Creative Thresholds

by Carla Aaron-Lopez

the great protector

Carla Aaron-Lopez writes regularly for Creative Thresholds about the experience of being an emerging artist. Her previous posts are: “Notes from kingCARLA,” “Notes from kingCARLA 2,” “Notes from kingCARLA 3,” and “That Moment When Artists Snap.” “Reiterating the Erotic” is a lecture she gave recently in Atlanta, GA for a Feminist Symposium called “A Bad Question: An Exhibition and Forum on Race + Feminism.”

The devil came wearing white today. And for the next few minutes, I want you to explore what you really think it means to be a feminist. I don’t burn bras. Men are not my enemy. I don’t have Sex and the City moments with my homegirls and I definitely don’t give a fuck about Susan B. Anthony and the suffragette movement. That’s somebody else’s history.

I am the villain who came to make you reconsider sexuality and sensuality using feminism and post-structuralism as my foundation.

Years ago, I wasn’t very moved by those I met that called themselves feminists. Either they were too contradictory, too hypocritical or too radical for my preferences.

Therefore, let me begin this conversation with the year 2012, when it fully clicked that I was going to be a mother to a son. When that realization finally hit home, I knew that everything I had been told, taught and programmed to believe was a beautiful yet hideously disgusting lie.

I truly believe that we live so far removed from truth that I began seeking a new story to tell, a new lie to believe. After my search, I was left with nothing fulfilling and I went into a sort of psychological hiding.

Hiding my thoughts, my fears, hiding who I really wanted to be.

I wanted to walk away from everyone and everything. I began wishing that stereotypes weren’t real because I was planning my great escape from this perceived reality. It was time for me to find a new hero. One that I could relate to in my dark, twisted and morbid little universe. But even that request didn’t hit on what I truly needed.

Ever since I was a little girl, the story of the damsel in distress has been shared again and again. The princess was always so sweet, so soft and so vulnerable that she constantly needed to be saved by a young prince. Growing up black, I also got sold that I needed Jesus to save me from myself and from the sins of the world. Yet another white man who needed to come save my ass.

As I became a young adult, magazines, music and movies told me that I needed to be saved still but in different and daunting ways. If I wear these clothes, he will be attracted to me. If I were this make-up, I will be cute for spring and winter. If I’m like this or that in bed, then I will drive him crazy.

To be honest, I’m still wading through the mess of my life but I’m here now. And to be even more honest, the power of motherhood and exploring the erotic has changed how I see and interact with everything around me. Our collective journey begins with that statement.

I began looking at myself differently from that point. I realized that nothing I learned was going to help the new journey that was unfolding before me. There was no man or woman who would be able to help me in the way that I needed. I could follow a classic framework knowing that I would be more broken on the inside than ever before. Some women aren’t meant to settle down but instead are meant to pierce the taut fabrics that make up your individual perception.

You will not find me in a church. You will not find me in a book club. You will not even find me at a Beyonce concert.

When the feeling came, that moment of clarity, I was standing in my room. The beginnings of my downfall from reality started right there.
And it was glorious.

It wasn’t late into the night but it was winter and it was definitely dark outside. I like the dark. I found myself in my favorite place at that moment. Sinking deep into my thoughts which is similar to navigating through a large warmed vat of thick, luscious, viscous Vaseline. It’s just as comforting as sunny Southern skies with lingering humidity in the air.

I knew this feeling very well and I automatically felt what it wanted to do with me. It started deep down low and seductively moved its way up to my brain sparking a quiet chaos throughout the rest of my body.

The feeling began to inform what I should do next with my life. At that moment, I could either be self-destructive, self-pleasuring or take that energy by its curly rolls and push it into another direction.

One text conversation with a friend later in the night brought back me to the mind of Audre Lorde and introduced me to her views on eroticism.  My friend sent me audio of Lorde sharing her essay, “The Power of the Erotic” (a recording can be found at the end of the essay). I pressed play but I wasn’t listening. Her voice was mesmerizing because I had never heard a woman speak with such confidence and comfort. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to inhabit that energy and share it with the people.

I needed to find the thing itself and print it out. The next day, I found her essay because I needed to hold her words and take them in while draped in silence. I needed to touch the papers and strike it with my pen jotting notes all over its margins. I needed a moment with those words and hear them with my inner voice for it to become one with my personal dialogue.

My reason for being so obsessive is because I needed for someone to put into words what I had been feeling naturally and solidify my reasons for working with such hypersexualized imagery. She flipped over and turned out everything that I knew about erotic and I, in turn, reconsidered how I defined the term. The exact same thing that I do with my personal work whether visual or written.

I enjoy looking at classic power structures and dismantling them in a way that I think is an improvement. I choose erotic imagery only because of the amount of negativity that surrounds being a sexual woman.

What if I flipped the perception and turned the eroticization of women into gods and titans? Who would they be to you then? Would they become something else? Would they influence a docile woman to become more than what she is? I don’t know but we’ll see as time passes us all.

I’ve learned that the erotic is a feminine energy and any person can come into the folds of that energy if they are seeking to re-establish his/her individual identity. For many years, I’ve gone on rants and lamented in many essays about the hypersexualization of women of color. Black and Latino women are often seen as aggressive enforcers of sexuality while white and Asian women are docile and submissive. Altogether, people will take advantage of a woman’s appearance, love and experiences. What I’ve learned is that if you just ask a woman what she likes, she might tell you. However, I’ve also learned that many of these same women don’t even know what to do with their sexuality because they are scared of it.

I don’t know why but I think I know a point of relativity. Most women refuse to examine the power within themselves because society says a woman should do and be whatever has been previously established of them from a patriarchal perspective.

For a long time that scared me to the point that I didn’t want to be anything like any woman and I refused to be seen as feminine. I preferred to be dressed in masculine energy and keep rappers as my alter ego to protect myself from critical world views on femininity. If you wanted a woman, don’t come to me because you were going to get a nigga in a dress. This is destructive thinking as a result of a sensitive soul reacting to mainstream images around me.

Ads tell me that I need to use certain products or else I will not be beautiful. I have never really been comfortable with agreeing to such a notion. They also tell me that I need to buy certain products or else my vagina will not be clean and it will smell. That’s scientifically dumb as fuck.

If advertisements aren’t telling me what I should do as a woman, then there’s entertainment showing me how I should act as a woman.

According to what we currently watch in movies, television and the internet, I should be a whore whose feelings are always abused because I’ve opened my legs to the wrong man throughout my adult life.

I should be taken advantage of due to the incredibly high amount of moving images that contain rape scenes and its various circumstances.

Or I should live my life docile and continue to wait for my fictitious white or light skinned knight in a well tailored suit because I am a good girl.

Fuck being a good girl. I don’t care about that anymore unless you want to re-enact a role play scene with me because you love me.

When women are denied the unlimited power and pleasure of being a woman, we create severe deficiencies within our quality of living and when she begins to accept denying herself as a result of our classic gender structures, she becomes the bitter bitch.

We all die a little bit when that bitch comes around.

Life without embracing the erotic is a life that is unfulfilled and obligatory, kind of like the bitter woman. To embrace the erotic is to examine a very wide spectrum of feelings emotionally, mentally and physically. We don’t even know all the words that we could use to describe these experiences.

From sharing joy with a loved one in complete silence to how we interact with the world around us. Have you revisited walking barefoot on wet grass after a fresh rainfall? Have you ever taken a deep breath of crisp air on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the fall? Closed your mouth and stared into the eyes of your lover? If not, I suggest that you do.

Free your mind and your ass will follow. Famous words by some very famous non-binary black people.

We need not confuse erotic any longer with female hypersexuality but give in to ourselves in order to enrich our human experience as a whole. I am a mother and there’s a woman halfway across the world whose language I cannot speak who is a mother, too. We can share in the joys of that experience. We can definitely laugh at its frustrations.

Embracing the erotic can bring life to our senses if we understand it as an extension feminine energy. It isn’t a sexual energy but a chaotic one that deserves our attention. From being constantly surrounded by sexual imagery, we confuse what that feeling is deep within us. Confusion leads to erratic thinking, poor decision-making and psychotic actions all blamed on the power of erotic.

If someone chooses to break the structure of what they have been taught as normal for their entire lives for the sake of their sanity and happiness then that is a person choosing power over oppression.

Politically speaking, right now, we, as global citizens, are in a stage of redefining and restructuring how we see and approach gender identity. Those lines have always been bent and crossed for a long time with no one voice as representation until now. Questions are being asked from all corners in regards to what defines male, female, man and woman. Of course, there is opposition and hatred to individuals that are creating new social binaries to define their sense of belonging.

It seems silly for me to live my life just for marriage and a man. Is that all my life amounts to because I am a woman? Shall I be in constant competition with another woman over the affection and attention of a man? Or shall I become the bitter woman spewing nonsense about being independent and not having a need for any man? NO. I just want to live my life. My life is not controlled by or in need of saving by any man (or woman).

I’m human and dysfunctional because everyday my heart and brain go through mini battles in the same manner that belief and reason do. All of those points lead to roads of abuse whether the abuse comes from the self or another person. There is no logic to that. There is no defending, upholding or supporting that. And because of that, I support embracing the power of erotic. I want it to drip from my skin, make a woman question her attraction to me and a man feel like I’m something to be cherished. All because I just want to be comfortable in the skin that I’m in and shine as brightly as I can until Death come to give me the sweetest, deadliest kiss I’ll ever encounter.

I find that exploring your own eroticism will lead to the identity and belonging we constantly search for as humans. To be erotic doesn’t mean that we do as want whenever we want. It also doesn’t give anyone the right to become sexually aggressive as a response to growing up in a Puritan patriarchal western society.

Being erotic is as simple as touching the skin you were born in and not having harsh criticism of its imperfections. Just touch it. Being erotic is finding joy and pleasure in things that make you peaceful mentally. And last, being erotic is taking the chaotic energy you were born with and manipulating it in order to enrich your above ground human experience.

Reading Audre Lorde’s essay has helped turn something that I thought was completely abstract into something that is concrete and tangible. She has given me a new life, new direction in defining how I can begin to comprehend my time on Earth because being erotic is in everything that I do.

From the air I inhale to the words that come out of my mouth.
From how I embrace my hair to how I enjoy a hot cup of coffee.

How I see my life’s work.
How I embrace my child.

I am no longer afraid to simply embrace my femininity. I think it looks great on me.

Any questions? Didn’t think so.

Artist: Carla Aaron-Lopez

Instagram: @iamkingcarla

Twitter: @teachkingcarla

Robert Rhodes, ‘ This was written by hand so you can feel it next to your heart (3).’ Ink and acrylic on Arches paper.

This post is part 2 in the series “Call Me Down the Rain” (the first post is here).

Preface:

This series first unfolded during the first week of July, 2015, when I posted “Call Me Down the Rain” on my Facebook page as a response to another round of attacks by Boko Haram in Jos and other locations in northern Nigeria. Poet j.lewis responded with a poem, and it became a conversation, with poet amu nnadi contacting me to add his poem “we fled jos” to the sequence. Poet and artist Robert Rhodes gave us permission to use one of his paintings as an accompaniment, and we are grateful to Creative Thresholds for bringing this conversation to wider audience.

–Laura M Kaminski, July 2015

drought

the air stands still and watches
as thirsty clouds drift, looking for water
an ocean, a river, or a lake perhaps
in whose familiar smile they will rekindle passion
in whose fevered shivering and chattering
they will find enough fetish for tears
enough shadow on bleached faces for refreshing

but the baked earth is too hard hearted
to stir the wind into this ritual of remembrance
leaves lie inert, their souls drained of humour
so they lie about, without language or memory
that can tell day, the high priest, how cowries
lost their voice and potency to the sun

here and there trees lean into themselves
eating their last memories, the last harvest
their hair is wispy weak, like a malnourished child’s
a few empty nests tell of stilled tweets
and all the fairweather friends who pressed the block button
and went seeking other friendlier walls,
their lean branches are spread out in supplication
begging for friendship or a drop of water
in which lie the translucence of rebirth

like a herd of starving cattle
burdened by humps of thirsty anecdotes
days come and go, panting, swallowing air
seeking like the clouds
a waterhole in which it can dip
the head of this angry sun
so clouds may cry with relief
so all the leaves may wipe their brow
and smile again, the air sighing,
so all the birds that migrated may return
and it is a new season

amu nnadi
a field of echoes
2015

==

how far to jos

there are no more guides
no one who will walk with me
past bloody fields
along the dusty highway
to j-town so
i make my way
alone

stranger to this country
but not to violence
the callous killings
for any or no reason
that leave us gaping
grasping at any hope
that someone we know
will have been spared
and we flee
if not in body
then in spirit
seeking peace
seeking hope

the burden of so much death
is heavy on my soul
and the miles are hard
on my feet
on my heart
i dare not stop
i cannot stop remembering
the faces in the news
the childless father
the motherless child
the stunned survivors

i stumble, fall, and
a graying man approaches
cautiously extends
one hand to help me up
the other busy
with a begging bowl
i try to fill with water
fill instead with tears
as he offers a quiet
blessing on my journey

he knows, he says
how far it is
to jos

j.lewis

==

this road is earth

i am this road
that goes on and on
gathering memories
as vehicles, wreckage and tar,
on both sides trees stand
taciturn, entranced
having journeyed from afar
to stand by the arena of roadsides
and watch all of life speed past
with loud presumptuous noises

sometimes you would see them
shake their leaves in disbelief
their blood white sap of shock
at how easily time and moments
and their diverse seasons
and lost lessons fly past
or crash into a crushed heap
of aborted journeys

i do not begin
where the first word is uttered
nor end, just because
before me
a hill rises as a full stop
or before us a river lays her traps
of drowned dreams
euphoric with ripples, bounding
with waves, boundless

i become a ship laden with memorials
or a gull travelling the expanse
buoyed by air and the currents
crying with my plaintive poems
of the vastness of earth and spirit
and how we do not end
when we find land again
or a branch of eternity

for we are this road
we neither begin nor end
when for us dawns break
our wings break, hearts break
or mud breaks our fall,
and with yearning and purity
earth breaks her silence
with eulogies of blood and wind

amu nnadi
a field of echoes
2015

==

funeral dance

we write as though
bagpipes were calling
scraping their tunes along
seacliffs and moors, calling
come,
come join the minor key–
turn slowly together
to mourn this latest
life gone out

we do not answer instantly
but let the sad notes linger
hollowing our hearts
until the walls are paper-thin
and we hold our breath
against the danger
that they may tear through
bleed us, drain us
dry as the clay
of this shallow grave

we begin a low droning
hymn of humankind
step closer to hear
the contrapuntal verses
of pain, tears, and hope
letting the unfettered
feet of each line
form their own impromptu
funeral dance

j.lewis

==

let this be enough

this is what is given us:
we sing despite chapped lips,
write despite the tears that drip and thin
the ink, attempt to rinse away
the grief that thickly chokes our words

this is what is given us:
our feet move slowly
as if the only destination
left is an exit, not an entrance
and we stumble as we dance

this is what is given us
so let this be enough:
we fashion the drum we will play
for God and practice, even when
we do not see the stars

Robert Rhodes, ‘Night map (1) so we can always find the way to one another.’ Acrylic, gouache and pencil on Arches paper.

Preface:

This series unfolded during the first week of July, 2015, when I posted “Call Me Down the Rain” on my Facebook page as a response to another round of attacks by Boko Haram in Jos and other locations in northern Nigeria. Poet j.lewis responded with a poem, and it became a conversation, with poet amu nnadi contacting me to add his poem “we fled jos” to the sequence. Poet and artist Robert Rhodes gave us permission to use one of his paintings as an accompaniment, and we are grateful to Creative Thresholds for bringing this conversation to wider audience.
–Laura M Kaminski, July 2015

Call Me Down the Rain

work-song honoring those attempting to return home to territory reclaimed from Boko Haram

I must dance a circle
bring the monsoon
call me down the rain

pray like someone greedy
give me give me give
more than my share

of this year’s water
bring it bring it bring
the water, carry me the river

call me down the rain
and flood the plateau, bring
rags and buckets to me

you will find me on
my knees and scrubbing
more than red dust

more than harmattan,
I must scrub the northland
clean down to the bedrock

how can we return
to farm and village, how
can we plant new crops

in this earth from which
we’ve lifted the broken
bodies of kin and country

washed them, taken them,
them all, to mourn and bury?
how can we till land

charred from bomb-blasts,
how can we plant when
we keep finding bullet-

casings in the soil?
our lips will not permit
yam and cassava grown

in blood-soaked dirt
to cross them, our bodies
will refuse such tainted

nourishment. no. you
must carry the Benue
here, bring bring me

water, call me down
the rain so I can first
scrub the stains

of blood and bitterness,
scrub until there’s
nothing left but dancing

here, until the stain is
gone from memory,
from sole and soul —
call me down the rain

–Laura M Kaminski (Halima Ayuba)
(first published in Synchronized Chaos, forthcoming in Dance Here, 2015)

response to rain

.
news footage and online video
carefully avoided to skip the tears
i only see him in my mind
where she painted his struggling plea
knees in the red sand, bleeding
for every friend and countryman
pulled down, laid down too soon
.
i see the rain clouds forming
sense sentinal drops, then deluge
as nature bends to help him purge
the unnatural evil that claws
at everything, everyone he knows
.
i see his upturned face
wet with the thundering gift
grief and faith and gratitude
mixed in his tears, in the rain
and i cry with him, for him
for a county i don’t know
for brothers and sisters unmet
for the violence in my own streets
ceaseless, senseless death
wondering if there will be
enough rain to cleanse us all
.
j.lewis
7/4/2015

Laura to J.Lewis, 04-July-2015: Blessings on you and on your house.

Sometimes simple phrases are a prompt for a poem. When Laura said “Blessings on you and on your house,” I knew I wanted to respond in kind. Here is my response poem:

poem of blessing

your words flow in my thoughts
and in my veins, as though
you were my natural sister
not a stranger with a pen
who cuts me rapier wide
with every new description
of overwhelming sorrow
of overpowering joy

you are in my heart, my head
as familiar as the ones
around my supper table
around the hasty coffins
we have both seen filled
weeping for the silent days
empty of their laughter
empty of their love

your pain rolls down my face
until i cannot tell if
these are your tears or mine
your stories or my memories
and i know without pause
that knowing you, reading you
fills me with a fervent hope
for better tomorrows

and so i call a blessing down
as one might call the rain
on fields of drought
a blessing on your head
and on your house

j.lewis
7/4/2015

gathering blessings

with heartfelt thanks for two recent poems from James E Lewis, “response to rain” and “poem of blessing” — another mourning for Jos, 07-07-2015

it rains. i stand beneath these
lemon-gems, sunflowers two meters
tall, heads bent in grief above
me. drops slip down the yellow

petals of their cheeks to drench
my hair. my own body seems too
small, unable to create enough

tears for me to weep, insufficient
reservoir to handle all the news
of dying. oh, jos! i cannot cry
enough to rinse away the vision

of so many bodies stretched out
side to side, lives now stilled
wrapped head to toe in fabric,

small rectangles of paper placed
on each, weighted with a rock.
as messages arrive, i dance
the passage of those known to me,

and weep. my friend, lend me
your tears, that we may honour
known and unknown both, may wrap

and cover each of these still
bodies. many are now the last
ones of their bloodlines, have
no other family to mourn them.

lend me your tears that none
of these are left to make their
final passage without the tears
of kin to bless their way. jos!
my heart is hollowed, a begging
bowl, i hold it out to gather
blessings, catch the rain.

–Laura M Kaminski (Halima Ayuba), 07-July-2015
(forthcoming in Dance Here, 2015)

we fled jos

for laura m kaminski (halima ayuba)

we fled jos when the catapult was merely hot
sending down hail, and katako was a purgatory
caught between heaven and hell, between
what was dreamed and the singeing of stones

the long walks to faringada at dawn, to share
those balls of peas, like green bullets, and carrots
sharpened as flints and dagas, the grey potatoes
and those cabbages hiding inside fold upon fold

memories and fading innocence of a thinning city
taught us how to turn casual strolls into a never
ending escape, the screams burning haram holes
into backs too scarred to fall into a trap forged

for pillars of salt, that lose their taste to hate;
today, laura, those stones have become bullets
they flower into thunder, bury their fiery heads
in soft flesh, and explode into flicking forked tongues

of despair, ceasing the heart of man and city
ah! jos grows too hot for warmth and embrace;
but how can we flee what festers in our hearts?
how can the heart not burn, our eyes not sing
when in us jos lives as city and lost companion?

how can we flee the love of its calm days, its
apple weather made for joy, sowed within us
which now fruit into acres and acres of kind
memories, as if once more faringada receives

all her broken farmers, with their wares of life?
how do you bury those picnic afternoons upon
shere hills, where man and cloud slept together
where the air, stoked and resolved, lustily sang
and all stirred leaves, and our thumping hearts

danced, and in the distance, like a fallen devotee
jos lay with her open arteries, invoking a mad god?
how can you truly flee what cannot leave you
for in our different places now, with stricken pens

we hold in ink the grief of love that coagulates
as blood, memoirs of our city, sad memories
of what dies, so poets can shed their singing
epitaphs, like this, with blood and angry stones

–amu nnadi, 07-07-2015
(forthcoming in ‘a field of echoes’, 2015)

About the Poets:

j.lewis is an internationally published poet, musician, and nurse practitioner. His poetry and music reflect the difficulty and joy of human interactions, sometimes drawing inspiration from his decades of experience in healthcare. When he is not writing, composing, or diagnosing, he is likely on a kayak, exploring and photographing the waterways near his home in California.

amu nnadi is a philosopher who describes himself as a lover of love and the elements. He insists on writing poetry without capital letters and full stops, declaring that poetry is life itself and is the spirit of God working through humanity to extend creation and enrich life. As he says: “life is a seamless stream of many commas but no stops. Poetry is bigger in all estimation than man.” Recent collections include ‘ihejuruonu’ and ‘through the window of a sandcastle’. He is currently working on ‘a field of echoes’, due for publication in 2015.

Laura M Kaminski (Halima Ayuba) grew up in northern Nigeria, went to school in New Orleans, and currently lives in rural Missouri. She is an Associate Editor at Right Hand Pointing and an occasional contributor to Via Negativa. Recent collections include And Yes, I Dance and Considering Luminescence; she is currently working on Dance Here.

Robert Rhodes is a poet and artist. We are grateful to him for allowing us to use his artwork as an accompaniment for this series. The painting is titled: ‘Night map (1) so we can always find the way to one another.’ Acrylic, gouache and pencil on Arches paper.

By Christopher Hutchinson

Judith Butler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler#mediaviewer/File:JudithButler2013.jpg

“In the late 80s, a new theorist emerged on the scene. She was called Judith Butler, and she was to revolutionise gender theory so fundamentally, that to write a paper on gender in the 21st century that does not at least reference Butler, is to almost place yourself outside of theoretical intelligibility.”-Caroline Criado-Perez

Sex & Agency

Both Butler and Foucault, leading theorists in queer theory, outline the automatic problems with identifying sex as a morally structured construct. Sex merely wants to “get off”. Sex has no interest in the organization of like sexual beings to engage in politics. Both theorists see the engaging of politics and origination as an agency that is separate from sex. Foucault suggests that the politicizing of homosexuality, for those agencies that are concerned with morality, should be more accurately discussed under birth control and reproduction. Butler goes further to analyze the gender role performed by all. She suggests that once one assumes an identity, then one has to perform the corresponding acts to fulfill that identity. That performance becomes just as binary as the patriarchal structure present. Both theorists see the binary gender roles as problematic. Butler attempts to identify and dismiss the performance in her discussion of performativity.

Judith Butler believed we were all performing gender-Caroline Criado-Perezhttp://www.newstatesman.com/voices/2014/05/caroline-criado-perez-judith-butler-whats-phallus-got-do-it

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Bathroom-gender-sign.png/600px-Bathroom-gender-sign.png

Performativity

Butler’s performativity is a complicated proposal that ends up being a place of ambiguity. The goal is to operate completely outside of the binary, to become oneself. No labels, no boxes, no campaign, no identity, no agency that can be used as propaganda. Performance functions within those paradigms. Butler’s argument is applicable to all gender roles and stereotypes generated in this culture, and subcultures. Should one assume and wave the flag of the stereotype/gender/ethnicity for an agency? Proving to be authentically a gender/stereotype/ethnicity is merely advocating the spectacle as it relates to patriarchal normalcy. Identity by itself is a lazy excuse to create art.

 Rashaad Newsome

Shade Compositions 2012 SFMOMA (27min. version)

Queer Realism

 “Realism is an approach to art in which subjects are depicted in as straightforward a manner as possible, without idealizing them and without following rules of formal artistic theory. The earliest Realist work began to appear in the 18th century, in a reaction to the excesses of Romanticism and Neoclassicism. This is evident in John Singleton Copley’s paintings, and some of the works of Goya. But the great Realist era was the middle of the 19th century, as artists became disillusioned with the artifice of the Salons and the influence of the Academies. Realism came closest to being an organized movement in France, inspiring artists such as Camille Corot, Jean-Francois Millet and the Barbizon School of landscape painters. Besides Copley, American Realists included the painters Thomas Eakins, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, both of whom studied in France. http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/realism.html

Henry Ossawa Tanner http://schillerinstitute.org/educ/reviews/2012/tanner/huge/Tanner-The_Banjo_Lesson_1893.jpg

The thoughts developed in realism seem most to encompass both Butler’s and Foucault’s queer theory, which would more accurately be described as queer realism. Butler’s ambiguity attempts to find this realism. Tanner’s Banjo Lesson is not about pity, sympathy, or idealism. It is simply a grandfather teaching his grandson the banjo. Contemporary Black art is today filled with sympathy, pity, and idealism the complete opposite of the Tanner’s realism, now belittled in a romanticized spectacle. So too have many under the banner of queer theory, moved so far away from queer realism to pure spectacle, engaging in the very same binary gender archetypes perfected in patriarchal society. Many have manipulated and abused Butler’s theory to advance their own agency of indulgence, politics, and morality.

Christopher Hutchinson is an Assistant Professor of Art at Atlanta Metropolitan State College, Archetype Art Gallery Owner in Atlanta, Ga, and Smoke School of Art Founder. He received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from Savannah College of art & Design, Atlanta and his Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama. He lived in Alabama for 10 years before moving to Atlanta in 2008.

Learn more about Christopher and his work at Black Flight 144.