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Ravenstahl and Pinder at Salon Contra

January 20, 2011

Ravenstahl and Pinder

After allowing its founding spirit, Philippa Hughes, a brief and much-earned hiatus for recharging, Salon Contra returned for 2011 with an exceptional evening that featured video/performance/conceptual artists Matt Ravenstahl and Jefferson Pinder. The two go back together a while; they met in the University of Maryland’s MFA program and have been collaborating in art and friendship since then. Pinder, a black man who describes himself as an identity artist, and Ravenstahl, a burly white guy who would look completely at home at a Redskins tailgate party, found that they shared an honesty and openness that allows them to go deep inside each other’s heads. Both do their own individual work and each has an academic day job besides, Pinder’s at the University of Maryland and Ravenstahl’s at a Northern Virginia school, but the most engaging discussion of this genuinely thought-provoking evening was of their collaborative work.

Ms. Hughes Presents!

Ravenstahl and Pinder travel together to sites freighted with particular significance in the racial history of this country. They’ve been to civil war battlefields, to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia (where John Brown is apparently still widely viewed as a terrorist) and to a restaurant in Fredericksburg, where they were unprepared for the discovery of a tunnel under a town restaurant that was used to bring newly-arrived slaves from their ships to the sale grounds, in order to spare tender white eyes the sight of the bound human beings.

Alberto Gaitan sat in front of me

The two then spend a great deal of time together processing what they have experienced, creating performances in front of a video camera, which are ultimately edited into the final piece. Their most well-known video is “Passive Resistance,” shown in 2008 at the Greater Reston Art center (GRACE) and in other venues. It shows Ravenstahl slapping Pinder and over and over again. Neither man speaks as the hits come more quickly and more violently. In the last few minutes, the screen splits and both men look at the camera as the slapping continues, confronting the viewers with their own inability and perhaps disinclination to do anything to stop it. The piece has visceral impact; we feel the utter subordination of the black man but also his stubborn insistence on survival with some measure of dignity and there is also the white man’s assumption of unchallengeable superiority and impunity.

Ms. Kristina Bilonick and friend

For Ravenstahl, the over-riding question and the issue that compels him to do this work is a desire to come to grips with the guilt that white people bear for the treatment of blacks, to confront it and cause the viewer to confront it. This is not a subject that not many white people find comfortable, and Ravenstahl has encountered outright hostility. Pinder didn’t discuss his own motivation but has said before that his intention is “to find black identity through the most dynamic circumstances.”
For me, conceptual work has to prove itself; I have confessed before that I come to it as a natural skeptic. The work of this pair, the depth of their inquiry, their honesty and the insights which they offered to us – I am very grateful for it and I congratulate them.

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