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REVOLUTIONARY ROAD As Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party Emory Douglas created some of the movement’s most iconic imagery, harnessing the power of art to communicate ideas. He talks to Neil Cooper about his political and artistic journey
‘In Revolution one wins, or one dies.’ When this slogan appeared aloft Emory Douglas’ image of a couple of beret-clad African-American guerrillas on a big-screen back-drop at major concert halls around the world, it was a far cry from the roots of Douglas’ work 30 years before. Then, such visual provocations were on the front-line of the American Black Power movement via the pages of The Black Panther Party’s weekly newspaper, which regularly sold more than 250,000 copies.
In the current climate of born-again activism, the archive of Douglas’ newspaper images, collages, posters and lithographs that visits GI is especially pertinent. Fusing the iconic immediacy of poster art with a loaded polemical intent, the images by the Black Panthers’ Minister of Culture up until the party’s demise in 1980 are a living record of one of the most turbulent times of American history that neither preaches nor patronises.
‘To me it’s about sharing the ideals,’ says Douglas
today. ‘It’s about getting information out there. Art is something people observe and learn through, whether it’s subliminal or very provocative. It’s communication. Once you understand that, you can learn to get your message across in a broader way. I see some young artists trying to do that, but it looks coded. If you learn that it’s about communication, art can become a profound tool for change.’ The man dubbed by critic Colette Gaiter as the Norman Rockwell of the ghetto fell in with the Panthers while making props for plays by radical black writer LeRoi Jones, (who would later change his name to Amiri Baraka), who was presenting his work in San Francisco campuses, community centres and shop-front spaces. After attending a meeting he’d
designed the poster for, Douglas visited the Panther- patronised political/cultural centre The Black House, where the likes of Jones and the Art Ensemble of Chicago were regulars. Here he found Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver poring over the first issue of the party’s rather dry-looking tabloid weekly, and told him he could make it look better. It was the beginning of a great, if stormy, adventure. ‘We were in coalition politics,’ says Douglas. ‘We weren’t in isolation. We had solidarity with groups in Vietnam and Korea. In America the Latinos formed the Brown Berets inspired by us, and there were other groups. That whole period changed how the dialogue in this country worked, with young people beginning to define things for themselves.’
After four decades working on socially and politically aware community-based projects, it was only in 2007 that the world rediscovered Douglas via the publication of Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas. The concerts, featuring the likes of proto-Rap street-gurus The Last Poets, latter-day hip hop troupe The Roots and free- jazz saxophonist David Murray, were a form of pop-cultural entryism rather than what Tom Wolfe dubbed in a famous 1970 essay ‘radical chic’.
Similarly, Douglas quite correctly points out that mainstream exposure of his work in museums is down to ‘open-minded people who open the work up to a new audience, where in the past it would’ve been black-listed, and that’s a plus. The pictures are fine in themselves, but once you get the history behind them, you see it’s not just art, but art with a meaning.’
Emory Douglas: Seize the Time, Kendall Koppe, Glasgow, Fri 20 Apr–Mon 7 May.
‘IF YOU LEARN THAT IT’S ABOUT
COMMUNICATION, ART CAN BECOME A
PROFOUND TOOL
FOR CHANGE’
Visual Art
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST Talitha Kotzé looks at the practice of photographer Wolfgang Tillmans
People have been making pictures for thousands of years, and 150 years ago the photographic process was added to that vocabulary. German- born, London-based artist Wolfgang Tillmans makes no distinction between a photograph and a painting, but he chooses photography to create his pictures and sees this medium as having a closer connection to the reality of the world.
In his exhibition at the Common Guild viewers will be presented with works from the Arts Council’s collection alongside a series of new works selected by the artist himself. As the youngest artist and first photographer to win the Turner prize in 2000, Tillmans started his career as a documentarian of his generation – especially that of the London club and gay scenes. Today he is known for his intimate portraits within manifold social landscapes as well as the way he references other image making and printing methods. He also pioneered a type of exhibition style that acknowledges the physical quality of the photograph by displaying these in a non-linear pattern, often unframed and instead pinned or taped to the gallery wall. Although this display method injects a temporariness that suits his scenes of everyday social situations, his classic, observing, and self implicating eye converts images of ubiquitous debris, and traces of human fragility, into iconic historical reference points.
Tillmans’ own selection of new works from his series ‘Onion’ and ‘Headlights’ ranges widely in both size and subject, and his exhibition guarantees to showcase the breadth of his artistic output. ■ Wolfgang Tillmans, Common Guild, Glasgow, Fri 20 Apr–Sat 23 Jun.
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