“Bishop piled clothing on the victims after a robbery, dousing the clothes with cleaning fluid and setting them on fire. [All three] died in the pyre.”
I’ve never seen a photo of Bishop “The Torch Slayer,” but I assume he is tall, hulking and with glistening muscles. I am certain he is black. Bishop was one of the late L.A. photographer, Miles Everitt’s, models. The vast majority of Everitt’s photos are of burly black men – flexing, showering, swimming and performing other mundane activities. Some of the photos are in black and white, others are Polaroids. Nearly all of the men are nude or mostly nude.
The photos are uncomfortable to look at. I feel like a voyeur peeping into Everitt’s sexual fantasies made real. I am a woman who is sexually attracted to black men, but I don’t recognize anything in these images as erotic or arousing. They are not for my eyes. And apparently, it’s not my being a woman that detaches – it’s my blackness, according to artist M. Lamar.
If you watch Orange is the New Black, you’ll recognize Lamar. On the show, he plays the pre-transition “Sophia Burset,” aka “Marcus.” Sophia is played by Lamar’s twin-sister, actress Laverne Cox.
M. Lamar, who is black and queer, wants to make us feel even more uncomfortable with Everitt’s work and the obsession that motivated it. Lamar’s “Funeral Doom Spiritual” is a requiem for the traumatized black man. Lamar speaks of the objectification of black men as being central to the narrative of white supremacy, stemming back to slavery: “They construct a hyper-masculine ideal on one level (who can work in the field all day and f*ck all night) but also they’re afraid of that same thing. It’s all constructed in their nexus.” And though slavery is over, the fantasy remains: “If you watch porn and you type in ‘BBC’ or ‘big black cock’ and you see billions of postings and listings… that’s such a dominant fantasy… that white men are obsessed with… The vast majority of people producing pornography are white men.” White men such as Everitt.
Everitt began photographing nude black men in the 1930s. Though he never displayed his work publicly, he was prolific — filling boxes upon boxes with thousands of photos until shortly before his death in 1994. I attempted to view Everitt’s entire archive before Lamar’s show, but it would have taken me weeks to get through every album. And after flipping past the 100th nude, I got the idea.
Significantly, Lamar doesn’t include any visual representations of Everitt’s work. No recreations. No parodies. This could be interpreted as a nod to Everitt’s furtiveness, but I think Lamar’s aim is to suppress the exploitation of his lens. Instead of showing any of Everitt’s images, Lamar displays messages he put on the back of his photos – which brings us back to Bishop “The Torch Slayer.” Everitt taped the article detailing Bishop’s crimes to the back of his photograph. His instinct to do so demonstrates the other offshoot of obsession – not lust, but fear.
The line connecting lust and fear is what Lamar is attempting to draw in his work: “The same sexualization of our bodies is the same thing that leads to our deaths in violence at the hands of police officers.” That’s Lamar directly referencing the death of 18-year-old Mike Brown at the hands of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Lamar points to Wilson’s court testimony that Brown resembled a “demon.” Wilson told a grand jury, “When I grabbed him the only way I can describe it is I felt like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.” Though Brown was heavier than Wilson, the two were virtually the same height. And Wilson was 10 years older than Brown. Still, Wilson sees Brown as superhuman, says Lamar: “He’s got a fantasy of black men that’s not unlike the fantasy of the big black cock. Sometimes I feel whiteness imagines black cocks as bigger because it’s just invested in that idea within white supremacy and that same impulse I think leads to the deaths of us by the hands of white people. I just think that it’s the same thing.”
And yet, it’s the image of the “scary black man” that is often most celebrated. To make that point, Lamar references the artist Robert Mapplethorpe’s “X-series,” which features graphic images of black men, most of them his lovers. (He was trying to find God in the black man’s penis, says a friend of Mapplethorpe.) In an HBO documentary about the art legend, model Ken Moody reveals that Mapplethorpe was obsessed with a certain type of black man: “There was a ghetto element to men he had the strongest attraction to. I had none of that. He’s quoted in an article as saying I was too white for him.” Lamar expands:
“It was interesting the Black people [Mapplethorpe] photographed – they didn’t seem to have a narrative or story that would precede his image of them. He wants to sculpt [black masculinity] in his own image. There isn’t a character like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Grace Jones — being these black people who would have been famous that he could have photographed that would have been in his scene — but he clearly didn’t *see* them. He didn’t see them if they weren’t a very particular kind of black man. And what he ended up doing is reproducing a particular kind of black man that was his fantasy. That’s just so fundamentally racist that if a person is thoughtful, educated, not hyper masculine, within a very particular white racist construct, then they’re not black.”
Lamar imagines “Funeral Doom Spiritual” as cathartic — a reprisal against the racist exploitation of black people in white supremacist America. One of the short films included in the work features Lamar presiding over several oversexed white male models. Another features a young white model with a whip sticking out of his rear end, a nod to Mapplethorpe’s famous self-portrait. By turning the oppressor into the oppressed, Lamar may have been trying to make statement on Black empowerment. But, I’m instead reminded of how white supremacy has negative consequences for everyone – including white males. We’re all bound to play a role – one we may not want to — and to deviate from the construct is to risk alienation from society. No one is truly free.
I can’t help but feel a sense of doom in viewing Lamar’s work. In the middle of the room sits a giant, beautifully-crafted, wooden coffin. And two small monitors show video of Lamar standing in a jail cell. I recall the phrase “dead or in jail,” which is where many young black men believe they will ultimately end up based on their life circumstances, lack of opportunities and their place in society.
Perhaps Lamar’s work lays bare the ultimate goal of white supremacy: To kill or to capture – in a jail cell or through a lens.
