In Kerry James Marshall’s seminal 1986 work The Wonderful One, the figure is an ineffable silhouette: its dimensionality is reduced to a stark flatness, meticulously shaped with black charcoal on a white background. Marshall offers no further detail beyond the figure’s eyes — a gaze — and its smile — a sentiment. It appears nude, flattened, projected, advancing with a correction of movement and an awareness of being watched, and carrying on its body the imprint of a potential threat. Its consciousness is that of an imperceptible existential doubling. In 1986, Marshall was reading Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952), whose nameless protagonist embodies the idea of “the wonderful one”: a young Black man in 1940s America whose invisibility does not annihilate his blood nor his flesh, whose body—manipulated and beaten—persists, and whose existence is both beautiful and deeply aware. The Wonderful One thus becomes an immediate reading of the Black experience in the United States within the awareness of its racist representations. James Baldwin explained it in these very terms: “You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.”1
Although framed around the “body” in contemporary artistic trajectories, the exhibition “Corps et âmes,” presented at the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris, primarily relies on works created in the aftermath of the American Civil Rights Movement, as well as more recent works aligned with similar political stances. Opening the exhibition, Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) operates through the disorientation of narrative and discourse in a continuous confrontation of signs, motifs, and symbols in cultures and politics, highlighting domains specific to the history and experience of Black people in the United States. It brilliantly uses the logics, systems, and strategies put in place both by and against Black people, questioning the relationship between each subject, object, and culture. The soundtrack used for the piece, Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” (2016), echoes throughout much of the exhibition. Ultimately, the experience of the work — and therefore that of the exhibition as a whole — is grounded outside of itself.
Here, the body becomes an implication — its gesture hindered, its movement obstructed — reflecting the historical and systemic contradictions it confronts. It is the muted sound of the African American contralto Marian Anderson, photographed in 1955 by Richard Avedon. The whistle of artist and musician Terry Adkins in Lorna Simpson’s film Cloudscape (2004). And the scream of A Cry From The Inside by David Hammons (1969). The presence of other works, however important they may be in themselves — by Sherrie Levine, Ana Mendieta, Miriam Cahn, Georg Baselitz, etc. — are in a state of total historical and topological confusion when confronted by the works explained above; they become entangled in a thematic confusion that, in essence, conveys nothing. The “body,” in and of itself, serves as the most fragile of pretexts for a collection exhibition and a curatorial position. And the “soul” — the contrapposto of the body, we presume — is only explained in the pathos of this white feeling of transcendence in the experience of the works.
The beauty and critical urgency of these works in contemporary discourse are undeniable. Nevertheless, within the exhibition, they are solitary; they reside within themselves as the frames of what they already are. They are never carried by any will — including that of the institution, which, in my opinion, struggles terribly, at least in Europe, to speak justly about African American works without the discomfort of a white gaze — other than their own.
Born in Paris in 1934, the Negritude movement marked a political and intellectual awakening among Black diasporas from Africa, the Caribbean, and the US. Figures such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor forged connections with Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, drawing the attention of surrealists like Man Ray. Works exploring the contrast of “black” and “white” reflected a fascination with cultural duality and otherness, especially between the West and Africa — whose objects challenged dominant notions of artistic value. The photographic treatment of Noire et Blanche (1926) by Man Ray — one iteration of which is featured in the exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce — attests to this binary. With her eyes closed — the complete absence of the subject’s gaze toward the object — the value of the work lies in the confrontation between black and white, as its title explicitly suggests. Later iterations of the piece, in which the black of the mask is reversed to white, and the subject’s white to black, echo the philosophical tradition of the “negative” described by Jean-Paul Sartre in his discussion of Negritude as an “antithetical value and a moment of negativity.”2 As Maureen Murphy explains: “The dialogue between forms and colors, shadow and light, is preserved, even if it is the woman who reveals the shadow, and the mask, the light. […] In Man Ray’s work, the West is evoked through a woman, and Africa through an object.”3
