Kirsten Stoltman, Let's Get It On/Paul Lloyd Sargent, White Blight Manifesto
Originally Published in C Magazine.
In the urban centers of the mid-western US, one cannot speak the language of cool without speaking about race -- specifically African American (and increasingly Latino) culture. Ever since I first arrived in Chicago I've felt that any attempt I make at style — at coolness — is at once pathetic and inappropriate. This is hardly a surprise. This city is known around the world for its jazz, blues and hip-hop. The second-city complex, which is a massive part of the psychology of the art scene here, does not apply in the same way to African American Chicago.
This poses an interesting challenge for the overwhelmingly white Chicago art scene, both in ideological and stylistic terms. A typical response is the appropriation and redeployment of signs from African American popular culture—hip-hop, R&B, and so forth.
Kirsten Stoltman's two-channel video installation Let's Get It On is a prime example of this tendency. In the work, the quintessentially uncool Stoltman (white, thirtysomething, dumpy even in her cocktail dress) is shown entering a casual but swanky gathering of African American women. The production values are high; it looks like an R & B music video. Stoltman proceeds to sing the eponymous Marvin Gaye hit in what Chicago critic and curator Hamza Walker describes as "a manner so bad it becomes parody."
I think that Stoltman is making a moderately valiant attempt to express her feelings of inferiority to the figure of the cool African American women. I think the impulse to express those feelings is understandable. I just can't shake the sense that the work does little more than reassure me, a fellow white artist, that I am not alone in my feeling of being inadequately cool.
Working as an exception to this is Paul Lloyd Sargent's White Blight Manifesto, which makes use of Hip Hop language and aesthetics (specifically the aesthetics of the low-budget local Hip Hop videos shown on public access television) to implicate himself as a consumer of commodified Black cool. WBM is a highly skilled and nuanced appropriation of the rhetorical mode, and a funny and astute poem in rhyming couplets about a young white man's coming of age, which is attended by growing feelings of guilt about his privilege. The protagonist grows up deriving status among his white peers for his ability to perform African American culture ("You were tha only white boy who knew how ta dance"; "Ya wowed yr whole frat with yr beat boxin skills"; "Ya learned tha Worm, yeah. Busta shoulder roll! Move tha whole crowd. Still make yr Mama proud."), then moves to the big city and begins to feel intense guilt about his whiteness. The piece ends with the suggestion that the character commit suicide -- but not waste his death and "...take a shifty CEO with [him]."
I feel obliged to implicate myself here: having lived and made art in Chicago for three years, I have avoided making work that deals with race. I fail at least as profoundly as any of the artists I've discussed. I do all the wrong things. I fetishize Blackness; I retreat to the safety of white culture (the Victorian novel, the academy, folk music); I cherish the sense of racial unity made available to me at political rallies and in the ordinary run of social intercourse with strangers. I make no claim to have resolved the question of how a white artist can be cool. I am now leaving Chicago and moving back to Halifax, Nova Scotia (a city with racial issues of its own). I don't feel I can leave without acknowledging this, the most complex and confounding element of my life here.