Send Him To the Cemetery

Journal 29; April 6, 2009

Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else. -Malcolm X

Oftentimes there’s a dissonance working between what we get and what we’re promised. Privilege, which is something you see only if you don’t have it. It’s why for the longest time people couldn’t get served at diners, use specific bathrooms, vote, and even now why some people can’t get married. It’s what can keep people out of neighborhood and keep people from making friends.

Emma Amos is an artist forced to deal with Privilege; she is a black woman, and so she is obligated in that terrible way we all must become warriors against racism if we can’t help but fly the colors of the minority team. This is very interesting to talk about, not only because it is politically commentarial art, but because it is “race” art, Mrs. Amos’s art becomes marginalized, and you can see this sort of artistic revolution in her methods. Both black and white men and women frolick in the nude in her paintings, not in that “all we are saying way” but in that lascivious way we all know as common sex. Oftentimes her work represents the failure of the American Dream, throwing X’s over the American flag decorated with a black and white lithograph of some poorly-dressed black children standing sullenly for the picture (“Stars and Stripes”) . She speaks honestly about contemporary ideals of beauty, and the necessary advent of the hair extension as a requirement for perfection (“Tribal Headdresses- 20th Century”). But in most of her art she is speaking against something, pressing some necessary and often overlooked issue.

In Tightrope (1994), Emma has painted a self-portrait of herself on a tightrope, holding a t-shirt print of Paul Gauguin’s Two Tahitian Women with Mangoes, 1899, and a quill in her other hand. Underneath her painter’s smock she wears the wonder woman’s uniform, and over all of this Mrs. Amos has thrown two symbolic X’s, because of course she isn’t supposed to paint about stuff like this, and she does for exactly that same reason. In this painting Emma Amos is calling attention to the unrealistic depiction of women, their otherization into purely physical beings. She takes notice of being a necessary champion for women in her placement as a woman artist, balancing the established ideas of women’s role and her own desires, literally on one hand the status quo and on the other a quill, the artist’s tool. While online critics are the first to point out the X as being a comparison to Malcolm X, this too is a silly notion: the x is simply a x, stating that she shouldn’t have created this.

It wasn’t appropriate.

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