Awol Erizku: The Only Way is Up

Since this publication in 2015 writer, curator, and educator Matthew Ryan Smith has since become the curator for the Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant in Brantford ON and write for publications such as Border Crossings and First American Art Magazine. Matthew Ryan Smith is also a featured writer in the upcoming issue 36.3 of BlackFlash.

Awol Erizku has gone on to achieve great success and worldwide recognition since his work was first featured and written about in issue 32.2 of BlackFlash. Erizku has since shot for Vogue and The New Yorker, and has had solo shows at Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, and STEMS Gallery, Brussels. Potentially, he is most well-known for his work with artist Beyoncé. Erizku took her pregnancy announcement photographs and the subsequently posted image on Instagram has been liked over 10 million times.

That the field of representation remains a place of struggle is most evident when we critically examine contemporary representations of blackness and black people [….] For some time now the critical challenge for black folks has been to expand the discussion of race and representation beyond debates about good and bad imagery. Often what is thought to be good is merely a reaction against representations created by white people that were blatantly stereotypical.

bell hooks(1)

One thing I like about Awol Erizku’s photographs is that I can pick up on their references, I’m in on the pun, which nod to the canon of Renaissance (and Post-Renassiance) vernacular portraiture, most of which still dictate the way in which we approach the portrait today. Girl with the Pearl Earring, 1665, with the over-the-shoulder turn, open-pursed lips and a wide-eyed gaze being one such familiar trope exploited by the hermit Dutchman Vermeer, is renewed in 2009 by Erizku as Girl with a Bamboo Earring. Another is the ¾-profile looking-off-into-space-without-irony pose, holding a rat, rendered by Da Vinci, a piece otherwise known as Lady with an Ermine, 1490. Here, Erizku replaces Da Vinci’s white muse with a black muse, and the ermine with a pit-bull. The only thing that stays the same and bridges the past with the present is a black-beaded necklace, black headband, and nature of the pose.

Many of Erizku’s photographs are about what is real and particular to his experience as a young black man in the world. These are digital satires that intervene into art history and the canon that validates it, so as to reframe the absence of the black body as potential for resistance. In effect, he deconstructs the monuments and artists of art history in order to kick them about and build them back up again in the image of his autobiography and experience. The result questions the quick assumption that the absence of colour in the represented image is not an absence of the coloured body in the world. Not surprisingly, these maneuvers and assumptions point to a mode of de-colonizing the “Western” image itself: The circle gets the square.

Since Erizku’s first showing at Chelsea’s Hasted Kraeutler Gallery in 2012, where he first exhibited the photographic series “Black & Gold,” that included several black models referencing classic art archetypes, Erizku has completed an MFA at Yale University and showed again at Hasted Kraeutler in 2014, under the title “The Only Way is Up.” Having added sculpture, ready-mades, and installation to his growing repertoire of mediums, a very different work was afoot; becoming almost stringently conceptual, allusive, and in a strange way, Americanized.

There continues to be, however, threads of semblance and consistency that underlie Erizku’s practice. For one, the marginalization and disappearance of people of colour from the Eurocentric-white-male canon of traditional art (and its history) is targeted as a strategy for reclamation and renewal and rebirth. To this end, Erizku has achieved notoriety in recent years for his particular brand of colliding the atoms of the then with those of the now, resulting in a veritable mash-up of history, image, and meaning.

While Erizku’s gallery representation has spoken of his work in exhibitions such as “The Only Way is Up” as “re-contextualized and re-purposed ready-made objects,”(2) or as appropriation, re-appropriation, détournement, or a mix of other adjectives, they are perhaps best explained through French curator and cultural theorist Nicholas Bourriaud’s concept of “postproduction.” Here, as Bourriaud rightly explains, the material that numerous contemporary artists “…manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the bases of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects.”(3) Boarriaud adds that “It is no longer a matter of starting with a “blank slate” or creating meaning on the basis of virgin material but of finding a means of insertion into the innumerable flows of production.”(4)

Erizku adopts the central tenets of postproduction by interject-ing blackness and personal experience into the ebb and flow of the cultural industry in the Western art world. For example, the title of “The Only Way is Up” is taken from a Quincy Jones compilation album; Erizku collaborated with DJ Kitty Ca$h to produce a mix-tape that served as a soundtrack for the exhibition; and many if not all of the works bore a mark to something or someone that existed before.(5) It’s a case of quotes making up the story.

The instruments behind these canny interventions into the vicissitudes of art history often rely on daring (if not Dada) appropriationist strategies made possible by Duchamp and the ready-made. In The Only Way is Up American Neo-Conceptualist David Hammons is everywhere as well; his cunning scrutiny of African life during the second half of the 20th century broke ground for the exploration of blackness in contemporary art practice. It should come as no surprise then, that for Erizku, “Duchamp is the Master and Hammons is the Godfather.”(6) Hammon’s African American Flag, 1990, which cuts through the “stars and stripes” by swapping red, white, and blue for black, red, and green, is there, somewhere, in works such as Oh, what a feeling, fuck it, I want a Billion, 2014, and its sister piece Oh what a feeling, aw, fuck it, I want a Trillion, 2014. Both works, one executed as-is in the readymade tradition, the other in black, riff on Donald Judd’s iconic Minimalist / “specific object” stacks fabricated from galvanized iron and other machismo materials; borrowing its scale and expansiveness. Unlike Judd, who sought to vacuum out extraneous symbolism from his objects, Erizku replaces Judd’s columns in a stack of seven regulation-size basketball rims crowned with an official National Basketball Association (NBA) game ball. For one thing, they infix blackness with the predominantly white narrative of the 1960s Minimalist movement; for another, they replace the uberintellectualism of Minimalism and its preoccupation with “objecthood”(7) with iconographies of the quotidian and the everyday. Finally, under Erizku’s tutelage, the monumentally cold stacks of Judd have some flavour.

Erizku doesn’t stop there: Even Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q is up for grabs. L.H.O.O.Q @Beyoncé after Duchamp # 1, 2014, and L.H.O.O.Q @Beyoncé after Duchamp # 2, 2014, similarly apply Duchamp’s tactic of absurding the Mona Lisa with a mustachio through the readymade image by transforming a found shopping bag featuring Beyoncé posing in a bikini; affixing a bountiful beard and ample armpit hair. This act seems to elevate Beyoncé to the mythic and prodigious status of the Mona Lisa while simultaneously problematizing it. They are either an easy comment on the falsification of women in commercial advertising imagery, the objectification of women in popular culture (as seen through the relationship between Beyoncé’s overly-emphasized butt and the rough translation of L.H.O.O.Q. to “she has got a nice ass”), a comment on the worship of false idols, or something else entirely.

Perhaps it has to do with a maturing artist no longer comfortable with the static image or the unambiguous object, choosing instead to follow conceptual tricksters such as Richard Prince, who after some pointed one-on-one discussion, encouraged Erizku to consider making work that no longer reveals itself right away.(8) It’s sound advice, and lucid, too; something that Erizku has seemingly taken up but hasn’t fully resolved.

Finally, the strongest example of Erizku’s inclination towards Conceptualist tropes is a collection of individual T-shirts hung in succession featuring the names of men and women—artists, theorists, educators, and others—whom Erizku looks up to in some shape or form. Above their names rests a two-digit number referencing the year of their birth. Shout-outs include, but are not limited to: Duchamp (87), Hammons (43), Judd (28), Price (49), Fred Wilson (54), and noted Yale art Professor Robert Storr (50), who mentored Erizku during his MFA. The grey-and-black T’s adopt the official colours of the Oakland Raiders football club (whose team colours were, during the early 1990s, adopted and made popular by a West Coast conglomerate of rappers including the members of N.W.A., Snoop Dogg, and Tupac).(9) Here, as else-where, the work sometimes appears too close; too referential to others, like a parade of homages. This has got to be the main charge against Erizku; however, one suspects that it won’t linger too long.

So: Will Erizku, like many of his heroes, remain a Neo-Conceptualist intent on usurping class and race issues through acts of appropriation and subterfuge? Maybe, maybe not. These things take time to sort out. This needs history.

1. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation
   (London: Turnaround, 1992), 3-4.
2. Hasted Kraeutler, “Awol Erizku: The Only Way is Up,” http://www.hastedkraeutler.com/exhibitions/2014-06-19_awol-erizku
3. Nicholas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (New York: Has and Sternberg, 2002), 13.
4. Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay:
   How Art Reprograms the World, 17.
5. Guy Debord is also useful here when he speaks of “détournement” as an ideological strategy to break down and subvert
   an image or object’s original meaning while replacing it with
   a new one, and such tactics of renewal are also the political groundwork for Stuart Hall’s concept of “delegitimation.”
6. Paul Laster, “AWOL ERIZKU: THE ONLY WAY IS UP,” Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, http://whitehot-magazine.com/articles/erizku-only-way-is-up/3016
7. See Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago:
   University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148-172.
8. See Laster, “AWOL ERIZKU: THE ONLY WAY IS UP.”
9. For more on the adoption of the Raiders’s grey and black, see ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary Straight Outta Compton directed by Ice Cube. http://espn.go.com/30for30/film?page=straight-outta-la

This article is published in issue 32.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue