“Disarming Surveillance—Crystal Z Campbell’s Model Citizen: Here I Stand.”
American Art 38, no. 1 (forthcoming Spring 2024).
Abstract: Crystal Z Campbell’s multimedia installation Model Citizen: Here I Stand (2018-19) revisited the monitored life of Paul Robeson. At the height of Robeson’s stardom in the 1920s and ’30s, the Black American singer and actor earned admirers the world over. Robeson also fascinated modernist artists, some of whom made him the subject of famous nude studies. However, in the late 1930s, Robeson’s embrace of anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-racist politics ended his studio modeling and tainted his mainstream reputation. From then on, FBI agents were among Robeson’s most avid followers. Almost a century later, Campbell forged an analogy between the gazes Robeson’s studio modeling attracted and the invasive governmental oversight he later drew as an outspoken, radical American citizen. By reframing the 1920s modernist nude studies, Model Citizen interrogates how these portrayals’ formal restraint neutralized Robeson’s divergent and defiant valences as a public figure. These restraining visual effects feed into a historical continuum of United States-based surveillance practices that yield reductive representations of Black individuals. I argue that the installation refutes reductive modernist visual approaches to Robeson by presenting his image through a nexus of aesthetic, social, and political contingencies and collective experiences. In so doing, this analysis of Model Citizen links critical race art history and visual cultural studies with the field of surveillance studies to show how Campbell’s installation correlates a set of artistically established conventions for visualizing the human figure with established methods for monitoring Black bodies.
