Jayson Scott Musson’s ART THOUGHTZ with Hennessy Youngman (2010-2012)
In 2010, while in graduate school for painting, artist Jayson Scott Musson uploaded the first episode of ART THOUGHTZ to YouTube. Acting as alter ego Hennessy Youngman, Musson’s series of videos mixed the lexicons of rap pundit vlogger and Artspeak, drawing attention to the pretensions and absurdities of the latter. Revisiting the works over decade later, EAI’s Executive Director Rebecca Cleman reflects on the sustained profundity of Musson’s project.
Jayson Scott Musson, ART THOUGHTZ with Hennessy Youngman: How to Be a Successful Black Artist
2010, 8:42 min, color, sound, HD video
View on YouTube.
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Jayson Scott Musson, ART THOUGHTZ with Hennessy Youngman: Institutional Critique
2011, 6:50 min, color, sound, HD video
View on YouTube.
Jayson Musson’s Art Thoughtz, a satirical performance art series staged on YouTube from 2010—2012 (and still readily available there, with accrued comments), is more profound than its entertainment value might belie. Musson’s turn as Art Thoughtz’s brash, blinged-out vlogger Hennessy Youngman added multiple dimensions to the artist’s expression of racial stereotypes and tropes, and how Black representations are constructed and circulated within white-dominated cultural networks. This is something Musson has explored across various distributed media, including writing, visual branding, music, and performance, and also within the art market, as with his more recent painterly abstractions composed of repurposed Coogi sweaters—Australian apparel made popular streetwear thanks to Christopher Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G.
Before his YouTube premiere, Musson had strived for a more open public audience in earlier projects, including as a regular columnist for the Philadelphia Weekly, and as PackofRats, his MC name in the Philadelphia-based hip-hop group Plastic Little. Hennessy Youngman’s first appearance was as a stand-up act in a comedy club. On YouTube, however, Musson was able to precisely construct Hennessy’s image, incorporating poignant music samples, visual cues, and a cultivated “casual vlogger” look that provided a comedic counterpoint to often heavy subject matter.
Hennessy is a brilliant amalgam of caricatures and references, his name a nod to hip-hop’s alcohol of choice and also to the legendary comedian Henny Youngman. In addition to Coogi sweaters, Hennessy wears Sesame Street character ballcaps and necklaces dangling conspicuous pendants, such as a gilded row house. Through the series Musson satirizes likely inspirations for his own art-making, including John Baldessari, Carolee Schneemann, Jay-Z, Richard Pryor, David Hammons, and the Dadaists, the commonality in this eclectic group being a lineage of rogue artists who have troubled cultural conventions and introduced new artistic identities.
On the one hand, there is the sympathetic loner Hennessy, single and eager for attention, both settled into and uncomfortable in the confines of his make-shift home studio – a highly relatable situation in the era of COVID-19 lockdowns. His only connection to the world seems to be with the faceless mass of the Internet, and for a time Musson would respond to YouTube comments and emails as Hennessy.
Then there is Hennessy as an embodiment of the entrapments of capitalism and systemic racism, calling out the art world’s discomfort with othered artists and their cultural backgrounds. In How to be a Successful Black Artist, for instance, he advises his target audience of aspiring Black artists to understand the role white curators want them to play in order to be successful, a renewed topic now as the art industry seeks to be more inclusive without necessarily changing the inherently exclusionary institutions determining these representations.
Musson was an art student at the Ivy-League University of Pennsylvania when he launched ArtThoughtz, perhaps as a way to exorcise the academic framework he was then navigating. Hennessy seamlessly incorporated Musson’s erudite knowledge of art-school trends and “Artspeak” into the guise of what the artist described as “someone without the seeming cultural authority to discuss what he was discussing,” which referred to Hennessy’s race, class, and presumed education background.
Significantly, Musson’s work considers how white publics receive Black or othered representations, and what effect the anticipation of that receipt has, especially in the realm of mass media and popular culture. A series of text-based broadside posters collected under the title Too Black for B.E.T. (circa 2006), used the syntax and aesthetics of advertising to lob deliberately unsettling provocations, such as a statement by PackofRats about the addled environment of post-9/11 America: “You see that white boy over there? Watch me cut in front of him on the line for the MAC machine. He’s all afraid of me because I have a sprinkle of facial hair and a dark tan complexion. White boy thinks I’m gonna slice him with a box cutter in the name of Allah just so I can check my fucking account balance…dumb honky. Doesn’t he know I gots a BFA?”
Musson’s confrontational humor and racial caricatures now coexist with the memes of the click-seeking social media platforms that have nurtured viral cultural appropriation. Digital blackface—a technology-enabled racial posing—is so pervasive that it characterizes a primary mode of online expression, ranging from naïve uses of certain words and phrases to more overt appropriations of Black names, appearances, and voices by non-Black users, often for comedic effect. These representations draw from an oppositional position that has crystalized around a continually othered and subjugated race, but separate it from this cultural signification and, even when undertaken to demonstrate solidarity or unity, do so in the glib echo-chambers of Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram/Facebook. In stark contrast, the humor in Art Thoughtz is the delivery system for a more serious consideration of the institutionalization of prejudice and disenfranchisement. It is telling that Musson selected YouTube as his main forum for the project, and that it continues to be available there even though EAI now distributes these works for exhibitions and screenings. This is a continuation of what many artists turn to video or media art for: a new context that might open up channels to reach the public in ways that elude, or at least complicate, art industry conventions, especially the white-walled gallery space.
The gravity behind Hennessy’s comedic veneer comes through bluntly in the episode Institutional Critique, which also dispenses with any notion that Art Thoughtz is merely an art world parody. At the start, Hennessy explains that “rather than, you know, talk about the theoretical aspects of institutional critique, I’m just going to go ahead and critique institutions in this video,” and proceeds to run through a list of five institutions that could be seen as horrifically culturally-defining: Rikers Island, ADX Supermax Prison, Abu Ghraib, Auschwitz, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Here Hennessy’s casual tone takes on a sinister edge, and his feigned indifference exposes a deeper recognition of how futile and callous a “critique” of these institutions is.
On a meta-level, Musson recognizes that Hennessy is also housed within and relies on an institutional construct, shifting his site of exhibition from a white-walled gallery to the “alabaster alcove” of his home studio (though for Institutional Critique he has relocated to an “obsidian alcove,” an approximation of the black box gallery that typically shows video art and where ArtThoughtz is likely to be screened), hosted by the commercial platform YouTube. The art theories Hennessy parodies, institutional critique and relational aesthetics in particular, are also useful for their emphasis on context for art, and its social position. Looking at this series a little over a decade later, and during a fever pitch of interest in making digital art a scarce commodity, ArtThoughtz is a potent demonstration of how art can achieve significant cultural value in a contingent and accessible form.
Rebecca Cleman is the Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix.
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