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Micahel Ray Charles: The Property of...
Jonathan Bober: Renaissance (and Baroque) Man

Of sacks and race

"The Property of . . ."

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman Arts Writer
April 12, 2003

It's no coincidence that Michael Ray Charles is mounting an installation about basketball just as the NCAA Final Four has wrapped up.

"It was strategic," the 36-year-old artist explains. Last summer, when gallery owner David Berman approached him about hosting an exhibition, Charles knew that the basketball buzz of early April would electrify an artwork that poses tough questions about race and professional sports.

Charles knows full well the power of timing and buzz and image. For the past decade, the Louisiana native and University of Texas art professor has culled racist, stereotypical images of African Americans -- Aunt Jemima, Sambo, black-face minstrel performers -- and transformed them into confrontational works of art. Most of his paintings look like advertisements or magazine covers or vaudeville-like posters -- artificially aged so that they look like relics of vintage pop culture.

In "100 A.J.," Aunt Jemima coyly holds down her skirt as it blows up around her -- just like that iconic image of Marilyn Monroe in "The Seven Year Itch." In "Beware," a shirtless, shoeless black child with cartoonishly huge red lips and white gloves dances and whistles. Then there's the Liberty Bros. Permanent Daily Circus series he started in the mid-'90s -- paintings that resemble circus broadsides for a fictitious troupe. Among them is an image of a rubber-lipped child driving a watermelon car.

"The past is always present," says Charles. It's a maxim he believes in so strongly that for a long time he had the phrase emblazoned on the wall of his studio in his far North Austin home.

To be sure, Charles' complex artistic tactics have brought him a lot of fame. Soon after he finished graduate school in 1993, Charles' provocative paintings catapulted him almost immediately into the upper echelons of the international contemporary art world, and he has stayed there. Charles has had a string of successful solo shows at influential galleries -- some of which sold out -- and prestigious arts venues in New York and Europe. His works show up in important museum exhibits. His paintings sell for $25,000 or more, his sculptures up to $75,000.

"Michael's ongoing project of creating a space and context for a discussion of racism make him an undeniably important artist," says Don Bacigalupi, the director of the San Diego Museum of Art, who organized a traveling retrospective of Charles' paintings in 1997 that showed at the Austin Museum of Art.

That show at AMOA was the last solo exhibit Charles had in Austin. And while in the past few years he has been shifting from painting to creating sculpture and site-specific installations, he's never created an installation here. It's not surprising, then, that when "The Property of . . ." opened Thursday at D. Berman Gallery, some 250 people thronged the high-ceilinged space and spilled out onto the sidewalk in front. The mood was celebratory, even a little breathless -- a homecoming of sorts for an Austin artist whose international career has kept his work far from Austin.

Despite the popularity in his hometown and around the world, Charles' paintings have also brought him a lot of flak from some who would just as soon have those racist images remain in the past. And he's not the only African American artist whose work has been in the hot seat.

Kara Walker, who crafts huge silhouette wall cutouts of stereotypical plantation scenes, came under attack after winning the MacArthur "genius" grant in 1997. Specifically, African American artist Betye Saar, who is in her mid-70s, started a public campaign against Walker's work, calling it "young and foolish." Saar also took aim at Charles.

"Today there are young black artists such as Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles who claim to be political because they satirize the most cruelly racist images of black people," Saar told an interviewer at the time. "Anyone can do what they like as an artist . . . (but) these two artists are benefiting from work that's not funny, not satirical, not ironic -- it's a form of betrayal."

It's the kind of criticism that vexes Charles. "It bothers me that my work bothers some black people," he says with long sigh. "But I'm challenging the idea of what black identity is by utilizing the very language of (racial prejudice) to critique the historical language of (racial prejudice). I make honorable art -- it's not malicious."

Then there was that collaboration with Spike Lee. A few years ago, Charles served as an artistic adviser for Lee's film "Bamboozled," helping to create the film's promotional images, which featured a smiling black child eating watermelon. African American activists complained; The New York Times refused to run the ad. Nowadays, Charles offers a measured response to the controversy: "One would think that if The New York Times runs 'All the news that's fit to print' they would have understood the goals and objectives of the film."

Plenty of people do understand the gist of Charles' work. "I think some of the discomfort that comes from viewing Michael's work is the way in which it forces us to confront the legacy of racist ideologies," says Bacigalupi. "Simply because the kind of racist pop culture images (that Michael uses in his art) might now be invisible in our current culture, doesn't mean that the ideologies they represent aren't still there. Michael's work forces (the viewer) toward a further level of self-examination, and that's unsettling."

A basketball walk-on

Though he's not critically shy, the bespectacled father of three sons is nevertheless reserved and soft-spoken at first, and admits that he's sometimes nervous about being interviewed.

"(Interviewers) always seem to be interested in what I eat or what kind of car I drive," he says softly with a smirk as he sits at a shady table outside the Dog & Duck Pub on a recent Sunday afternoon. Charles is an extraordinarily busy man, and he's got just enough time between an hourlong trip to Home Depot to pick up hardware for the installation and a long night in his studio for an interview, though a constantly ringing cell phone interrupts.

Indeed, in talking to Charles, you get a sense that he is in a constant, progressive dialogue with himself, that his thoughts and ideas are continuously developing; he just happens to share them out loud when he talks and paints. And people hear him.

"Despite his shy personal manner, Michael is not shy about what he wants his artwork to express," says Kenneth J. Hale, professor of art and chairman of UT's art department. "He's not afraid of going straight for the jugular, but he's still doing it in a sensitive way. He's constantly trying to teach by raising difficult issues."

Charles says his work "is very much about communication and images."

"I'm interested in how words and images are manipulated -- how meaning shifts over time -- by the mass culture. It's something I've been concerned with for a very long time."

The swirl of media images and marketing concepts is something Charles has studied closely. Charles majored in advertising at McNeese State University, with the hope of channeling his lifelong interest in art (he was always a compulsive sketcher) into a viable career. After all, his lifelong love of basketball hadn't panned out. "I was a walk-on at McNeese," says Charles, who easily towers past 6 feet. "I might have been able to play in the European leagues after college, but there was this very real reality of having to make a living, and I could see the writing on the wall," he says, laughing.

A professional career in basketball wasn't in the cards for Charles. Neither, it turned out, was an advertising career.

Graduating from McNeese in the depths of the '80s recession, Charles had no luck landing a job in the advertising and public relations fields in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. So he enrolled in the graduate fine arts program at the University of Houston -- the only African American graduate art student at the time and only the second to receive an MFA. Soon after he graduated in 1993, UT came calling, and he and his wife, Renee, moved to Austin. After all, the art world can be fickle; tenure is forever.

Players and profits

One side of the red velvet stage curtain is held back by a plain twine rope. Part basketball court, part jazz club and part vaudeville tent, "The Property of . . .," is a three-dimensional, multisensory critique of how our culture transforms African American basketball players into products, marketing them -- their identity, their talents -- for a profit. And as in his paintings, Charles doesn't mince matters.

Stepping through the curtain that is reminiscent of a circus tent, visitors to "The Property of . . ." find themselves on a worn wooden floor with a basketball court center circle painted on it. At the far end hangs an old window positioned like a backboard -- "a window of opportunity to reach another realm of being," explains Charles. Hanging from the ceiling are burlap coffee sacks cut like basketball jerseys, some with numbers painted on, some with startling images like a grinning child standing on a basketball or a smiling Sambo. One jersey sports the words "Black Art." More burlap jerseys are stuffed with cotton and lay against the walls. And some are joined together so that they are life-size and hang eerily from the ceiling. A baby grand piano sits at center court. From hidden speakers, the strains of Etta James, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald waft through the space.

These are pretty direct images, according to Charles. As he explains it, the coffee industry is known for its exploitation of labor (much like the sports and entertainment industries). Also, teams market cheap sports clothes at an enormous profit to youths filled with hoop dreams, hence the worn burlap. And then there's the entertainment industry. Like sports, it is largely run by whites who benefit from African American performers: Exhausted bodies, enormous profits, exploited African American talent, the allure of celebrity. And the hanging body-size burlap jerseys are a direct reference to the history of lynchings.

"We're a very visual culture," says Charles. "But the masses aren't out there deconstructing those images."

What we should see, Charles maintains, is that black athletes are turned into commodities -- falsely promised fame and fortune by the entertainment and sports industries but then used as mere products.

As Charles explained in an interview a few years ago, "We have too many African American youths who want to grow up and go into basketball. . . . This is the only thing that America is telling them they can do and do well."

S. Craig Watkins, professor of sociology, African American studies and radio-television-film at UT, notes that, thanks to the huge expansion of television coverage, professional sports spiked in popularity in this country in the '60s and '70s -- the very same time the black consciousness movement was gaining steam.

"Suddenly, we saw the black athlete in a much more visible and prominent way," says Watkins. "And to the extent that that became the prevailing image of a successful African American, it's created this false illusion that all the fame and fortune that comes with being a professional athlete is easily attainable. We have had two, three generations now of African American youths who have developed a naive devotion to athletic prowess (rather than academic prowess)."

The synergy of hip-hop culture and basketball has made this allure even more powerful, notes Watkins, who is a friend of Charles. "Most of the (NBA) is now made of players of what might be called the hip-hop generation, and that adds even more of an aura of credibility to the illusion that success, fame and celebrity can be easily achieved for African American youth."

Charles' biting artistic critique doesn't interfere with his passion for the game. "I love the sport," he says, but he nevertheless admits he didn't watch the final game of NCAA Final Four because his loyalty to the Longhorns -- and a busy schedule -- left him too disappointed. "I'm not angry at the people -- the players -- who participate," he says. "They don't construct the image that they promote -- It's constructed for them."

And that's a furious brew of opportunity and exploitation. But then for Charles, tackling the tough stuff in a most direct and uncompromising way is an obligation. "(The problem) is larger than who we are all," he says. "But we are all responsible for questioning it."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699

Michael Ray Charles: "The Property Of…"
April 10 - May 17
d berman gallery

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Curator Jonathan Bober finds the world's great art a home in Austin

Renaissance (and Baroque) Man

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
April 4, 2003

"I'm a pig in deep mud," grins the tall, slender man in the upstairs gallery of the Art Building on the UT-Austin campus. The remark sounds a little incongruous in such a place, especially coming from such a refined figure, and yet given his position -- curator of prints, drawings, and European paintings at UT-Austin's Blanton Museum of Art for the past 16 years -- you can see why Jonathan Bober says it.

This is a man whose passion is art, and here he is in the midst of a glorious bounty of it. In front of him are masterful engravings by Dutch artists of the 16th century; on adjacent walls are equally expert etchings from France and Italy in the same period; behind him hang a dozen etchings from 17th- and 18th-century France and England; and across the gallery hang etchings and engravings by European artists of the last two centuries, and to reach them, one must pass by glorious paintings and drawings from the richest periods of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. The entire floor is luxuriant in portraits of gods, heroes, muses, peasants, saints, prophets, images drawn from Scripture, scenes from Greek and Roman mythology, scenes from village life, landscapes and livestock, rendered by the likes of Peter Paul Rubens, Albrecht Dürer, Giorgio Ghisi, Simon Vouet, Schiavone, Guercino, Picasso. Here is Jonathan Bober, able to ... well, let's say it, wallow in all this visual splendor, the space currently exhibiting 100 prints and 40 paintings spanning four full centuries of European art with heart-stopping breadth and artistic quality, including what Bober calls the "canonical masters" in the Western cultural tradition. And he can not only take pleasure in these artistic treasures; Bober can take pride in the fact that he is responsible for them being in Austin.

Without Jonathan Bober, two of the cornerstones of the Blanton Museum of Arts' holdings -- the Suida-Manning Collection of Renaissance and Baroque art, comprising some 250 paintings, 400 drawings, and 20 sculptures; and the 3,000 prints of the recently acquired Leo Steinberg Collection -- might not be here.

Right Man, Right Place, Right Time

Bober might demur on such a point. When he tells the story of these major acquisitions, he makes a point of including the names of others who played a significant role: the "extraordinarily generous" donors who "get the big vision" when it comes to expanding the collections and UT-Austin President Larry Faulkner, who saw the unique value of the Suida-Manning and Steinberg collections for the museum, for the campus, and for Austin.

Bober's point is well taken. Treasures of the scale of the Steinberg Collection (an estimated value of $3.5 million) and certainly the Suida-Manning Collection (more like $35 million) aren't typically secured by a single individual, especially an employee at a state university, even if the state is Texas. Support must be garnered from a number of key people within the institution, and private support is critical, which in a multimillion-dollar deal these days means multiple donors.

Still, even when he downplays his own contributions, it is clear that Bober was pivotal in these particular accessions. He was the right man; that is, he had the eye to appreciate what was on the table, the presence of mind to call the university's attention to it, and the persuasive skill to argue the case that they could be invaluable additions to the university's holdings, despite the exorbitant cost. And he was in the right place at the right time.

Case in point: It's 1994, and Blanton Director Jessie Otto Hite takes a call from a gentleman in the gallery. He tells her that he's a collector of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, so she invites him to her office. But as his name isn't familiar to her, she uses the time before he arrives to call Jonathan Bober and see if he knows a Robert Manning. Bober knows. Bober really knows. When he was in graduate school at Harvard, he had actually visited Manning's home in Forest Hills, N.Y., where every wall -- we're talking hallways, living room, dining room, bedrooms, and powder room -- was covered floor to ceiling with spectacular artworks from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Robert Manning and his wife Bertina, working from a collection started by her father, the scholar and art historian William Suida, had assembled one of the most valuable private collections in the world.

It turned out that Bertina Manning had died two years earlier, and now Robert Manning was beginning to look for another home for their collection. As a native of Mart, Texas, he was hopeful of finding one in his home state. The possibility of acquiring this $35 million treasure seemed, to Bober, "utterly implausible," even for a school with pockets as deep as UT's. But Hite and Bober kept in touch with Manning, paying him a visit in Forest Hills a few months later and seeing the collection firsthand.

Here and in subsequent visits, Manning made clear that he wasn't about to hand this collection over to just anyone. He had a deep connection to these works and to the fact that his life and the life of his spouse and the life of her father had been devoted to the assemblage of these works into a collection. Here was his grand achievement, and any institution that wanted it would have to prove itself worthy, would have to show that it truly appreciated what it was and what it held.

Bober was the point man for the Blanton in this regard. He spent hours with Manning poring over the collection, work by work, discussing in intimate detail each piece's look, feel, subject matter, composition, technique, inspiration, influences, cultural contexts -- in short, any and every scholarly aspect of the work coupled with the sighs and superlatives of a die-hard fan. And when Manning died in 1996, before negotiations with UT were complete, he did the same with the Mannings' daughter, Alessandra Manning Dolnier, and her husband Kurt Dolnier. In her own way, Alessandra had an attachment to the collection as deep as her parents: She had grown up with its paintings and drawings in her home, and they might as well have been the siblings she never had. In Bober, she found someone she could trust with her "family." And the Dolniers offered UT the opportunity to purchase the collection. With Bober and Hite working feverishly to secure support from inside and outside the university, the arrangement went forward. The deal was sealed in 1998, and UT had Suida-Manning.

The Natural

You get a sense of how Bober swayed folks to support the Suida-Manning acquisition as you listen to him talk about a work of art. His unaffected enthusiasm is downright contagious. He'll start with the kind of general appreciation -- "a beautiful piece," "I love this" -- that makes him sound like any Joe off Main Street. But then he'll find details in, say, the contrast in the shadow and highlight of a figure or the gradation of color in the modeling of some fabric or the heaviness of a line under a thigh to give it weight that shows just how much he really sees, but also gets you seeing more than you ever thought you would. And the longer Bober talks -- which can be a considerable time; he says of himself, "I can go on like a fundamentalist preacher" -- the more his enthusiasm turns to ardor and an ardor for not only the painting or drawing or print but for the creator of it and the society that the creator lived in and the artists and cultures that came before and after, right up to our time today. In a few lines on a piece of paper, he can give you the world.

Bober comes by his love of art naturally. You could even say it is in his genes. His mother, Phyllis Pray Bober, was an archaeologist, a scholar of Renaissance art and architecture, as well as a scholar in culinary history. His father, Harry Bober, was trained as an artist but became an art historian specializing in medievalist works. Jonathan Bober describes them as "old-time bohemians" who wouldn't join the white flight out of the Bronx, so he grew up in a big house in the heart of New York, surrounded by art and playing great basketball.

Despite his parents' vocations, he was not force-fed culture as a child. Their home was filled with objects from which "there was no aesthetic distance," Bober says. "If I took an interest in something it would be in my hands, I'd be handling it." And what he was told about it wouldn't be "a pedantic explanation; it would be: Feel, think, understand." Harry Bober insisted that his sons "not be dragged to art museums; his attitude was that if my brother and I were going to come to art, it would have to be on our own terms. The deck was stacked against us, and if we were dragged to it, given the environment we were raised in and our parents' own concerns, it was set up for us to flee and reject it." The strategy worked. Jonathan's brother David made a career of interior renovation and custom carpentry, and developed a passion for collecting Japanese art and objects. Jonathan followed his parents into art history, studying at Harvard, interning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery, spending two years as a Kress Foundation Fellow in Milan before starting as assistant curator of prints at the Fogg Art Museum (where he met art historian and print collector Leo Steinberg for the first time).

In trying to articulate what he is drawn to in art, Bober relates it to "the psychology of a collector." That is, he says, "I commune with these things and have spent however many years trying to understand the ways in which they communicate, and I recognize so many and identify with them so deeply, it becomes as any art does: a kind of surrogate or metaphoric self."

Bober aligns this idea with his pathological shyness about public speaking. "I was sick from public assembly any time my class had to sing," going so far as to fake it with "the thermometer on the light bulb, the old classic." But he learned that if he was talking about something, he was OK, and with works of art, he says, "It's not that they speak for me, it's that I speak with them. In public, I'm sharing that dialogue. I'm sharing what I can of how I commune with it."

Evenings With Leo

Perhaps it was Bober's collector psychology that made him seem a kindred spirit to Leo Steinberg when they met the second time. This was in 1995, when Steinberg had come to Austin for a visiting professorship. One Saturday Bober was able to bring the scholar into the Blanton's print room and show him part of the museum's collection: "the conventionally great stuff," Bober says, "but also the offbeat stuff and things I was especially proud of, that I valued especially." As happened with Manning, Steinberg was struck with Bober's knowledge, taste, and passion. But here Bober was even closer to the collector's heart since among his special interests were -- yes! -- French and Italian prints made before 1800.

This was more than a shared taste in style and period. Bober felt, as Steinberg had when he began his collection in the 1960s, that prints were significant, that they played a critical role in the dissemination of cultural ideas and iconography. (See "Prince of Prints.") As Bober will tell you, passionately, about prints: "Until photography, this is it. This is how the Western world knows its imagery. And as I love telling students, probably 80% of the imagery in the West before photography is prints. You need to know the Sistine Ceiling, but know that for every one Sistine Ceiling, there are hundreds of iterations and prints, and this is how the world knew it."

A relationship was founded. Having admired the Blanton collection's mix of masterpieces, canonical work, more eccentric work, and its density in works by the same artist and in the same period (so similar to his own collection), Steinberg told Bober, "You must come see my collection." Though he was flattered just by the invitation, Bober accepted, and from 1995 on, whenever Bober visited New York -- four to six times a year -- he would go see Steinberg in his two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. According to Bober, all of Steinberg's 3,200 prints lived in this small space, in cabinets, in two closets, and under his bed, with only 20 to 30 framed and hanging on the walls.

The typical visit involved Bober dropping by between 6 and 7 in the evening, at which time the two would chat and have a sip of sherry or wine. Then they would order out, usually Japanese. Then they'd start looking at prints. They would start with a school of artist or a period of time or medium, and then, as Bober says, "free associate." "It's the nature of the collection the way he put it together. Incredibly dense with internal cross-references, visual cross-references." This "almost orgiastic looking at prints" would go on until about 1 or 2 in the morning.

From these visits, Bober experienced firsthand this scholar's staggering intellect, his refined eye, his exceptional sensitivity. "There are the collectors who simply accumulate, and then there are the ones who live it deeply," Bober says. "With Leo, the extraordinary thing -- and you never get away from it, whether you're reading his writings or you're looking at his prints or you're talking to him about politics -- is the combination of the mind and the eye and the capacity of language. Leo has such a mind that beyond the ostensible topic and the conventional research he's constantly getting at the deeper structures of things. It's powerful; it's inspiring; it's intimidating to be around Leo for any length of time."

After a year or two, Steinberg felt sufficient trust in and respect for Bober and the Blanton that he began to give the museum prints from his collection and came to gentleman's agreements with the museum over wholesale prices for other prints he was willing to sell. The Blanton obtained some 300 prints from Steinberg, half in purchases, half as gifts.

Eventually, Bober started asking, "Leo have you thought about what you're going to do with the collection?" Steinberg replied that he had the idea of giving others the same pleasure from the prints that he had; they're fish, you throw them back to the sea. Bober began to float the idea of the Blanton acquiring the entire collection, and after some back and forth, a deal was struck and the prints were moved to Austin in 2002.

Now, Steinberg is in the position of coming to visit Bober to see prints. As a rule, Steinberg doesn't travel, but as the first show of prints from the collection was being put together, says Bober, Steinberg became more and more curious. "At every stage, he wanted to know, 'Which are you pulling?' The Blanton extended an invitation to him to come down and see his collection on display, and eventually he accepted. This week, Steinberg pays his long-awaited visit, during which he'll address the topic "What I Like About Prints" in a public lecture on April 10 at the LBJ Library.

Needless to say, Bober is pleased to have Steinberg here. He takes pride in this accomplishment, as he does in the acquisitions of the Suida-Manning and Steinberg collections. "If I were hit by a truck tomorrow, I've done something big and consequential for this institution. It's very substantial and will bless this city that I've loved being in. It will be part of its landscape, a part of its historical landscape and its cultural landscape" for a long time to come.

But there's no truck on the horizon. Bober expects to be around for a long time and aims to show that "the significant collection is not just a one shot, not just a phenomenon; it's part of a pattern of what we can do when circumstances are most favorable. It's the kind of principle that Harry Ransom pursued and that succeeded brilliantly, making [his Humanities Research Center] one of the absolute jewels, a beacon for bibliomanes and scholars of literary material. We move toward becoming that for the visual arts."

He smiles the smile of a pig in deep mud. "There are more collections to come."

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