ON THE CONTEMPLATION OF BEAUTY...

Painting by Alma Thomas, American School

The black experience has been one, admittedly with more than its share of tragedy, but as we move into the 21^st century the increasing outcry of Black men will not be to share their stories of pain and struggle only but to express their exaltation of “Beauty” to be counted among the ranks of intellectuals in their own right.  By tradition a Black man had always to work… and work he did… but when he did he was always expected to labor like a slave although he had freed himself from bonds… The struggle to sustain self and family via utilitarian means of employ had condemned this man to the rut of survival… no room was left for creativity or self-expression… it was deemed to be superfluous, a thing for dilettantes and was not added to cache of manly pursuits expected of or to be expected by Black men in America…  His worldly options were presented as those of James, the father of the mid 1970’s series “Good Times”.  Soon he would rise to George Jefferson status still working too hard and too long to pursue art as a career and passion but now able to provide the means by which his children might escape the labor sentence of the great American automaton with the possibility that they might be able to live as artists in their own right or have time at least to devote to artistic pursuits…  On close examination of 1970’s popular media it appears that only Chicken George, an aged slave, retired and no longer viable to the plantation, was fully able to realize his artistic manifest destiny… but he did so seemingly without any compensation at the will of his master…  Surely there was no Decca or Def Jam Productions to liberate this Antebellum musician circa 1790.   Within the last century economic empowerment has allowed Black men to pursue the one thing held so far away from their grasp…  The contemplation of sheer beauty.  And for once, there is a growing field of patronage allowing them not only to live their dreams but to make them sustainable…

Close To Trees by Sam Gilliam American School

Increased economic and intellectual success will have the effect of adding gold and the broad spectrum of colours to the grey-scale of the Black Experience, not that it hasn’t  been celebrated heretofore by countless artisans and aesthetes of the past and present… it is just that the pure contemplation of beauty has yet to become, in my opinion as an artist, a viable and sustainable role for Black men in America save a few… and to that end I would greatly desire to see a veritable revolution of Black men pursuing careers as artists… whether it be painting, sculpture, poetry, prose or otherwise, to include the fields of engineer-inventor, scientist-inventor, and culinary artist, the focus on production of a work of art, (functional or nonfunctional), as a product of pure intellect establishing the Black man as an “INTELLECTUAL”.  But such a cultural revolution in this capitalistic mecca requires patronage… so simultaneously Black people must recognize the need to support the arts that edify their culture.

The Eclipse... Alma Thomas, American School

I have often said that it is the products, inventions and physical legacies of a civilization that make it stand out as a memorable episode of human effort and cooperation.  The monoliths of the Great Zimbabwe, Abu Simbel, Tiahuanaco or modern structures such as The Hoover Dam, The Eiffel Tower or the Suez Canal are indelible hallmarks that a great civilization was once there and great intellectual thought was focused on the realization of magnanimous ideals.  Furthermore, the art and literature of cultures long dead… forgotten… save for their visual gifts to humanity, the text of the ancient Egyptian Book of The Dead, the ancient Mayan Codex’s;’ Chilam Balam and Popol Vuh, the Benin Bronzes or the Caryatid Gate remind us that not only did humans exist in the past but they far exceeded daily subsistence… they left us tangible evidence of a complex society and its technology that did not merely subsist upon the tokens of creation already available to them… rather they expounded upon nature and in effect created technology and beauty from natures good example…

James Baldwin writing...

The Greeks are renowned for their tragic plays but juxtaposed against these was the creation of a fabulously artistic and beauty-conscious society.  The Egyptians were a sober culture seemingly o’er focused upon death and afterlife but through their contemplation of mortality came about one of the most exuberant and creative evolutions of art, literature, architecture, and technology… yes technology… a culture is not viable and is not sustainable, will not be remembered if it does not create technology… BROTHAS… let us ask ourselves if a crack-pipe is technology?  Or even better… if it was created by crack-heads at all?  What crack head was the glassblower who manufactured the pipe?  Did crack heads create crack?  Or were they merely the sad victims of a technological innovation to which they became enslaved?  What culture five thousand years from now, (allowing that humanity is still extant), will hallmark Black American culture because of its creation of a makeshift crack-pipe?  I digressed BROTHAS  to make a simple point.  The history of Black men in America has been otherwise replete with creative, innovators of art, music, theater, literature and technology and the momentum must be kept up in order for us to remain a viable segment of civilization… this, of course, means education and the pursuit of higher artistic goals rooted in intellectualism, the pursuit of knowledge and art or beauty for its own sake… Art for the sake of Art and Art for the sake of the advancement of human civilization…  it means a philosophical abandonment of the “Crack-Pipe” culture which has come to replace the one set in place by the fathers of ligitimate Black American culture…

Sam Gilliam American Painter and Sculptor, American School

If I did not make the connexion between the contemplation of beauty and the perpetuation of civilization itself then let me here make pause… if only to reiterate my argument…  The innate passion of man appears to be rooted in his inexorable pursuit of some lofty ideal of aesthetic perfection… In order to attain his goal mankind necessarily improves the world around him which he deems to be in a state of rusticity… having solved the mysteries of mere survival mankind may exalt himself to the “polishing” of himself and his environment via, the arts; literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, engineering, performance, and ultimately art for the sake of art… merely as an expression of his satisfaction with life in specific to say, “Ah! Yes! The world is beautiful”!  Not only has man created a thing of beauty but he has built the foundations of culture itself by creating tangible artifacts that are the practical and philosophic basis of civilization itself. 

Alma Thomas, American Painter  and one of the founders of The Washington Color School

Onaje Gumbs, Jass Musician/Composer

The twentieth century and the twenty-first have fully captured the anguish and the pain of that genre of man known as the Black American man… Also, it has captured him in his grandest expression of sheer unbridled beauty…

play on Ellington…

write on Baldwin…

paint on Gilliam… 

into infinity not oblivion…

The continuum of expression, of contemplation of pure beauty must continue and expand and become more and more complex as a form of expression… These recitals entreat all men and most assuredly Black American men to take time to contemplate beauty… and to create it…

John & Alice Coltrane

 FIN

Written by David Vollin on 7-7-12

George Lewis Ragtime Musician/Composer

Sam Gilliam, The American School