March 31 to May 14, 2016
40 E 63rd St #2 (between Park and Madison avenues)
New York, 917 868 9010

A lot has been said on the idea of “black genius” of late. In February, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, Dr. Jordana Saggese, Kim Drew, Dr. David Clinton Wills and Juliana Huxtable were part a symposium titled “Basquiat and Contemporary Queer Art,” focusing on Jean-Michel Basquiat as a symbol of black genius. In March, critic Jason Parham, in a review of Kanye West’s Life of Pablo (2016) and Kendrick Lamar’s untitled unmastered (2016) for Fader, called “On the Occasion of Black Genius,” wrote at length about the concept.

So what is this concept of black genius? The term, I believe, was first brought to public attention with the book Black Genius: African American Solutions to African American Problems (2000) — featuring texts by Melvin Van Peebles, Spike Lee, bell hooks, and others. The book’s editor, Walter Mosley, describes “genius” in his introduction, as a “quality that crystallizes the hopes and talents and character of a people.” Therefore black genius is perhaps best described as the greatness of an individual that rewards the larger community of black people, contrasted against the American Dream — a system rooted in the presumed authority of middle-class, white, cisgender men. As a result, the term not only expresses black pride and excellence, but black power and solidarity.

If one were to look retrospectively, there is no doubt that one of the most influential artists to exemplify black genius would be Harlem-born photographer Roy DeCarava. A new exhibition of his work, titled “New York 19,” at Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art, is emblematic of this, featuring a series of nine silver gelatin photographs. The photographs were shown in a TV movie called Belafonte: New York 19, a musical special celebrating Postal Code 19, “the city’s midtown melting pot of diversity, culture and the arts,” broadcast on CBS in 1960. (All the photographs on view were made that same year, with the exception of Child Playing at Curb, Eighth Avenue, 1952.)

DeCarava, better known for his photographs of famous jazz musicians, spent most of his career documenting everyday life in Harlem. A graduate of Cooper Union, he disavowed painting as a white man’s medium and picked up the camera, being one of the first artists to spearhead photography as a legitimate art form and thereby making it his own. He was the first African-American photographer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship in 1952. DeCarava’s photographs have an overwhelming sense of beauty and depth. The impact is immediately visceral. When looking at his pictures I am struck at how washed out and flat they are­ (this is not a bad thing)—nothing is too garish or high-contrast, yet the range in tonality from gray to black is immeasurable.

The overarching theme of “New York 19” is loneliness. Four photographs bear the title Lonely Woman, each one capturing a female figure in isolation: a young black girl in a white dress sitting on a trash can and leaning her head over a metal gate, one arm bent over her back. In another, a black woman with sunglasses and a fur coat sits alone on the bus. A woman, her back facing us, dressed all in black with a black scarf around her head, walks wearily down the sidewalk, and a black woman dressed all in black, carrying her baby covered in white sheets down a desolate block full of scattered bricks and dust. The last one in particular is reminiscent of DeCarava’s well-known photograph Graduation (1952), which depicts a young black woman in a white gown, similarly walking alone through a dark, desolate block full of trash and rubble.

This feeling of loneliness is expressed not just in isolation, but also in contemplation — a loneliness that is more internal and shared. This is indicative of how DeCarava chooses to show his female subjects either in complete isolation or, in some cases, large groups. It is not hard to imagine that these women may be mourning the loss of a son or brother, or they are struggling to make ends meet as a single mother, tired of long days work. The feeling may also just be that of fatigue or existential angst, but all are situated within a black experience. And this is not to say that DeCarava’s photographs do not transcend race and class, but they do demand a certain attention to the specificity of the black figure. It is through this figure that DeCarava is able to provide an image that dutifully expresses the duality between oppression and resilience. The photographs’ dreamlike compositions and dramatic lighting, suggest a certain mood that not only showcases the vulnerability of these black figures, but also, the quiet and perhaps unnoticed perseverance and strength of black femininity.

In International, a young woman sits on the wing wall of a stoop in three-quarter pose. One can barely see the profile of her face, highlighted at the top of her cheekbone and brow. The back of her head, her short black curled hair, is the focus, at the center of the composition. She rests her left hand on her hip, while casually holding the end of a jump rope in her right hand, as a girl and boy prepare to jump into its swing — the person holding the other end of the rope is outside the frame, unseen. Two young men stand at the top near the doorway. One girl standing in the background, on the top step, stares blankly at the camera. Despite all this activity, the woman who is the image’s focus appears tired, ruminative, and alone among the people and presumed excitement.

The loneliness that DeCarava depicts in his photographs is one of sadness, but also of Otherness — an Otherness that transcends both gender and sex. The photographs are timeless and describe a universal loneliness that all black people can share in. James Baldwin, in his 1985 essay “Here be Dragons,” writes:

I hazard that the physically androgynous state must create an all-but-intolerable loneliness, since we all exist, after all, and crucially, in the eye of the beholder. We all react to and, to whatever extent, become what that eye sees. This judgment begins in the eyes of one’s parents (the crucial, the definitive, the all-but-everlasting judgment), and so we move, in the vast and claustrophobic gallery of Others, on up or down the line, to the eye of one’s enemy or one’s friend or one’s lover.

While Baldwin’s essay is centered on the idea of androgyny, the slippage of gender holds great importance in DeCarava’s work with regards to the this notion of “eye of the beholder.” As opposed to showing a reality of a loneliness felt by his subjects, he rather creates environments to express the feeling of what he sees. However, in the examples described above, each figure, in some manner, has their face concealed (even covered by scarves and sunglasses). Their faces on drawn back from the male gaze of DeCarava himself. This interplay is of great significance, for his interpretation of these figures is determined by what he can and cannot see, insofar as the figures themselves, and the viewer are drawn into the same set of circumstances. This tension reveals nothing but the pure emotions that are being “seen”: sadness, loneliness, resilience, and self-reflection.

Black genius is therefore, in terms of artistic pursuits, an ability to vacillate between the real and concrete to the unreal and abstract. In this sense, the peripatetic artist carefully uses profound imagery to move from ideas grounded in hope and truth to empower the black community. From this vantage, DeCarava is able to transform reality to describe a thought or a feeling that makes sense of the black experience. “Because it’s black and white, it’s removed from reality,” he told Terry Gross in a 1996 interview. It is DeCarava’s eye and mastery of light that uncovers his black genius — that makes his work enigmatic and timeless. In his ability to capture the beauty and darkness of everyday life, through harsh lighting and wonderful compositions, he provides truth — a transcendent truth of emotion and sheer feeling predicated on the black experience.

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March 15 to May 27 2016
45 East 78th Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 0020

The fiction of the facts assumes innocence, ignorance, lack of intention, misdirection; the necessary conditions of a certain time and place.

Have you seen their faces?

–Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

“Prankster” is a word that comes up repeatedly in discussions of artist David Hammons and his work. Much has been made of his evasiveness, of the fact that he has spent his career flouting the art world’s propriety: his continual refusal to settle on a dealer; the propensity to make himself unavailable to curators even in the midst of show preparations; to stage exhibitions, performances, and installations with no prior announcement. Then there are the works themselves, from alluring abstract canvases you will never really see, as they’ve been shrouded with trashed vinyl tarps, to sculptures that cull beauty from empty bottles of $1.99 wine. But to seize and insist upon the perceived jokey qualities of Hammons’s art and persona resists the deeper significance of his output over the past 50 years. “David Hammons: Five Decades,” currently on view at Mnuchin Gallery, offers a corrective to this narrative. Comprised of 35 works spanning from the late 1960s to the present, it’s a crystalline show that helps to elucidate the long view of an artist who has made a career of otherwise obfuscating it.

This is the third show of Hammons’s work presented by Mnuchin (formerly L&M Arts), and though much care has been taken to note that the gallery does not strictly represent the artist, it seems clear that Hammons finds satisfaction in the contrast of having his work — frequently made from lowbrow or dilapidated materials — showcased in the refined and august premises of the Upper East Side townhouse. It also eschews the sterility of the White Cube, of which Hammons has in the past proclaimed his disdain. Notably, just prior to this exhibition’s opening, Hammons arrived unexpectedly at Mnuchin and upended the nearly complete installation: rearranging, removing several works, and adding new ones. The entirety of this show at Mnuchin, as organized by Hammons, becomes its own distinct work of art, a complete whole made from its heterogenous parts.

Shrouds abound in the exhibition. Two large paintings, both untitled (2008–14 and 2015, respectively) are almost entirely obscured by ragged tarps that dangle across their faces. With two large sculptural works, also both untitled (2013 and 2014, respectively), Hammons has concealed ornate, gilded floor-to-ceiling wall mirrors, one with a black cloth and one with large sheets of galvanized steel. Aside from the more apparent association of this shrouding as a manifestation of Hammons’s own mystique, it also brings to mind the Jewish tradition of covering the mirrors in a house after the death of a beloved. One wonders whether these works, all made within the last few years, are indicative of an artist reflecting on his legacy in his elder years.

With the inclusion of the diminutive but potent In the Hood (1993), a shroud of another sort takes on a more politically foreboding tone. The work consists simply of the hood of a sweatshirt severed from the shirt itself, and hung on one wall. The dark void at the center of the hood, where a head should be, conjures the familiar image of the Grim Reaper, and when considering its high placement on the wall one can’t help but be reminded of the deplorable chronicle which pollutes American history — that of the scores of African-Americans lynched at the hands of whites through the decades. And at nearly a quarter-century old, In the Hood seems remarkably prescient as an object, anticipating the outsize symbolism of racial inequity in American culture that the “hoodie” has taken on — especially acute in recent years.

So loaded has that article of clothing become that poet Claudia Rankine selected In the Hood as the cover image of her award-winning 2014 book of prose poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, which reflects on black life and systemic injustice in the United States and whose pages are peppered with reproductions of artworks by prominent black artists. It also includes a passage dedicated to the memory of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager shot and killed by George Zimmerman in 2012. Zimmerman claimed Martin was suspicious in part because of the dark hoodie he wore as he walked down the street of a private community. The point is underscored by several black-and-white prints from the late 1960s and early 1970s Hammons has hung in the same gallery, whereby the artist pressed his own body to the page and then added charged imagery like the American flag, or the spades of a playing card.

Robert Storr says of Hammons, in an essay included in the exhibition’s catalogue, “From the very start it is plain that he has set his higher goals as high as they come. Specifically that has meant escaping the sorry fate of ghettoization while slipping the noose of becoming a token ‘black’ artist in a predominantly ‘white’ art world.” Considering Hammons’s work solely through the lens of race runs the risk of reducing his conceptual athleticism to a single note. As an object, In the Hood is a descendant of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), down to the conscious, unexpected placement of the work. The viewer garners a solid sense of the roots Hammons shares with artists like Piero Manzoni or Joseph Kosuth, who were thumbing their noses at artistic conventions in the early 1960s. By being able to see the long trajectory of Hammons’s output gathered together in this mini-retrospective, we can also understand how the disparate parts align.

In the last gallery, a taxidermied cat curls up on a wooden drum stool. Called Standing Room Only (1996), it has been placed in the corner, the cat’s sleeping face pointed towards the window instead of towards the center of the room. A creature known for its cunning and detachment, the cat might be Hammons’s spirit animal. Aloof and mysterious, with his back to the world, we revere the cat for what he is able to pull off — living freely, and purely on his own terms.

The post America is Hard to See: David Hammons at Mnuchin appeared first on artcritical.

JESSICA HOLMES: What are you working on at Centrale Fies?

JUSTIN THOMPSON: I’m working on a big performance, “Mi Daran Tomba…e Pace…Forse [They will give me a grave…and peace…maybe],” which is a dialogue about Leontyne Price, the first African-American opera singer to sing a lead role at La Scala, in Milan. In the 1960s, she performed the lead in Aida. This piece is a way of thinking about the layers and implications of this woman in Italy, singing the aria “O Patria Mia,” about how she’ll never see her country again, and the politics that allowed her to step into the main role of an Ethiopian princess. I created a triumphal arch out of scaffolding that’ll have musical instruments attached, and I’ve got a local marching band, the Banda Sociale Dro e Ceniga, who will perform the instruments. We’re also pulling from Price’s farewell to opera, where after she sang she just stood there while people applauded. She didn’t move for 10 minutes; she didn’t break her pose, she didn’t do anything. I’ve sort of expanded upon the idea of controlling the audience, not allowing that release. We’re playing with this kind of anticlimax.

Many of your works, including “Moldy Figs,” involve collaboration, most often with your brother, saxophonist Jason Thompson, and the artist and filmmaker Bradly Dever Treadaway. Can you talk about how the three of you work together?

The collaboration with both of them was born as an undergrad at the University of Tennessee. I’ve played music with Jason since we were kids, but in college I took a filmmaking class where I had to create movement and gestures. There was performance involved, and I had to create sound for it. I first collaborated with my then-classmate Bradly on his films, and he’d collaborate with me on mine. Jason also performed in those films and was involved with the sound explorations.

Unlike Jason, I’m not a musician. If I have to do something vocally, or with my guitar, I can, but working with Jason has opened up a world of collaboration with musicians. Generally, I’ll provide a driving concept of the piece, reference points that I want to touch on, and usually some sort of feel — awkwardness, or whatever it is that I’m interested in — and he has free reign to interpret that. Sometimes he’s really literal, sometimes not at all; and we’re able to discover things together. I trust him 100% with whatever he comes up with, and most of the time I don’t hear it till we’re going live.

With Bradly, we have two different branches of how we collaborate. He works with me to develop video, which creates a new experience that is not the same as the live performance. The other branch of our work is going head to head, which we first initiated when he got a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy in 2005-2006. We show up in a space with our own tasks to do and we just make it happen. I’m making his stuff, he’s making my stuff, and it’s completely fluid and interchangeable. We’re able to push each other in a way that I haven’t been able to do with other artists. I always find it amazing how different we are in our language. He often pulls from an idea of identity that is much more rooted in specific lineage, images and archive, while I think of my work as much more abstract, a collective identity. A visual clash happens that makes me uncomfortable and I thrive on that. I enjoy more and more what happens when I’m not in control. There are often things I absolutely would have never put in a piece that are in the piece. But I appreciate the way it wakes me up.

When I went to see “Moldy Figs,” the painstaking, homespun effort of the many assembled parts impressed me. Tell me about your process.

For every show I make the centerpiece; everything else is stuff I’ve made over time. In “Moldy Figs” there are some pieces that date back even six years. No individual object took all that long: I sewed the hundred pairs of shoes in a month. The five shoeshine boxes I did over a period of a couple weeks. The pieces I developed onsite were the centerpiece — the merry-go-round, which I just built out of wood, and the DJ booth. That was a more abstract thing that I initiated while I was in the space. I think a lot about the ways in which doing things by hand creates a sense of ritual through repetition.

The concept of labor pervaded “Moldy Figs.” I participated in the performance held during Bushwick Open Studios. While sitting on the merry-go-round and having my boots gilded, a significant part of the experience was watching your crew perform physical labor: pushing the machine, stopping, doing the shoe work, then pushing again.

Labor has been at the root of social unrest forever. Black history in the US is frequently a dialogue about labor, and the social roles that are assigned through that. Gold-leafing shoes is one of my longer-standing projects. It’s had the most iterations, and each time I’m trying to find new ways to engage with it, and allow the old layers to show up and be represented. The gold-leafing is based on this minstrel song “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” which was included in an anthology of poems my mom gave me when I was about eight. It’s followed me till now, this song, which talks about putting your best things away on a shelf, awaiting judgment. It’s a wonderful metaphor of preparation for freedom/death. Because of the class and racial associations linked to shoe shining, it made a lot of sense to think about what happened if it’s the shoe shiner that’s providing redemption. With the “Moldy Figs” crew, I assigned them each a very simple task. I said to them for example, “The only thing I want you to do is spray this on the shoe. That’s it! That’s the whole gig. But own it.” So the task is refined in the hands of whoever is doing it.

A lot of the gold-leaf work is also about creating a dialogue about fictional elegance. It’s striking and lush, but also really, really low-class. You see the gold-leafed shoes and think, “Is that falling apart?” I really love the ways in which this superficially elegant thing actually gains importance by context. When I was initially researching shoeshine stands I came across a newspaper article from the 1930s that showed a shoeshine merry-go-round. The poet Melvin B. Tolson wrote in the 1940s about his philosophy of hierarchies, the merry-go-round of history versus the Ferris wheel of history. In terms of the Ferris wheel, he spoke about conquerors going up, and then inevitably coming down, whereas on a merry-go-round everything is on equal planes but just keeps moving and shifting in space. He equated that to democracy. I really like how inadequate that metaphor is.

A lot of your work deals with history, most often African and African-American history. How do you see it situated in the contemporary moment, which, especially in the US, is so volatile? Is that something you’re thinking about?

I think that looking to elements of African-American history has always been something ingrained in me. My grandfather first instilled in me an interest in history, specifically African-American history, and literature, poetry, and art. Living in Italy, you begin to understand kinds of continuums, and that feeds me. I don’t think of my work as being about race, but about class and the hierarchies involved. In Italy, so much art-historical iconography is rooted in classism. I like to think about how to unsettle some of the traditional associations we have about class regarding work and folk culture, and the distinctions we make between those humble traditions and the more elitist sphere. I like when those things mix, completely contaminate each other, and perhaps become the same. Culturally, I miss the US. Living here and trying to remain connected to my American roots, it always feels good to arrive in the US. You feel you’re still in touch somehow and what you’re doing still has relevance. You’re not a foreigner.

People seem to have an inherent need to label others automatically: what “are” you? Why do you think that is?

I think about it a lot. In the visual arts, in particular, we’re not comfortable with simply experiencing something. We’re on a quest to understand. There are certain keys you can put in artwork that allow people to check a box that says, “I get it,” and that makes it much more comfortable. For example: most of the time people read it as a giveaway that I sing. I once titled one of my sound pieces based on the four–word critique a guy in Italy gave me: “Molto soul, molto black!” Once, after a layered, involved project I did in Spain, the first comment I got afterwards was a guy walking up to me and saying, “Oh, you do have a little Negro in you.” One of the reasons I don’t like to define my work through the lens of race is because I think it assists people in reading stuff in a way that is not constructive. The point of entry is there for everyone.

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I couldn’t think of a better prologue to the opening of Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art than the haunting cello compositions performed by Icelandic musician, Hildur Guðnadóttir, in a pop-up concert this past Friday. Setting a transcendental tone befitting of the exhibit, which opens to the public today and centers around the sartorial mourning rituals of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries (a time when the mortality rate was much higher and the average person didn’t live into their fifties) — the cellist, who’s played with bands such as Múm and Animal Collective, wove soul-stirring Icelandic hymns about death with angelic alto lyrics and original songs of layered cello loops.

Three days later, walking down into the basement gallery where the Costume Institute exhibit is on display, I thought about the resounding affect of the cello and the ways in which death echoes throughout our culture, but is often linked with shadowed conversation and dark arts. Though the show’s theme sounds morbid, its tone is lightened by baroque music, and white mannequins whose presence is much less sinister than the masked ones at the Met’s Alexander McQueen show a couple years ago.

The anticipated exhibit, which displays some 30 dresses (including those of Queen Victoria and Queen Alexandra, the former of which wore various shades of mourning attire for the last 40 years of her life), were made primarily of carefully tailored black crape — the folds, pleats, and ruches mimicking the fashionable silhouettes of the time and the guidelines for mourning set forth by magazines advocating “nun-like simplicity” and etiquette guides outlining the mourning practice. Here we learn the deepest state of mourning is reserved for widowed women who show their loyalty by maintaining the dark affect, adding white accents and then gray or mauve to the stiff and dull appearance of black, only after a reasonable amount of time has passed.

These practical observations are juxtaposed by a cheeky sentimentality throughout the exhibit. The burden of this attire on one’s finances and even the ways in which some began to enjoy the all-black aesthetic are common threads throughout. The show is also punctuated by mourning accouterment, memorial embroideries, watercolors, and postmortem photos — which are also the subjects of an exhibit on view now in Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum.

But even if wearing grief on one’s sleeve was a form of protection during social engagements, it was also an invitation for women to become targets in the gender-driven attire. Harold Koda, curator of the exhibit explains in the press release, “The veiled widow could elicit sympathy as well as predatory male advances. As a woman of sexual experience without marital constraints, she was often imagined as a potential threat to the social order.”

This exhibit gives insight into often forgotten Victorian ritual and manners and is underpinned by perhaps an even more important statement about our cultural reluctance to talk openly about death, except to licensed professionals: “We don’t have [grieving] rituals anymore. Ritual practice helps us give form to something we can’t articulate,” says Koda during the press preview of the show. “People needed this before therapists.”

If the cellist was the prologue here, I am still left to consider where this exhibit might conclude. It would be interesting to see how mourning garb translates into avant garde fashion, goth culture, and contemporary death ritual. The exhibit is simply an Anglo testament of mourning attire with much less depth than its opening performance might suggest, but it’s a good conversation starter.

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