Week 5 - Kehinde Wiley

Kahinde Wiley is a Gay American based painter born in Los Angeles, who has an international reputation living between Pe King and Brooklyn.













Last weeks ALVC class focused on the Post Modern them "INTERTEXTUALITY", re-read Extract 1 The death of the author on page 44 of your ALVC books and respond to the oil paintings of Kehinde Wiley. How do we make sense of his Kehinde's work? Identify intertextuality in Kehinde's work?

I read books and I got more information about INTERTEXTUALITY.
It refers to connection of contexts. Roland Barthes or Julia Cristeva said that if we read one text in one's name when we read about that, we can't read and we can't understand. we can understand or interpret stories by thinking More two texts connection. INTERTEXTUALITY can make expectation of story when we read a book.

Derived from the Latin intertexto, meaning to intermingle while weaving, intertextuality is a term first introduced by French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late sixties. In essays such as "Word, Dialogue, and Novel," Kristeva broke with traditional notions of the author's "influences" and the text's "sources," positing that all signifying systems, from table settings to poems, are constituted by the manner in which they transform earlier signifying systems. A literary work, then, is not simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the strucutures of language itself. "[A]ny text," she argues, "is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another" (66).
Intertextuality is, thus, a way of accounting for the role of literary and extra-literary materials without recourse to traditional notions of authorship. It subverts the concept of the text as self-sufficient, hermetic totality, foregrounding, in its stead, the fact that all literary production takes place in the presence of other texts; they are, in effect, palimpsests. For Roland Barthes, who proclaimed the death of the author, it is the fact of intertexuality that allows the text to come into being: Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text. Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of sources or influences; the intertext is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located; of unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation marks. ("Theory of the Text" 39).
Thus writing is always an iteration which is also a re-iteration, a re-writing which foregrounds the trace of the various texts it both knowingly and unknowingly places and dis-places.
Intertexts need not be simply "literary"--historical and social determinants are themselves signifying practices which transform and inflect literary practices. (Consider, for example, the influence of the capitalist mode of production upon the rise of the novel.) Moreover, a text is constituted, strictly speaking, only in the moment of its reading. Thus the reader's own previous readings, experiences and position within the cultural formation also form crucial intertexts.
The concept of intertexuality thus dramatically blurs the outlines of the book, dispersing its image of totality into an unbounded, illimitable tissue of connections and associations, paraphrases and fragments, texts and con-texts. For many hypertext authors and theorists, intertextuality provides an apt description of the kind of textual space which they, like the figures in Remedio Varo's famous "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," find themselves weaving:a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships, and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. (Pynchon 10)
(http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab//hfl0278.html)

Kehinde Wiley’s works reference specific paintings by Titian and Tiepolo, but he incorporates a range of art historical and vernacular styles in his paintings, from the French Rococo to the contemporary urban street. Wiley collapses history and style into a uniquely contemporary vision. He describes his approach as “interrogating the notion of the master painter, at once critical and complicit.” He makes figurative paintings that “quote historical sources and position young black men within that field of ‘power.’” His “slightly heroic” figures, slightly larger than life size, are depicted in poses of power and spiritual awakening. He deliberately mixes images of power and spirituality, using them as a filter in the portrayal of masculinity. Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition Infinite Mobility recently appeared at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
(http://www.deitch.com/artists/sub.php?artistId=11)


Kehinde's work relates to this weeks Post Modern theme "PLURALISM" re-read page 50 and discuss how the work relates to this theme?


Wiley recreates history by inserting African Americans into the canon of art history, and in doing so expands our knowledge of how race has been expressed in it. Paul D. Miller, also known as D.J. Spooky states, “Wiley’s canvas surfaces are a mirror reflection of America’s unceasing search for new meanings from the ruins of the Old World of Europe and Africa. In the process of reflection, the world that we see on his canvas transforms the way we think about old and new, race, masculinity, and above all, the generous soul of an artist’s ability to provide a way of saying simply: another world is possible.” (11)
The paintings baldly appropriate portraiture from the past, and juxtapose this appropriation with embodiments of an American culture that is usually represented by images that inspire fear, danger, and anger. The portraits are political, but contain humor and empathy at the same time. Wiley appropriates images from old world Western realism, and recently from political posters, and juxtaposes them with ornamentation, pattern, and hip hop fashion, a process DJ Spooky describes as “Sample: Cut, Paste, Repeat.” (11)
Wiley’s initial artistic project was simple, and elegantly defiant. He asked young African American males to model for him in his studio. He then had them look through art history books and assume poses from historical portraiture. He would then photograph them and paint their portraits as those icons of art history. Black American youth replaced European princes and kings, and African Americans became retroactive subjects for iconic historical paintings. (11)
Since those early works, Wiley’s portraiture has expanded to include celebrities, models posed as figures in Communist Chinese propaganda posters, and work based on African sculpture. In his most recent show at Deitch projects entitled “Down”, Wiley confronted issues of violence and oppression in African American male culture. This then; the rewriting of history, a reconsideration of race, and the formal chops to do it in the form of these dazzling portraits.
kehinde-wiley-acting-in-accordance-with-chairman-maos-instructions-means-victory-2007-oil-on-canvas-6-x-5-feet
Wiley’s paintings are exercises in dense color and ornamentation. We see rococo swirls and fleur de lis flash and pop like abstract flames around the figures. Often they are patterns from African or Middle Eastern Ornamentation. (12) Wiley gives his sitters the decorative settings worthy of the halls of kings. And though Wiley’s paintings are heavily devoted to the Old Masters in iconography, they also feel very contemporary because of how they are built. Wiley uses photographic reference and digital manipulation that he does not try to diminish. His paint handling is smooth and brushless, and the edges and surfaces around the figures are hard and unnatural. This adds a formal level of complexity to the paintings, as his methods add another juxtaposition between art history and contemporary image making. The paintings ultimately transform into what Wiley calls a “Third Object” (12), – neither historical nor contemporary, but a sample of both that becomes wholly new in Wiley’s paintings.
Kehinde's work raises questions around social/cultural hierarchies , colonisation, globalisation, stereotypes and the politics which govern a western worldview.
Information on specific paintings was difficult to obtain however Matt has the info for the last 2 paintings.
(http://portraitsocietygallery.wordpress.com/essays-about-portraiture/)


Renaissance master
1.) K.W.’s art replicates important historical figures and shows young, urban, black men with power. These images show how he used an old renaissance painting, but changed it to a new, unique, and contemporary way. Wiley’s work is different and a fresh change. The complimentry colors he uses work really well together. It is easy to understand and has a good message.)
(http://megsny.wordpress.com/2008/04/)