Celeste Dupuy-Spencer responds below to a comment prompted by last season’s Alice Neel show at the Met:
“There was a really odd wokey line in an explanatory side-bar to one painting of a black woman who helped Neel around the house. The portrait was of this woman with her infant son…– One of dozens Neel did of moms…and neighborhood people – Anyway – the curators hinted that the picture evoked a certain exploitative relation…- Maybe… but that surely wasn’t obvious…– And I thought to myself – this painter had NO money for decades – no studio EVER… – and lived in hoods the Met curators would never have set foot in…So their tut tuts seems FUCT to me!”
The Neel thing is so annoying! I feel like I understand the frustration on their part, like that the only times black women appear in the history of Western art is in the role of maid, that sucks. But the woman existed! It feels insulting to her, to her life. Like wokey rich people who see a black woman depicted in her place of work… it’s like pin the tail in the donkey wokeness. I wonder if Alice Neel would be comfortable with the way the art elite look at her friend, the assumptions they make about the woman, and their relationship. I have the feeling that if there’s exploitation it lands on the viewers more than the artist.
But I can feel the other side. Though I don’t feel it when it’s coming from an art elite. It makes me think of this book I just listened to – Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung – by, ah…Nina MacLaughlin who I had never heard of and now LOVE!! It’s a rewriting of the Greek myths, letting the women, goddesses and mortals, tell their stories for the first time. It was a fucking amazing book. Excruciating at times, I could feel the writer totally overcome by these women who had been silenced for thousands of years, seizing their chance and bursting out in fiery explosive rage. She had given voice to the deeply familiar eternal disappointment and anger that comes from living in the midst of the unfathomable number of missing voices everywhere you look, imbedded in the structures that enable the core society-ness of society. It comes to the point sometimes where I don’t give a shit if it’s “historically accurate” or well intentioned, I don’t want to see a woman depicted by any man left or right as a man’s accessory or victim or temptation and I’ll smash the next tv it appears on. (I’m still too religious to slash paintings… haha.)