“Picasso Baby”: Hip-Hop and the Appropriation of Space

with Mickaline Thomas “Picasso Baby”: Hip-Hop and the Appropriation of Space
by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

The most conventional way to think about Hip-Hop culture, particularly rap music, is to think of it as the structure that has given generations of youth (largely Black and Brown, but no longer exclusively so) a voice to project myriad fears, desires, angers and joys into a world that has little interest in any of it—unless it impacts the bottom line. 
Yet from the very beginning Hip-hop was about a politics of space—from the ways that that first generation was socialized by a State logic that rendered them (and their communities) inconsequential, thus subject to all manner to removal, relocation and dislocation, to the buildings, and subways and other public works that they “bombed” in order to reorient a built environment more interested in interstate travel than their lives, to Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell’s simple desire to have a space where the young folk could convene.  Wherever Hip-Hop has gone, it has fundamentally changed the space.
Jay Z’s recent film short, Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film , directed by Mark Romanek, who also shot Mr. Carter’s “99 Problems,” is a reminder of those politics of space as it relates not only to Hip-Hop but the encroachment of Black bodies—of the actual and rendered kind—into spaces that remain defined by privilege, whiteness and White Privilege.  Jay Z’s entrance into Pace Gallery recalls a scene nearly thirty years earlier, when three young Black men, clad in black leather jackets and black brims, proclaiming themselves the "King(s) of Rock," walked into another museum and are told “you guys don’t belong here.”
Just as Run-DMC was breaking down commercial barriers—MTV then as resistant to Black bodies as any high end art gallery—Jean Michel Basquiat was breaking down barriers in the art world.  Though Picasso is the signifier that brings every one together—and to our worse fears about Picasso and appropriation, Mr. Carter is here appropriating, dare I say colonizing, space— it is Basquiat who clearly haunts this space. 
Since Jean Michel can’t be in the room (though he makes rhetorical appearances), we are provided with his people—the legendary graff artist Fab Five Freddy, Lorna Simpson, Mickaline Thomas, Wangechi Mutu (whose Trevor Schoonmaker curated exhibit A Fantastic Journey opens at the Brooklyn Museum in October) and Kehinde Wiley, to name just a few;  Black artists who can imagine making a living in the world of high brow art without having to traffic in trinkets of tokenism (what Thelma Golden was trying to explode a generation ago with her notion of the post-Black) or the guilt of having to be too authentic for audiences who know no better.
Direct inspiration for “Picasso Baby” can be traced to performance artist Marina Abramović and her 2010 installation “The Artist is Present” (MoMA), though Jay Z also draws from other conceptual sources, notably Fred Wilson.Pace Galley represents Wilson, who shows up frequently in the early stages of “Picasso Baby.”  The Bronx born Wilson, a sculptor by training, came to prominence in the late 1980s with his installation “Room with a View” and later “Mining the Museum” in which he used the Maryland Historical Society’s collections to highlight a history of enslavement in the United States.  Much of Wilson’s art in recent years has literally been about re-purposing museum spaces.  As Kellie Jones writes of Wilson in her book EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art, “he began to blur the lines between curator and artist and move toward an art practice that would take as its central force the explosion of antediluvian museum frameworks…Wilson addressed not only viewers but also people working inside such cultural institutions.” (13)  True to Hip-Hop’s signature conceit, Jay Z is trying to alter the space.

As Nasher Museum curator Trevor Schoonmaker notes of Wilson’s presence in the “Picasso Baby” film short, “No one would bat an eye if say, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) and Fred were in the same room. Nor Kehinde and Jay-Z (which of course we just saw)., but Fred and Jay Z? And while Pace Gallery does represent Fred, Jay-Z and his video editor/director clearly strategically highlighted Fred Wilson at the beginning, middle and end of the video. Many artists are more famous than Fred, but few are more respected for the integrity of their critical work. Purely strategic association.” Schoonmaker adds,  “it's a brilliant move for [Jay Z] to align himself with a group of socially conscious and politically dedicated visual artists. Not to mention the editing makes them look like any other fans of his.”
One of the difficult realities when a celebrity of Jay Z’s status inhabits such an elite space—even as he duly acknowledges Black working artists who are perhaps equally famous in their own realms—is that it can overshadow those artists who have been…doing the work.  Such might be the case with Atlanta-based artist Fahamu Pecou, whose recent installation All Dat Glitters Aint Goals —a visual meditation on the relationship between Hip-Hop and Black Masculinity—literally brings those images to life via a series of music videosand recordings.  As Pecou tells Creative Loafing’s Rodney Carmichael, “So this first body of work is All Dat Glitters Aint Goals, and it's really kind of playing with the perception and oftentimes the constructs that you see these rappers have, which are not really indicative of who they truly are. These are characters that they create to sell records. But to people on the outside looking in, there's no suspension of disbelief.” 
Though their level of execution is different—Pecou is a working visual artist has been fighting the good fight to have a presence in these spaces his whole career, while Jay Z is a pop star (with artistic sensibilities) whose social capital allows him to ”buy” himself into these spaces—their commitment to transforming the space is what aligns them.  When you see Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film, you see a room full of people that you might not expect to see at an art gallery—some of them even famous like Taraji P. Henson or Rosie Perez or Wale. 
What makes Jay Z’s intervention here important, is not the art per se, but the people he can bring to the space.  This is not lost of Pecou: “Regardless of where in the world I do an exhibition, there generally tends to be anywhere from a dozen to a half a dozen people who come in and are like, 'Man I never been in an art gallery before. I didn't know this was art; I get this." I get that on a very small level every time I do a project so I've been trying to figure out ways to create more meaningful, impactful engagements for people who don't necessarily frequent the art gallery, but can appreciate this and have a dialogue about this and really get something from it.”
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Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University and the author of several books, including the recent  Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities  (NYU Press).  This fall Neal will be a Fellow at the Hiphop Archives at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Follow him on Twitter: @NewBlackMan