The inclination came to the child during punishment. A young Awol Erizku got kicked out of class for pulling a prank. Limbo was an art room. Waiting for whatever repercussions, the child looked around and began to get ideas. Erizku has in the past offered this memory as an origin story for his practice. And it gains drama, a sense of the life scaled down to the miniature, when we consider how that practice has unfolded: a wit introduces himself, deconsecrates the canon of the West, and grows far enough from that canon, which is to say history, only to construct his own spiritualized view of history, which he now calls Afro-Esotericism.
Erizku is a prolific photographer, sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and d.j., and I sometimes wonder if, down the line, he might become a writer. I could list the requisite influences: Donald Judd, David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, Richard Prince, Man Ray, and the rest. But I keep coming back to Erizku’s literary sensibility. The titles alone tend toward something like verse, splicing the slang of a rapper, the declaration of an insurrectionist, the phrasing of a poet. Speaking of poetry: Erizku could well have been Aimé Césaire. Like the Martinican poet, Erizku is drawn to flora and fauna, which he places wryly among inorganic material. He knows that this Earth is in ecological trouble, to say nothing of the crises of humanity, but his vibe is spiritual, not polemic. Erizku is self-aware: the point is not to replace one ideology with another. There is Erizku the surrealist and Erizku the satirist, the appropriator from the school of Duchamp who stamps the Black Panther symbol on the American flag and spray-paints it on the proverbial-made-real white picket fence, lest liberals feel their Blackness-as-noble-suffering fantasies too corroborated as they walk the expanse of a show that he knowingly named “Make America Great Again.” He decided to show that body of work in Europe! That Surrealist’s wink.
Erizku was born in Gondar, Ethiopia, in 1988. Not long after, his family relocated to the United States and settled in the South Bronx, in New York, where his father lived. Erizku lived in government housing. He loved music. Idolized Nas. He has described his mother as a closeted poet, because she has written but never published. “Closeted,” mind you, not “undiscovered.” What effect did her example—of creating art outside the frenzy of capitalistic consumption, of creating art from an internal urge—consciously or subconsciously have on her son, who increasingly takes on the role of art-world refusenik? Showing promise at a young age, Erizku went through the prime funnel of arts education: the High School of Art and Design, in New York, then Cooper Union, then an M.F.A. at Yale University. David LaChapelle and Lorna Simpson were among his mentors. The rigidity of these institutions caused productive mutinies in a couple senses: in terms of medium, Erizku entered Cooper Union as a painter and graduated with a focus on film and photography. He began at Yale as a photographer and then pursued sculpture and installation. And, in terms of his thinking, he became exhausted with the Eurocentrism of his métier—an ideology that reveres Picasso and Rauschenberg, that casts the trips great men took to Africa as dalliances, and then Africa as the raw material, not the source.
Most of the time, I cannot actually remember my first encounter with an artist’s work. Most of the time, that is because the early works are necessarily unoriginal and therefore not memorable; it is important for the young artist to pass through the embryonic stages of mimicry to get to the authentic voice. Erizku did not need to go through that phase. We were there for what might be remembered as Erizku’s début. And by “we,” I mean his generation of young Black Internet kids, who almost immediately sought to enshrine him as a figure of the Zeitgeist. We shared Erizku’s subversion of Vermeer, “Girl with a Bamboo Earring” (2009), rabidly. With his subsequent revisions of Western European representational art—his odalisque series, featuring sex workers in Ethiopia, the boys placed among fruit and clutching flowers, looking ripe for consumption—he has come to the art world as an insurrectionist, not in the least because he does not need to be in its thrall. Erizku shows in galleries, but he has also, historically, skirted the system, showing his work on his Tumblr (now inactive) and Instagram accounts, which he used to open to the public during designated hours. He has received “It Boy” profiles in magazines, naming him the king of some easy Afropolitanism, even as he was buying African masks from a vender in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art, with the intention to burn them.
Categorize Erizku if you want to. It’s a losing game. The sweetness of his demeanor—Erizku’s voice is a soft, low hum; the tenor reminds me of Alice Coltrane’s harp—should not confuse you, for the artist has a heated spirit. Erizku’s trajectory has veered further and further from the tyranny of the signature image. He seems to steer away altogether from the notion of an upward trajectory, with its requisite attachment to the Black bourgeoisie. In interviews, Erizku speaks passionately about his disdain for simplistic representation. Fuck Black excellence, in other words. But it is not that Erizku does not want to uplift the race. He is interested in iconography, and, moreover, he is interested in his people’s intense relationship to iconography, to fashion, to style, to beauty. So many celebrities have sat for him. And it is for a reason that he has made certain historical figures, including Nefertiti and Malcolm X, recurring idols in his still-lifes. What Erizku rejects is the defensive perch that kills the spirit of so many image-makers. Nota bene: it is a relief to have a twenty-first-century visionary who thinks outside the street-style dicta of “authenticity,” who blatantly choreographs and poses. I am thinking, here, of “Pardon My Ladder (Arm n Hammer)” (2019-20), Erizku’s sui-generis exploration of Black masculinity, desirability, and violence. (The photograph is one of many featured in “Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax,” the first major monograph of the artist’s work, out from Aperture in June.) In the image, we see a Black man’s naked torso, his head just outside of the frame. He seems to be a creature of fashion; he holds a Glock delicately, as if it were a handkerchief—hence the pun in the art work’s title—and on his extended fingers are beautiful rings. The photograph is the visual equivalent of a rapper’s epic, both fantasy and reality at once.
Erizku has done a difficult thing. He has grown in public. Over the years, he has cultivated an aesthetic grammar. It begins with lighting and color. “Rich” is not a strong enough word; the reds, blacks, blues, and oranges in his photographs have the opacity of unmixed pigment, sometimes giving the works the flatness of modernist paintings. The opacity correlates, I think, with Erizku’s mode of portraiture, which is rooted in a cool distancing rather than obvious invitation, or exposure. No doubt, there is great pleasure to be had in gazing at an Erizku portrait. But the anima is protected, shielded; this is why there is great mystery in his portraits of famous figures such as Beyoncé, Kevin Durant, and Michael Brown, Sr., the father of Michael Brown. Erizku’s is a radical conceptualism in the style of Barkley L. Hendricks—that is, when Erizku is working with people. When he is working with objects, we sense the shadow of David Hammons surrounding him. Erizku’s ethos as a collagist—mixtapes have long been the formal inspiration for his technique—is fierce. Masks, boxing gloves, designer loafers, bricks of clay alongside bricks of cash, jewelry, dice, basketball hoops, that Glock, candles spent to the wick, those busts of Nefertiti and the pharaohs, the recurring roses, his rose—Erizku has given the objects a metonymic charge. He knows that contemporary Blackness, made and unmade on the stage of capitalism, is as much defined by its spiritual reckonings as it is by the elemental stuff. That contemporary Blackness need not be constricted to the Black form at all; there is an argument to be made, based on the artist’s later work, that Erizku is becoming an abstractionist. Borders exist less and less in his work, as does the United States. As much as Erizku is drawn to creation, he is also thinking about obliteration as a means of reflection. Lately, he has been making drawings using fire and ash.
Earlier, I mentioned that Erizku’s fans wanted to make him a figure of the Zeitgeist. A kind of literalist pop-culture god, an analogue to this or that famous musician, an interpreter of the mood. Yet remember the Surrealist’s wink. Erizku is widening his sense of pre- and postcolonial time. No wonder he is drawn to the Sphinx, which he first saw in Egypt at the age of thirteen. It was the subject of his show at Gagosian on Park Avenue, which I saw one freezing day in 2022. The gallery walls were painted black, sucking out the light. Erizku had created his own illumination. The six photographs glowed from within, installed within light boxes. No traditional sphinx was represented; Erizku took the colossus as metaphor for a recombinant world, where unlike parts move in cosmic tandem. ♦
This is drawn from “Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax.”
