character in it, the book ‘wouldn’t sell in the South,’ and that Southern distributors would boycott DC comics.”18

in the sunday independent 7 september 2002

by daniel tervoort
Perhaps not the first, but for my money the greatest black superhero of them all was LUKE CAGE, HERO FOR HIRE.

Begun by Marvel Comics in 1972, the intention was to create a “hip”, black superhero based on the popular “Shaft” movies of the time. (It was cheaper to create their own carbon copy character than to try and license the original property… just as they did when they created the character of “The Punisher”, ripping off the popular “Executioner” paperbacks.) Luke Cage had the same tough guy persona as Shaft. He worked as a sort of private investigator (albeit one with superpowers). He didn’t take any crap from anybody. He lived in a seedy downtown office/apartment upstairs from a second-rate movie theater. He didn’t generally cross paths with the regular Marvel heroes and villains (at least not at first) but instead seemed to battle a lot of gangsters and drug pushers. The writers created new villains for Cage to fight… generally African-American or Latino villains. Comics, up to this point, had barely featured people of color as anything but the most cartoonish of caricatures and the serious portrayal of darker-hued heroes and villains was a big step for comics to take.

Our hero, Lucas was a streetwise young tough guy who got framed and thrown in prison. He volunteered for a scientific experiment that could get him released sooner. A jealous and sadistic guard sabotages the experiment and Cage suddenly gains super strength and steel-hard skin. Cage slaps the guard, not realizing the extent of his new powers, and almost kills him. Knowing that this does not bode well for his early release, Cage uses his fists to knock a hole in the prison wall and escapes. He heads for New York and adopts the name “Luke Cage, Hero For Hire”, deciding that he can make a living doing superheroic deeds for cash. Still, more often than not Cage would wind up doing his superdeeds for free… he had too much of a conscience to be a total mercenary.

The whole “Shaft” persona may have been a stereotype but Luke Cage seemed to rise above it, becoming more and more his own man as the series progressed. Rather than the “one-night-stand” kind of superstud that John Shaft was, Cage was much more human… more down to earth and even more romantic. He began a relationship with a pretty young nurse who worked in a free clinic and was allowed a few scenes of genuine tenderness amidst all the superhero action. These early issues are highly regarded by those who remember it. (In fact, actor Nicolas Cage chose his last name specifically out of admiration for the “Hero For Hire” comics he read as a youth.) The art, especially when Billy Graham was inking George Tuska , was not as flashy as some of the other superhero books but intense and gritty. The stories were generally solid: simple one or two-part stories that spotlighted Black Culture in ways it never had been before. Unfortunately, there was still much resistance to a book of this sort in some of the more prejudiced areas of North America and this may explain why the book’s sales were not as high as they should have been.

After 16 issues the decreasing sales on the book had caused Marvel to change the title of the book to “Luke Cage, Power Man” in hopes of attracting more notice. Sales didn’t increase drastically but the book did manage to hang in there for a few more years. In issue #50 Luke Cage teamed up with another lower-rung Marvel hero, Iron Fist and they went into business together. The title of the book became “Power Man and Iron Fist” and they worked together as a sort of “Odd Couple”. They had nothing in common except outliving the “black P.I.” and “kung fu” exploitation movie genres that had inspired their creation. On their own, neither hero seemed able to carry a title of his own… but together they were able to carry on for several more years.

There have been more recent attempts by Marvel to resurrect the Luke Cage character, redesigning him to be more in step with current African-American culture. One recent incarnation has Cage wearing lots of “bling” and acting more “gangsta”. (Basically trading in an outdated stereotype for a more modern one.) This kind of “updating” has worked for many of Marvel’s other superheroes (Spider-Man in particular) but didn’t seem to do a thing for Luke Cage’s standing in the superhero community. As a supporting character in Marvel’s “Alias” title Brian Michael Bendis’ version of Cage has an affair with a white superheroine and fathers a child with her out of wedlock. It’s too bad that Marvel didn’t give this more human version of Cage a shot in his own book because there seems to be much more potential here.

Recently Marvel put out “The Essential Power Man” a thick paperback collecting the early issues. Here’s hoping than the fans take notice and demand that Luke Cage be brought back in a new series worthy of the original.

this article first appeared here