Hip Hop Portraiture

 

            Contemporary hip hop portrait painter Kehinde Wiley attended Yale, where he received his degree in fine art. How many young, successful painters get their degrees at Ivy League universities? Obviously, Yale University (alma mater of enemy-of-the-Republic, Skull and Bonesman George W. Bush) thought this young black painter was gifted enough to have bestowed upon him the blessings of the power elite. With this credential and his artwork speaking for itself, it is no surprise that Wiley should be a spokesman for hip hop culture.

In mid-2008 (just after the ascension of our first CIA-weaned-'n'-groomed president, Barack “Barry Sotero” Obama) Wiley exhibited his work in a show at The National Portrait Gallery entitled RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture. It was an effort to articulate a message to the public that black, hip hop cultural icons have earned a definite place in post-modern society, i.e., they should be RECOGNIZED, acknowledged…but appreciated? Whether his subjects have earned a place in the Hall of Fame or the Hall of Shame, Wiley is the chronicler of the lionized image of black, hip hop entertainers who have somehow raised the underclass ghetto lifestyle to a surprising degree of musical acceptance worldwide. But, as the saying goes, “There’s no accounting for public taste”—in music as well as in art. However, maybe we need not be so easily dismissive of Wiley’s art.

Any attempt to analyze Wiley’s portraits simply as art, i.e., divorced from their supposed socio-political message, is a practical impossibility. The viewer must appreciate the whole context, both of the subjects themselves and their social power, i.e., how they are juxtaposed to similar poses and gestures of well-known works of Old Masters from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries (whose identities and works are discussed below). 

Portrait art has always memorialized the dress and manner and lifestyle of its human subjects. Its object is always to preserve a record of human culture, of people, in contrast to that of the natural world. Hence one might say that there has always been some degree of artifice, something contrived, whenever considering what might be described as the civilizational project of humanity. This is especially evident in portrait paintings from any era; if it is not wealth and affluence the subject wishes to project, it is power, social identity or some specially honed personal quality or ability. The competent portrait painter is the one skilled at imbuing its subject with all of his or her symbolic trappings, to include the supporting role that a body language of poses and gestures plays.

In essence, then, portraiture amounts to a kind of human charade, but one of historical significance. And art plays its part; it must provide the images to support the civilizational project, if for no other reason than people might simply become bored without such self-reflections of their consensus reality, their culture trance. And today’s heroes are not so much the powerful military men or kings of yore, but rather actors and entertainers. Perhaps the world now prefers to follow those who imitate life rather than those who really live it. When so much has been co-opted by powerful, commercially-charged, corrupt political interests, who is the public left with other than weak-of-character, loud-mouthed actors on the stage of life?

Enter the anti-hero: the hip hop rabble with their popularizer potentates have made it cool to be dumbed-down, screen-gazing, thing-loving materialists who lust after the very things that oppress them. This is just as the System wants it to be (with Yale University willing to lend a hand) and Wiley wants to put this bunch on the map. Why not? High fashion now takes its cues from the underclass, adding their push in the direction of bad taste and garish, punk-hoodlum, bling-laden frippery. 

The hip hop motto seems to be:  Be street-wise and flaunt your crude, uneducated, in-yo-face, profane yearnings, or forever hold your peace. As a counterfoil to those vanishing, less publicized “real” heroes, who displayed a more heart-centered sort of intelligence (Jimi Hendrix comes to mind), these hip hop characters are a poor substitute, but this is the world as it is today. And Kehinde Wiley memorializes it; by so doing he supports it, or, as he says in his online artist’s statement, he is “at once critical and complicit”—mockingly critical, perhaps, of those chosen works by the Old Masters for the power treatment, yet complicit in that he borrows these very same types of power trappings for his hip hop anti-heroes. 

In my opinion Wiley is a semi-talented artist and sodomite who glorifies no-talent poseurs passing themselves off as musicians and rebels, viz., shallow anti-heroes from the underclass with crass, materialist values. But because they’ve “made it,” (as in, made lots of money and achieved fame! and a following!) this makes them black men worthy and deserving of Wiley’s attentions.  From this perspective Wiley is a pop artist. The bright colors in the textile-like designs that often surround the figures in his paintings, besides imparting an African flavor, also signal a pop sensibility.

Just as Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres painted Napoleon on His Imperial Throne with his power trappings of royal scepters, crown and robe, Kehinde Wiley presents his own "Napoleon."

Similarly, one of his hip hoppers poses in a lavish suit with white hat amid columns and gilded design. 

Although the effect is not as imposing as Napoleon, the attempt at projecting the power of his subject is evident. 

Looking at the baggy ill-fitting droopy drawers and flowing over-sized shirts of some of Wiley’s other subjects puts me in mind of the Three Graces by Peter Paul Rubens.  How could this possibly be so? I refer to the sumptuous, fleshy proportions of the ladies whose body types were fashionable in the eighteenth century. Today such Rubenesque, cellulite-laden bodies hardly seem graceful.

 

 

In a similar way, perhaps one day people will look back on the so-called hip hop fashion of today with the same kind of head-scratching wonderment.  I’m not sure that Wiley was picking up on this aspect. It is more likely that he was more sensitive to the rococo styling that forms the upper border and helps to frame his own Three Graces.  Wiley borrows this idea, although he embellishes upon it in his own run-away technique using more textile-looking, Arabesque-to-paisley design borders. In fact, what are borders in some paintings become background in others.  

When viewing The Banquet of the Officers of the St. Adrian Militia Company by Frans Hals one gets a slightly similar effect; there is a kind of patterning effect presented by the black, white and red in the garments being worn and the half-unfurled draping of the flag which are all so closely crowded together. You also get the sense of a brotherhood commonality on display, especially in the slightly cocky male poses, which are commonly portrayed in Wiley’s paintings of the hip hop crowd. 

Wiley takes this border/background patterning to extremes, as in the painting of the rapper who is floating in his own green and orange decor. (A study for a future great work perhaps? Wait a minute. Let's count the fingers.) 

In Van Dyck’s Self-Portrait and his Triple Portrait of Charles I the viewer is treated to the in-your-face affluence (tripled in Charles I) of fine clothes and self-possession as seen in gesture and facial expression.   Wiley presents a similar effect in the smug faces and hand gestures of his pool-playing hip hoppers and in the hand-in-the-pocket-of-his-fancy-suit in another of Wiley’s paintings (see above) on display in this same exhibition.

In short, Wiley has taken some common painting techniques of the Old Masters that were used in their day to portray the "white man’s power" and applied these same or similar techniques to young black men anti-heroes of our times.  But there is one difference between the props and background used by the Old Masters and how Wiley portrays his subjects.  In Wiley’s works there is nothing depicted from the natural world. Whereas you can see a lovely naturescape in the background of the Three Graces and a giant sunflower in van Dyck’s Self Portait, Wiley situates all of his subjects indoors among man-made props like balls and pool cues and textile-like designs. There is not one natural object in Wiley’s paintings or any reference to the outdoors.  This, I think, is a faithful recording of our society today, particularly of the hip hop generation, who have all but lost contact with the natural world. In place of nature, the hip hop culture revels in its own solipsistic image-making that is callously urban and “staged.” The colors Wiley uses reflect this. They certainly are not earth tones, but rather are gaudy in their brilliance or muted and synthetic. Hip hop is definitely an indoors culture that ventures out only as far as “the street.”

  The display of Wiley’s paintings at The National Portrait Gallery was, I suppose, worthy of any accomplished contemporary artist. Accordingly, Wiley was given two rooms (another blessing of power by the cultural elite). Each work was mostly on a large canvass that spreads across its own entire wall. Given that the subjects are all black men, and given the similar color tones, one can get an eerie sense of almost being with the folks in the paintings, as if you are in a club or in some indoor space of some kind with them (as indeed you kinda, sorta are).

To summarize, I can appreciate that Kehinde Wiley succeeds in painting these portraits in that he faithfully memorializes hip hop icons and black hip hop culture.  By bringing some of the techniques of the Old Masters forward in time, Wiley demonstrates that portraiture stays true to its civilizational project, even as it declines and devolves. And his “official portrait” of the former occupier of the White House falls easily into Wiley’s established pattern of glorifying depressing entertainers.