Week 5 - Kehinde Wiley

Last weeks ALVC class focused on the Post Modern them "Intertextuality", re-read Extract 1 The death of the author on page 44 of your ALVC books and respond to the oil paintings of Kehinde Wiley. How do we make sense of his Kehinde's work? Identify intertextuality in Kehinde's work?


Kehinde's work relates to this weeks Post Modern theme "Pluralism" re-read page 50 and discuss how the work relates to this theme?


Kehinde's work raises questions around social/cultural hierarchies, colonization, globalization, stereotypes and the politics which govern a western worldview.



1 Intertextuality is, thus, a way of accounting for the role of literary and extra-literary materials without recourse to traditional notions of authorship. It subverts the concept of the text as self-sufficient, hermetic totality, foregrounding, in its stead, the fact that all literary production takes place in the presence of other texts; they are, in effect, palimpsests. For Roland Barthes, who proclaimed the death of the author, it is the fact of intertexuality that allows the text to come into being: Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text. Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of sources or influences; the intertext is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located; of unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation marks. ("Theory of the Text" 39).
Intertextuality refers to the way that any one text is influenced, or made up of a variety of other earlier texts. As a result, the notion of intertextuality suggests that whenever we try to make sense of a text we are constantly referring back to our understanding of its influences to help us understand it.The work relates to intertextuality in the way it is a representation of an earlier style of painting, thought the subject matter has changed over time, the some aspects still stay the same.

Kehinde Wiley’s works reference specific paintings by Titian and Tiepolo, but he incorporates a range of art historical and vernacular styles in his paintings, from the French Rococo to the contemporary urban street. Wiley collapses history and style into a uniquely contemporary vision. He describes his approach as “interrogating the notion of the master painter, at once critical and complicit.” He makes figurative paintings that “quote historical sources and position young black men within that field of ‘power.’” His “slightly heroic” figures, slightly larger than life size, are depicted in poses of power and spiritual awakening. He deliberately mixes images of power and spirituality, using them as a filter in the portrayal of masculinity. Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition Infinite Mobility recently appeared at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Kehinde's work relates with the theme 'pluralism'. The meaning of Pluralism is that refers to a single social and cultural group and thus opened the doors to a greater representation of contemporary visual culture from other cultural and social groups. In Kehinde's work there are different cultures . For example, he add African style pattern in his work. That's why I think Kehind's work relates to the 'PLURALISM'.

2 The paintings baldly appropriate portraiture from the past, and juxtapose this appropriation with embodiments of an American culture that is usually represented by images that inspire fear, danger, and anger. The portraits are political, but contain humor and empathy at the same time. Wiley appropriates images from old world Western realism, and recently from political posters, and juxtaposes them with ornamentation, pattern, and hip hop fashion, a process DJ Spooky describes as “Sample: Cut, Paste, Repeat.”


Wiley’s initial artistic project was simple, and elegantly defiant. He asked young African American males to model for him in his studio. He then had them look through art history books and assume poses from historical portraiture. He would then photograph them and paint their portraits as those icons of art history. Black American youth replaced European princes and kings, and African Americans became retroactive subjects for iconic historical paintings.

Reference:

http://anthemmagazine.com/story/Q-A-with-Kehinde-Wiley

http://www.deitch.com/artists/sub.php?artistId=11

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~desing/ART/NAB/PluArt.html