Afropick: Playfully Political

Robbie Lyman

Certainly the tallest work in the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ in print / imprint exhibition at

roughly six feet high, Sanford Biggers’s Afropick (fig. 1) stands out among the print works on the

wall. A clenched fist morphs into the long prongs of an afro pick, striated in black and white to

suggest the contours of the hand, veins, and prongs. The work, which is printed monochrome on

plain paper except for what appears to be a small name seal on the lower right, is entirely given over

to this one subject, with no additional context provided. As such, the statement it makes appears

to be clear, almost bare and undeniably political. In this paper, I will discuss how medium effects

Biggers’s work, gesture at the implications of race for a reading of this piece and attempt to think

through how these intertwine to inform the political impact of Afropick, as well as the challenges

present in this reading.

I visited the Bronx Museum during their Children’s Day event, which meant the gallery was

noisy and cheerful with small voices and the occasional running toddler. Just two nights before,

demonstrators (myself among them) shut down the West Side Highway and marched from the

Financial District to Times Square to protest the grand jury decisions not to indict the killers of

Mike Brown and Eric Garner (among other injustices). I joined the protesters, along with other

Columbia students, after black and brown students staged a die-in at the Tree-Lighting Ceremony,

a Columbia tradition to celebrate the end of the semester and the beginning of the holiday season.

The students’ refrain, “They left us dead! They left us dead! And we ain’t supposed to be mad?”

echoed in my head as I sat in front of Biggers’s print in the museum. (Biggers is Assistant Pro-

fessor of Visual Arts at Columbia.) Connecting art and politics, images and lived experiences is

absolutely at stake in reading a work like Afropick in 2014. As a white participant in anti-racist

activism, I see my reading here as ultimately part of an attempt to better support my black peers

through self-education.

Afropick is, on one level, crystal-clear in its content. The black fist held straight up is a symbol

that means “black power.” White kids in middle America are taught this in middle school, and

in Afropick the black fist is also literally the color black. Without the title, the fist grows out of

what might appear (to me) to be roots, except that despite the small bulges and bends, they’re too

orderly to be roots. With the title, of course, the “pick” part of the image is also impossible to miss.

Biggers connects one symbol of blackness, the afro pick (and thus the afro), with another, the black

power fist. The implications are easy: black hairstyles—for despite white appropriation, the afro

is a black hairstyle—are linked to black politics, particularly the revolutionary black politics of,

say, Malcolm X or Angela Davis. Biggers combines these two symbols on an empty background

at an enormous scale. The subject is otherwise uniform in its detail work, the tight black and white

stripes very characteristic of woodcuts. Afropick is thus didactic; the piece offers nothing else, as

if to avoid distracting from Biggers’s message. Combined with its huge size, the piece is able to

communicate across a gallery floor and further: one can easily imagine a print of Afropick on a

billboard or the side of a building, where it would be legible from blocks away.

After looking at the print for a few minutes, it becomes possible to notice the small wrinkles

and creases in the paper—notice that the image is a print. As a woodcut, Afropick can be essentially

recreated dozens of times. If the red part of the image (fig. 2) is a name seal (and the circle in the

upper-right reads “Biggers” in Japanese), then even a form of the artist’s signature can be recreated

along with the image.1 This opens up the possibility for Afropick to be in more spaces than the

Bronx Museum. Walter Benjamin writes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological

Reproducibility” that, “Above all, [technological reproduction] enables the original to meet the

recipient halfway.”2 Benjamin has the photograph and microphone in mind, of course, but he

allows that print technologies like the woodcut make possible a certain kind of reproducibility.

1Of course, the print is also signed—but in pencil!2Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, Volume

3: 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Others (Cambridge: Belknap, 2002), 103.

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This, Benjamin continues, makes possible the creation of works of art made with reproduction in

mind. Afropick’s lack of background is an example of this. By eschewing all but the essentials,

Biggers makes it possible to imagine his image in other places and other forms, even perhaps as

an actual afro pick! A successful reading of Afropick must avoid putting too much weight on the

object itself.

Woodcuts, as Benjamin would have it, are incredibly passe: they have been supplanted by

etching, engraving, lithography and now photography.3 Yet Afropick is a woodcut. We can see

this in its adherence to the convention of using hatching for shading (although very little cross-

hatching), as well as in the curves and bulges of the teeth of the pick, which suggest variations in

the wood that could cause a gouge to swerve. Afropick bears traces of the artist’s hand—signs of a

struggle, almost.

Furthermore, the scale of the woodcut is remarkable. Since the image does not appear to be

enlarged, we must assume the block from which it was printed was enormous. Here, close to

the limits of the form, the labor put into a woodcut begins to resemble that of sculpture. Harold

Rosenberg writes of painting in the mid-twentieth century that

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after anotheras an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design,analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas wasnot a picture but an event.4

At six feet tall, Afropick is similarly not (just) a picture but an event. Of course, there are sig-

nificant differences between the works of those whom Rosenberg calls the “action painters” and

Biggers’s piece. Although Afropick is not strictly representational, it certainly cannot be said to

be a depiction of the act of carving a woodcut either. However, the connection between visual

art and performance is an important one.5 Rosenberg uses this connection to argue for a kind of

psychoanalytic reading of artists like Jackson Pollock, writing that “a painting that is an act is in-

3Benjamin, “The Work of Art. . . ” 102.4Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965 [1959]), 24.5Especially considering how performance, sculpture and installation figure into much of Biggers’s other work.

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separable from the biography of the artist.”6 In many ways, this is incorrect: for example, just as an

actor may adopt the mannerisms and movements of a character quite unlike her own, so too could

an artist like Jackson Pollock choose to act “in character” on a canvas instead of a stage. What

is well-taken, however, is the way such an artwork brings the artist along with it. The loosening

of brush strokes in the hands of the Impressionists revealed how the artist formed the picture, so

that on some level to view an Impressionist painting was to be reminded of its creation. Reading

Afropick as an event or an act draws attention to the work Biggers did in its production.

This focus on the woodcut as an act allows us to shift away from confronting Afropick only

as a unique or authentic art object and into the realm of its creation and the signs at play in its

interpretation. Attempting to psychologize Biggers or read his biography into a work that makes

such an overt use of well-known signs would be misguided (at best) and likely play into racist

stereotyping. Instead, we should consider the signs Biggers mobilizes in Afropick and their use in

the 21st century.

Kobena Mercer, complicating current wisdom about the meaning of black hairstyles in his

essay “Black Hair/Style Politics,” writes

The historical importance of Afro and Dreadlocks hair-styles cannot be underesti-mated as marking a ‘liberating’ rupture or break with the dominance of white bias.But were they really that ‘radical’ as solutions to the ideological problematization ofblack people’s hair? Yes: in their historical contexts, they counter-politicized the sig-nifier of ethnic devalorization, redefining blackness as a positive attribute. But, on theother hand, perhaps not, because within a relatively short period both styles becamerapidly depoliticized and, with varying degrees of resistance, both were incorporatedinto mainstream fashions in the dominant culture.7

The fact that white kids in middle school can recognize the afro and the black power fist and point

to a certain era of U.S. history and style is a part of this incorporation into the mainstream. Another

part, of course, is the afro wig. Mercer marks the importance of hairstyles like the afro, along with

the movements they were associated with, but complicates it; reminding us that it is possible to

ascribe too much significance to a style. In 2014, it would be naıve to consider the afro pick and

6Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, 27.7Kobena Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics.” New Formations 3 (1987): 35.

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black power fist as political signs without also considering their cooptation, commodification and

incorporation by and into mainstream culture. To consider Biggers’s work as merely a faithful

reproduction of or meditation on symbols—mysteriously delayed some 40 years—of 1960s and

70s politics, would be to do him a disservice. And yet, the Bronx Museum appears to do just that,

placing Afropick next to a collection of protest graphics from Latin America.

At this point it becomes important to ask whether it is possible to read something akin to

irony into Afropick. Of course the answer is yes: Biggers melds two signs of black culture and

black politics that could be called “dated” and renders them in the most archaic of print forms, the

woodcut. Afropick could be seen as too full of indices of “history” to be a political, rather than

aesthetic statement. Such a reading also accounts nicely for Sticky Fingers, (fig. 3) a 2001 work

that also involves a giant combination afro pick and black power fist. With its almost too-glossy

comforter and pillows in red and black, it is hard to not see Sticky Fingers as too on-the-nose to be

taken seriously.

This question of interpretation can be related to similar questions in the interpretation of Pop

Art. As Leo Steinberg articulated in “A Symposium on Pop Art,” one of the challenges of Pop Art

in its emergence was that “[critics could not] yet see the art for the subject.” He continues: “. . . in

[Roy Lichtenstein’s] work the subject matter exists for me so intensely that I have been unable to

get through to whatever painterly qualities there may be.”8 For Steinberg part of the challenge in

interpreting Lichtenstein’s work is that the subject was so clearly and unmistakably realized that it

becomes difficult to see anything else in it. Similarly, the challenge of interpreting Afropick is that it

appears to foist an interpretation on the viewer almost before she can react. Henry Geldzahler tells

us, “What we are left with is a heightened awareness of the object and image, and of the context

from which they have been ripped, that is, our environment.”9 Part of what makes a Warhol Brillo

box so intriguing, in other words, is that the viewer can place it, mentally, on a shelf in a store with

all the other Brillo boxes, and yet here it is, on display. While Biggers’s piece is neither a faithful

8Steven Henry Madoff, ed., “A Symposium on Pop Art” in Pop Art: A Critical History (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press 1997), 72.

9Steven Henry Madoff, ed., “A Symposium on Pop Art,” 67.

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recreation of an actually existing object, nor is it in the style of one, its marshalling of recognizable

symbols also brings along with it “the context from which it has been ripped.” Because Biggers

gives the viewer no (or almost no) comment of his own on the subject of his print, she is left with

just the object and its context, which is markedly absent.

“Black practices of aesthetic stylization,” Mercer writes, “are intelligible at one ‘functional’

level as dialogic responses to the racism of the dominant culture, but at another level involve acts

of appropriation from that same ‘master’ culture through which ‘syncretic’ forms of diasporean

culture have evolved.”10 Black culture in the U.S., and particularly black art, then, is not solely

involved in responding to anti-black racism; it does not function merely as a response, say, to white

art in the U.S. Rather, black art also draws elements from a variety of racially-varied sources to

create what Mercer might call “syncretic” black art. Thus, perhaps, a woodcut of an afro pick.

More to the point, Mercer would remind us that Afropick has the possibility to be something

other than solely dead-serious and political. (The children at the Bronx Museum tried to remind

me as well.) The political message Biggers gives to us on a scale that would call out from blocks

away—that black hair is political and black hairstyles can be an important part of liberation—

should not be ignored and feels particularly resonant as I write. Upholding these resonances to

the exclusion of all others, however, carries with it the danger of perpetuating the pigeonholing of

works by Sanford Biggers and other black artists as “political” or “always about race.” To do so

without regard for the nuances, complications or playfulness possible in their work, would be a

racist, if perhaps well-meaning, failure of interpretation.

10Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics,” 45.

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Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected

Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Others. Cam-

bridge: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.

Mercer, Kobena. “Black Hair/Style Politics.” New Formations 3 (1987): 33–54.

Pop Art: A Critical History, edited by Steven Henry Madoff. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1997.

Rosenberg, Harold. The Tradition of the New. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965 [1959].

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Figure 1: Sanford Biggers, Afropick. 2005. Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York.

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Figure 2: Sanford Biggers, Afropick (detail). 2005. Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York.

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Figure 3: Sanford Biggers, Sticky Fingers. 2001. Artist’s website:http://www.sanfordbiggers.com/pages/work.html#work/sticky-fingers.

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