Kehinde Wiley. Leviathan Zodiac (The World Stage: Israel), 2011; oil and gold enamel on canvas; 115 x 79.75 in. (framed). Collection of Blake Byrne. Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA.

In September 2010, Bad at Sports founders Richard Holland and Duncan MacKenzie, along with Dr. Amy Mooney, associate professor at Columbia College, sat down with artist Kehinde Wiley at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, in Chicago, during the installation of his exhibition The World Stage: India-Sri Lanka. The interview was presented as Episode 263 on the podcast. We bring you an abridged version of that conversation in anticipation of Wiley’s upcoming exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM), The World Stage: Israel. The eighteen paintings included in the CJM exhibition and represented here are, like the series presented at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, portraits of young men that Wiley has encountered on the streets of cities around the globe who are influenced by and style themselves in the fashion of urban African American youth culture. Regardless of their diverse ethnicities, Wiley renders these men in poses that adopt the conventions of European aristocratic portraiture. The World Stage: Israel will be on view from February 14 through May 27, 2013.
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Richard Holland: In your earlier work, you have these patterns that define the space and then work themselves onto the figure. But now the work is back into that more illusionary mode, in which you are obviously quoting a lot of Orientalist work. But you’ve put these figures back in control of spaces and things.

Kehinde Wiley: So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, “What is that difference?” I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in 18th- and 19th-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there’s the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter. In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says. In many of those earlier works, the paintings speak about landed gentry who possess not only women’s bodies but the bodies of indentured servants and the bodies of, well, we could almost consider the land a body. What happens when we empty that out and create this swatch through which we push through the decorative?

I started working with street casting in the streets of Black America and then moved on to the streets of Africa, from Nigeria to Senegal. I went on to Rio and São Paulo, to Afghanistan and Israel. I find models who are completely unknown to me. I find people who take the train and get to work every day or people who go to the store to buy milk. I stop them and say, “Look, I think there’s a characteristic in you, and I can’t really describe what that is, but I need you to trust what this is. Look through the historical sources that I found. Which one do you like? Who do you want to become in this picture?” That is revealing.

Read the full interview here.

Kehinde Wiley. King and the High Priest, 2014; 22k gold leaf and oil on wood panel; 40 x 24 x 2 in. © Kehinde Wiley. Photo: Max Yawney.

The exhibition opens with a series of Wiley’s equestrian portraits—paintings that embody the lurid drama of his entire oeuvre. Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps (2005) is an icon of Wiley’s particular brand of pastiche in service of parody and critique. In Napoleon, a model—“street-cast” from Harlem or Bed-Stuy—is portrayed in his everyday attire and inserted into an 1801 historic tableau by Jacques-Louis David. Wiley’s figure becomes Napoleon, thereby collapsing centuries of old art-world hierarchies between high and low, insider and outsider, White and Black. In place of the rocky landscape background in David’s piece (a site of conquest, no doubt), Wiley introduces a flattened French brocade pattern, which is punctuated by golden blooms of swimming sperm. Undeniably a fantastic work of propaganda, Napoleon is a vision of epic idealism much like the evoked original.

Kehinde Wiley. Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005; oil and enamel on canvas; 108 x 108 in. © Kehinde Wiley.

This idea of building a heritage and tradition for Blackness remains the crux of Wiley’s practice today. He came of age in the 1990s, a decade defined in the art world by ruminations on postcolonial theory and institutional critique. In 1994, Thelma Golden, now director of the Studio Museum of Harlem, curated Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, an exhibition that originated at the Whitney Museum and traveled to the Hammer in Wiley’s hometown of Los Angeles the following year. Black Male brought together works of art that examined the Black male as a body and political icon, challenging and deconstructing stereotypical representations dominating the whole of sociocultural life. Most importantly, it created a space for the Black voice and identity within an exclusive institutional realm.

In the past decade, identity politics have fallen out of fashion in the art world, but the social and political realities have not gone away. In fact, they have reinvigorated the collective consciousness with renewed urgency. Wiley’s work, while seemingly a collection of artful one-liners that are visually alluring yet conceptually predictable, needs to be examined beyond its shiny surface. He is not another blue-chip artist stagnating within his brand of success. Rather, he continues to push his practice forward, examining culture—its formations, permutations, and material manifestations—as a global project.

Kehinde Wiley. Two Heroic Sisters of the Grassland, 2011; oil on canvas; 96 x 84 in. © Kehinde Wiley. Photo: Max Yawney.

The World Stage (2006–ongoing) examines how culture is formed and reformed by the systems of empire and global capitalism. The portraits in each series employ an amalgamation of visual codes to unpack the bastard lineages of colonialization as they manifest in frictional objects and signals. In Haiti, French fleur-de-lys patterns merge with motifs of indigenous plants, and Napoleon’s daughters are recast by everyday citizens; in China, a Communist propaganda poster is framed by Islamic indigo batik; in Israel, Ethiopian mythological characters are integrated into traditional Jewish woodcut; and in Nigeria, an ancient wooden sculpture from Mali is superimposed with a Dutch wax-print textile motif. Which of these recognizable signs are actual cultural symbols, and which are empty patterns that Western eyes identify as representations of ethnicity? How are visual codes imposed and adopted, becoming flags of cultural identity? Just as there is a fine line between visibility and exploitation in Wiley’s work, there is murky tether between cultural appropriation and imposition that is expressed as well.

Questions around the commodification of cultural identities are brought to the fore with Wiley’s aptly named series Economies of Grace (2012). These paintings feature Black American women adorned in Givenchy gowns in poses taken from historic European portraiture. In this series, fashion and femininity are expressed as equal economies; the models are produced by the garments that adorn them.

Kehinde Wiley. Mrs. Waldorf Astor, 2012; oil on linen; 72 x 60 in. © Kehinde Wiley.

Wiley has an uncanny ability to find the sameness within difference that, ultimately, comes back to the universal drive to commoditize culture. His work proves the relationship between culture, identity, and economy is eternal, transcending time, geography, culture, and gender. Are Wiley’s overt art-historical references merely an indicator of a much larger endeavor to critique the system of global capitalism from within? Referred to as the Black Andy Warhol, Wiley has organized his art practice like a fashion house, establishing factories in New York, Beijing, and Berlin that continue to churn out the patterned backgrounds and ornate frames so crucial to his work. A New Republic is indeed an empire of sorts—the Republic of Kehinde Wiley, whose prolific output continues to be on the ascent.

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 10 (1973). Black-and-white photograph and letterpress text panel. Image courtesy Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, scholar Elaine Scarry describes the inability of language to interpret and express physical pain: “By its very nature, pain resists, even destroys the language that grapples with it.” But what of the capacity of visual art to interpret and translate this bodily experience? “For a Long Time”, on view now at Roberts & Tilton in Culver City, attempts to answer this question by showcasing visual work that grapples with physical endurance and its effects. The result, though ambitious in scope, is a little too conventional.

For A Long Time, installation view. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

“For A Long Time” takes its cues from a long lineage: in 1974, an assistant nailed Chris Burden to a Volkswagen Beetle for his performance piece Trans-fixed; in 1989, Matthew Barney jumped for hours on a small trampoline in Drawing Restraint 6; and, in 1997, Francis Alÿs pushed a solid block of ice through the streets of Mexico City for seven hours until it melted in The Paradox of Praxis I. Several among the show’s artists—Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, and Hamish Fulton—have made a lifelong practice of using their own bodies as raw material. Abramović’s Rhythm 10 (1973), for example, depicts the artist kneeling piously before a series of neatly arranged knives; in a smaller, neighboring frame, a descriptive text written by Abramović reveals that her performance will consist of cutting herself with each knife. In A Machine For Living (1981),Vito Acconci, the self-described “godfather of transgression and pioneer of performance art,” pairs charcoal drawings and photo-documentation of himself swinging his body around a hulking, nonfunctional sculpture. The work is strong but predictable, and the show benefits from the presence of a few younger artists, such as Whitney Hubbs and Erica Love, who diversify the group.

Erica Love, Remote Control (2009). Video still. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

“For A Long Time” is at its best not when it considers pain and physical endurance at large, but rather when its artists seize upon the moment of breakdown, the threshold between having control and becoming unhinged. In their respective video pieces, Smile (2001) and Remote Control (2009), Kehinde Wiley and Erica Love achieve this unnerving quality. Wiley, famous for his heroic, realist paintings of Titian-esque, young African-American men, has made a multi-channel video picturing four African-American men, each attempting to hold a smile while facing the camera. As time wears on, their smiles turn to strange grimaces, their cheek muscles twitching in discomfort. In her single channel video, Love holds Barbara Kruger’s book, Remote Control (1993), her hand in the same pinched position as the appropriated image on the cover.  Love holds this positions until she can no longer bear it, and, after thirty-seven minutes and twenty-six seconds, drops her unsteady hand.

Kehinde Wiley, Smile (2001). Installation view of video. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

The show’s intentions are worthy, but the work and its curation is too tidy, failing to push into new territory or offer anything unexpected. The human body is still as enduring and even dangerous an agent as it was forty years ago. Yet after an era of art practices that bravely tested its limits and terms, we need new propositions.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

With The World Stage, Wiley moves away from using models sourced from the streets of Brooklyn and Los Angeles to pose for his majestic paintings, which emulate the portraiture of Western European noblemen and kings. Instead, he has embarked on a select world tour in this body of work, wherein he chooses models native to the country that he is working in, expanding his ideas beyond the basis of traditional European portraiture to create a more global dialog. He now refers to the artistic and historical traditions specific to those cultures which continue to be marginalized or ignored by the art world. Bringing these developing countries into the forefront of the discussion, Wiley begins a dialog about identity and power that isn’t dominated for once by the ideas of the West.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The previous installments of the World Stage were China and Africa, Lagos-Dakar. For the Brazil series, Wiley continued his pattern of working in which he sought out a very specific type of model to be photographed. He was very clear that he was looking for young men from their teens to early thirties, who come from poor neighborhoods and who carry certain physical traits similar to the art works he is attempting to emulate. Wiley even mentioned in his lecture at the Getty that when word began to leak about what type of models he was looking for on the streets of Rio, hoards of young men showed up doing their best impressions of what they heard he was interested in.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The larger than life canvases in ornate wooden frames on display at Roberts & Tilton introduce confident, yet accessible young men posed amidst fluorescent backdrops of explosive pattern. The young men from the “favelas” of the so-called Marvelous City, in their contemporary Brazilian style, appear at once completely unrelated to their staged circumstances — the old-world postures, the props that they hold, and the floral backdrops that intertwine with their bodies — and at the same time seem to embrace the roles that their director has asked them to undertake.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

In Rio de Janeiro, Wiley’s inspirations did not rest in old master paintings hanging on the walls of powerful institutions, but allowed the work to be impacted by the iconic nationalistic sculptures found around the city, which he might argue are the cultural equivalent to the David or Velasquez paintings referenced in his earlier work. The earnest looks in the painted mens’ eyes seem to be pleading with us to accept them and the orchestrated scenes into which they are set. The sheer size of the paintings and the nearly unmatched skill in rendering human elements, down to the soft skin and muscular arms, command the viewer to linger in front of the colossal works much longer than the pieces might merit if executed in a smaller scale. The backgrounds, which are inspired by ethnic tapestries discovered by the artist, hypnotize the viewer as their eyes attempt to make sense of it all.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

In discussing his oeuvre, Wiley admits to having a great affection for, interest in, and knowledge of the scope of Western painting from which he draws inspiration for his modern day recreations. So it has become clear to the viewer over the past few years that his attitude isn’t necessarily one of criticism of these works which have undoubtedly dominated the canon of art history for centuries. Rather, by bringing the element of the young, modern black man into the picture, he is creating a conversation about power, which is much more interesting and effective than satire in this dialog. However, since his completion of the MFA at Yale and his residency at the Studio Museum Harlem more than half a decade ago, Wiley has been, essentially, exhibiting the same work — albeit cleverly and progressively investigating the broader themes of art history, power, war or the fallen with each new series. While most of his audience remains basically enraptured by the work — because of its size, because of its photo realist qualities, because of its social implications, because of the way it relates to modernity overtly or through undertones, or because of its bright colors and patterns — one wonders if it is still challenging us in the way it had when the first series was shown.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The World Stage is moving beyond the comfort zone of the Western context of power, and into a world still largely unexplored by American artists, and through this, Wiley has added another dimension to the discourse. The conversation now reaches beyond the obvious juxtapositions of social prestige and into ideas about the American fetishization of the exotic and especially the less-than, as he discussed at his lecture at the Getty. It’s one thing to paint images of “the other”, and it’s another to paint scenes that refer to art history, but when the two are combined, the viewer is forced to contemplate each piece on several levels. It begins to be more difficult to deduce from each painting the same one-liner about contemporary culture versus historical ideals of power and pomp. Introducing the Brazilian men and the many contexts from which they come, into the pieces, American viewers now find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being faced with something we may not fully understand, and that means the work is asking us to spend more time with it, thinking, talking, and even struggling with our own preconceived notions.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The World Stage: Brazil is on view at Roberts & Tilton through May 30, 2009 and is accompanied by a 64-page hardcover book of the exhibition.

Kehinde Wiley is based in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA from the Yale University School of Art and his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Columbus Museum of Art, The Denver Art Museum, The UCLA Hammer Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He has shown in solo exhibitions internationally, including at sorrywereclosed, Brussels, Belgium; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Milwaukee; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles. His work has been discussed in Art in America, Newsweek, Artforum, ARTslant, The New Yorker, Art Papers, on NPR and many others.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA