Jayson Musson - ART THOUGHTZ: How to be a Successful Black Artist, 2010.
The function of TAP and TOUCH Cinema directly depended on Export’s identity as a woman, but the artistic value of identity is not limited to the functionality of their work. Identity can also help carry a message, enabling the artist to draw from personal experience to support their project. While discrediting artists because they touch subject matter that lies outside their personal experience and perceived demographic can end up being censorial, it is also the case that an artist purposefully working as a member of a specific demographic can contribute insights based on their personal experience that those who do not share that demographic cannot. In the case of works such as Jayson Musson’s ART THOUGHTZ: How to be a Successful Black Artist, this can have the added benefit of making offensive content more palatable to a public that would be otherwise unreceptive.
ART THOUGHTZ is a series of performances by Musson under the persona of Hennessy Youngman, a kind of nonchalantly crass alter-ego of Musson who shares his thoughts on everything from relational aesthetics to the realities of graduate school. Though most of these performances take the form of amateur Youtube videos shot with Musson’s computer camera, he has also given performances of ART THOUGHTZ at institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago35 and considers the videos part of his professional practice. In one video entitled How to be a Successful Black Artist, Musson calls out the stereotypes36 that the professional art world holds for black artists, as well as the black artists that perpetuate these stereotypes.
While the functionality of the piece does not directly depend on Musson’s identity as a black man, the biting satire that carries the message of the performance is dependent on the character of Youngman, who is himself a kind of amalgamation of black clichés, allowing Musson to make honest, serious criticism behind the buffer of a caricatured persona whose very manner of speaking calls attention to the racially-tinged elitism that is commonplace in the art world.
As Brian Boucher, an editor and critic at Art in America, stated, “Bringing urban black language and attitudes to the generally pretty-white world of contemporary art commentary just seemed unbelievably bold, and once he did it, it seemed incredible no one had done it before, at least not so effectively.”37 Adding to Boucher’s statement, ART THOUGHTZ is not bold just because Youngman uses “urban black language,” but also because of the brutally honest, potentially offensive statements that Youngman casually makes while pontificating on whatever the subject of the video happens to be. Of these performances, How to be a Successful Black Artist was chosen specifically because of its politically charged content pertaining to contemporary notions of identity and the potential for this content to be offensive.
For example, in the video, Youngman says, “As a nigga-artist, if you don’t got anything particularly unique to say, you always have slavery to fall back on.”38 In terms of the discourse of western contemporary art, the delivery of this statement is the social equivalent of sitting on a landmine. Excluding the obviously offensive pejorative, ”nigga,” one could expect that such a recorded statement by a white artist would presumably end their career. However, this point should not be misconstrued as an endorsement of Youngman’s statement, or as a claim that white artists should have the ability to make such statements without consequence.
What is interesting is that, in Musson’s case, the landmine did not explode. Despite charged statements like these and others that were more blatantly offensive, such as when Youngman does a shout-out to the artist Kara Walker and tells her, “let me put my finger in you,”39 the reception to How to be a Successful Black Artist, and ART THOUGHTZ more generally, has been largely positive. The comments on the Youtube video, for example, are almost exclusively in favor of Musson’s work, and he has not encountered any major controversy on the level of the artwork previously examined. Given the potential consequences of offending, it is worth exploring why this was the case. In that sense, the examination of How to be a Successful Black Artist is not so much an investigation of offense, but a lack thereof.
As stated, offense is not universally beneficial, as it can also make people unreceptive to the message of the piece. The success of How to be a Successful Black Artist is that it delivered its inflammatory statements in a way that people were receptive to. This is due, in part, to the way in which Musson constructed his performance. First off, humor is the primary mode in which Musson attempts to deconstruct stereotypes, addressing black artists with statements like, “... don’t let them know that your dick be regular, or that you have a savings account, or that you recycle because that shit is bad business.”40 In addition, Musson assigns culpability to white and black people alike, making the offense more palatable by generalizing the blame. However, in the sociopolitical context in which it was made, one the most important factors in How to be a Successful Black Artist was received was the character of Hennessy Youngman, who (by virtue of them being the same person) shared Musson’s identity as a black man.
The previous examples show that the perceived offense of a work is relative to the identity of the author. This, in itself, is not a justification for or against offense, and to state that the identity of the author should have no impact on the reception of the artwork is overly categorical and unrealistic, not to mention detached from the present realities of contemporary discourse about identity. A more nuanced approach would be to state that the importance of the identity of the author in respect to the message of their work is dependent on what the message is. In the case of How to be a Successful Black Artist, Musson’s perceived identity lent him the credibility and social capital to speak honestly on issues that directly relate to that identity. Of course, the positive reception to Musson’s work was not only due to the fact that he is black, and to assume so is to be reductive and deny Musson the credit he is due. However, given the context in which How to be a Successful Black Artist was made, it is also worth stating that Musson’s identity certainly helped deliver the message, and that this, by no means, diminishes that message.