…the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”
[…]
His political maturation prompted him to connect the U.S. war in Vietnam to the deteriorating conditions in U.S. cities, and of even more consequence, it prompted him to search for more effective tactics in confronting the legal menace of segregation in the North and the attendant crises: slum conditions, unemployment, and police brutality.
Within this context, King began to publicly articulate an anticapitalist analysis of the United States that put him in sync with rising critiques from the global revolutionary left of market-based economies. Despite the “affluence” of the United States, it was, nevertheless, wracked by poverty and entrenched in an endless war. King masterfully tore down the wall that the political and economic establishments used to separate domestic policies from foreign policies.
JB: My effort in this book is to try to shift the debate on nonviolence from an exclusively moral framework to a social and political one that is informed by ethics. The question of what you would do as an individual in this situation returns me to the moral framework. Of course, sometimes we function precisely in that way and ask: what do I do?
My answer is twofold: On the one hand, I would say that there are enormously forceful and aggressive forms of nonviolence that can be used to oppose state violence and police violence. It can be used to sort or undermine the capacities of violent institutions or violent individuals. I am in favour of that. I do not understand nonviolence as passive. I do not understand it as peaceable. I do not believe it emerges from some internal place of equanimity. Nonviolence can be raging and in fact it might be defined as a way of cultivating or redirecting rage in such a way that it does not reproduce the violence it opposes.
VIDEO CREDITS Director: Stephan Gray / www.StephanGray.com Video Production House: Gray Matter Productions Video Producer: Zack Tupper Editor: Stephan Gray VFX by: Traver Hoar, David Godwin, Joe Garber Colored by: Joel Voelker
Henry Taylor, Haitian working (washing my window) not begging, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 72 x 3 inches https://blumandpoe.com/exhibitions/henry_taylor9Henry Taylor, Don’t hate Haitians 2, 2016 Acrylic on canvas 19 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches https://blumandpoe.com/exhibitions/henry_taylor9Henry Taylor May You Live In Interesting Times La Biennale di Venezia, Venice Arsenale, May 11, 2019 – Nov 22, 2019Henry Taylor, Portrait of Glenn Ligon, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 84 x 72 inches
Henry Taylor’s Promiscuous Painting – The California artist’s subjects are drawn from wildly divergent walks of life—the famous and the down-and-out, the sane and the mad, the rich and the poor. By Zadie Smith, July 23, 2018 (New Yorker). (Also, at Ursula).
Beer with a Painter, LA Edition: Henry Taylor by Jennifer Samet June 27, 2015 (Hyperallergic).
JS:And what is the story of the painting of the couple — the guy with an erection?
HT: I had a really good friend at Cal Arts named Richard Ocampo. He had a stroke when he was 28 years old and was paralyzed from the head down. But he was so positive. His wife said to me, “He can still fuck.” I said, “Right on.” One day I was making a painting of him and that’s what happened with the painting. He was a badass dude.
Henry Taylor, “Untitled” (2015), installation, dimensions variable, originally commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio (photo by Mark Menjivar)Henry Taylor, “Untitled” (2015), installation, dimensions variable, originally commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio (photo by Mark Menjivar)
What is the narrative of your exhibition? When I came here I hadn’t visited in years, but my grandparents are from Texas and my family still has property in east Texas. Being here conjured up so many memories from the past. My grandfather was shot and killed in 1933 and my nine-year-old father had to help my grandmother pick up his body and move it in a wagon. My dad didn’t talk about his father unless he was drinking and on occasion he would call me up saying “They shot my dad, they shot my dad!,” which became the title of the show. I thought of my dad as a strong man, so these calls were a 180-degree shift in my perception of him.
I originally wanted to make a video during my residency to take advantage of the opportunity I was given. And while that didn’t happen, the paintings became a storyboard for the narrative I would have shown in a video.
On the evening of the opening, a performance collaboratively conceived by Taylor and close friend, Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph, will take place in the third gallery. This staging will coincide with an installation of a related film project created by Joseph and inspired by Taylor’s encounter with reggae legend Bob Marley.
Wizard of the Upper Amazon, Kahlil Joseph
Artifact of memory. Recount, encounters…
In 1979, Henry Taylor, barely twenty years old, found himself backstage of the Santa Barbara County Bowl after a Bob Marley concert. Whether happenstance or divine intervention, Henry stumbled into room that was lined with Rastafarians from Kingston, Jamaica, in various states of meditation, smoking, and vibing, with a sole white woman rolling joints in the corner. The scene hovered somewhere between sacred and surreal. Among the men, sitting with his eyes closed, was Bob Marley himself. Henry sat down next to Marley and waited some twenty minutes for him to open his eyes, all the while, searching for what he might have the courage to say to him. Henry spoke to Marley for what felt like an hour and the experience of doing so has stayed with him, decades later. Marley, global music icon, a symbol of peace and spirituality in Jamaica and beyond, died two years after this encounter.
