“What would life be like without Richard Pryor?” Whoopi Goldberg once said. “Dull, baby, very dull. There will never be another Richard Pryor. He is, and always has been, the funniest man alive.”
It’s about to become less dull, baby. This Thursday in St. Louis, Richard Pryor will be the funniest man alive again. Except he won’t be a man, not exactly.
White Flag Projects, 4568 Manchester Ave., will host an outreach performance exhibit of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which closes in New York on Sunday. The Whitney Biennial is the biggest show in contemporary art, as far as the official art establishment is concerned, and it’s a major honor to see an element of it travel to an independent gallery in St. Louis.
White Flag Projects is hosting a free performance of Donelle Woolford, one of the 103 artists selected for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. This is where Richard Pryor comes back alive, though not exactly as a man.
Donelle Woolford was selected for the biennial by Michelle Grabner of the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, one of three curators who put together this year’s show. Grabner said one priority in making her selections was “art as strategy.” That’s where Donelle Woolford comes in.
Donelle Woolford is a collaboration between the artist Joe Scanlan, a white male artist who teaches and directs an arts center at Princeton University, and a series of black women actors, most recently Jennifer Kidwell.
Scanlan has said he started the project to see what happened to his art if he presented it as made by someone else. For this other self he switched gender and race, making her a middle-class African-American woman. He adapted her name from that of a professional football player, Donnell Woolford, a cornerback who was a 1st round draft pick for the Chicago Bears in 1989 and played a decade in the NFL.
This playful experiment with art and identity took on a performance element, Scanlan told The American, thanks to Jennifer Kidwell. Scanlan said that Kidwell came across a lost final episode of the short-lived Richard Pryor Show that aired on NBC (unbelievably, in prime time) in 1977. Scanlan said Pryor purposefully told a series of obscene jokes that could never be shown on television for the fourth and final episode, which was therefore cancelled.
This alleged lost show – what Scanlan described to The American as “a buried routine” – is what Kidwell performs, in character as the performance artist Donelle Woolford, in “Dick’s Last Stand.” That’s the show that’s coming to White Flag Projects on Thursday, May 22 in its next-to-last stand. The tour’s last stop, fittingly, is Pryor’s home town of Peoria, Illinois.
Scanlan’s positioning of this routine seems to be part of the act. He said Pryor filmed the routine as the fourth and final episode of The Richard Pryor show which was never aired, but in fact a fourth and final episode of that show was televised. The jokes that Kidwell (as Woolford as Pryor) told on February 15, when the tour stopped at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, are mostly familiar from other, surviving Richard Pryor routines – they were never “buried” and this show does not bring them back from the dead.
In fact, their act revives classic Richard Pryor. In the actual fourth and final episode of The Richard Pryor Show that NBC did televise on Oct. 4, 1977, Pryor is skewered in a vicious celebrity roast. Only parts of the roast could be televised, but in the safe-for-TV portion, Robin Williams – then a young emerging comic, not yet a world-famous actor – said of Pryor, “This man’s a genius. Now, who else can take all the forms of comedy, slapstick, satire, mime, standup and turn it into something that will offend everyone?”
That sums up Richard Pryor’s comedy, very much including the bits that Kidwell (as Woolford as Pryor) will perform at White Flag Projects on Thursday, May 22. Take it from Pryor’s official website, RichardPryor.com: “By accessing this site, you confirm that you are over eighteen (18) years of age and are not offended by foul language of any kind.” If you are offended by foul language – or brutal, satirical humor – of any kind, do not go see “Dick’s Last Stand.” And do not take anyone to see it who is under 18.
Richard Pryor was adored by audiences, but attacked by censors and officials for trespassing racial and sexual boundaries so shockingly. The Donelle Woolford act is not being played before adoring masses of fans hearing transgressive humor for the first time. It’s performance art being staged in contemporary art settings to audiences who feel like they’ve seen it all. Its originator, Scanlan, has come under attack for the racial and gender transgressiveness of his act. Some claim that Donelle Woolford is a white male artist paying black female actors to facilitate his 21st century transgendered minstrel show that exploits the legacy of Richard Pryor.
While that’s defensible critical attack, a more generous assessment of the “art as strategy” going on here is possible. “Dick’s Last Stand” can be understood as Scanlan’s deeply knowing posthumous contribution to the celebrity roast that Pryor commissioned for the actual fourth and final episode of his television show. That could be the secret to understanding the trick Scanlan seems to be playing in positioning this routine as a fake fourth and final episode that didn’t air.
This involves a flip from last to first, just as Scanlan already has switched from man to woman and white to black. The Richard Pryor Show’s fourth and final episode actually was televised, but the very beginning of the first episode did not air as part of the show. In this sketch, Pryor faces the camera dead-on, answering objections from his audience that he would have to compromise his act to make it on network television.
“People say, ‘How can you have a show? You’ve got to compromise, you’ve got to give up everything,’” Pryor said in the cancelled bit.
“Is that a joke or what? Well, look at me. I’m standing here, naked. I’ve given up absolutely nothing. So … enjoy the show.”
The joke is visual. As Pryor is saying he has given up “absolutely nothing,” the camera pans wide on him, to reveal the comic standing nude in a flesh-tone bodysuit that makes him appear to have been castrated. Think about Scanlan burying his male gender to revive Richard Pryor performing a fake “lost” final episode of a TV show that started with this actually, factually lost opening sketch, and then you get the joke of “Dick’s Last Stand.”
For more information and to register to attend this free event on May 22, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.
