Down to The Crossroads: The Art of Alison Saar

Author(s): Judith Wilson

Source: Callaloo , Winter, 1991, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter, 1991), pp. 107-123
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2931444

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 DOWN TO THE CROSSROADS:
The Art of Alison Saar*

By Judith Wilson

I. Forging an Artistic Identity

I have no desire to make myself less than what I

am.... [W]hen you mix coffee and cream together,
you don't get cream."

-David Avalos'

... the art world's institutions have consistently

ignored how hybrid American artists have translated
the polymorphous process of their cross-cultural
experiences into visual evidence."

-John Yau2

As an art student in the late 1970s, Alison Saar came of age in a climate hostile to
the cool pieties of minimalist sculpture and postpainterly abstraction. At Los An-
geles's Otis Art Institute, where she received a master of fine arts degree in 1981,
"there were no traditional painters . . ., no one working in traditional forms at all."3
Initially, though, her own art involved a sort of compromise.
While she was inspired by the coloristic language of Albers and Rothko, Saar sym-
pathized with their metaphysical aims more than their focus on formal problems. In-
deed, her future emphasis on craft-that is to say, her stress on grittily self-evident
modes of fabrication as a means to evoke the art-making process as a revelatory strug-
gle with resistant materials-was foreshadowed by the use of handmade paper in
much of this student work. And though the resulting pieces were "mostly abstract,"
they frequently contained a found image -another sign of things to come.
Despite the persistence of her attraction to found materials and her concern with
the spiritual, Saar's break with this early semi-abstract, colorist mode was quick and
decisive. Always prolific, she had completed work for her graduate show several
months in advance, when a profound sense of dismay set in. Suddenly "sick of all
that," she abruptly switched to woodcarving, in an attempt "to make a piece that I
really wanted to own."
The result was a small, doll-like figure seated on a bright red chair, its pitch-colored

*This article was first published by Third Text, No. 10, Spring 1990, London. Reprinted by permission
of the author and publisher.

Callaloo 14.1 (1991) 107-123

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 _____ _ CALLALOO

torso and head crudely carved out of wood and its tubular legs embedded with chips
of blue-and-white glazed ceramic. Each leg consisted of two potsherd encrusted cyl-
inders -thigh and calf- strung on twine, like the West African glass beads they recall.4
At the center of the figure's chest, a rectangular opening had been gouged out and
painted white. But instead of the medicinal herbs and magical objects that fill similar
compartments in the famed nkisi figures made by the Bakongo people of Zaire, Saar
inserted slivers of broken glass.
In figurated Bakongo prototypes, the medicine-containing cavity is covered with a
piece of mirror or porcelain or brilliant white cowry shell. Having conducted extensive
research on Bakongo iconography, the distinguished historian of African and African-
American art, Robert Farris Thompson posits these items "may ... signify power-
the flash and arrest of the spirit."5 Unshielded and littered with broken glass, the
"medicine chest" region of Saar's sculpture suggests the utterly vitiated and vulner-
able state, the shattered soul, of the individual who has internalized racism.
Pushing even farther this eloquent conflation of things African with things Amer-
ican, the piece bore the chilling title Si j'etais blanc [If I Were White] -a reference to a
lament sung by Josephine Baker,6 the legendary U.S. black entertainer who functioned
as a chief fetish in the modern cult of "the primitive" that swept Europe between world
wars. Having written that "the black body in Paris of the twenties was an ideological
artifact," James Clifford also notes the intersection of opposing mythologies in the
figure of Baker. Thanks to her, in Clifford's words, "archaic Africa . .. came to Paris
by way of the future-that is, America."7 Thus, one could argue that in Si j'etais blanc,
Alison Saar visits the transcultural/transhistorical crossroads that is modernist prim-
itivism, in order to survey the paths that have led some blacks to a form of existential
heartbreak.
Fueled by the resonance of this piece, Saar swiftly carved another, then "trashed"
her previous body of work and turned out a completely new M.F.A. show, tapping a
vein of techniques and imagery she has continued to mine almost a decade later.
Within a year of receiving her degree, she was exhibiting professionally. Her solo
debut, in a June 1982 show at Los Angeles's Jan Baum Gallery, won measured praise
from L.A. Times critic William Wilson, who linked the young artist's penchant for
assemblage to her mother's example and hailed the daughter's "spontaneity and in-
ventive use of materials from colored glass to rusty tin."8 Two months later, a photo
of Alison Saar's nine-foot construction, Fear and Passion, accompanied a review in Arts
magazine of the L.A. group show in which it had appeared. A giant, bristling cutout,
this bright blue figure, made of bound sticks covered with paper pulp, was said to
contain African, Oceanic, and Amerindian-derived elements. The reviewer ascribed
to the piece "some of the most powerful neoexpressionist form around."9
In February 1983, Saar moved East to take up a year-long artist-in-residency at Man-
hattan's Studio Museum in Harlem. Increasingly, some of the genuine awkwardness
of the early figures was replaced by greater self-assurance. But the work nonetheless
retained a folkloric candor. Now too, she would sometimes cover parts of her wooden
figures with sheets of stamped tin that had once lined the ceilings of New York's in-
dustrial buildings. Or surround them with painted backdrops and toy props. Or
mount them on altar-like pedestals. At times, actors on Saar's mental stage might be

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 CALLALOO

rendered in giant drawings, or sewn onto modest-sized sequined flags, or painted in

low relief frescoes, or pieced together in multimedia assemblages akin to votive im-
ages.
Although her style had already consolidated itself by the time she reached New
York, the themes of this artist -who has described her previous life as "sheltered" -
would undergo marked change in response to the raw urban dramas she now wit-
nessed. Her 1984 Subway Preacher, for example, originated in a reality every bit as tragic
as the one suggested by Si j'6tais blanc. But instead of the earlier work's unmitigated
pathos, the new piece achieved an edgy emotional balance.
"Every morning when I used to go up to the Studio Museum, there was a fellow
who essentially was just begging in the subways," the artist has explained. "I would
give him money, but he would never look me in the eye. He just had this serene
dignity about him-like, you know, he had to do this to survive, but .. ." With a kind
of dead-on metonymic accuracy, Saar targeted the beggar's trenchcoat, rendering it
in brittle, begrimed sheets of embossed ceiling tin, which she then sliced open to reveal
a miniature altar. Thus, she gave form to her notion that this medicant's shabby garb
concealed "some sort of glory inside him."
This spiritual wealth vies with the beggar's obvious material deprivation, the two
elements laying equal claim to our attention. Apparently, the forced intimacy New
York imposes on nearly all its residents had toughened Saar's vision. Up close the
dispossessed look as morally complex as everyone else. Only distance permits the
luxury of pure contempt or unalloyed pity. The following year, in a Los Angeles solo
show entitled "Shamans, Saints and Sinners," the artist placed such insights stage
center.
Her cast of morally ambivalent and/or magically transcendent characters included
street hustlers with preternatural survival skills, tortured torch singers, athletic heroes
who double as sociopolitical pawns.10 It was a pantheon that combined historical gi-
ants like Joe Louis, literary creations like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and genuine
Afro-Caribbean deities like the love goddess Erzulie Freda. And with its use of such
elements as bottle tops and children's toys, and its appropriation of such modes as
Haiti's sequined vodun "flags" or Mexico's painted metal retablos, the show exemplified
the blend of secular and sacred, ancient and contemporary, pop and mandarin, fa-
miliar and foreign that authors like Ishmael Reed and David Jackson have labeled
"neo-hoodooism."11
Saar's eclectic approach to materials and irreverent leveling of thematic hierarchies
partly reflected her extensive " 'research into African art and black cultures.' "12 But
Mexico's rich array of popular artforms has also been a potent source of inspiration.
A 1985 artist-in-residency at New Mexico's Roswell Museum of Art provided easy
access to the vernacular splendors of life "south of the border." During a trip to the
Yucatan, for example, she was awed by a contemporary culture of scarcity in which
even the smallest cast-off would be cherished and ingeniously transformed into an
object of delight. Back on U.S. soil, her appreciation of this ability to invest the mun-
dane with a sense of the miraculous led to her first outdoor installation piece, Soul
Service Station. Located alongside a highway near Roswell, this concrete replica of one
of our car culture's most ubiquitous features was furnished with a beatific black at-

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 CALLALOO

tendant, whose presence signaled the artist's play on the multiple meanings of the
word "soul."
The six-month stay in New Mexico also brought a shift in size in Saar's work. While
there she carved her first life-size full-length figure, Sweet Daddy Goodlife (1985) and
her first bust-length pieces, Snake Charmer (1985) and Sapphire (1985). These works and
three enormous drawings appeared in a January 1986 solo show in New York, along
with a number of smaller objects-mostly icon-like frescoes and a few tiny figures.
Again, the cast of characters ranged from Afro-Caribbean deities through personifi-
cations of cultural cliches (the stoic Indian of Eloquent Algonquin or Sapphire, the com-
bative woman of color) to a range of inner city "sinners" and "saints." The show elic-
ited generally favorable response from critics like Peter Bushyeager, for whom Saar's
"wonderful sense of texture and deft use of materials" dispelled any "questions about
the legitimacy of [her] borrowings" from "various folk traditions."13 Yet some writers
tempered their praise with startling objections.
Having noted the sculptor's racial identity and dubbed her "a serious student of
black American culture and art history," Donald Kuspit, for example, went on to con-
demn Saar for "giving us a nostalgic look at something she has experienced only sec-
ondhand."14 Similarly smug in her naive assumptions about black identity and Saar's
relationship to it, Ellen Lee Klein charged the artist had "absorbed too much of the
image of black culture as perceived by white culture so that her recreated imagery
does not always directly reflect the black experience.'5 Such commentary unhappily
reminds one of the prevalence of a type of critical apartheid that labels black and other
artists of color "inauthentic" or "unoriginal" if they tap aesthetic sources beyond their
designated ethnic turf. Meanwhile, of course, it remains a white prerogative to raid
the aesthetic cookie jars of the world!16 A look at the personal and cultural sources
that have shaped the art of Alison Saar exposes the illogic of such misconceptions.

II. Family/Culture(s): The Crucible of the Self

"The key is what is within the artist. The artist can only
paint what she or he is about."

-Lee Krasner17

"If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn!"

-Charlie Parker18

Like many other artists' quests for creative identity, Alison Saar's arrival at a sig-
nature style involved a manifold return to individual and cultural roots. Indeed, given
her family background-an artist mother and an artist/conservator father-it hardly
seems surprising that her aesthetic origins would ultimately overshadow stylistic ten-
dencies planted in shallower, art school soil.

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 CALLALOO

An early attraction to the mystical is suggested by Saar's recollection that, at age six
or seven, she was sufficiently taken with "these real strange images of Christ in a tree"
executed by her father to swap him one of her own creations -probably an unfired
clay ashtray or something she now dismisses as similarly "dreadful" -for one of these
drawings. She also cites her Unitarian upbringing as a source of belief in a spirit-im-
bued world that was greatly stressed by both parents.
At the same time, art-making came as "second nature" to a child whose mother was
enrolled in a variety of graduate art, design, and film programs, and worked as a
costume and graphic designer during Saar's preschool through high school years. As
a result of her mother's printmaking activities, for example, Saar recalls she and her
two sisters were made to "do art just to keep us out of the etching acids and stuff like
that."
But family ties not only explain this artist's fascination with the spiritual and gave
her a head start in developing the motor, sense, and mental skills involved in pro-
ducing visual art. Evidently, what has been dubbed her "theatrical'19 bent also stems
from a combination of childhood experience, parental example, and genetic predis-
position. Saar's single figures powerfully encode character and suggest dramas, but
the artist longed to take things further20 and soon found a way to incorporate theatrical
space in her work; at the same time she instigated a spontaneous mode of audience
performance.
For a show entitled "Ritual and Myth in the Twenty-first Century," at Long Island's
Islip Museum of Art, she produced her first indoor installation, a multipart work re-
sembling a miniature golf course. Viewers were equipped with mock golf clubs, made
of lengths of wood with bits of urban asphalt attached, and could putt their way
through a series of holes and traps symbolizing the various obstacles faced by inner
city youth. Later that year, the fruits of Saar's fall residency at the District of Col-
umbia's leading alternate space, Washington Project for the Arts (WPA), went on view.
A solo exhibition in the form of a multifigure installation, it was accompanied by a
display of artists' books by Alison, Betye, and Lezley Saar (Alison's elder sister).
A subsequent review in The Washington Post noted that these books demonstrated
"what talented families used to do on rainy afternoons before television and VCRs
came along."'21 But in fact, such creative pastimes were not only typical of Alison Saar
childhood. They spanned several generations, with Betye Saar recounting childhood
memories of her mother's involvement in a variety of craft activities, including puppet-
making and performances, en famille.
An additional vein of creativity running through the family tree, a specifically lit-
erary one, can be traced to Betye Saar's father, who "had written plays and poetry."22
Small wonder then, that an interest in narrative figures prominently in Alison Saar's
art. Indeed, both her and her mother's work seem characterized by a story-telling
impulse that, while visually compelling, remains open-ended-offering viewers a
piece of the imaginative action, as if we, too, were members of the artists' family circle.
It seems inevitable that works of literature would provide both mother and daughter
with creative points of departure. As it turns out though, in the one instance known
to this author in which creations by the two bear related literary titles-Betye Saar's
1982 mixed media assemblage The Invisible Man and Alison Saar's 1985 mixed media

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 CALLALOO

drawing Invisible Man -the artworks stem from entirely different sources. The senior
Saar has described her piece's theme as "romantic," adding that it was part of an au-
tobiographical series. The title, rather than a reference to either H. G. Wells's science
fiction tale or Ralph Ellison's allegorical novel, referred to a poem published in a Los
Angeles newspaper in which a young woman commented on "the way people come
in and out of each other's lives."23 In contrast, the younger artist ascribes her image's
appearance to Wells's description of his character, while admitting a thematic debt to
Ellison's symbolic treatment of racism's effect on black Americans.24
Having worked for her conservator father, in various capacities, for twelve years,
Alison Saar credits him with being a major influence upon her choice and treatment
of materials. She began helping him by performing menial tasks on a part-time basis
while she was in high school and gradually gained an assortment of technical skills
while assisting him through her college and graduate school years. In a sense, the
experience served as an old-fashioned apprenticeship, inspiring a respect for process
that equalled her regard for the conceptual side of creativity. But unlike the appren-
ticeships immortalized by Vasari, Saar's was an introduction to art from far corners of
the globe and remote periods of time. As a result, when this artist talks about fresco
technique, for example, she is apt to have Chinese frescoes in mind! By her own ac-
count, her duties provided a hands-on familiarity with world art. She "worked a lot
on mummies," occasionally on icons, and developed a particular fondness for Pre-
Columbian and African objects in the process of conserving them.
Perhaps another source of the artist's culturally eclectic vision is her multiracial her-
itage. Her father is white. Her mother, like many U.S. blacks, is of mixed-African,
American Indian, and European-ancestry.25 Reared in Los Angeles's Laurel Canyon
area, at a time when this section of the Hollywood hills was not yet fashionable and
served as a semi-rural outpost for nonconformists, Alison Saar's sense of cultural iden-
tity has always been complex. Her orientation seems not so much simply "dual" as
"fluid," subject to shifting contextual currents that conventional notions of race would
dismiss, discount, or deny.26
According to the artist, this aspect of her biography accounts for the variety of skin
tones and hair colors, languages, and other signs of international history that char-
acterize the "black" world her art depicts. Such personal motivations dovetailed with
an already extensive knowledge of world art, when she enrolled as an undergraduate
at Scripps College, where she took on a double, studio and art history, major. Under
the direction of art historian Samella Lewis, a pioneer figure in the study of African-
American art, Saar studied African, Haitian, Afro-Cuban and other black visual tra-
ditions and wrote a senior thesis on U.S. black vernacular art.
Most of Saar's subjects-be they Afro-Cubans, Haitians, U.S. mulattoes, or mem-
bers of South Africa's majority-share black ancestry. Occasionally though, there are
images of Amerindians, like the 1982 figure Fear and Passion or the 1985 retablo-like
Eloquent Algonquin, or of Chicanos, like the 1986 Tinto en Tando y Suta, a lifesize poly-
chrome rendition of a Mexican milagro that replaces the genre's traditional emblems
of answered prayers with the figure of a modern antihero, the barrio "zoot-suiter."
And at times, one of her characters may even be white (for example, Joe Louis's op-
ponent in the 1982 Max Schmeling and Joe Louis). But, aside from racial hybrids whose

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 CALLALOO ____

"outsider" status intrigues her-like the offspring of U.S. black troops stationed in
Germany or the Afro-Asian children of the Vietnam War-Saar generally feels dis-
inclined to make art about European or Asian subjects. She defines her focus instead
as mainly encompassing the products of the transatlantic slave trade and the inter-
national impact of Afro-American culture.27
Because spiritual power is a recurrent theme of Saar's work, her interest in New
World black cultures naturally led her to the African-derived religions of the Americas.
The accompanying set of visual resources-the vodun pantheon, hoodoo28 charms,
santeria altars, etc. -are ones her mother's art also taps. Both artists, for example, have
executed pieces named for High John the Conqueror, the root that is a frequent in-
gredient in hoodoo potions: Betye Saar's 1971 mixed media assemblage John the Con-
queror and Alison Saar's 1988 wood sculpture Love Potion #3: Conkerin' John.29 And both
have based work on various aspects of vodun (such as Betye Saar's 1979 handkerchief
collage Houngan-Houngan and Alison Saar's various sequined flags).
There are significant differences between the two artists' approaches to these shared
formal and thematic elements, though. Betye Saar focuses more on the occult-on
beliefs and practices found worldwide that are especially concerned with the indivi-
dual's relationship to unseen forces. Her daughter's taste in metaphysics leans more
toward collective, institutionalized practices. Vodun, santeria, and Mexico's syncretic
folk Catholicism, which figure strongly in the younger artist's work, are religions, with
priestly hierarchies and elaborate public rituals, not private lines to the spirit world.
In contrast, astrology, palmistry, and magic, which are prominent in the elder Saar's
work, are solo techniques for gaining insight into and contact with mystical forces.
Nevertheless, hoodoo, with its stress on one-to-one client/specialist relationships, and
shamanism, which centers upon the visionary powers of spiritual experts,30 are turfs
the two artists seem equally inclined to explore. Perhaps, awareness of ancestral ties
to New Orleans accounts for the pair's attraction to hoodoo.31
Consistent with the historical backdrop against which each woman operated
though, the senior Saar turned to specifically black cultural references at a later stage
in her career than would be true for her daughter. In a 1973 interview with Ishmael
Reed, Betye Saar explained that her black imagery grew out of the use of various occult
symbols she had begun in the mid-1960s. By her own account, she began "drawing
zodiac signs and star charts" in 1965 "and that led to palmistry and phrenology and
then the phrenology went from the head of a phrenology chart to a man's head to a
black man's head and that evolved into the black thing." Around 1969-70, a black
series emerged when she started collecting commercial products - sheet music covers,
tobacco tins, toys, etc. -that employed racist stereotypes.32 Prior to these politically
charged pieces, however, she had begun exploring elements of black cultural heritage
in works like her 1967 drawing Bone Conjuring Sirens and the 1968 box assemblage
Africa.
To this observer, Alison Saar's fascination with cultural cliches (the "sweet young
thing" of an eponymous 1987 painted ceiling tin construction) and social types (the
evangelical huckster enshrined atop a miniature carved Cadillac in her 1985 Sweet
Daddy Good Life) displays stronger affinities with her mother's spate of works dealing
with the political implications of derogatory black imagery, than with her forebear's

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 _ A__ _ __ _ C LLALOO

more mystically oriented objects. Not that provoking social change is part of the young
artist's agenda to the same extent it apparently was when her parent produced works
like her 1972 Liberation of Aunt Jemima or her 1970 Whitey's Way. The 1980s, the period
in which Alison Saar artistically came of age, after all, were a very different time than
the early 1970s had been.

III. Mid-1980s: A Critical Juncture

"One of the key assumptions of the postwar/

postmodern is that ... [e]verything is connected to
everything else....
... I think this is a new time, that a boundary has
been crossed."

-Richard Schechner33

"What I'm trying to do with my personas is show that

their history is ours."

- Ai34

Looking back, the mid-1980s now seem to have been a critical juncture, a period in
which previously disparate intellectual, artistic, and social currents unexpectedly con-
verged under the rubric "post-" -as in , "postmodern," "poststructuralist," "post-
colonial," post-you-name-it! What many of these movements shared was (1) an aware-
ness of the enormous scope of language as an explanatory model; (2) a wish to radically
revise the structures of power and corresponding cultural hierarchies the new lin-
guistically based analyses revealed; and (3) a belief that certain styles of communi-
cation-especially those that seem democratic, open to change, and attuned to di-
versity-suggest liberating alternatives. Thus, when a critic like Craig Owens
described postmodernism as "a crisis of ... the authority vested in Western European
culture and its institutions,"35 he did so on the basis of a poststructuralist brand of
cultural theory that was busy undermining the old order by mapping covert ties be-
tween the aesthetic and the social, the exotic and the familiar, the secular and the
sacred.
Artists of color have an especially large stake in recent interrogations of Western
hegemony. For them, in many ways, the rhetoric of postmodernism is a mere repe-
tition (disguised by an imported critical jargon) of insights that authors like Albert
Murray, Ishmael Reed, and Ntozake Shange had previously voiced.36 Yet, despite
widespread cries for "multiculturalism" as we near the twenty-first century and as the
national complexion increasingly darkens, precious little critical attention has been
paid to the distinctive ways in which artists like Alison Saar evoke an already plural
vision. Nor, have many proponents of linguistically based cultural theory bothered

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 CALLALOO _ _ _ _ _ _

to examine the crucial role of verbal practices in shaping such artists' perspectives.37
Spoken language is inseparable from its visual counterpart both in constructing
"meaning" and determining "style" in Saar's art. The artist's gleeful indulgence in
simultaneous, interactive linguistic and iconographic play is readily seen, for example,
in Mamba Mambo (1985). The punning alliteration of this piece's title has its visual
correlative in the image of a snake-handling naked woman who, as Robert Farris
Thompson has observed, doubles as "mambo" dancer and vodun priestess or
"mambo."38
But Saar's conflation of the Cuban dance with the Haitian ritual specialist also mir-
rors a historical reality-the shared African etymologies of the Cuban dance and the
Haitian religious functionary-itself a type of space/time pun writ large in related-but-
different New World cultural forms. Adding a formal layer to this heady confection
of verbal, visual, and cultural rhymes, the undulating contours of the dancer's form
echo the zig-zag rhythms of the mamba snakes she wields. What have these elaborate
symbolic games to do, though, with Saar's style?
Well, everything.
During her fall 1986 artist-in-residency at WPA, Saar produced an installation she
called Throne of the Vulcanization Nation. The work's title gave a respectful nod to James
Hampton's legendary Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millenium General As-
sembly, permanently on view at Washington's National Museum of American Art.39
But, at least to this author, the title also flashed a conspiratorial wink in the direction
of cosmic funk guru George Clinton's "funkedelic nation." The piece consisted of a
dim and desolate corridor, full of the menace of an inner city drug den, in which
ideograms of ghetto life occupied the wall's upper register. Inside this crypt-like space
stood a modern mummy-a life-size, wood, male figure wrapped in strips of black
rubber, his gilded heart revealed by an open door in his chest.
With its field of references stretching from ancient Egypt to modern "Babylon,"
Throne demonstrated the transgressive extravagance that marks so much of Saar's
work-a lush stew of ideas mixed with an obvious delight in crossbreeding materials,
modes, genres. There is in the calculated crudeness of Saar's carvings, the preference
for cast-off materials, and the undisguised appropriation of vernacular modes, an ap-
parent antithesis to the artist's preoccupation with classic themes of spiritual trial,
quest, and power. Elevated states don't get the standard "high art" treatment from
Saar. Instead, like the makeshift ingenuity of jug bands and bottleneck guitar players,
she has no compunction about dredging the soul with homemade tools.
Her subsequent installations, Love Potion #9 (1988) and Crossroads (1989), amplified
these contrasts, as well as the semantic and sensory abundance that so distinguish
Saar's art. With Love Potion #9 the artist turned to the hoodoo storehouse of charms,
elixirs, and spells in order to produce an earthy, humorous and ultimately, insightful
meditation on eros. As always, though, an anarchistic play of referents defeated ef-
forts to nail down meaning and the resulting discursive field remained as fluid and
irreducible as certain thinkers claim female desire to be.40
Created for a three-person show at the Queens Museum,41 Love Potion #9 was in-
spired by The Clovers' 1959 single of the same name, a pop "novelty item" that became
a Top 40 hit.42 The song is a commercial musical example of the age-old, black ver-

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 L___ ___ ___CALLALOO

nacular, verbal practice known as "signifyin'."43 In it, the powers of love, hoodoo
magic, and a popular French perfume (Chanel No. 9) are humorously cross-refer-
enced. After a trip to New Orleans, where she and her husband visited the grave of
legendary hoodoo priestess Marie Laveau, as well as one of the local botanicas (stores
for ritual ingredients and implements), Saar put her observations and impressions to
the sort of wry, multi-associative use announced by the installation's title.
To recall the mossy walls of the semitropical city, the room was painted a cool green
mottled with what the artist has described as "the shadows of magnolia trees and the
spirits that dwell within."" Entering, one passed a single wrought-iron gate, the short-
hand rendering of a portal, its interlaced design translating the slave-made ironwork
of New Orleans' French Quarter into Haitian veve symbols for the vodun love goddess,
Erzulie. Deceptively seeming the most transparent object in the room, this gateway
fragment simultaneously invoked an ancient African craft tradition, slave labor, love
(the ultimate bondage or the ultimate freedom), New Orleans' historical ties to Haiti,
and the port city's role as a nautical threshold between the U.S. and our various Latin
neighbors.
The nine objects in the room included two figures. One, a voluptuous life-size
woman in a red dress, was carved out of wood then covered with copper turned green
by oxidation. Her hair consisted of rusted ceiling tin and her tin dress was painted
bright red. Her left breasts opened to disclose a wooden heart studded with nails. She
was Potion #9, "a dangerous infatuation that robs its victims of all sense." The second
figure, a three-quarter-life-size male whose lower legs branched into a root-like tangle,
was Saar's rendition of the folk hero/aphrodisiac ingredient, High John the Conqueror.
Made of wood and partially covered with rusty tin, he represented Potion #5, the
artist's prescription "for a deeply rooted love."
In a notable departure from her previous work, all of the installation's remaining
components were nonfigurative objects. They included things like "a cast-iron heart
attached to a ball and chain," meant as "an ironclad hex for marriage,"45 and a carved
heart covered with shoe soles and tire rubber, a charm "to tether a ramblin' man. "46
This move away from figurated sculpture, which the artist sees as a shift toward
greater abstraction, would be even more pronounced in her 1989 installation at the
Bronx Museum, Crossroads -a work dominated by the large, terracotta-colored, plas-
ter cross placed at its center.

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 _ CALLALOO _ _ _ _ _

IV. Myths for the Multiculture

"Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed,

the colonized, the exploited, . . . a gesture of defiance
that heals, that makes new life and new growth
possible."

-Bell Hooks47

The use of multiple objects and "real" space in her installations allows Saar to or-
chestrate ideas that one suspects spring from single figure works in much the same
way that, for some novelists, giving birth to individual characters precedes the con-
struction of plots. Thus, producing single figures remains one of the artist's central
tasks. Recent examples include a tabletop-size carving called Lazarus (1988) and the
life-size Lady Lazarus (1988). The stories vested in these objects are highly topical ex-
tensions of the artist's previous concern with both the perils of contemporary urban
life and the possibilities of spiritual transcendence.
The unvarnished wood figure of Lazarus demonstrates an increased attention to
anatomical detail. A full-length nude carrying a staff in one hand and making an open-
palm gesture of offering with the other, he is one of the artist's most classically graceful
statues and one of the first whose stance suggests momentarily arrested motion. His
body is studded with gemstone "sores" and Bandaid-like strips of tin.
The Christian Lazarus evolved from a fictive character-the sore-covered beggar of
the New Testament parable in which the eternal damnation of an uncharitable rich
man is contrasted with a pauper's heavenly reward -into the patron saint of medieval
mendicants and lepers.48 Saar's Lazarus, however, doubles as the Western saint and
San Lazaro, a syncretic Afro-Latin American deity-Cuba's Babaluaiye and Brazil's
Obaluwaiye or Omolu - associated with smallpox and other skin-deforming dis-
eases.49 With the current AIDS epidemic, images of the Catholic saint/African god are
in great demand at New York City's botanicas. "He's really a needed saint these days!"
the artist observes.50
In contrast, Lady Lazarus had its origins in a real-life miracle Saar witnessed from
her loft window. Painted blue and given rusted tin hair, the body of the wood figure
is dotted with gemstones and bicycle reflectors, as well as small tin bandages. The
statue is a symbolic portrait of one of the temporary occupants of a building slated for
demolition that stood opposite the artist's residence. An ailing homeless woman, hob-
bled by swollen and badly scarred legs, and forced to rely upon a found-metal cane,
this improbable angel managed to tend fellow squatters, feeding an assortment of
male derelicts, "washing their clothes in the street" and gracing their nights with
"amazing" gospel songs.51
While Lazarus and Lady Lazarus demonstrate Saar's continuing preoccupation with
modern tragedies and equally modern spiritual triumphs, other recent figures show
her interest in related but different themes. The gorgeous repousse'-covered Scar Song
(1989), for example, is one of several works in which the artist has targeted female
stereotypes. Here, symbols of various sexist cliches are inscribed on the surface of the

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 a CALLALOO

female body, satirically literalizing the objectification of women and the superimpo-
sition of the male gaze on female identity.
With Dying Slave (1989) Saar offers a blunt alternative to Michelangelo's almost camp
image of death in bondage. The glass-covered "nail fetish" located in her figure's belly
functions as a "window into his heart," through which we glimpse "the remains of
his soul" and the traces of his ancestors "in his guts." From this front view, the artist
aims to elicit a conventional "sad" or "sentimental" response.52 From the rear, the
statue summonses a much more visceral reaction, thanks to Saar's inspired use of a
can opener to rip open the subject's rusted ceiling tin back and leave it striped with
jagged slashes. By inserting African-American history into the history of Western art,
she "talks back" to both the Old Masters of art and the "old masters" of antebellum
history. And the opposing faces of her statue mock all monolithic conceptions of either
history.
The February 1989 show at the Bronx Museum, "Traditions and Transformations:
Contemporary Afro-American Sculpture," placed Saar in the distinguished company
of artists like Martin Puryear, Mel Edwards, Maren Hassinger, and Howardena Pin-
dell. For the occasion, she produced the multi-object installation, Crossroads. Oriented
in relation to the cross centered on the floor the piece included three figures sited at
its head and arms. A marvelously makeshift emblem for a pool-a bucket full of
water-stood at the foot of the cross. Inside, a coiling black snake could be seen
painted on its bottom. The artist cites the manifold associations of snakes with water,
ranging from West Africa's Mammy Wata cult through aboriginal Australia's rainbow
snake to her own fascination with the serpentine undulations of rivers, to explain the
latter imagery.53
Moving clockwise from this point, one encountered the first figure -a voluptuous
female striking a seductive arabesque pose. Covered with green, oxidized tin, her
torso and thighs had several small cavities in which tiny plastic roses were seen
through transparent windows. At the ankles, her legs forked into magnificent
gnarled, branching roots that ended beneath a bed of dried flowers. The artist, who
was pregnant at the time, has explained that this round-bellied "root woman" rep-
resented Woman as the embodiment of the natural elements.
The next figure, a male, stood for fire and its properties. Rising from a carved cloud
of smoke above carved flames, he held open the doors of his chest, inside of which a
jerry-built gadget produced flickering light. To make him look charred, the sculptor
covered him with bits of fire-damaged ceiling tin. Small mounds of coal were massed
at the feet of this Black Prometheus, who symbolized both fire's positive and negative
potential.
Metal was the final statue's featured material. Sheathed in rusted tin, his body was
riddled with nails, blades, safety pins, etc. The personification of aggression, war-
mongering, and industrialization, this figure carried a wrought-iron bullwhip. Small
piles of rocks stood between the four principle objects. And suspended high overhead,
above the installation's cruciform center, the bottom rungs of a ladder dangled like a
mystic fire escape.
With its prominently-placed Christian-but-also-African54 symbol and its title merg-
ing references to Bantu cosmograms,55 a Yoruba god,56 Haitian veve, U.S. blues,57 and

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 CALLALOO

related African-American folklore in a type of symbolic lamination, Crossroads sum-

marized the heterogeneous currents that have run through Alison Saar's work
throughout her career. Operating as a kind of theater set with viewers allowed on
stage, it is a site at which sacred and secular, gods and bluesmen, high culture and
low, Africa and Europe meet and blend.
While she was installing the piece, the artist found herself discussing its meanings
with curious bystanders who informed her that Irish crossroads are marked by stacks
of stones and the Irish believe that adding a stone to an existing pile protects one's
spirit and honors ancestors "who've passed [here] before." The latter custom, some-
one else noted, also flourishes in Japan. Another informant told Saar about stone piles
found in Israeli cemeteries. Meanwhile, the artist recalled the descansos or crosses she'd
seen in Mexico and New Mexico that marked both the deceased's final resting place
and the location at which the individual had met her/his death. The association of
crosses with Haitian vodun's Lord of Death, Baron Samedi, was a further parallel, she
knew.58
Crossroads then, apparently function internationally as a symbol of transit between
the worlds of the living and the dead. Cosmic intersections, they are ideal sites for
magical transactions like the legendary pact with the Devil by which famed bluesman
Robert Johnson is said to have secured his uncanny musical powers. On a more mun-
dane level, we think of them as junctions between paths leading from and to different
locations in space or time -allowing us to speak of "international crossroads" or
"crossroads of history."
Rooted in a love of the ordinary, yet fueled by a fondness for the occult; inspired
by Michelangelo and by miniature golf; focused on the black cultures of the Americas,
but open to parallel practices among the Irish, Israelis, and the Japanese, Alison Saar's
art seems always headed down to the crossroads. It is an art that celebrates cultural
difference and confronts moral ambiguities. It is an art that invites us to experience
complex new revelations as we gaze forward and back, stationed at the threshold of
a new century.

Notes

1. David Avalos, artist's statement, Cafe Mestizo: A Grind So Fine You Give Into the Pleasure (exhibition
announcement/poster), INTAR Latin American Gallery, New York, NY (June 13-July 28, 1989).
2. John Yau, "To Propose, To Provoke," 2 Emerging Artists: Cal Lom and Editha Mesina (exhibition
brochure), Asian American Arts Centre, New York, NY, March 2-22, 1989.
While Yau feels mainstream institutions "have consistently ignored" these complexities, post-
modernist criticism comes in for special censure from Paul Gilroy. The black British author notes
the irony that, although postmodernists recognize certain pluralist features of black culture, they
generally miss the bigger social and artistic picture. "[T]he nascent orthodoxies of postmodernism
... can only see the distinctive formal features of black expressive culture in terms of pastiche,
quotation, parody and paraphrase," according to Gilroy, "rather than a more substantive, political
and aesthetic concern with polyphony and the value of different registers of address" Gilroy,
"Cruciality and the Frog's Perspective," Third Text: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art &
Culture (London) 5 (Winter 1988/89): 40.
3. The artist, quoted in Judith Wilson, "Hexes, Totems and Necessary Saints: A Conversation with

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 CALLALOO

Alison Saar," Real Life 19 (Winter 1989): 38. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent Saar quotes
come from this interview.
4. In order to suggest its cultural relevance to Saar's theme, I have referred to the type of bead I
have in mind as "West African." In fact though, such beads are manufactured in Venice, but have
been popular in Africa for centuries.
5. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York:
Random House, 1983), 117-18.
6. According to Lynn Haney, the title of the song Baker recorded "between 1931 and 1935" was "Si
j'6tais blanche." Haney, Naked at the Feast: A Biography of Josephine Baker (New York: Dodd, Mead
& Co., 1981), 177. Saar used the masculine form "blanc," however, because her figure was male.
Alison Saar, conversation with the author, July 26, 1989.
7. James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-
Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 197-
98 and illustrations on 199.
8. William Wilson, "Galleries: . . . Wilshire Center," Los Angeles Times, Friday, June 11, 1982; part
VI, 12.
9. Betty Ann Brown, "Reviews: . . Southern California: . . . Theatrical Imagery . . . ," Arts 57
(October 1982): 25.
Brown cites Oceanic sources for Saar's method of using paper pulp attached to a bound stick
armature to construct some of her early figures. But the artist claims she was unaware of the
Pacific Islands precedent, explaining that her approach derived from traditional European fresco
technique instead. For the plaster and wood slats of the European technique, she simply substi-
tuted paper and twigs. Alison Saar, taped conversation with the author, July 26, 1989.
10. In an Artnews review of the show, Merle Schipper noted the "pervasive . .. implication of the
black as performer," explaining that a piece called Shadow Boxer, for example, showed "the
champ's shadow. . . shaped like a begging dog." Merle Schipper, "Los Angeles Reviews: Alison
Saar [at] Jan Baum," Artnews 85 (January 1986): 109.
11. Reed's 1969 discussion of "neo-hoodooism" as a literary phenomenon was one of, if not the first
persuasive descriptions of a new African-American aesthetic that can now be recognized as ex-
tending to activity in the visual and performing arts during the past two decades. "What distin-
guishes the present crop of Afro-American and Black writers from their predecessors is a marked
independence from Western form," Reed astutely observed. A similar indifference to, skepticism
about or irreverence in the face of European-derived models, marks the work of many artists of
color who have emerged since the mid- to late-1960s. Ishmael Reed, "Introduction," 19 Necro-
mancers from Now: An Anthology of Original American Writing For the 1970s (Garden City, NY: Dou-
bleday Anchor Books, 1970), xvi.
During a 1981 broadcast, radio personality and cultural critic David Jackson delivered a succinct
statement of neo-hoodooism's radical egalitarianism, its enraptured sensuousness and its dis-
enchantment with Western materialism: "Neo-hoodoo believes that every person is an artist and
every artist is a priest. In neo-hoodoo, Christ, the landlord deity, is on probation .... The drum,
the ankh and the dance are the center of neo-hoodoo, while Christianity is centered on the organ,
and the grave." Author's notes, David Jackson, "The Stormy Monday Show," radio station WBAI,
New York, NY, December 14, 1981.
12. Saar quoted in Zan Dubin, "An Artist With Stroke of Magic," Los Angeles Times (Friday, October
4, 1985), part VI, 2.
13. Peter Bushyeager, "New York: Allison [sic] Saar," New Art Examiner 13 (March 1986): 57.
14. In accusing Saar of a "secondhand" knowledge of those aspects of black culture she depicts,
Kuspit imposes a curious double standard on this artist-a standard the critic fails to extend to
an artist like Leon Golub, for example, whose images of military terrorism do not reflect the
painter's direct experience, to my knowledge. Donald Kuspit, "Reviews: Alison Saar," Artforum
24 (April 1986): 112.
15. Ellen Lee Klein, "Alison Saar," Arts Magazine 60 (April 1986): 132.
Klein's claim that Saar's imagery is excessively tainted by internalization of white perceptions
of black Americans exemplifies a crude brand of cultural essentialism. In such views, black iden-
tity is a static and singular entity, untouched by distinctions of time, class, or geography, that
can be permanently and neatly distinguished from some concept of white identity as equally
uncomplicated by history. Reducing African-American heritage to such essences ignores the fact
of five centuries of black/white interaction in this hemisphere, as well as the daily assault of even
the most "marginalized" citizens by the homogenizing mechanisms of contemporary mass media
and mass market consumerism. Indeed, what black and Third World scholars from Du Bois

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through Fanon to Spivak have viewed as a common trait of the various "experiences" of people
of color is the divided self-consciousness or epistemological dualism that Du Bois called "double
consciousness" and Spivak describes as "a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist
self." W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1961),
16-17; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World (New
York: Grove Press, 1967), 17; Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique
of Imperialism," in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1986), 272.
16. An interview with the organizer of what was billed as "the first truly international exhibition of
worldwide contemporary art," the 1989 Paris show Magiciens de la Terre, provides an especially
clear-cut example of such thinking. When critic Benjamin Buchloh asked Jean-Hubert Martin
whether the exhibition would include "the particular forms of Black modernism that have
emerged in the United States. . . , or the cultural practices of African and Arabic minorities living
in France at this point," the Musee National d'Art Moderne director replied that the work of such
artists was insufficiently "individual" and dismissed them as "more or less imitating the main-
stream culture of the Western world." In contrast, neither Buchloh nor Martin seemed the least
concerned about the extent to which Western participants in the show, like Mario Merz, Sigmar
Polke, or Nancy Spero, were indebted to cultural heritages not their own. Benjamin Buchloh,
"The Whole Earth Show: An Interview with Jean-Hubert Martin," Art in America 77 (May 1989):
158.
17. Lee Krasner quoted in Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (New York: Touchstone,
1979), 23.
18. The words of the legendary bop saxophone player apparently struck home with Alison Saar, who
reported the quote to me several days after she'd watched a televised portrait of Parker that was
part of the PBS network's "American Masters" series. Author's notes, July 26, 1989.
19. The term has been used to opposite effect by different critics. For example, Betty Ann Brown
writes favorably of the theatrical quality of Saar's art, linking it to a widespread 1980s rejection
of minimalist self-referentiality, while Donald Kuspit expresses disapproval of what he alternately
labels the artist's "suave theatricality" and "a kind of vernacular aestheticization of the primitive."
The present author is troubled by Kuspit's implicit assumption that "the primitive" exists aside
from its history as an ideological construct, as well as by the apparent confusion of individual
versus social agency involved in his use of the term "vernacular aestheticization" as a criticism
of Saar. Betty Ann Brown, op. cit., 24. Donald Kuspit, op. cit., 111.
20. During a spring 1986 interview, Saar mentioned wanting to develop a theatrical work in which
live actors would perform roles based on some of her sculptured characters. Alison Saar in taped
conversation with the author, March 19, 1986.
21. Jo Ann Lewis, "Galleries: Urban Iconography," The Washington Post, Saturday, January 10, 1987,
section D, 9.
22. Betye Saar quoted in Munro, op. cit., 356.
23. Betye Saar, taped conversation with the author, July 26, 1989.
24. Alison Saar, taped conversation with the author, July 26, 1989.
25. In an interview with Eleanor Munro, Betye Saar explained that her maternal grandmother had
been an Irish woman and added, "there's the same mix on my father's side." These remarks were
made in the course of the artist's explication of her watershed assemblage Black Girl's Window,
which includes a small tintype of an anonymous white woman. "I feel that duality," the elder
Saar continued, "the black and the white." Betye Saar quoted in Munro, op. cit., 358.
26. Describing her youthful sense of exclusion by existing racial norms, Saar recalled feeling "like I
was floating between two worlds." In this regard, the artist's experience is representative of the
central paradox of "race" -a concept without "objective reality," as historian Ira Berlin has noted,
yet one that has exerted tremendous force in shaping individual and collective destinies. "[R]ace,"
Berlin writes, "is a product of ideology, not biology-more a subject for historians than physical
anthropologists." Ira Berlin, "A Brown Elite in a Class by Itself," The New York Times Book Review
(December 16, 1984), 12.
27. Alison Saar, taped conversation with the author, July 26, 1989.
28. I am using the term "hoodoo" here to distinguish the Afro-U.S. ritual complex, for which New
Orleans has traditionally been a hub of activity (although many of its components can be found
throughout the rest of the South), from vodun, the kindred religion of Haiti. Both phenomena are
commonly labeled "voodoo" by outsiders. The latter name blurs the important historically de-
rived distinctions between the two, however.
29. According to the pioneer black folklorist, Zora Neale Hurston, John the Conqueror was "the most

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 CALLALOO

widely used root" among Afro-American conjurers and herbalists. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules
and Men (New York: Perennial Library, 1970 [orig. 1935]), 277.
30. Joan Halifax, Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visonary Narratives (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 3-
4.
31. In her conversation with Eleanor Munro, Betye Saar explained her "Mojo boxes" made reference
"to voodoo, [a]nd they refer to our passage from Africa to, in my case, New Orleans." Betye Saar
quoted in Munro, op. cit., 359.
32. Betye Saar quoted in Ishmael Reed, "Betye Saar, Artist," Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 149, 146.
33. Richard Schechner, "The End of Humanism," Performing Arts Journal 10/11, 4 (1980?): 12.
34. Ai quoted in Matthew Flamm, "Ai Came, Ai Saw, Ai Conquered," Village Voice (July 22, 1986),
43. Further clarifying what this prizewinning poet means by "our history," Flamm writes, "Ai is
talking about herself-about her mother, who is Irish and German as well as black and Indian,
and about her father, who was Japanese-American. 'The history of my family,' Ai says, 'is itself
a history of America'."
35. Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism," in The Anti-Aesthetic:
Essays on Postmodern Culture. Hal Foster, ed. (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 57.
36. Far too little attention has been paid to this phenomenon, which is the intellectual equivalent of
the "cover record" -that is to say, the ideological or aesthetic "tunes" of a Reed or Shange only
make the cultural Top 40 when sung by some academic or artworld Elvis Presley or Madonna.
Two rare examples of the type of revision that desperately needs to be done are Greg Tate's justly
legendary "Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke: The Return of the Black Aesthetic," [Village] Voice Lit-
erary Supplement (December 1986), 5-8, and David Jackson's seminal, but unpublished, manu-
script "The Alternatives and Beyond" (1980), a history of the New York City "alternative space"
movement that replaces the black figures who are usually erased from such accounts. My own
essay in the catalog for the 1988 exhibition Cut/Across at Washington Project for the Arts (WPA),
is a rudimentary attempt to similarly install a key episode of 1960s Afro-American art history in
the larger cultural framework it deserves. Judith Wilson, "Beyond 'Universality'. . . And Towards
a History of How We Got There," Cut/Across (exhibition catalog), Washington Project for the Arts,
Washington, DC, January 24-March 5, 1988, 9-12. Another show at WPA, scheduled fall 1989
and not yet open as of this writing, "The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism," or-
ganized by art historian Richard J. Powell, promises a substantial reordering of twentieth-century
American artistic turf and will be accompanied by a major catalog.
37. While he probably would not wish to be identified as a strict adherent of any brand of theory,
Robert Farris Thompson has been a pioneer in the application of linguistic methodology to the
study of African-American visual expression. For an informal discussion of the genesis and pur-
pose of Thompson's controversial approach, see my 1985 interview with him in Issue, A Journal
for Artists 5 (Winter 1986): 23-27.
38. Robert Farris Thompson, "Nineteen Ninety Now: The Arrival of the Haitian Gods in New York
City Art," Deja Vu: Haitian Influence in Contemporary American Art: Paul Gardere, Alison Saar, Ken
Tisa (poster/catalog), Jamaica Arts Center, Jamaica, NY, March 8-April 29, 1989.
39. Hampton's visionary tour de force consists of 180 ceremonial objects-an altar, pulpits, offertory
tables, etc., -made of combinations of used furniture, discarded light bulbs, and other detritus
covered with gold or aluminum foil. Constructed in an inner city garage, between 1950 and 1964,
during the federally employed janitor's spare time, the piece is a vernacular masterpiece of in-
stallation art. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, James Hampton: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations'
Millennium General Assembly (brochure), National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Insti-
tution, Washington, DC, (c. 1987?).
40. I am thinking primarily of French poststructuralist feminist theorists like Helene Cixous, Luce
Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. While their poetic equation of female sexuality-its interiority, mul-
tiplicity, and subversive resistance to localization-with an anti-authoritarian politics may seem
far-fetched to Americans schooled in pragmatic, empiricist modes of thought, it does offer a dra-
matic metaphor for an array of nonhierarchical values.
A similar rejection of absolutist rigidity is characteristic of many non-Western cultures and, it
has frequently been observed, a hallmark of African-American thought. Author Toni Morrison,
for example, has remarked, "Black people in general don't annihilate evil.... We believe that
evil has a natural place in the universe. We try to avoid it or defend ourselves against it, but we
are not surprised at its existence...." Toni Morrison quoted in Bettye J. Parker, "Complexity:
Toni Morrison's Women-An Interview Essay," in Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in

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Literature, Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds., (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1979), 253.
41. The exhibition, New Visions: James Little, Whitfield Lovell, Alison Saar, took place at the Queens
Museum, Flushing, NY, July 1-August 23, 1988.
42. My thanks to historian and doowop buff, Ernest Allen, for this information.
43. Definitions of this term offered by such esteemed authors as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison,
and Henry Louis Gates are quite disparate and fall short of the range of actual practices subsumed
under this heading. In an attempt to amalgamate these and other sources, I would define
"signifyin' " roughly as a distinctly African-derived form of boasting, threatening, flattering, or
tall tale-telling that employs virtuosic punning, parody, exaggeration, and other techniques of
supplementing or subverting literal meaning.
44. Alison Saar, [descriptive note accompanying the exhibition checklist] New Visions, op. cit., 14-15.
Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent quotes in reference to this installation come from this
source.
45. The artist quoted in Wilson (Winter 1989), op. cit., 40.
46. Ibid.
47. Bell Hooks, "Talking Back," She, the Inappropriateld Other, Trinh T. Minh-ha, ed., Discourse: Journal
for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 8 (Fall-Winter 1986/87): 128.
48. James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects & Symbols in Art, rev. ed. (New York: Icon, 1979), 105.
49. William R. Bascom, "The Yoruba in Cuba," Nigeria [Lagos] 37 (1951): 14; Pierre Verger, "Yoruba
Influences in Brazil," Odu: Journal of Yoruba and Related Studies [Ibadan?] 1 (January 1955): 9-10;
Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil, trans. Helen Sebba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1978), 255-56, 264-65.
50. Alison Saar in Wilson (Winter 1989), op. cit., TK.
51. Alison Saar in taped conversation with the author, March 19, 1986.
52. Alison Saar in taped conversation with the author, July 26, 1989.
53. Ibid.
54. For a discussion of the cosmological significance of cruciform imagery in Bakongo belief, see Rob-
ert Farris Thompson [in Thompson and Joseph Cornet], The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in
Two Worlds (exhibition catalog), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, August 30, 1981-Jan-
uary 17, 1982; 28, 40, 43, 151-157.
55. Ibid., 151.
56. In Yoruba cosmology, the deity Eshu-Elegba, presides over crossroads.
57. For an especially enlightening discussion of Robert Johnson's famous 1936 Crossroads Blues, see
Robert Palmer's, Deep Blues (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 126-27.
58. Alison Saar, taped conversation with the author, July 26, 1989.

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