by Onajídé Shabaka - 17 Jan., 2007

   WTF, Is there a lesson here?

    by Onajídé Shabaka

"A Promise That Never Bloomed, a Post-Minimalist You’ve Never Heard Of" by Holland Cotter (NYTimes)

The [Lester] Hayes story is a familiar one, and of a kind the art world loves. Not only was he tragically unrecognized but, we now learn, he was also hugely influential. Gallery news material notes that his 1965 Lena Horne piece, made while he was working for Mr. [Richard] Tuttle, anticipated by two years the first of Mr. Tuttle’s unstretched canvas pieces. And another Hayes work, “Bound to Fail” (1966), which refers to slavery, predates by a year Bruce Nauman’s “Henry Moore Bound to Fail.”

The politics of influence are unmistakable. White artists adapt the work of an African-American artist, but drain it of racial content. The same white artists achieve prominence, while the black artist sinks into an obscurity from which he should now, finally, be raised.

But he will not be raised, because there is no Lester Hayes. He never existed. He is entirely an invention of Triple Candie. The gallery’s directors, Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett, the co-publishers of the magazine Art on Paper, who assembled the Hammons survey from photocopies and the Noland from replicas, cobbled together all the “Hayes” work from scrap material and cooked up the detailed biography to go with it.

When that show opened, it was bitterly attacked for perpetuating racist myths and substituting documentary material for actual work by black artists. Can such charges be leveled at Triple Candie for the Lester Hayes show? Is it an example of the white art world — Ms. Bancroft and Mr. Nesbett are white — getting mileage out of the work of a black artist, real or not?

Foreground, “Beyond the Pail,” and, in back, “Self-Portraits,”
by Lester Hayes, an unrecognized, influential and extremely elusive artist.
photo: Triple Candie

I wonder why the artist chosen in this episode is African American and, why the creators of this episode are ("white") Euro-Americans? Even though there was some initial excitement while reading the article, that there could be some undiscovered African American talent, the whole thing evaporated in a flash. Remember that "white" NY artist trying to live his life as a double of Tupac Shakur? Another "white" artist getting national press while potentially a deserving African American artist goes without. Yes, even in 2007 the legacy of racism is part of our cultural landscape, and more intensely exposed in the visual arts as it has been for so many years.

If this had been done by two African Americans would the reception have been the same? If the artist they created was "white" would that have made some kind of significant difference? I guess the first thing would be to have two African Americans working in the same positions. And, it is very likely some African American artist from the 60s has been ignored so the whole episode seems a bit more plausible. Why not with the 80s and 90s as well? I feel like "we" have been used for someone's agenda. It does raise awareness of some issues that need to be addressed, however, but I am cynical that this kind of thing is the way to address it.

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