ON LYLE'S CASE: THE USES OF MASK AND EMBRACE IN THE WORK OF LYLE ASHTON HARRIS

by Iké Udé

The aim of the photographer is to see all things as they really are, to realize a thing for itself, without substituting its reality or veracity. But facts are often lacking, and the postmodern mind yawns, finding them cumbersome. The superiority of the ingenious lie, and its ability to truthfully cast shadows of doubt on facts, is diminished by the amateur. The camera, by design, renders what is presented to it as matter-of-fact. Yet the image produced, no matter how matter-of-fact, is the truth that the photographer claims as his/her own.

All photography arguably can be classified as "candid camera," too saccharin, too good, too National Geographic, inexorably trapped in the world of "fact." The best photography succeeds in exorcising its subject and putting a hex on the viewer. Acutely aware of the danger of triteness and always in search of contradiction and paradox--the liminal thresholds of truth--photographer Lyle Ashton Harris deliberately chooses to go beyond the appearance of a thing. His art expresses a rich inwardness, pointing toward a center holding the soul, beauty, profundity, and need one say, sensuality.

Lyle's photographs are iconographic, using symbols to articulate complex matters. The symbols he plays with are lethal, made more so by the highly contagious journalistic verbicide that has become, sadly enough, the standard lingua franca of our age. Whether Lyle uses a grotesque blond fright wig, a mock bridal veil, or white face paint, these devices enable him to realize the value of one symbol while balancing it with its opposite.

In Passing, white pigment is painted on the artist's and model's faces, and then contrasted with their complexions. Their white faces shrilly echo the simultaneous dilemma and ambivalence of Passing. But the passing is merely intellectual, a mode of intellectual bleaching. Imagine! Is a mind field ever such a playground to venture into, albeit with nimble feet?

Lyle fortunately shares artistic kinship with other exemplary predecessors in this particular genre of photography. George Platt Lynes comes to mind first. Lynes ennobled the genre by sowing the initial, profoundly important "sinful seed," during an uneventful epoch characterized by its inveterate stupidity toward other truths outside of the mainstream. Later, Robert Mapplethorpe saw to the genre's crucial germination, while Rotimi Fani-Kayode guarded and nursed its growth. And now, their heir, Lyle, knows the risks and history of his inheritance; thus he seems singularly determined to nurture this historically strange tree to fruition.

Lyle's admirable willingness to tackle two historically calcified stigmas in an extremely hostile society known for its lynch law practice toward persons of other truths, must be applauded. This artistic mode, the intellectual equivalent of action, devoid of crude faculties, is an overdue anodyne. A miraculous one at that. One of Lyle's most heroic photographs is a self-portrait in a fright wig, Miss Girl, from the Reflections of a Past Life Through Glass series, 1987-88, which I shall simply call the Blond Fright. In the Blond Fright, Lyle's gift for tactful disdain is clear and his nebulous sympathy for vulgarity illuminated.

What are we to make of a figure with rouged lips, artificial beauty mole, eyeliner, mascara, and the blond fright? Quickly, as if in anticipation, the artist seems to sum up all these complex faculties with an implied mock fellatio, as if to appease our lower regions and tired faculties. And this he does without resorting to plebeian pictorial rhetoric.

Lyle is not unlike a physician who, lacking guinea pigs, brazenly tries his untested vaccine on himself and awaits the outcome. As Lyle explains, "I explore how caucasian beauty is imposed on African subjects. I confront my own complicity with this caucasian aesthetic. I explore the African subject at the center of the matrix of desire, not as a fixed ideal, but in flux, liberating, complex and self-reflecting." Lyle chooses to be his own guinea pig, so he is able to experience full empathy with his photographic subjects.

Lyle is like Aime-Cesaire's Rebel: "I have muzzled the sea while listening to gardeners struggle toward the fabulous rump of morning in a softness of scandal and spume." Dualities abound! In Nigerian culture, the art of masquerade is seen as a divine act, expressing transcendental capacities. At the moment of the masquerade the Nigerian artist is no longer human. The masquerader can speak in tongues; he can be vile or sincere to a fault, he may be God and as easily the devil, but certainly no mere mortal. This seemingly absurd feat has been myopically christened voodoo by Western empirical orders, who have yet to explain the existence of a no-longer-human phenomenon. Well, even lubricants have their limitations, I hasten to add!

Lyle as masquerader uses a white face in Passing, and in the Blond Fright, a drag face. In Passing, he swiftly mocks the one inveterate: self deception. In the Blond Fright, he sneers at the sister-inveterate: moral righteousness. One is inclined to read Lyle's mask as though the artist is an actor delving into his subject matter with uncontrollable abandon--coy but not malicious. His simultaneous despair and strange revelry seem to melt under his feet, while the eyes reveal a fierceness of spirit anchored in his mind's vacuum. A vacuum that allows his fancy and intellect free rein.

To reckon fully with Lyle's bizarre pictorial field in the Blond Fright, we must first reckon with the deliciousness of the Blond Fright's pout, a persimmon alluring and intensely voluptuous, an illustration of an inedible picturesque epidermis pregnant with sultry sheaths of edibility.

The pictorial temperament in Passing is locked in a nimbostratus condition. There are the various muted nuances of grey, of tone into tone, of one indeterminate black into another. This percussion effect, resonating in the shifting indeterminacy of greys and partial blacks and whites, becomes a sombre substitute for reality itself. There is still, however, a spectre of danger in Passing. If we are eager enough--and the eagerness does exist--we may be compelled to read the mask too literally, almost a shade too factually, without being absolutely truthful.

In the Blond Fright, Lyle is the actor, gingerly portraying some disconcerting ambiguities. In Passing, he is the educated artist aware of the price of his stature, and a deep vein of betrayal is etched in his sardonic icy stare. Questions arise: Is Passing the same for us as it is for Lyle? Is it a portrait in retrospect? A study in the luxuries of regret? Is it a portrait rigged with anxiety? What echoes does Passing find in etoliation? While the reciprocal ambiguities of Passing and the Blond Fright may acquaint one with certain truths, the truths remain partially undeciphered, though one is left with a peculiar sense of knowingness.

There is a third picture, The Embrace, that could be read as a steel/feathery caress. This picture is of such an improbable compactness, superbly cropped, oozing sensuality, robed in warm supple tints of light. All the senses are in a revel: there's the convergence of thighs, the teasing of the groin, the knees begin to buckle, all sensations seem to melt under the feet, unabsorbable, repeating ad infinitum.

I had gone to Times Square on occasion to study this picture, which was part of a group exhibition. There I courted the impressions and opinions of some of the spectators. One, a clergy man: "It's kind of weird." The second, a young man, said: "It's sort of weird for men to be seen like that," while tightly holding the hands of an obviously queer man, who wore an ACT-UP T-shirt and was clutching in his other hand a worn, notoriously queer paperback novel written by James Baldwin. The third person was of an indeterminate sex but the voice rang rather mannish: he/she matter-of-factly said, with a simultaneous snap of his fingers: "It's about time, girlfriend".

It was astonishing that the fragments of their respective responses found a curious thread of communion: "It's about time, girlfriend". Unmasked, the respondents seemed nervous, they felt shameful somehow, exposed; their eyes revealed painful truths they harbored inside. In that state, they were passing. To these strangers was The Embrace a key or a lock?

At any rate, the insipid cloying embrace, wantonly charged, is an element at once negative and positive as is found in nature, and undoubtedly holds a wearisome sway for the uninitiated and heraldic sway for the initiated.

I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant have you been to me: your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women

This strange, but heartfelt biblical eulogy, from the second book of Samuel, chapter one, verse twenty-six: David's lamentation from ages ago, has for Lyle a life affirmation, a song of praise; a rebirth; a marriage and a happy death. Can this holy verse, echoing between David and Lyle, be a remarkable happenstance or an immaculate predestination? When or wherever this question arises, it will clearly, and with irony, display an effect.

Finally, whether or not this picture is a steel embrace or a feathery caress, it is certainly a flowering from the hothouse, where all is dim and feverish, fragrant but not flagrant--where innumerable pockets of desires are veiled in purple raiment, and where Christ, on his second coming, might exchange an olive branch and then a real kiss with Judas.