NOT LANGUAGE BASED: An Interview with Artist, Sherman Fleming

Sherman Fleming is a painter, sculptor and performance artist currently based in Philadelphia, with deep roots in the Chocolate City, also known as Washington, D.C. Fleming has an impressive 20 year history, creating performance works that emerge from his practice as a visual artist. Merging feats of physical endurance, with symbolic iconography and disintegrating narrative, Fleming's daring and risky performance work uses his body as his palette, his tool. Ironically, Fleming has eeked out an existence all these years, as a Black artist who creates challenging conceptual works, while maintaining a small Black audience and living and working primarily in a Black town. Not an entertainer by any means, Fleming stands as a sort of reminder of where performance art has come and gone. Through a series of online conversations, Shine discussed his work and experiences with him.

SHINE: What is a Black performance artist?

SHERMAN FLEMING: I have come to realize that most of my visual and performative work derives, in part, from a twinned opposition to white folk and as a black performance artist I tend to practice strategies and/or actions that articulate an identity that addresses and maybe even oppose locations of white supremacist power that propel ideologies that deny, degrade or stereotype people of color, particularly black folk. So, I'd have to say a black performance artist addresses issues of blackness.

SHINE: How does one do that?

FLEMING: When I think about who my audience is--predominantly white--and my venues--white galleries and predominately white universities and Europe--I question how my work will be perceived. Are folks just gonna be swayed by the spectacle of the black body or will content that drives my work be compelling and thought provoking? For instance, when I performed UN/SUB: De jacht op Zwarte Piet in Amsterdam, after I climbed out of a pit of sugar in which I was buried one 2 white men lick the sugar off of my body. Clearly there is an erotic component to the piece but also it's a meditation on how the Dutch in their inability to fully address their own racial issues (the presence of a burgeoning African and Moluccan population) literally confectionalize and consume the body of color through the Sinterklass (Santa Claus) ritual of eating a gingerbread doll, the tai-tai pop. The Dutch got the message immediately, some of whom approached me after the performance and remarked this was the first time they even thought consciously what the tai-tai pop represented (Zwarte Piet, a moor).

SHINE: What about Black audiences?

FLEMING: How do I address a black audience? Well, take, for example, "Pretending To Be Rock." When I was invited to perform at DCAC I specifically wanted to perform with a colleague, Josephine Nicholson, a black woman because I would be facing her suspended body with my kneeling one and I wanted to direct the focus on how the materials of water and wax, respectively, impacted our bodies as an issue of endurance. Meaning, I wanted the audience to see the discipline required to endure dripping water and wax on us without the charge that a white woman/black man would bring to the piece, which is what happened when I performed the piece prior to this one and with a white woman. Also the presence of a white person in the piece raised questions of authorship: When I first performed the piece in Raleigh and thereafter, it was assumed that the suspended white woman was the author. Add to that, the depiction of a black man on hands and knees in front of a suspended white woman was so erotically charged that people could not see the other dimensions of the work.

SHINE: What made you begin to experiment with performance art? And why do you continue to participate in such a difficult and unsupported medium?

FLEMING: It was as an undergraduate at Virginia Commonwealth University that I was introduced to concrete poetry and fluxus by Davi Det Hompson and saw a certain freedom in the medium that appealed to me in contrast to the more traditional forms of art such as sculpture and painting. I had also began to take courses in Gestalt psychology which infused my movement pieces. Besides I didn't have anything to depict visually or didn't know what to visualize. Plus, my investigation of sculpture and painting and art in general wasn't being supported by my professors except by Hompson and, later, Joe Seipel and that presented a problem. The concrete poetryworks to which I added movement I continued to investigate in my graduate studies at Hartford Art School. Major academic influences at the time were Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Lucinda Childs, to name a few. Then, there's James Brown, my hero and the mythic John Henry. Regarding why I continue to work in that vein, well, I feel that there is a certain communication that can best be expressed within the medium which may include the more traditional disciplines. Or to paraphrase Sun Ra's response to as to why he embraces the impossible, "Everything possible has been done and nothing's changed.

SHINE: How would you describe some of your work or your performance approach?

FLEMING: They are visual pieces in real time.

SHINE: As a Black male performance artist how has your work been received and would you say that you were, or are a part of a movement or group aesthetic? Are you aware of other Black performance artists who have been working at it for as long as you?

FLEMING: Well, what can I say? I think I stated it earlier when I said that no one can believe any "other" folk make art except white folk, so, operating under that distinction whenever I'm performing the audience seeks authorship with the white participants of my performances. It's a myth that the media invents and reinforces. Even though Senga Nengudi and Adrian Piper and Ana Mendiata have been working in this vein, not mention Joyce Scott, Rhodessa Jones, you, they aren't even mentioned in the same breath as white performance artists. My work does come out of the traditions of conceptual art and minimalism with direct connections to Afro-Atlantic traditions. I guess, all in all my work blends the traditions of public (pluralist/populist) and private (biographical/ childhood). My work may not be accessible to a largely black audience because in part there is the belief that except for music and poetry there are no black visual performance artists.

SHINE: What could you say were your worst and best performance experiences?

FLEMING: Let's see.....
POOR HORRIBLE PERFORMANCE: RealArtWays, yuck!!! Went up there after long negotiations with a bunch of folk that, even after sending them detailed script of performance, sending them a video of the performance, didn't know what it was and what I'd planned to do with it. Then coming up there as part of the "Other Bloods" exhibit which had premiered in Amsterdam to be their inaugural exhibition of their as yet to be completed new space. Couldn't even install my work until the day before the exhibit because they had to put in some fire exit, there were code violations, so, they were still building.
BEST PERFORMANCE: Not really the best, but second best. Just moved to San Francisco when one of the "bloods" who taught at SUNY/New Paltz, Terry Adkins, invited me to participate in a conference on the "body." We just went in there and did that piece; me, my collaborator of 20 years, Haig Paul and Terry sponsoring us we were perfect. We had them in the palm of our hand, Terry, all 3 of us, man, we were big, bold, beautiful black brothas doin' the do'. The head of that school's theater department who I had to beg to use "his ladder" came up to me later--IN TEARS!!--talking 'bout he ain’t never seen anything like that. Plus, up to that point he, predictably, of course,--looked down on performance but no more. Shit, I was competing with Pilobolus and Angels in America, both up there performing when I was but he was doing his St. Paul impression so go figure. It's interesting, Terry told me later that a few women asked if I were gay. Cause when it looked like I wasn't interested in them, then, I must be gay, as if. Like, a straight up black man can't doff his clothes, get under some 200 candles and stay there until I'm covered, get up and go home. Have they not heard of Brown, Green, Jackson, the artist, Ra, Coltrane, X, both Kings, Richard, Davis, Abrams, Bowie, you, me? Shit, they better ax somebody!!

SHINE: How would you describe/define the economics of presenting, developing and then nurturing your work?

FLEMING: Well, getting funding for my performances has been tough and so I've relied mostly on my own resources. I don't know whether it's the institutions that don't seriously consider my work to vigorously go after funding or that my funding needs don't garner that much attention. On the other hand, I consider my performance to be a personal experience, and not requiring that much technological infrastructure, so, therefore not requiring that much financial support.
This may have hurt me more than help me when it comes to working with an institution. I recall, when working with alternative spaces, the main places for performance works at one time, the performance paradigm began changing, which is a natural process to be sure, but one of the issues regarding the mounting of performances took a lot of effort with too little pay-off, meaning, using the resources of a space for a one-time event became too costly; I think that triggered a change in the presentation of performance, it became a more labored and layered process to meet market demands, more planned, which, didn't work for me the ways I approach that medium.
Some of my work does take a lot of time to make happen, for instance, "Pretending To Be Rock" took 6 years to make: 4 of those years spent convincing various organizations to fund it, finally getting both a gallery with whom I was affiliated and my undergraduate school to enter into a partnership to present the performance and create the sculpture respectively. I felt what impeded my efforts to get the piece done sooner was that it was difficult for institutions to see performance as a serious discipline.
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SHINE: Conversations Between Artists is a newsletter dedicated to the stories of artists. Stories of their successes, struggles and their solutions to living and working as artists in these times. SHINE is published by Homer Jackson, an interdisciplinary artist from Philadelphia with a background in teaching and social service. For additional information, contact Homer Jackson via email at <homershines@yahoo.com>