Dress It Up, Then Make It Real

In our February 13 issue, Blair McClendon reviews “Edges of Ailey,” the Whitney Museum’s show about the legendary choreographer Alvin Ailey, curated by Adrienne Edwards. “If Ailey’s dances come across as pleasurable rather than noxiously pandering to a received idea of blackness, it is not solely because we recognize the motions and situations,” he writes. “It’s Technicolor again. We know the strut, but then, none of us can move quite like that.”

As the Technicolor analogy perhaps suggests, McClendon comes from the film world; he is an editor whose credits include Aftersun, The Assistant, and, in 2024, The Last Showgirl and Union, a documentary about the successful effort to unionize Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island. His writing—about cinema as well as novels, art, memoirs, and celebrity—has appeared in Bookforum, n+1, and The New Yorker.

Last week over e-mail, McClendon and I discussed Ailey, the interaction between art and politics, the class divisions within black art, and the narrative possibilities and biases of nonfiction.

Nawal Arjini: You write that “Ailey—his name, his fame—has given the curators an opportunity to subtly stake out the parameters of a black canon in the visual arts.” What do you see as the value of that canon?

Blair McClendon: Canons are living things that expand and contract; their barriers are always questioned and rearranged. Perhaps I should say that I am against them, but it’s just true that Moby-Dick is better than most other novels, and your life will probably be better for having read it. So in that sense, I think a black canon is the same as any other: it stakes a claim to aesthetic excellence, some social relevance, and the work’s enduring influence. But black canons also obviously have the political function of assailing the color line that has been, and often still is, drawn around the arts. It wouldn’t be difficult to take a course in twentieth-century art and never see a black artist or writer unless someone has thought to include one or two for diversity’s sake, probably from the 1960s. Black canons demonstrate how inane that is.

Has this project of canon-making changed in the past few decades (or maybe even just the past ten years)? How, say, has the meaning of the Andrea Davis Pinkney children’s book about Ailey, which you discuss in the piece, changed in the generation or so between your childhood and that of a child today?

Obviously canons have come under increasing scrutiny for all of their arbitrary barriers, which have less to do with marks of quality than of identity or status. But to the specific question here: what happened in the span of this last generation or two is stupefying. I, and many of my peers, are the children of people who were themselves children when Jim Crow fell. There are plenty of appropriate qualifications and political orientations that address that fact, but I think it’s sloppy to pretend that the continuities from slavery to now are the same thing as constancy. Life is manifestly not the same as it was, and we know this not from questions of who is celebrated for “excellence” but from mundane facts: where we can go to school, where we can eat, who we know, how we know them, who we are colleagues with, who we love, who we are near enough to truly hate. The fading of the civil rights movement and the shattering of the black power movement created an ambiguous atmosphere. That generation was raised amid half-sincere promises that advancement was possible.

Their children—my generation—experienced a childhood where black stars were still ours (the latter-day mainstream adoption of Wu-Tang or Biggie is belied by a general ignorance of the subject matter of their lyrics) but were also finding greater ease at becoming the world’s stars. The burden was supposed to be even lighter, though we were still told to work twice as hard. But the moments of rupture, and their increasing intensity, became impossible to reconcile. The marches, protests, and riots engendered by the 2008 recession and the spate of highly publicized police and vigilante killings meant that images of black people burning buildings again returned to the fore in American discourse. Certain corners of the left spent the last decade awaiting the return of a midcentury revolutionary subject while black teenagers kept putting their lives on the line to fight the state.

I gloss all of that because we have lived in a time when black stars—senators, presidents, dancers, actors, painters, singers, filmmakers—have never been more visible, more beloved, more highly remunerated, and still our cities burn. The link between the general condition of black people in America and our “best and brightest” is coming undone. How long can an artist remain one of ours? We hear all the time the claim that work is being made “for” black people, but materially that is often not true, which isn’t really the fault of the artist.

The rapidity with which black culture is now assimilated into the mainstream makes it difficult to explain neatly. This is a silly example but I recently read an article about Gen Z slang and saw the words flex, cap, bet, shook, G.O.A.T. and sus. This leads me to believe that all of Gen Z must be black New Yorkers from 2013. So I don’t know exactly what Pinkney’s book would mean to a child today, if it could signify the same things.

As exciting as the art in the Ailey exhibition is, there seems to be a slight strangeness in how the actual dancing is almost necessarily sidelined, as even the name of the exhibit implies.

I’ll admit that I’m a believer in the proscenium. I work in film, I believe in frames. I believe in film—the material substrate—proper, in the sense that an increasingly high-definition fidelity to life bores me; the point is to look through a veil. Dress it up, then make it real for me. So I think it is quite difficult to present in an open space something that has been designed with a particular “front” in mind. Ailey’s dances might be better suited for a museum than some other work precisely because of their sheer prowess, their opulence.

I do think it would be difficult to actually stage a museum show strictly about dance without it becoming a festival of dance—which I like, but which is something else. I appreciate how it is situated alongside other arts, because the siloing of different media does a disservice to our understanding of their history and future. I think some of the most exciting parts of the show were not where it cohered but where there were moments of tension or contradiction. Part of why I focused on Faith Ringgold’s work is that it made me ask a question I hadn’t before: Where was Attica in Ailey?

In your reading about Ailey’s life, was there a tension between his inclusion in the American mainstream—as you write, Revelations was performed in the USSR at the behest of the state department—and his place in black arts?

If you are a black American and you make phenomenal work and you are not a dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary living in a revolutionary moment, you can rest assured that your work will eventually become a part of the story America tells about itself. Even if you are those things, it might still happen. Some people aspire to this; others resist it. Jazz was hated and then it was popular and then it was soft power. Rap was hated and then it was popular. Now you see Italian drill rappers woo-walking thousands of miles from Canarsie. That’s a testament to black culture, but also to the channels carved in global culture by American institutional power. Like Ellington before him, Ailey went on state tours. It’s hard to imagine Amiri Baraka doing that. Ailey was also a supporter of, and made work about, the Mandelas when the American government still backed apartheid South Africa.

This is, and probably will continue to be, one of the great tensions in artistic production in this country. I don’t think it’s as clear a dividing line as we might like. Everyone loves the James Baldwin of Notes of a Native Son, but fewer people seem to quote the Baldwin of No Name in the Street, who called for a socialist America and wrestled with the class divides among black people.

Your day job is as a film editor; you’ve spoken beautifully elsewhere about the musical sensibility that informs your understanding of film and your responsibility as an editor. Would you speak a bit more about this process? How do these sensibilities, drawn from other media, inform your writing or your experience of reading?

I basically believe that moving images are a question of rhythm. The size, duration, color, and composition of two images implies something about the third. It’s true, sometimes you cut or add a sound or don’t use a shot because of a technical problem, or a problem of technique. But ideally one ought to make a movie where each successive image is surprising and still lands right. I think it’s hard to do both. It’s easy enough (given the resources) to do what is expected, and it is easy enough to produce something chaotic. There are no wrong notes, but if you know how to listen there is a world of difference between Albert Ayler getting loose and an undisciplined saxophonist trying to squawk his way through a lack of formal understanding. I think, as an artist, you’re basically trying to make your way from the latter to the former.

It’s hard for me to say how exactly one medium acts upon the other, besides the fact that I might mention movies more often than some other writers. I may be more critical of writing that never mentions how the movie appears but only what happens. With movies I often come back to small gestures rather than scenes; that’s how I remember what I’ve read, too.

A few years ago, you wrote that “two of the best films ‘reckoning’ with the Trump era”—meaning his first term—preceded it:

Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables and Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, both from 2016, pointed to what is always right there before us: punishment and denialism running neck and neck with survival and resistance. They did so while turning away from direct narrative, placing greater faith in discrete images and voices.

Could you say a bit more about the affordances of such formal experimentation? After Gaza and in Trump’s second term, has anything changed about the truth-telling potential of these anti-narrative experiments?

Deborah and Brett are some of the best filmmakers working today and I thought that before I knew Brett. I think it’s not so much what formal experimentation affords as what is demanded of it. It’s hard for me to imagine wanting to be an artist only to repeat what has already happened. That doesn’t mean everything has to be new or innovative, but it’s nice to try. I guess, broadly, it feels like an era of academicism. I’ve said this before, but cinema has been around for barely more than a hundred years; people will confidently tell you how movies work and how they don’t as if, without carbon dating, one could look at the first cave painting and one made a hundred years later and tell the difference. Nobody knows how movies work, nobody knows what audiences want, we just know what we like.

It’s difficult right now to talk about truth-telling in light of the genocide in Gaza. Everybody knows the truth. Many deny it, but everybody knows the truth. Filmmakers who have claimed to be committed to depicting the lives of the marginalized are not silent because they do not know the truth. Columnists who have otherwise been so eloquent about justice did not fall silent because they do not know the truth. I am not saying this in resignation, but we might have to stop talking about how to speak truth to power and figure out how to give the truth power.