Alarm Magazine
#25 Spring 2007

Fahamu Pecou
Words: Whitney Kassell

Faking being a faker has always been a specific niche.

Jesters imitated pompous kings in royal courts while the king of pop art, Andy Warhol, mocked the bon vivants of the art world despite his undoubted position as a poster child among them. Within this offbeat tradition of solipsism, Fahamu Pecou grapples with crises of race, fame, and artistic frustration using the same cartoonish, tongue-in-cheek sarcasm of his forerunners.

At first glance, the faux art magazine covers Pecou creates resemble the masturbatory doodles of a self-obsessed yet talented teenaged boy. Echoes of ultra-aggressive hip-hop album covers and belligerent “in da club” rap videos stand out in each of the self-conscious poses to such an extent that in between eye rolls one starts to wonder if this guy can actually be serious.

Of course, if you know what you’re looking at from reading Pecou’s extensive and quite erudite manifestos, you already know that he isn’t – or not exactly anyway. But just because the artist’s obnoxious alter ego isn’t a true-to-life reflection of the Pecou that you might meet on the street does not mean that the pictures he paints don’t say something - and a lot - about the very specific message he is trying to convey. In fact, Pecou’s “doodles” are so well thought out as to move away from the emotional spontaneity normally associated with “art” and into the realm of social commentary.

In describing that message, Pecou uses terms that would probably confound the version of him that he so carefully constructs on canvas.

“My intent is not to promote hip-hop lifestyles but to subvert and take ownership of a system of political connections and exclusion,” he explains in jargon more befitting a college professor than a crotch-grabbing, blunt-smoking public urinator. “The ideas and comments on fame are more a dismissal of the institutional politics of the art world and to a greater extent, those of contemporary pop culture.

“The references to hip-hop are like coded language, masking and disguising criticism of notions of fame, fine-art insider politics, image and black masculinity, hip-hop culture vs. pop-culture, and much more,” he goes on, laying out a distinctly cerebral case for his large format paintings, which look more like posters on inner-city bus stops than expressions of a complex sociology treatise.

An open critique of the gaudy bravado of what modern hip hop and broader pop culture has become--an undeniably corporate, manufactured and marketed product--would be more at home on a fake Vibe or The Source cover than on lesser-known pubs like Art on Paper or Art Journal. However, this incongruence is Pecou’s deliberate attempt to bring his critique not just to corporate and popular culture—a road on which so many other critics have tread as to cross the line of saturation—but also to the art world and in particular to the exclusive echelons represented in those glossier art magazines.

“My intent is not to promote hip-hop lifestyles but to subvert and take ownership of a system of political connections and exclusion.”

As a child whose first aspiration was to be listed in the World Book Encyclopedia as a famous artist, Pecou always paid special attention both to what it takes to “make it” to the top in visual arts and to the seemingly predefined characteristics of who does and does not gain entry into “the club” of revered modern artists. What he saw struck him as having little to do with actual artistic talent and a lot to do with race, class, and what he calls the “insider politics” of the fine-art world.

Finding himself squarely outside the confines of what, in most cases, makes it as “fine art,” Pecou started to push the boundaries as one way of finding out where those boundaries lay and maybe even breaking them.

“I made a conscious effort through the Fahamu Pecou is the Shit campaign [a tag line he uses along with his hip-hop persona] to utilize the tools used in marketing music artists or movies, etc. to market myself as an artist, simply because that’s just not done for visual artists and I wasn’t quite sure why. The bravado seems to be pretty standard on a music magazine, but the art world doesn’t typically show black male artists on their covers, and definitely not grabbing their crotches,” he says in reference to one of his pieces showing him in that pose from the waist down holding a bundle of long, wooden paintbrushes. By bringing the superficial hip-hop culture he claims to simultaneously disdain and still respect into contact with an art world that has no place for it, Pecou simultaneously shows the cracks in the value systems of each.

Atlanta, Pecou’s current home and a notoriously tense town in terms of race relations, provides an appropriate backdrop for one of the central issues of his work—the images of black men both in fine art and pop culture. In the realm of fine art, he appears to be searching for anything really, aside from the tragic, Basquiat figure of an outsider being exploited and corrupted by the cut-throat, largely white art establishment—an image that he often invokes by adding that artist’s signature three-pointed crown or other trademark graffiti to his pieces. Pecou also takes his invocation and attempt to move away from that victim-like trope a step further, adding an element of perseverance.

“The same politics of race and exclusion that I react to also permeated his [Basquiat’s] career, and early on inspired a lot of his work. Invoking Basquiat as I do helps me steer clear of the traps he fell victim to. Referencing him in my work is my way of surviving Basquiat.” Much like Basquiat, Warhol and other self-conscious critics of modern art and fame, Pecou’s statements do not end on the canvas. Instead, they often spill over into a type of performance art that blurs the lines between him and the character he has created. At his openings and group shows as well as other events around the country, Pecou has taken to showing up in his “the shit” costume--big sunglasses, white minks and designer sneakers, an entourage of hanger-ons and bodyguards trailing behind him like the wake of a yacht in sunny St. Tropez.

In describing the effects that this presentation has on those around him - his “audience” - Pecou hints at the distinct mix of respect, awe and self-abasement that often comes with proximity to fame. “People are really intimidated by my bodyguards and don’t know if its OK to talk to me or approach me, so I often catch someone staring.” But as always, it is the reaction of children—the un-fazed mirrors of what lies behind adults’ carefully socialized and often well-filtered behavior--that brings home what Pecou is getting at in this NEOPOP series and in his approach to what art should tell us about our society. “A couple of them [children] came up to me immediately wanting to know if I had a limousine and if I was a movie star, then they wanted to give me a hug like I was a character of Disneyland.”

The conflagration of someone in full “Diddy-like” (as Pecou calls it) attire to a larger-than-life cartoon plucked right from the living room TV drives home without dispute what Pecou says more subtly in his work -- that those to whom we feel inferior, whether they be MTV personas or the high-end art world’s “next big thing”, are in many cases merely playing tricks with mirrors, beaming back what we expect. If one can lift the curtain, exposing the undercurrents of why a man holding his crotch can appear on the cover The Source but not in ArtForum, the artist reveals our expectations and, in turn, the often unsavory or unexpected assumptions behind them.