Adam Ibrahim
Professor Gorski
WRIT 150
8 October 2018
Art, Individual / Understanding Michael Ray Charles
From artificial intelligence to zero-human factories, modern society industriously tracks towards automation across plenty of existing and yet unimagined facets of our lives. Still, from as far back as the 17,000 year old primitive cave paintings of Lascaux, to the present age, artistic expression remains unadulterated — deeply rooted in unique human identity. African American artist Michael Ray Charles takes the form of a modern exemplar: creating works saturated with ironic representations of his own cultural identity and delving deep into the essence of representation in his subject. As the impressionable audience, we face an interesting affair in considering his works. If we fail to utilize knowledge of the unique human circumstance of Charles’ artwork, we open the way to ignorant misinterpretation. Simply basing our opinion of a work of art on its implicit values may work in aesthetical analysis, but to understand the profound human expression behind a composition requires an attentive approach.Taking into consideration an explicit effort has been made to address societally relevant themes of identity in his work, it is our duty to attempt to understand Charles’ intent before forming our perspective.
Michael Ray Charles is notorious for his easily misconceived racist imagery. Like a satirical mockingbird, Charles melds together brazen Black stereotypes of the Antebellum South and images from modern advertising and pop-culture to expose the clandestine prevalence of racism in contemporary society. Upon first glance, our contemporary minds may be turbidly appalled with his paintings’ bigoted portrayals of Black Americans. Further inspection in the context of Charles’s intent and identity yields certain clarity. Indeed, his paintings represent an expulsion of bigotry under the burning scrutiny of public light. Charles, born in 1967 in Lafayette, Louisiana, is both critically celebrated and a source of controversy for his mimetic subversion of cultural, racial, and historicized themes. Understanding the evolution of stereotypes through Charles’s well-informed eyes leads us to better deal with the past and present images of racism in the context of modern society. Approaching his work outside of the context of his intent may leave us with nothing more than indignation, thus imparting a necessity for understanding Charles broad cultural identity and its impact on his work.
Growing up in the deep south a short time after the success of the Civil Rights Movement presented Charles with a first-hand immersion into an environment full of racial tension. Baptized in the waters of animosity towards his own race, Charles pursues topics of personal interest in his work, dipping his brush into the dark past of an era mockingly caricturizing Black Americans as monkey-like and brutish. “Charles draws comparisons between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an earlier era and contemporary mass-media portrayals of black youths, celebrities, and athletes—images he sees as a constant in the American subconscious” (Art21). Charles’ use of relevant commercial images is focused on his own individual relation to their portrayals. Charles makes an explicit effort to confront representations of his identity, ironically basing his paintings in racist iconography relating personally to his cultural past and present experience.
Charles’s exploration of his identity as a black American began even before his first painting. His prior experiences guided his work towards the graphically styled, racially charged paintings he is best known for. In an interview for the Art21 docuseries, Art in the Twenty-First Century , Charles recalls the deep-seated experience which drove him to work with the painful images of minstrelsy and stereotypes. Charles explains, “I was in search of an image that could best articulate Americanism—could sum up what is happening, or what has happened, or what was happening with blackness.” After experimenting with images of the American flag to try to achieve his symbol-searching goal, Charles incorporated an intimate personal experience into his final piece. “… a friend handed me this [a die-cast figurine of a conspicuously racist character from the Tarzan franchise, ‘Leopard Man’]. This led to a series of pieces” (Michael Ray Charles, Art21). Charles, intrigued by the ignored blatancy of the toy’s stereotyping, found his symbol of Americanism in the model. He set to work creating fifty clay molds of the figurine, standing around and inside of an equal number of sculpted miniature baby carriages set atop an American flag, each representing a star. The piece stood for a strong commentary on the incessance of racist images, fostered time and time again by the patterned lack of sensitivity in a seemingly unaware — or at least underactive — populace.
The installation’s reception drives home the importance of artistic identity awareness. The clay figure and flag model was put on view in the Houston public library. “ I got a sense of not only the seriousness involved with the use of these images but also the emotion, the emotional presence of the past. People began to knock over the glass case and, on many occasions, condemned the presence of such imagery” (Charles, Art21). Rather than understanding the significance of Charles’s piece, viewers were offended by the racist image of the primitive black figures as seemingly representative of the image of black Americans. Their reactions give a view of both sides of the argument; while the figurine and the flag used the same blatantly racist figure, the latter is an unemotive commercial portrayal, devoid of any attention to its place as a perpetuator of racism, and the former, Charles’s installation, is characterized with a knowingly ironic portrayal, inspired by the personal experience of the artist. However, without knowing the artist’s intention, which interestingly, was available upon request from library staff (Charles, Art21), some viewers were offended at the audacious nature of the installation’s subject when placed into the context of their own identity as the American consumer, strengthening the original commentary made by Charles. Without properly understanding the satirical Michael Ray Charles, viewers failed to understand the piece.
Charles clearly presents his identity as a driving force behind his work.
However, identifying information is often not presented. However, this is not an excuse for ignorance; if an art piece explicitly involves a controversial subject matter, an investigative attitude should be applied to gain a full understanding. On the surface, Charles’ painting titled “Lifesaball, Eat it Up” may seem provocative and perpetuary. The painting depicts a toothy, fat-lipped Sambo character enjoying a basketball as if it were made of watermelon.The words ‘LIFESABALL’ & ‘EAT IT UP’ frame the character while the bottom right corner bears the logo of the National Basketball Association. Charles is often condemned for depicting such stereotypes. An unknowing audience may fail to realize Charles' intention is to make people uncomfortable. His works and in turn, his racial identity, are questioned. “I've been called a sellout. People question my blackness," Charles says. "A lot of people accuse me of perpetuating a stereotype. I think there's a fine line between perpetuating something and questioning something. And I like to get as close to it as possible." More specifically, Charles wants to make his audience question the reason behind what is making them uncomfortable. He provokes his his audience into questioning race relations; by infusing the minstrel stylization of old and modern symbols like basketball and the NBA in one body of work, he allows us to compare the racial issues of today with those of generations prior.
Whether or not Michael Ray Charles crosses a provocative line in the jarring visual effect of his work, he still accomplishes his goal: to create conversation. Looking at our own present society, we can see that racist imagery and stereotypes still prevail in the shadows of our culture, making it much more important to bring to light and discuss them. Where the conversation stems from and where it leads is dependent on us as the viewers; we can choose to harness the power of knowledge and perspective, or give in to impulsive anger and ignorance. Analyzing Charles’s work specifically, teaches us that building human context for contentious entities is essential to their true understanding, for ideas are not harmful on their own; rather their misinterpretation and ill-praxis lead to precarious behavior and thought.