Throughout his work, Wilson attends to the site, location, and form of the ‘black’ body in visual representation. Although his work is primarily about the institutional and discursive framing of cultural difference, and he has explicitly commented that his approach is not intended to foreground ‘race’ over other cultural discourses, there is a recurring attention to the idea of skin color in his works, and its role in the framing of subject and their subjection. From the condition of the dark-skinned museum guard who is invisible yet always on display, to the presence of African-American slave children, nearly hidden in the corners of eighteenth-century American painting, Wilson’s installations offer something like a topological study of the circulation of ‘black’ bodies in visual culture and material culture. Wilson shares with Renée Green and James Luna an attention to the forms of visibility and invisibility that support a cultural logic of placement or location; in other words, they each attend to how ‘black,’ ‘red’ and other, bodies have carefully assigned sites and values, whether in popular culture or in museum culture, so that they are susceptible to being seen, or disappearing from view. For it becomes clear both in Wilson’s installations, and the broader social contexts to which they refer, that the status of the ‘black’ body is a monolithic, fabricated concept that extends beyond any single historical subject. It is this monolith, its maintenance, and its intersection with living subjects that Wilson’s critical practice asks us to contemplate.

What does it mean to be both excessively visible and virtually invisible? Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man is perhaps one of the most poignant testimonies to this condition of invisibility and institutional erasure operative as a matter of course for ‘black’ men in the 1940s and 1950s. Responding in part to this classic text, Wilson’s 1993 installation An Invisible Life: A View into the World of a 120-Year Old Man addressed the relation between biography and invisibility through a carefully crafted domestic display. Produced in conjunction with Capp Street Project in San Francisco, the installation occupied a Victorian-era home, recreating in meticulous detail the life of the previous inhabitant: Baldwin Antinous Stein. Rooms were filled with objects that mapped a history as complex and subtle as it was incredible. (Fig. 2.17) Docents informed visitors of the extraordinary life of this unique individual, who was born in the Caribbean (slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873, 120 years previously), became a world traveler, professional portrait photographer, polyglot, friend to the photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Alfred Stieglitz, and an acquaintance of Marcel Proust in Paris (Fig. 19). Although his ethnicity is undetermined, the clues offered suggest that he could be of mixed racial heritage.

On the first floor, as docents led visitors from room to room explaining the architectural and historical details, recorded voices could occasionally be heard. From an armchair in the living room the voice of a young man whispered, “Am I alone? Is it only me? Is there no one else?” while across the dining room table two older men’s voices praised the merits of Socratic dialog. On the second floor of the house, in the library and bedrooms, hundreds of photographs—portraits of men of different ethnicities—cluttered the shelves and table tops like so much Victorian bric-a-brac. There were turn-of-the-century photographs of sailors, athletes, gentlemen in business suits, and other men lounging outdoors (Fig. 2.18). The house was also filled with memorabilia, statuettes of men wrestling, and other art objects from around the world. Books sitting on table tops, such as Love in Ancient Greece, Of Human Bondage, Nijinsky, and Proust and the Art of Love, were interleaved with yellowed bookmarks that read: “a mystery created, page 104,” “a history denied, page 117.” Although never explicitly stated, an observant visitor could piece together the visual and textual evidence of Stein’s gay desire—a desire that may have been “closeted” all of his life. To bring the point home, Wilson installed a silent video image of two eyes (the artist’s and others’) looking out from the back of the bedroom closet, barely visible among the clothes. (Fig 2.19) When visitors looked into the closet, each saw a different pair of eyes, and thus formed a different image of the racial or ethnic identity of the “closeted” man.

Stein was, of course, an entirely fictional character. The artist produced a suggestive script for the docents to read that highlighted the “faux finishes” and “hidden” architectural details of the house, as well as conflicting evidence about Stein, to suggest to visitors that “all was not what it seemed.”¹ Yet visitors were mostly surprised and sometimes dismayed to learn at the end of their tour that Stein was not a real person.² An Invisible Life enabled the artist to make evident both the degree to which visitors invest museums and their docents with an unquestioned authority, and the degree to which life histories of men like Stein—educated, cosmopolitan, gay men of the last century—have generally been rendered invisible. The absent body is made to appear, the invisible life is rendered visible, yet this rendering also proves to be fictional—a circular predicament that is not unlike that of the visible/invisible ‘black’ body in visual culture. Stein stands in for the lives of all men across the span of 120 years whose freedom is yet uncelebrated. As in Cheryl Dunye’s film The Watermelon Woman (1996), Wilson created a fictional character to tell the story of actual lives. The work is also autobiographical to the degree that it establishes an identification between this fictional character and Wilson, whose own life as a gay artist of Caribbean descent might equally be rendered invisible by history or by art criticism. The fiction of Baldwin Antinous Stein was an autofiction for Wilson, an alter ego, an imaginary life, an intimate mythology that leveraged the signs of the past for the present.³ Working from what might be called the “evidence effect” of artifacts, Wilson’s display allowed for an otherwise inexpressible history to be imagined through a spatial topography—an autotopography.

1

Interview with the author, October, 2002.

2

“Fred Wilson: Art in Context,” exhibition brochure, (New York: Metro Pictures 1995).

3

See discussion of autofiction and autotopography in the Introduction and Chapter Two.