by Philip Auslander
Identity theft isnât necessarily a
crime. As popular culture becomes less local and more global,
marking off pieces of cultural territory as belonging to
particular groups becomes increasingly difficult. Ten years ago,
it made sense to describe hip hop style as a New York
City-centered expression of Afro-diasporic consciousness and
ãblack urban renewal.ä1 Now,
however, we must speak of a hip hop inter-nation as young people
everywhere have taken up the music and its associated
styles÷sometimes as the lingua franca of the disenfranchised,
sometimes merely as fashion or fad.
Such borrowings inevitably refer back to
their origins: to be recognized as a rapper, for instance, one
has to move, talk and gesture like a rapper, which, since the
performers who established the genreâs conventions were largely
African-American, means like an urban American black person.
Whether or not imitation is the sincerest form of flattery is
open to discussion, but other forms of replication, such as
parody, mockery, caricature and travesty, clearly are not
flattering. Itâs pointless to insist that only certain people
have the right to express themselves by certain means÷we donât
live in that world anymore, if we ever did. However, it is
reasonable to examine how people use the cultures they borrow,
not in the spirit of censorship or censoriousness but in the
spirit of dialogue.
 |
 |
iona rozeal
brown,
a3 blackface #59, 2003,
acrylic on paper, 50 by 38 inches
(courtesy the artist). |
iona rozeal brownâs exhibition
ãa3...black on both sidesä examines a particular Japanese
appropriation of hip hop. brown, who is a practicing hip hop DJ
as well as a painter, was born in Washington, D.C. and currently
lives and works in Chillum, Maryland. She originally studied
kinesiology at the University of Maryland, but returned to
school to study art, receiving her BFA from the San Francisco
Art Institute and her MFA from Yale University. In 2002 and
2003, she exhibited acrylic paintings on paper under the title
ãa3...black on both sidesä in Los Angeles, New York and Miami.
While traveling in Asia, brown was
struck by the enthusiasm she saw there for African-American
culture (and herself as an African-American) but disturbed by
the tenor of that enthusiasm:
there was the time in Itaewon·while
walking down the street, some random man approached me, and,
with his hand held high, ready to give me a pound, he loudly
asked, ã WHAAAATSAAAP?!ä or the store that I visited named
ãLauryn: ladies street wearä (after, but not by, Lauryn Hill)
where there sat two black Barbies with their hair cornrowed,
and braided·and posters reading ãBLACK IS BEAUTIFULä
In Japan, brown encountered the
phenomenon of ganguro, Japanese teen-agers (primarily, but not
exclusively, girls) with extreme, store-bought tans who wear
pale makeup around their eyes and mouths and have adopted the
trappings of hip hop culture. The outpouring of work brown made
in response to the unsettling historical and cultural resonances
of this subcultural practice examines interactions among
African, Asian and American identities by deliriously
juxtaposing visual signs drawn from all three. Geishas with
darkened faces coifed in Afro puffs or wearing Erykah Badu
headdresses disport themselves in compositions reminiscent of
Ukiyo-e prints.
brownâs perspective on this clash of
cultures is arguably one-sided: she uses the way one
particularly strange group of Japanese youth has appropriated
hip hop to represent a larger cultural encounter between East
and West without acknowledging that hip hop has sometimes been
insensitive in its appropriation of Asian culture.2
But art is not obligated to be fair and balanced and brownâs
work is ultimately contemplative, not polemical; her images
derive energy from the cultural paradoxes and contradictions
they contain.
Many of brownâs juxtapositions of
cultural signifiers create a sense of historical drift as the
imagery and material culture of twenty-first century hip hop
overlay figures and compositions derived from the floating world
of nineteenth century Japanese prints. This world now contains
DJ turntables, records, headphones and television sets with
which the figures are perfectly comfortable: one set of
headphones bears the logo of a major Japanese electronics
manufacturer. In a3 #8 (2002), a traditionally garbed Japanese
woman looks on as two smaller figures (perhaps her children)
watch a hip hop video on television, dramatizing this sense of
history in motion. What the children have gleaned from the video
is suggested in the dark tan or makeup that one child has on her
face and feet, her hair tangled in dreads and her robe patterned
with marijuana leaves. A smaller figure gazes raptly at the
television screen. She has no darkened skin, but her hair is
done in cornrows and she conspicuously wears name brand
sneakers. The complicity of the older figure in the childrenâs
assimilation of blackness is evident from the fact that she,
too, has darkened skin and that her traditional Japanese
hairstyle is made up of braids (in this painting, as in all the
works entitled a3 blackface, a line around the figureâs face
distinguishes her tan or dark makeup from her skin tone).
The current of history also runs the
other way in these works, particularly in the repeated figure of
the female DJ-cum-geisha. This analogy is thought-provoking:
like the first hip hop DJs, the original geishas were men.
Traditionally a highly skilled musical entertainer (not a
courtesan, as is often supposed) the geisha also is completely
bound by tradition and objectified by her male audience. Brown
depicts her DJ-ing geishas alone with their equipment: these
works emphasize is not the female entertainerâs relationship
with her audience and the attendant risk of objectification but
her relationship to the music and her craft as she listens
through her headphones and studies her turntables. In that
sphere, she has absolute control.
|
iona
rozeal brown,
a3 blackface #21, 2002,
acrylic on paper, 33 by 25 inches
(private collection). |
|
 |
One of the central pleasures of brownâs
work lies in the seductive juxtapositions of colors, textures,
and patterns from which she builds her compositions. a3
blackface #23 (2002) plays the floral trim of a Japanese robe
off against the star pattern running down the leg of baggy
sweatpants, while striped sneakers and the figureâs wrapped
headdress add still more patterns and folds. Everywhere in these
paintings kimonos drape over baggy sweats; the paisley swirl of
a bandana stands out against a striped robe; athletic shoes jut
unexpectedly from beneath folds of fabric. The figures display a
catalog of hairstyles, including Afros, dreads, Afro puffs,
cornrows, and mutant combinations of all these with Japanese
styles, all rendered with detailed attention to color and
texture.
brown describes the ganguro
appropriation of hip hop by saying ãitâs surface,ä while, for
her, true engagement with hip hop as a lifestyle goes ãbeyond
and deeper than surface.ä For all of brownâs understandable
concern that the global circulation of hip hop culture
deracinates and reduces it to its outer signs, I see something
other than a straightforward commentary on this phenomenon in
her a3 work. (Her more recent work, which features worm-like
characters that devour fashionable commodities, seems to
satirize more clearly the reduction of culture to consumer
goods.) The figures in her paintings are constructed of
surfaces: they are defined by the folds and layers of fabric
that engulf and embrace them.
The resulting riot of patterns and
textures suggests a radical heterodoxy. In a3 blackface #20
(2002), the checkerboard pattern of a huge platform shoe rests
directly on the draped pink surface of a kimono around which
wraps a sash displaying a green camouflage pattern. Beneath the
kimono, the figure wears fringed jeans with rolled-up cuffs; the
mottled surface of her Afro puffs contrasts with both the
linearity of the fringe and fractal fuzziness of her furry
collar. She is in blackface but is applying makeup over it.
Layer upon layer upon layer; surface upon surface upon surface;
culture upon culture upon culture. For me, the figureâs cultural
identity need not be resolved. It is not the thing under all the
layers÷it resides in the fact of the layering and is as
disturbing and pleasurable as the playful proliferation of
surfaces in the paintings. A desire to protect something she
loves clearly motivates brown, but she does not tell us what to
think: she encapsulates an extraordinary cultural encounter in
intellectually provocative and sensually satisfying images and
lets us decide for ourselves.
NOTES
1.
Tricia Rose, ãA Style Nobody Can Deal With: Politics, Style
and the Post-Industrial City in Hip Hop,ä in Microphone
Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and
Tricia Rose (Routledge, 1994): 71-88.
2.
See, for example, Tina Chadha, ãMix This,ä The Village
Voice (July 2-8, 2003). Chadha describes Indian-Americansâ
concerns over hip hop artistsâ uses of South Asian music and
culture in recordings and videos.
iona rozeal brownâs ãa3·black on both
sidesä is at Atlantaâs Spelman College Museum of Fine Art
through May 14, 2004. Another solo exhibition, ãMATRIX 152,ä is
at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford until June 13, 2004.
PHILIP AUSLANDER writes from
Atlanta, where he teaches in the School of Literature,
Communication, and Culture of the Georgia Institute of
Technology.
