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Jeff Donaldson - 3

A: That may well be true. You are perhpas familiar with the fact that that Wall of Respect movement that started in Chicago in '67 did grow beyond the boundaries of black people. OTher Third World people got involved...but also a number of mainstream artists(and I use that term to encompass everybody who is outside of that mainstream); mainstream artists got into the wall pting. movement to the extent that they robbed it of its lifeblood, that is the contextual aspects of it. I wouldnt see that as being outside of the realm of possibility. B ut I do feel that some of the tenets of this movement will be very difficult; well I guess the context of the wall was ignored also by those artists. I would think that perhaps they would deal with the surface aspects.

Q: Im sorry. I didnt mean to imply that Robert Rauschenberg was going to see the light, but rather that just as jazz revitalized the American cultural tradition as a whole, so too here is something which is existing here. Do you see evidence that it might?

A: Well, one of the problems is that there's very few avenues of expression for this form of art and you still havent had a major institution see the importance of this art. Even those who have seen the importance of it are afraid to take a chance on it. So I think thats whats necessary. Either some one from the establishment will have to reach out and pull it in, or it must be ushered in on the same platform that you find other forms of painting expression...

Q: Do you see a danger that there might be an effort at cooptation of the more readily accessible elements of the Neo-Africanist mode? And commercial exploitation?

A: Thats the nature of our culture.And I think that it's a good thing because it separates the wheat from the chaff. In the '60s we didnt quite understand that. I dont mean just black people. People of a certain age didnt understand that the strength of this culture is (250) the ability to absorb and to somehow expend itself to include whatever become s a part of it. It doesnt, wisely, always attempt to quash or to destroy but it makes every attempt to see if there is some thing that can be brought into the whole mix and I think that we have a greater u nderstanding of that now. I also believe since the demise of Mr Hoover et al there has been less of a tendency to feel it is necessary to coopt, and people have fewer feelings about,fears of beig coopted or wiped out. We now take a more practical view toward 'that; we can see few of these things have anything to do except these people having or these people not having; those that have are reluctant to give up. So you have to use whatever means that you have at your disposal to deal with that. But its not a question any more of people being too concerned about being coopted, because in many cases the wheat and the chaff are separated in that process. Also in that process something is to be gained from seeing how other shings are treated. Ideas about how the market works...Ways of reproducing things cheaply can be useful to everybody and the development of consciousness raising of people in the direction of wanting images...and so we see this as a growth proces and perhaps its necessary to have the 'shlock' to point out as what should not be done.

Q: In many areas of American culture during the '70s there's been a "mellowing out" a looking for...a humanistic implication of something that may already have existed, without necessary renouncing what the ideology was before, I think I see this in some of the art (297)