Kehinde Wiley’s Classicisms

In response to the colleague who once asked whether the artist Kehinde Wiley directly engaged with classics “rather than just classicism as an aesthetic,” this paper argues that more exacting attention to Black classicisms in the visual arts frees us from the tyranny of this artificial and unproductive distinction. Wiley’s equestrian portraits in particular open up two approaches for turning the colleague’s question on its head: 1. the provincialization of classics as, in the end, one contingent form of classicism, sorely in need of rewriting its relationship to Blackness; 2. the decentering of the universal Man (as benchmark for classicism) in favor of alternative modes of intra- and interspecies relation.

My contention that Wiley’s work invites us to provincialize Classics marches partly to the beat of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000); it also derives inspiration from ongoing dialogues in Black studies and critical race studies. “But what does it mean,” Willie James Jennings has asked in After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, “to take the ideas, words, and voice of another in a world and in educational systems that were formed by theft and shaped by a taking that continues to this very moment?” (Jennings 2020: 43). Ranging from Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005) to Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II (Michael Jackson) (2010) and Equestrian Portrait of Isabella of Bourbon (2016), the paper’s first half studies how Wiley’s artworks mount powerful critiques of the imperially extractivist regimes by which Blackness itself was constituted as diametrically opposed to and ultimately inconceivable within Classics and Eurocentric classicism—this despite the necessity of Black persons and Black labor for their articulation.

The paper’s second half takes up one component of the visual language through which Blackness and classicism are fused together in Wiley’s paintings: the salience of the non-human. Wiley’s intervention in classicism is well attuned to Sylvia Wynter’s call to dethrone the Western bourgeois version of the human: “Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself” (2003: 260). Wiley is hardly alone among Black artists in testing the boundary of human and non-human; on the spectrum of imaginative devices for this testing, equestrian representation may for some viewers seem tame by comparison to the aggressive hybridization or centaurification of such works as Nandipha Mntambo’s photographic composite Europa (2008). What is refreshingly explicit about Wiley’s practice is his keen feel for the “complete fiction” of “the scale of man to horse” (Wiley in Cunningham 2018). This section will therefore be interested in gauging the payoffs of Wiley’s work for those seeking to imagine “interspecies relationships anew and ultimately to abolish the forms of antiblack thought that have maintained the fissure between human and animal” (Bennett 2020: 4). Wiley’s concern for florality and vegetation invite engagement along similar lines, and the paper will close with a summons to embrace at a disciplinary level the consilience of Black classicism and “vegetal being” (the phrase: Irigaray and Marder 2016).