On Art
BLOCH, BRADLEY W.
On Art BLACK SATIRE AND BLEEDING HEARTS BY BRADLEY W BLOCH A good DEAX of the art created during the last 10 years has had a decidedly cool temperature. The rephotography of Sherrie...
...In the hands of a lesser talent this would amount to at most a formulaic trick...
...If getting us to question our cultural biases is something Colescott does particularly well, far too often it is done poorly...
...What is worse, her facile approach trivializes the serious matters of political honesty and racial injustice...
...Yet more than race, it seems to be about vulgarity, on which no people have a monopoly...
...The rephotography of Sherrie Levine, the teakettles of Haim Steinbach, the sparse, electronic imagery of Peter Halley—all these cerebral, static pieces keep the viewer at a distance...
...an oarsman pushing away ice floes in Leutze's original has been replaced with a cackling fisherman...
...A reminder of this is provided by Howardena Pindell, who is included in a showing of work by black artists, Art as A Verb: The Evolving Continuum, at the Studio Museum in Harlem...
...As is true of Colescott, you can't approach these works with a cold, appraising eye...
...Where will they be when they can no longer count on support based on politics or ethnicity...
...One can't help wondering, after all these centuries, how adequate a symbol she ever was...
...The same grotesque humor is found in Eat Dem Taters (1975), where the suffering peasants of Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters are transformed into a dirt-poor black family delighted with its meager fare...
...Behind the anxiousness to tell one's story there is a cloying adolescent earnestness that hampers artistic development...
...No matter how you feel about his work, you cannot dismiss it...
...Colescott is at his best challenging ideas about sex...
...Few educated people today would think of minstrel characters as emblematic of the black race, or that blacks are satisfied with anything thrown their way...
...A teakettle on a shelf can only invoke so much...
...It allows the artist to become lazy and indulgent, to use art merely as a form of personal therapy...
...Other pieces are more pointedly satirical...
...Many of those showing at the Studio Museum in Harlem might keep this in mind...
...she lays out in very explicit terms what life at home, and particularly life in the kitchen, was like...
...The result is Mojotech, an urban silhouette punctuated with circuit boards and computer chips...
...Robert Colescott also enjoys the "luxury" of having some people like his work because he is a wily black artist who stomps all over Caucasian icons...
...This is a step the artists of A rt as A Verb need to learn...
...Nonetheless, the show, continuing through June 18, is worth seeing...
...Her Video Drawing: War Series superimposes the word "Liar" onto television stills of George Bush and Dan Quayle, and a video tape, Free, White, and Twenty-One, interweaves her personal reminiscences of prejudice with a white wornan scolding her for paranoid exaggeration...
...Colescott's appropriation does not denigrate the original...
...Her choice of medium is poignant...
...Pindell's art lacks both creativity and any semblance of thought...
...A half hour can go by simply reading Ringgold's quilt, a marked contrast to the few seconds usually allotted to a piece of art these days...
...Senga Nengudi, in her collage All in All, includes a vandalized poster announcing a speech by Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter Yolanda, as well as a letter suggesting to Nengudi that "maybe one of your artist friends could use the bits of posters in a collage or something to make a statement of sorts...
...there is an emotional heat that draws you in...
...InHomage to Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People (1976), for example, he simply took some of the white revolutionaries in Delacroix's original and made them black...
...The story that unfolds is the artist's decade-by-decade relationship with food, ending with a dramatic weight loss...
...In At the Bathers Pool (Interracial Blues) (1984), inspired by but not taken directly from Cézanne, a confused white Venus looks on as ablack couple stands knee deep in a natural pool, locked in conjugal embrace...
...Out of familiar visual materials he has built a house of mirrors that reflect preconceptions with biting insight...
...In Tea for Two (The Collector) (1980), ablack art collector gaudily blows cigarette smoke through his nose while standing in front of a wall of Lichtensteins, Flavins and Stellas...
...A number of black artists have been moving determinedly against such chilly currents...
...But he does not address himself exclusively to this relatively narrow group...
...The impact is startling because of its very subtlety...
...And in some instances Colescott chases after a weaker observation when the real topic lies elsewhere...
...The emphasis in A rt as A Fero is on the sharing of private emotions, and this is both the show's strength and limitation...
...each person is left his own responses...
...Even as one admires these works, however, there is a feeling that their immediacy has faded in the years since they were created...
...In addition, automatic audiences are rarely permanent...
...she is merely mouthing well-worn pieties...
...To be sure, when they are first encountered there is a fascination with their antiseptic quality, but the thrall quickly gives way to frustration, then indifference...
...All in All is sincere, yet one balks at the self-consciousness of a work that "makes a statement" by incorporating the request that this be done...
...The artists represented all clearly perceive themselves as "black artists," but this identity manifests itself in different and interesting ways...
...No less significantly, once he has made us uncomfortable he does not press his point...
...Having an automatic audience is a dangerous luxury, though...
...Betye Saar takes the idea of the mojo, African mystical amulets made from found objects, and brings it to the 20th century culture of information...
...Saar paints her skyscrapers in a metallic copper that echoes the wires of her electronic parts and infuses the scene with a magical, internal glow...
...Walking through a room strewn with baseballs and armor may well express how Adrian Piper felt turning 40, but it does not do much else...
...George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an A merican History Textbook (1975) depicts Carver, dressed as General Washington, standing heroically in a boat filled with slapstick stereotypes of mammies and banjo players...
...they tend to move from cause to cause as popular sympathies shift...
...The target here is not race, it is clashing views of sexuality: Although in Western tradition Venus is thought of as the personification of love, when faced with flesh-and-blood passion her unattainable, idealized nature reduces her to a spectator...
...Change: Faith Ringgold's Over II0lb...
...The painting's cartoon-like style heightens the humor...
...One laughs initially at the characters, and then, in a much different way, at the fact that the boat's passengers—a token historical figure and a bunch of darkies—were once considered by many whites to be representative of the black race...
...As a result, black artists, especially those who see themselves as "black artists," can count on their work being appreciatively received by certain progressive viewers...
...Perhaps the most notable among them is Robert Colescott, whose retrospective recently left New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art for the Seattle Art Museum...
...The current cultural ethos places a high premium on diversity, and no diversity is considered more authentic than the display of ethnic sensibilities...
...Like many bad artists today, she appears to believe that trafficking in politically correct sentiments automatically confers legitimacy on her work...
...According to an accompanying note, the painting derides the notion of art collecting as the exclusive preserve of rich whites...
...The core of the show consists of famous paintings that have been redone by changing the race of their subjects...
...The figures are rendered in the curvaceous, sensual manner of the sculptor Gaston Lachaise...
...rather, its subject is raised from the specifics of the French Revolution to the universal claim of liberty for all...
...Neither the passage of time nor the occasional near miss, though, diminish the overall power of Colescott's genius...
...in the end the viewer is slightly dizzy yet deeply affected...
...He reaches out as well to the skeptic...
...Colescott adroitly uses the gambit to achieve a wide range of effects...
...Weight Loss Story Quilt, on the other hand, is decidedly low-tech...
...The squares of the quilt alternate between photocollage reproduced onto the fabric and an accompanying narrative explaining the pictures...
...Quilts have their roots in the domestic environment of hearth and home, an environment usually only hinted at by the scraps of fabric used to make them...
...Ringgold's quilt, of course, does not hint...
...He is in a dance with the viewer, leading him in one direction, then another...
...Still, there is something esthetically dubious about such an outpouring of revival meeting sentiment...
...Other pieces tell equally personal stories, from Charles Abramson's memorial, The Bending of Osa Nyin, to Adrian Piper's monument to her mid-life crisis, The Big Four- Oh...
...The ability of black artists to develop beyond that kind of self-consciousness will determine how enduring their impact on "mainstream" art will be...
Vol. 72 • May 1989 • No. 8
