February 13 to May 26, 2019
235 Bowery, at Rivington Street
New York City, newmuseum.org

This exhibition offers a unique window onto the black experience. Nari Ward is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose career spans twenty-five years. His work is composed primarily of found objects from the street in New York, Harlem in particular, that critiques and subverts conversations around capitalism, poverty, and race. His New Museum retrospective fills three floors with assemblage, sculpture, painting, video, and installation in an exhibition that, in generously embracing and provocative ways explores how crime, justice, care, violence, and economics all have a stake in what it means to be a responsible citizen. Found, humble, everyday objects are shown to contain a web of epistemological and linguistic meanings and connections that can twist and propel the past and the present.  With Ward, nothing is exactly as it seems, as his objects are stripped of original meanings and given new ones. And however much his semiotic disobedience stems from intuitions of questioning and refusal, his creativity nevertheless connects us to his life in Harlem, to social sculpture, and to a variety of folk traditions in Jamaica, where he was born.

I vividly remember my first encounter with Nari Ward. It was at a show of his from 2015 at Lehmann Maupin in the Lower East Side that incorporated a whole series of performances by guest artists that took place on top of his Ground (In Progress), a large square floor piece composed of copper bricks. There were many stunning performances there and the artists involved have gone on to other great things. Sticking in my memory were performances by Niv Acosta and by several of Ward’s former students from Hunter College, Zachary Fabri and Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow amongst them.

At the New Museum, Ground (In Progress) lay inert in the middle of a room, surrounded by stoic guards and grip tape. The walls of this room are filled with a number of large paintings done on copper panels through a process of patina, etching, drilling, and hammering nails. Each work is slightly different, but with a recurring symbol in them all: the cosmogram. The Bakongo cosmogram, to which Nari refers, is an ideographic religious Congolese symbol for the cosmos and the continuity of life that can comprise a cross, a quartered circle or diamond, or a seashell spiral. Describing its importance, Robert Farris Thompson has written that  “a person stands upon it to take an oath, or to signify that he or she understands the meaning of life as a process shared with the dead below the river or the sea…[in Kongolese ritual] the real sources of earthly power and prestige”. These cosmological symbols exist in many other instances around the world such as the Catholic Church, The Klu Klux Klan, the Confederate flag, the Jamaican flag, alchemical treatises, mandalas, etc., and artists such as Adrian Piper and Jean-Michel Basquiat have also been known to also employ cosmograms in their own work. In this exhibition, the cosmogram refers to the transatlantic transfer of this African spiritual symbol preserved in black churches throughout America. In Savannah, Georgia, the First African Baptist Church was a stopping post in the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves. The former slaves would hide under the floorboards in the basement of the church and a breathing hole was drilled for them in the shape of a quartered cross. Imagine hiding below floor decks, pitch black, situating yourself between life and death, and this is the only light you can see. This symbol beams out of each of these paintings as a point of intersection between the ancestors and the living.

During his residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1992-93, the young Ward filled his studio with old ragged baby strollers collected from neighborhood streets, culminating in the installation Amazing Grace, where a large room was filled with hundreds of them.  There is a middle cluster where about a third of all the strollers are tied with fire hoses in the shape of an oval, Virgin mandala, or a ship. The rest of the strollers circle around the center shape in attention while a gospel recording of “Amazing Grace” plays soulfully from the strollers in the middle. The fire hoses on the ground and on the strollers trigger, for me, Civil Rights era riots from the 1960s where black protesters were sprayed down by police with pressurized water from fire hydrants, literally soaking their dignity. I was personally very moved by this room because for me it symbolizes the intimate, existential struggle between black youth, white supremacy, and religion. A journey made from the void of absent young bodies, and for each missing, a fiery potential extinguished. Adjacent rooms evoke similar conceptual and metaphorical themes through a range of assemblage-based street sculpture, such as a wounded lion, shopping cart monuments, and the abject caramelized remains of the drink “Tropical Fantasy”, a beverage widely marketed to black communities in the ‘90s that contained ingredients, believed then and now, to affect male fertility.

If an idea is not sensitive to the poor it can neither be radical nor revolutionary. Several things are known. The planet can no longer sustain capitalism. African-Americans literally planted the seeds of imperial wealth in this country. As an artist creating a body of work that actively works around capitalism instead of with it, Ward creates a voice for those neglected by the system, those forsaken by legislation, history, politics, and justice. We the People offers a walk in another citizen’s shoes. Ward’s evocative readymade conjuring of the human condition teaches us profound lessons about ourselves.

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In an upstairs gallery at Paula Cooper, Charles Gaines has 12 identically-sized, clear acrylic boxes march around the perimeter in an orderly parade. Each box is about six feet high by five feet wide and six inches deep. Both the front and back surfaces are gridded in black with a neat handwritten number and letter system running down the left vertical edge. The front panel of each box has a highly generalized drawing in a particular color of the face of a famous philosopher or writer starting with Aristotle and proceeding in rough historical order to bell hooks. Each filled-in square has a number, counting out from the midline, carefully written on top in a contrasting color. The colored “pixels” are painted on front and back of the clear acrylic giving them a slight visual shiver. Despite the imposing scale  of these frontal “headshots”, the generous track size of the grid (about one half an inch) gives these pixelated drawings an extremely abstracted, lo-rez feeling. They immediately call to mind the facial landmarks extracted with widely used facial recognition algorithms.

As the series proceeds, each drawing drops to the opaque panel on the back of the next  box as a new one occupies the front. So, as you proceed, the most recent portrait stands out in front of an increasingly dense tangle of all the preceding ones in the series. Whenever a spot in two or more drawings occupies the same “pixel” on the back panel, the colors are carefully mixed to form a new tone. There is some variation in the intensity of the color from pixel to pixel and the unoccupied pixels on the back panel are given a variegated scrubby gray. These minor variations in hue reminded me of old mosaics in the New York subway. The whole thing accumulates in a logical fashion like some big board game, while all the time getting more and more challenging to read. Clarity and confusion are set at war with each other. The snarl of color in back becomes increasingly entrancing as each new outline in front struggles to take its place. Despite their obviously systematic method of manufacture and the corresponding suppression of any personal gesture or expression these pieces nevertheless have a distinctly hand made quality, the product of a considerable amount of time and attention. The aura of the mechanically rendered or the computerized graphic hovers in the background more as metaphor than as method.

The faces are hard to identify without the title sheet, but once you have them in mind, certain individuals do seem to stand out, particularly W. E. B. Dubois in red and Edward Said in a deep aqua blue.  They all run toward the history of leftist, liberationist thought with important inclusions of African American thinkers like Malcolm X. The theme is the politics of identity. The second wall with Dubois, Malcolm and Jacques Lacan and the fourth wall with Said, Molefi Kete Asante and hooks are particularly powerful. As the color in the back panel increases in density the areas around the eyes and mouth tend toward rich tonal browns giving the later portraits a slightly scary backdrop. The multiple outlines of hair and beards turn into slightly wild, vibrating auras.  Any sense of dry, methodical production in the series is belied by this chromatic crescendo . This points to the possibility that within the world of rational procedure there is still a chance for affective engagement. A person can be moved by the impersonal. And despite the chaos of context there may be some access to another’s identity. To give an analogy: While it’s certain that reading Das Kapital in 2018 is a very different experience from reading it in 1917, nevertheless the text itself retains traces of a living consciousness and to some extent reading that text lets us enter into that individual’s reality. Gaines’s portraits seem to project this somewhat tenuous access to identity onto the accumulating entanglement of history. It literally gets harder to read the individual as the context gets thicker and yet the relief of the individual against that context gets more striking. Identity emerges not as a goal but as a process. Whereas initially Gaines’s piece seems almost didactic, I think, in fact, he is interested in these paradoxes. Somewhere in the space between logic and emotion, system and chance, language and image, simultaneity and history, Gaines sees a void that opens up and that is where he wants to stand. At each moment of history there is the possibility of constructing a workable identity with which to negotiate the paradoxes of the changing environment.

In a second room Gaines shows the preparatory drawings for Faces 1: Identity Politics and two musical scores from a series called Manifestos 3, created by assigning musical notes to the letters of the alphabet in two speeches by Martin Luther King and James Baldwin. The scores play as a video monitor scrolls by the words of the speeches. I do not have the musical knowledge to assess what I heard, but I was struck by the gentle, almost mournful quality of the music lending a quiet counterpoint to the contained fury of two of the most brilliant figures of the 20th Century.

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Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

Grey Art Gallery, NYU
September 10 to December 7, 2013
100 Washington Square East
New York City, 212-998-6780

Part two of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art will open November 14 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and will remain on view until March 9, 2014.

The ambitious two-part survey Radical Presence, originally organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, is a thrilling endeavor.  The exhibition showcases 50 years of performance by black artists, with two dozen artists featured in the first installment on view at Grey Art Gallery.  According to the gallery’s director Lynn Gumpert, this portion of the show will be the more historical of the two, with a selection of contemporary works to open at the Studio Museum in Harlem next month.  It was inspiring to see a show entirely devoted to black artists in performance, one which exhibits Cassel Oliver’s deep investment in tracing a historical lineage for artists of color outside the modernist fabric of aesthetic judgments or the strategies of production central to postmodern cultural critique. The exhibition will be accompanied by more than a dozen live performances during its run. However, it is the historical evidence of these works—the document, the artifact, the object—which are central to the installation, forming a new heredity of black performance rooted in the subjective experience of viewing.

Cassel Oliver’s mission to find historical precedents (ie generational links) for artists of color is readable through her installation, which places canonized performances (Adrian Piper and David Hammons) next to lesser known ones.  Radical Presence presents black performance art not as an extension of theater—a medium rooted in visual passivity—but rather in terms of body art practices that illustrate questions of racial difference by actually enacting this difference through its relationship to the body of the viewer.  One such artist is the brilliant Pope.L, whose work Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) occupies a prominent place in the exhibition.  The installation consists of a toilet mounted on a 10-foot tower where Pope.L originally sat for several days, dressed in a jockstrap and caked in flour, reading pages from the Wall Street Journal before consuming and eventually purging them.  The wall text quotes the artist who writes, “I am a fisherman of social absurdity, if you will…. My focus is to politicize disenfranchisement … to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from.”  His crawl pieces, a project he began in the 1970s, also display the politics of embodiment and social history.  For The Great White Way, Pope.L crawled down 22 miles of Broadway in New York, making himself horizontal against the pavement amidst a capitalist jungle of high-rises and industry.  For this work he donned a capeless superman costume—an appropriated illusion of (white) strength, historically unavailable to him.  These works engage a cross-cultural conversation: why is it that we conceive of whiteness as somehow separate from blackness when one relies on the other for signification?  Rather than seeing either culture as “authentic” or segregated, Pope.L’s work performs the ways in which binary social structures are in fact deeply imbricated in one another.

Coco Fusco is another artist interested in our preconceptions of “the other.”  She is perhaps most well-known for her 1992 collaboration with Guillermo Gomez-Peña in The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994), which traveled widely and remains the archetype for contemporary questions of colonization, the aesthetic of primitivism and the very function of the museum.  Fusco’s Sightings Photo Series from 2004 continues her examination of the role and responsibility of the viewer.  The work came out of her video project In her video a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert (2004) in which Fusco weaves together archival video and staged surveillance footage of the FBI search for Angela Davis.  In a portion of the video Fusco narrates “Some women began to fear that an afro had become a one-way ticket to a holding cell, other women decided to put on afro wigs to pass for black.”  During the FBI search, hundreds of black women were wrongly detained or arrested before Davis herself was brought to trial.  What then does it mean when white women appropriate this righteous black aesthetic without any potential for misidentification and thus no actual bodily risk?  This notion of “passing” is something that Adrian Piper commented on extensively early on in her career—a question that is rooted in the experience of the seer as opposed to that of the subject.

Benjamin Patterson’s 1962 work Pond is on display as a series of instructions for performers to produce an indeterminate work.  The open action is guided by a grid designed by Patterson, as well as a number of wind-up frogs that direct the participant’s movements.  In the exhibition catalog Cassel Oliver notes that it was actually an investigation into Patterson’s career that prompted her to begin researching work for Radical Presence.  Patterson, a classically trained musician, was one of the founding members of Fluxus yet remained largely absent from canonical discourse, that is, up until Cassel Oliver organized his retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The Fluxus preoccupations with destabilizing hierarchies through chance operations and the group’s emphasis on the phenomenological (and thus subjective) experience of the viewer is very much in line with the more provocative works in Radical Presence.

The artist Rammellzee (1960-2010) also comes from a musical background.  Known for his elaborate performance costumes and narratives, he became famous in the 1980s New York underground through his freestyle rapping and graffiti tags in the subway.  A photograph on display at Grey Art Gallery features a selection of his elaborate costumes, as the original garments were installed as part of the exhibition in Houston.  Also on view is his 1979 document, Iconic Treatise on Gothic Futurism.  In this treatise, Rammellzee speaks to the political power of language, in particular letters, which, when separated from their narrative function can become powerful weapons that work in opposition to what he calls “counterfeit linguistic systems.”  He was directly inspired by monastic traditions and illuminated manuscripts, in which letters serve both a literary and formal function.  Interestingly, the wall text glossed over Rammellzee’s sci-fi, urban shaman persona; like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, he began as an artist by using the city’s walls as his drawing board.

The art historian and performance art theorist Amelia Jones notes the power of body art, as enacted by the non-normative subject, to expose the naturalized exclusionism in modern art history.  The works in Radical Presence hinge on elements of social construction, intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and the idiosyncratic relationship between seer and seen. This is art that challenges not only the structure of the art institution, but also makes an indelible impact on the social structures beyond the gallery’s walls: Radical, indeed.

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