LAILA PEDRO, BARRY SCHWABSKY and ROBERTA SMITH join DAVID COHEN to discuss

Frank Bowling: Make It New
Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West 26 Street, New York alexandergray.com

Charline von Heyl: New Work
Petzel, 456 West 18th Street, New York petzel.com

Yasumasa Morimura: In the Room of Art History
Luhring Augustine Bushwick, 25 Knickerbocker Avenue, Brooklyn luhringaugustine.com

Pope.L: One thing after another (part two)
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, New York miandn.com

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LAILA PEDRO, BARRY SCHWABSKY and ROBERTA SMITH join DAVID COHEN to discuss

Frank Bowling: Make It New
Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West 26 Street, New York alexandergray.com

Charline von Heyl: New Work
Petzel, 456 West 18th Street, New York petzel.com

Yasumasa Morimura: In the Room of Art History
Luhring Augustine Bushwick, 25 Knickerbocker Avenue, Brooklyn luhringaugustine.com

Pope.L: One thing after another (part two)
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, New York miandn.com

artcritical.com/reserve

Explore the archives: This will be Roberta Smith‘s tenth appearance on The Review Panel, Barry Schwabsky‘s sixth, and Laila Pedro‘s second. Podcasts go back to the series’ debut at the National Academy Museum in 2004 and can be accessed here at artcritical. Here are the most recent appearances of the October guests:

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February 25 to May 22, 2017
2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, barnesfoundation.org

“The Person of the Crowd” is a large survey of 53 artists that has numerous successes and failures, leaning towards success. It is inherently unwieldy, stretching across five or six decades surveying installation, video, performance and conceptual works centered on the theme of the social and political context of modern urban life, crowds, political life, private lives in public, and communities. The exhibit includes work by seminal artists in these various fields as well as recent developments. Many of the works are shown dovetailed and overlapping each other in one large gallery, in a way that is for the most part a curatorial success, pulling into interactions with each other video works and conceptual sculptures sometimes shown dryly and remotely detached in the white and black boxes of other museums and galleries.

Several parts of the exhibit take place around the streets of Philadelphia including posters and billboards by Jenny Holzer and the Guerilla Girls, as well as performances by Wilmer Wilson, Ayana Evans, and a re-enactment of Tania Bruguera’s Diplacement of 1998, an important work of recent political art resulting in Brugeura’s arrest and detention in Cuba. The pieces in the gallery stretch from Robert Rauschenberg, Guy Debord, and Vito Acconci, to more recent artists such as Zhang Huan, Virgil Marti, and Papo Colo. If the viewer is familiar with art history, works such as Carolee Schneemann’s Beatle Box, c. 1960s, and David Hammons Untitled (Speakers), 1986, provide a whiff of context to the more recent works. One of the failures of the show is that even with the judicious and informative labeling, some of this historical context is hard to grasp. On the other hand, a success of the show is that even slight pieces—slight in relation to the other later accomplishments of these two artists—are brought back to life by seeing them next to other likeminded works. A kind of visual and historical rewinding takes place in this exhibit which is hard at times to follow, but yields a more vivid experience of most of the individual works. Again this is not without some failures, but the successes often outweigh them.

Along with the art of this period, “Person of the Crowd” weaves together two additional contexts in its consideration of contemporary flânerie: the history of the Barnes Foundation itself and the narrative provided by Walter Benjamin and others in regard to 19th century Parisian idlers, voyeurs, and observers in the crowd. The Barnes Foundation is a non-museum intended to be a visual demonstration of a self-proclaimed “objective” method of understanding art through plastic values that was developed by Albert Barnes and the longtime director, Violette de Mazia, and illustrated by many of the best works money could buy in the first half of the 20th Century, hung floor to ceiling and wall to wall. “Person of the Crowd” curiously displays works similarly, except the interactions of visual qualities reach across diverse mediums and speak more directly to social and political worlds.

Thom Collins, executive director and president of the Barnes Foundation, and curator of the exhibition, focuses in his wall text on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd;” the poet, Charles Baudelaire; and the idea of someone who has the leisure time to wander through crowds in the city, such as the flâneur, or dandy, all of which figure prominently in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.”

The main collection of the Barnes Foundation carefully compares visual qualities of works in its “wall pictures” which for some are curatorially heavy-handed. Similar relationships occur in this exhibit. It is questionable if Jean Shin’s found pieces of blue painted plywood construction site fencing from her 2016 “Surface Tension” series are seen best here running through the middle of the show rather than closer to the wall, as she has shown them before. Here Shin’s series seems to be a room divider and backdrop for other works, even as they regain some original context as found fencing.

“Person of the Crowd” provides the rare pleasures of seeing Robert Rauschenberg’s 1961 Second Time Painting (1961), next to Brett Day Windham’s Rosary (2008-13), both of which examine the mystery of quotidian objects. Pope L.’s The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street (2003) contrasts vividly and starkly with Kimsooja’s Beggar Woman – Cairo (2001). The efforts of performance and the engagement of the spectator are questioned by both. In a corresponding way, the narrative territories of many of these works, if read from the right angle, pleasurably enrich each other’s various transitional states of social identity, as in the works of Jefferson Pinder, Papo Colo, Sanford Biggers, Kendell Geers, and Lynn Hershman Leeson. Likewise the rooms of the Barnes Foundation makes use of strategic comparisons that inverts relationships between performance pieces, say African masks, and narrative art, such as Picasso’s and Matisse’s paintings. Benjamin in Part II of his essay contrasts a hero or political figure that stands in the crowd with the heroism of the crowd. Pinder’s Marathon (2001) and Biggers’ Duchamp in the Congo (1997) leans more to what separates members from the crowd, but not without redefining a moving center of the crowd.

Beyond the obvious social and political engagement that links the works of “Person of the Crowd” are their narrative complexities, narrative twists and turns, made evident in conjunction with formal, visual, and political weights. (This is in fact true of the Barnes Foundation’s collection as a whole, but is rarely acknowledged by either its admirers or its detractors.) And part of this narrative complexity that cannot be overlooked is the diversity of voices and cultural outlooks present in this exhibit. (Ditto.) While including a nod to 19th century Paris, other connections and conversations are brought into a state of motion and play, maybe frenetic but not chaotic, which renders the works and their themes animated and in a state of transition.

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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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