[EMAIL PROTECTED] It is great to see this get coverage. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 18, 2005 Art Review | 'Frequency' Where Issues of Black Identity Meet the Concerns of Every Artist By ROBERTA SMITH Once upon a time, toward the middle of the 20th century, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art regularly mounted theme shows and surveys of contemporary art. These days, only the Whitney, among New York's big museums, maintains the habit, most notably with its flawed but indispensable biennials. The job of sorting through a moment that is astonishingly, if not dismayingly, thick with contemporary art has fallen to younger, suppler institutions. It rewards them with a vitality and relevance that larger museums are hard pressed to match. P.S. 1 has now mounted two "Greater New York" exhibitions, one in 2000, the other last spring. In 2002 and again in 2004, the Queens Museum of Art mounted shaky biennials of artists living in its borough. El Museo del Barrio has its "S-Files" shows. And without christening its efforts with a carry-over title, the Studio Museum in Harlem has opened "Frequency," its second survey in four years of young and emerging black artists living in the United States. "Frequency" is not quite as strong as "Freestyle," its 2001 predecessor, which was also organized by Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum's director and chief curator, and Christine Y. Kim, its associate curator. Their exhibition brings together 35 artists, most born since 1970, who display varying degrees of accomplishment, promise or cluelessness. This may be par for the course with new-art surveys, and it's also part of their usefulness, especially to even younger artists who, because they are figuring out how to make their work, are the most important audience for shows like this. Not surprisingly, "Frequency" suggests that black artists deal with black experience or identity in ways as numerous as themselves. Some make it the center of their work; for others, it is one aspect among many; for still others, it is beside the point, a buried subtext. The degree of explicitness has nothing to do with the quality. This exhibition, for example, includes the young, enormously talented Kalup Linzy, who parlays black experience into a complex form of self-consciousness in the video "Conversations Wit de Churen III: Da Young and Da Mess." This ostensible soap opera fuses camp, scathing satire, minstrelsy and a real heart-rending narrative concerning gay lovers in what seems to be a small town into a bristling concoction, with the artist playing several roles. But also on hand is a work by Michael Queenland, whose "Untitled (Radical Since 1774), No. 2" consists of a long, subtly altered encyclopedia entry about the brilliant mathematician who became the Unabomber; the text has been beautifully rewritten by hand. The Unabomber is referred to only as X, and his tale is illustrated by images of Russell Crowe as the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind." This splinters the narrative in several directions at once, toward Malcolm X and Hollywood glamorization, while illuminating the tragic waste involved in any form of marginalization and exclusion. And as might be expected, black experience can also be used superficially, without enough personal inflection or originality. Zoë Charlton's drawings add nothing to an imagery already well developed by Kara Walker; Lester Julian Merriweather's cutout wallpaper suggests a craftsier, more down-home take on Arturo Herrera's cutout forms. Paula Wilson's multipaneled landscape painting-collage exudes ambition and mixed-media possibility, but neither escapes its academicism nor sheds new light on the black experience by adding a video image of a black arm breaking twigs off a tree branch. More promising and thought-through is Xaviera Simmons's color photograph of a black woman in a flowered robe standing in the middle of a wintry cornfield, but it never exceeds terms established by artists from Cindy Sherman to Katie Grannan. Much of the work in "Frequency" tends to occupy two extremes: the fairly Conceptual, and the overtly physical or pictorial - that is, art that involves cameras of one kind or another and art that is densely, sometimes ostentatiously handmade and visually intense, if not oppressive. The camera/Conceptual side of the aisle includes, in addition to Mr. Linzy's video, Michael Paul Britto's hilarious action-movie trailer "Dirrrty Harriet Tubman" and Hank Willis Thomas's video "Winter in America," made in collaboration with Kambui Olujimi, which uses action-figure dolls to recount a senseless murder, making the crime all the more shocking. In photography, Leslie Hewitt creates cryptic homages to childhood memory with a brightly symmetrical version of handmade photomontage, while Wardell Milan II builds convincingly (and digitally) on Martha Rosler's politicized use of the medium. Karyn Olivier's "Doubles" pairs a photograph of two old, neglected two-family dwellings that serendipitously resemble Gordon-Matta Clark's sawed-in-half house with a real wood seesaw that also implies the structures' slide into oblivion. Demetrius Oliver adds to the history of body art, staged photography and subtle wordplay with images that are themselves like body blows. Mr. Oliver's "Till" commemorates one of the most notorious lynchings in the United States with an image of the artist's head slathered in ketchup, but also suggests the word "until," which is freighted with unfinished business. The standouts in physical and pictorial density are Jeff Sonhouse's bristling, masked, mug-shot-like portrait, "Inauguration of the Solicitor," with its precisely deployed paint, collage and regimented matchsticks, and Nick Cave's heavily sequined, gorgeously patterned "Sound Suits." Covering the entire body, and culminating at the head in tall, shieldlike shapes, these amazing confections conjure quilts, disco-worthy finery, altars and a multicultural array of rituals and decorative motifs. They argue vociferously for clothing as an elaborately communicative text, a view echoed by two paintings from Mickalene Thomas's "Brawling Spitfire" series, in which women in rhinestone-studded garments grapple for dominance and sometimes resort to biting. And another kind of decorative density prevails in Shinique Amie Smith's imposing bale of brightly colored clothing, which invokes labor both forced and tender. Its careful organization makes it a kind of cubic quilt. As Ms. Smith's work suggests, artists working with found objects and materials or pre-existing situations often split the difference between Conceptual spareness and physical opulence. Jefferson Pinder's "Carwash Meditations," a collaboration with Jeff Stein, shows a black man inside a car as it passes through a carwash; the radio blares angry, pulsing hip-hop while the colors and textures raging outside the windows reiterate the music's furious creativity in visual terms. Rashawn Griffin covers a low platform with bands of found fabric, creating an abstract portrait that is also a landscape (and that brings to mind Mike Kelley's early afghan pieces). Rodney McMillian makes a broken-down armchair eloquently evoke a work-worn body, near collapse, while Mike Cloud extracts images from a book called "African Ceremonies" and fashions them into handsome collages that wreak havoc with National Geographic orderliness but still pale in comparison with the cobbled-together figures of artists like Wangechi Mutu. In surveying the work of these black artists, "Frequency" also indicates some of the challenges and options facing most artists today. Above all, it reflects the ways that issues of identity have become part of a larger mixture of concerns for black artists while reminding us that these preoccupations should be inherent in all art-making. Any art of lasting interest is a form of identity art that emanates from, and expresses the core of, the artist's personal and social being. The ability to get at this core is a necessity for art and a result of being free. After "Freestyle" and "Frequency," one looks forward to future exhibitions at the Studio Museum, including more whose titles may begin with that inspiring syllable. a.. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company b.. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/LRMolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scifinoir2/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
