The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse by Valerie Cassel Oliver

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse by Valerie Cassel Oliver Sharon P. Holland The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse. By Valerie Cassel Oliver. (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 282. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-934351-19-2.) The Dirty South is the culmination of a decade-long plan at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts “to enhance and broaden the institution’s service to the public, specifically in the areas of African and African American art” (p. viii). While the depth of cultural expression for the African-descended on this side of the Atlantic spans more than four hundred years, the exhibit and its catalog explore the period from 1920 to 2020, arguably some of the most turbulent years in Black expression and experience in the United States. The South of the exhibition’s curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, is indeed dirty, messy even. Its edges need a touch-up, but its roots stretch over that graveyard that begins with the gates through which we all return. The goals of this exhibit are ambitious, as its creators, artists (both visual and sonic), and dreamers aim to reposition our appreciation of the American South and how we frame what Cassel Oliver calls “the overall art historical narrative” (p. xiii). In her signature essay for the exhibition catalog, Cassel Oliver reminds us that the moniker “Dirty South” has been not only about a way of life, but also a way to life. This idea resonates across the spectrum of ideologies of Blackness in social justice and arts movements. In many ways, this collection of essays raises the question: why not use visual culture as a textbook for an understanding of Black history itself? Moreover, it questions what an archive is without its sonic and visual compatriots. Even as the exhibition and its catalog emphasize the materiality of African-descended cultural production, they speak to that place of spirit. Alabama-born artist Jack Whitten, for example, interpreted soul as “dematerialized matter” (p. 18). This is especially true in how the natural world comes forth in “vernacular” cultural production and “land art,” washes over, burrows under their creations. Assembled here in three sections, all of which refer to other artworks across the catalog, the essays yield little gems—like a conversation between Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Jennifer Burris about how Beverly Buchanan’s works both “live in the world” and speak to the world that the exhibition manifests (p. 36). One of the themes that the collection mines and revisits is more subtle, but perhaps it is its most important contribution to the discursive terrain that is the South. This theme is the sense that folks living elsewhere—in the space on the other side of an inverted Mississippi, or living in what is sometimes called the eastern corridor—often discount the contributions of folks who make their living life in this place, while at the same time waxing poetic about their own connection to this place they only visit in a kind of imaginary. As one of the most important scholars of this Dirty South and its music, Regina N. Bradley, reminds us, even within that entity called hip hop, axes of difference, especially in class, abound. As scholar Kirsten Pai Buick proposes, perhaps these contestations and differences can be understood by following the colonial history of this place. She argues that the South is not necessarily an entity that is part of the matrix [End Page 191] of the United States, but an imperial power that has thought of and—as you learn if you if you live here long enough—continues to think of itself in those terms. Shifting our vision once again, the exhibition catalog’s second section traverses this early southern empire. As scholar Anthony B. Pinn notes, the relationality of life and death in modes of Black expression is manifested in the slab, a custom car that becomes “a marker of ideological commitment aesthetically articulated,” where Black expression remakes transportation, turning it from ordinary to extraordinary (p. 84). In this catalog, we not only see constant...