July 17 to September 13, 2015
50 Orange Street
New Haven, CT, 203 772 2709

This summer marks one year since New York City police choked Eric Garner to death. Since and before then, an uprising of activism and conversation has highlighted systemic racism and its link to criminalization and brutality. Artspace’s “Arresting Patterns,” curated by Sarah Fritchey with Titus Kaphar and Leland Moore, tackles these issues in a group show innovatively framed around seriality.

Titus Kaphar’s The Jerome Project (2011–present) began with the artist discovering a series of other men in the criminal justice system sharing his father’s name. From the project’s Asphalt and Chalk Series, X (2015) overlaps three black men killed by police: Michael Brown, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo; while XVII (2015) stacks three Jeromes on top of each other. The poignant connections made in these pieces through repetition set the tone for the show.

Adrian Piper also explores the connotations of names with Everything #19.3: NYT Portrait of Megan Williams (2007-8). A search for images of a twenty-year-old African American woman named Megan Williams kidnapped by white perpetrators resulted in exclusively white women and men unrelated to the incident. Piper tightly prints the Megans from the image results and repeats the mug shots of the perpetrators.

Andy Warhol was obsessed with how images of death and disaster could be repeated until they became meaningless. His obsession remains pertinent in our contemporary 24-hour news cycles and perpetually refreshed feeds. Warhol’s Birmingham Race Riot (1964) reflects upon the persistent question of police brutality. The piece’s appropriation of a Life magazine image feels immediate in its cold, blurred reproduction.

Connecticut-based Iyaba Ibo Mandingo’s Grave Marker Series (2014) reads with the pop sensibility of Warhol’s protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat and uses bright house paint, oil sticks, and crayon on recycled paper. The pieces commemorate black parents of murdered sons and allude visually and linguistically to African patterns. The language scribbled and repeated on the markers (“Boo!,” “Y do I frighten?,” “I am ur boogie man”) addresses the systemic fear of black bodies.

Language is also central to Jamal Cyrus’s Eroding Witness 7 Series (2014), four pages of laser-cut papyrus reproducing headlines covering the 1970 shooting of organizer Carl Hampton. These works, which include both mainstream and alternative presses from Houston, demonstrate the range of language used to report the event (“Black Militant Slain on Dowling” contrasts with “Exclusive Eyewitness Accounts: Police Fired First”).

“Arresting Patterns” insists on plain and direct confrontation. Dread Scott’s two-channel video Stop (2008) (in collaboration with Joann Kushner) depicts six men of color from New York and London stating how many times they have been stopped by police. Adrian Piper’s Safe (#1-4) (1990) corners the viewer with four images of smiling black families captioned “We are around you,” “You are safe,” “We are among you,” and “We are within you.” The installation, which contemplates questions of assimilation, includes self-aware audio of the artist talking as a white viewer who is having a “really hard time” with the piece.

The works in the show are as much about looking as they are about looking away: Kaphar’s dizzying portraits contain multiple pairs of eyes; Scott’s stopped men stare; Piper’s black families wave. The show is aware of the things that we can’t look at—either because they’re blurred by Google Maps like the unseen jail in the work of Maria Gaspar (Wretches and Paramount (Extreme Landscape Series; Google study of Cook County Jail in Chicago), 2014-5) or because they’re fading and fragile like Jamal Cyrus’s papyrus newspapers. It knows that we’re constantly doing both.

Along with “Arresting Patterns,” Artspace is also showcasing work from The 15th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program, this year led by Titus Kaphar, Aaron Jafferis, and Dexter Singleton and inspired by The Jerome Project. The New Haven high school apprentices worked closely with visual and performance artists to create work contextualized by a curriculum and field trips. Kaphar discussed processing the heavy experience of visiting a corrections facility with the apprentices and assuring them that there was art to be made about those moments.

The work impressively echoes the ideas of “Arresting Patterns” and shows a range of approaches: from Ruby Gonzalez’s acrylic abstractions (Untitled I) to Emanuel Luck’s realistic white pencil portrait, Don’t Chalk Your Ancestors. In collective collages (Sinque 1, Sinque 2), the apprentices also addressed complex the history of their city, researching New Haven’s cartography and its role in the Amistad trials to inform their art.

The work of Arianna Alamo, entitled Martyrs and The Prophet (MLK), depicts the mug shots of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, among others. Using tar paper and white chalk (like Kaphar), Alamo frames the figures in a gold Byzantine halo, achieving an almost Warholian allusion to devotion. Most striking was the halo around King: a pop collage composed of gold, consumerist jewelry.

Artspace’s approach to both shows is effectively interdisciplinary. Looking beyond the language of art and the space itself, the works are contextualized not just through wall labels, but also through takeaway cards with statistics relevant to the ideas presented in the show. Further contextualization is provided with the space’s reading room, which includes a timeline of American racial violence and books such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010).

The conversation about race and criminalization goes beyond the content of this (or any) show. Less explicit in the works displayed are the patterns of policing femininity, queerness, and nationality—which often also intersect with race and with violence.

Still, Artspace’s “Arresting Patterns” and the work from The 15th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program make important and engaging connections through seriality, language, and confrontation. No matter the age of the work or the artist, the show’s selections feel immediate and challenging.

In continuing the urgent advocacy activism addressing these layered issues, admitting patterns and highlighting repeating acts—of violence, of incarceration, of policing—will remain critical.

Artspace aims to continue the conversation with a free two-day conference on September 12th and 13th at the Yale University Art Gallery. Visit arrestingpatterns.org for registration and more information.

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February 28 through April 11, 2015
132 Tenth Avenue (between 19th and 18th streets)
New York, 212 367 7474

The first New York solo exhibition by Brazilian Jonathas de Andrade recently closed at Alexander and Bonin. De Andrade works mainly with installation, video and photography, and is a rising star in Brazil’s contemporary art scene. Based in Recife, on Brazil’s northeast coast, de Andrade has shown his art throughout Europe and the United States. Last summer in New York, the Guggenheim’s survey on contemporary art from Latin America, “Under the Same Sun,” featured de Andrade’s Posters for the Museum of the Man of the Northeast (2013).

At Alexander and Bonin, de Andrade re-installed Posters for the Museum of the Man of the Northeast, and included other works that expand it. In the ground floor’s main gallery, the first piece was 40 nego bom é um real (“40 Black Candies for 1 Real,” 2013), a two-wall installation in which illustrations and text provided a recipe for a banana candy produced in a fictional factory. One could follow the story as if it were a comic book on the wall, with montages of digital images og the production line of Nego Bom, a real banana candy popular in the region. In Brazil, nego is often a “warm” way of calling someone black, although it also contains deep-rooted racist connotations.

There is humor in the fact that one follows a recipe and a production line in the form of comics, with directions on which ingredients to use, how to let the mixture rest, or when to add sugar. The workers are focused, often smiling. But as one’s eyes moved along to the installation on the right wall, irony started to replace comedy. Two prints depict another illustration from the fictional factory and the plantation: arrayed on two plywood sheets are 40 small notes printed on paper, and 40 small portraits of workers. Each note has a short description about each worker and their monthly pay, and after assembling the pieces of de Andrade’s inventory one realizes those men were part of a system of cheap labor.

In Posters for the Museum of the Man of the Northeast, in the rear gallery, a similar semi-fictional account continued. Photographs hung from the ceiling, suspended at the viewer’s height by monofilament threads; many more pictures were mounted on the walls, their distribution and position varied. These photographs were color portraits of men from northeastern Brazil, printed on wooden posters, all sized equally. While in 40 Black Candies for 1 Real the pictures of workers seem to be taken from history books, in Museum the photographs show ad-like faces and bodies enlarged, bleeding to the posters’ frames.

The installation had a strong anthropological tone, as if de Andrade were studying these people. On one wall, he reproduced two newspaper sheets with classified ads. One reads, “I’m looking for a strong, brown-skinned man — ugly or handsome — for a photograph of the poster of the Museum of the Man of the Northeast.” Another said, “I’m looking for a man over 30 years old, who works with his hands and knows of local craftsmanship for a photograph poster of the Museum of the Man of the Northeast.” In 2012, de Andrade advertised in local newspapers and documented his encounters through photographs and notes. The project for the artist’s Museum is a comment on a real institution of the same name, in Recife. Founded in 1979, the mission of the actual Museum is to preserve customs and crafts from the northeast of Brazil. It takes its inspiration from the writings on “racial democracy” by Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre (1900 – 1985), who wrote on the emergence of the Brazilian mulato, a brown-skinned ethnicity from the northeast, the children of indigenous peoples, blacks, and Europeans.

In de Andrade’s works, though, the traces of Brazil’s colonial origins of color prejudices and stereotyping are recounted. Brown-skinned northeastern farm workers are one of the most neglected classes in Brazil, whose struggle with racism mingles with labor exploitation. One could spend hours reading and comparing the excerpts from these stories, and could fill the fiction’s gaps with one’s own imagination about these characters. The portraits are also stunning, funny. When these men take over de Andrade’s Museum, they become models. As they strike a pose, they look incredibly sexy, sometimes feminized, working against the stereotypical idea of the macho northeastern man. Some of them reveal to the camera their bare, muscular chest — forged by labor rather than a gym — while they hold objects like hammers or plumbing tools.

De Andrade provided that group of workers with a temporary empowerment, which may have survived at least the span of a camera’s shutter release: the piece consolidates the artist’s attempt to break with stereotypes, even though one could question what happens with that subversion when an installation with portraits of minorities goes for sale in a gallery. The flip side of that question, though, is de Andrade’s continuing concern with labor and exploitation, which is part of a broader project on reviewing his own position as an artist: he stands on a contradictory threshold between being implicated within exploitation and enacting the role of a pseudo-anthropologist. And it is through humor and fiction that de Andrade sustains this contradiction, as when he adopts the supposedly friendly word “nego” to reveal prejudice. As a Brazilian myself, I am also interested in what we, as spectators, do when these stories pass on to our hands. To select the best portraits of the Museum, or to scavenge information among classified ads often makes us smile, but it may also make us think about the position we occupy: of those who exploit, of those who observe in silence, of those who commiserate, or of those who take action.

The post Jonathas de Andrade: Subverting Cheap Labor and Racism in Brazil appeared first on artcritical.

October 29, 2014 to January 25, 2015
235 Bowery (between Stanton and Rivington streets)
New York City, 212 219 1222

“Chris Ofili: Night and Day,” the first major solo museum exhibition in this country devoted to the artist, is staged on four floors of the New Museum. At the lobby façade is his vinyl on glass Afro Waves (2002-03). On the second floor, there are 17 paintings from the 1990s, 26 small watercolors and pencil drawings, and a couple of sculptures. On the third floor, the pencil on paper Afro Margin drawings and an enormous room full of dark blue paintings. And, on the fourth floor, seven large pictures made in the past decade. Because these galleries are very large and extremely high, and so best not subdivided, they can be a difficult painters. But Ofili’s tall works really command the setting. This generous installation provides a really good understanding of his career.

In the 1990s, he favored single figures in a vertical format: the Madonna, some other women, and the phallus of Pimpin’ ain’t easy (1997). In the first decade of the next millennium, when Ofili moved from London to Trinidad in 2006, came the dark narrative scenes such as Blue Night Watcher (2006). And then more recently, inspired in part by a commission from the National Gallery, London, he began his compositions after Ovid — Ovid-Actaeon (2011-12), for example — in response to the Titians recently accessioned by that museum and National Galleries of Scotland, the former Bridgewater loan of Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto (1556-59). A large number of contemporary artists were been invited to respond to old master art in the National Gallery. Ofili responded empathetically and most successfully to this commission by enlarging the narratives of his earlier painting. In place of his icon-like frontal scenes from the 1990s, and the political ‘blue night’ pictures, he began to develop more complex narratives, some based upon Ovid, others presenting sacred texts.

As this masterful exhibition demonstrates, Ofili has a rare capacity for decorative, room-filling ensembles of paintings. Because his sources, in both old master and contemporary art, are so very varied, his ability to create an effective synthesis of the two, which cannot have been uncomplicated to achieve, is all the more impressive. If it is not easy, sometimes,to read his retelling of these stories, that is because this ability to generate decorative schemes doesn’t support focus on individual works:without knowing the titles The Raising of Lazarus (2007) and Ovid-Actaeon (2011-12), it wouldn’t be easy to identify these (very different) narratives. Because these pictures are gathered together by the high-pitched pastel colors of the recent narratives on the fourth floor and the very dark blues on the third, the net effect of his installations on both floors is much great than the sum of the individual pictures.

In Reflections on the Nude (1967), the British art writer Adrian Stokes speculatively described Paul Cézanne’s The Bather (1894-1905), recently acquired by the National Gallery as “among the first and perhaps the greatest works of a deeply founded cosmopolitan art which . . . (is) to pre-figure the eventual evolution of a multi-racial society.” He was thinking of its anticipation of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon “and upon all those works that were so soon to forge the easiest of links with Negro sculpture.” I see Ofili’s recent painting, which makes excursions into such diverse sources as hip-hop music, Zimbabwean cave paintings and Blaxploitation films as an answer to this hopeful prophecy.

No service is done to the present reputation of this ambitious, wonderfully successful mid-career artist, however, by replaying the story of the reception of his The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) in “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum, as it is at length by several writers in the New Museum catalogue. Since, in that unhappy political controversy, the true merits of his art were not really at stake, why look back to 1999 when right now he is a heroic artist to reckon with? Having provided a magnificent installation, in its catalogue the museum has let him down. But that is a minor problem.

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It’s been more than 100 days since most of America learned about a small town outside of St. Louis, MO called Ferguson, and many more since a cell phone video went viral of a man dying from having his throat and chest crushed while being restrained by police on Staten Island. While Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s names have received the most attention in the popular press, there were many more Black people killed by law enforcement officials this year, a phenomenon that is not new or that unusual. It wasn’t just that “the block was hot” this summer, but it seemed like the entire nation suddenly felt the heat. Each time another racial injustice was revealed this year, it became more difficult to claim with sincerity that we are living in a post-racial America, or that race doesn’t have as much impact in daily life as it once did.

I know in the art world, it can feel like we aren’t really supposed to talk about this race stuff, but in 2014, it’s been really difficult to avoid the topic. There was the YAMS Collective controversy during the Whitney Biennial, discussions of how to critique the new Latin American wunderkind without bringing up Basquiat, a questionable exhibition in London, and an art dealer defending the exploitative work of an artist by saying there are worse things to be upset over… like global warming. Was it easier to report on and critique those and similar incidents because they were such blatant examples of racism? Why has finding words to discuss the aftermath and recent “non-indictment indictments” in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown been more difficult?

I’ve struggled with writing something that said everything I wanted to say about the images the media used to tell the story of Michael Brown’s death and its aftermath too. How do art critics talk about the framing of all Ferguson protesters as rioters and looters, the visual absence of Officer Wilson, the ghost of the deceased Brown, and the use of racially coded language like “thug”? Why do we even need to speak up? In art, we critics — unless our last names are Davis, Cotter, or Saltz — don’t always have the freedom to talk about race in concrete terms for fear of accusations that we lack objectivity or may be employing our “race card” — whatever that is — or worse. None of us want to be dismissed as crazy or hysterical, people who have nothing better to do than stir up the pot and keep sleeping dogs from lying down. Besides, isn’t art free from all of those social constructs like race and gender or economic limitations…?

Lived experience tells me that we have a lot of work to do, and that there is much at stake. Responses to the media treatment of Brown like #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, where social media users paired photographs of flattering images like a yearbook portrait with something fault-finding, such as an impulsively misguided selfie to highlight the news media’s polarizing and oversimplified portrayal of black youths, is devastatingly real. If one of the roles of criticism is to reflect on the contemporary cultural moment and spark thoughtful conversations about how we experience the world, examining the visual culture associated with current events matters. Imagine how the language of critique might shift or how the range of voices and topics heard might expand if more art critics didn’t consider their primary role as that of quality control for good taste. Art objects and images have value in the world beyond their aesthetics. Objects and images help us interpret the world and give it meaning. The things we make reflect the way we see. What if we spoke of the visual language of respectability politics in these officer-involved shootings? What if we critiqued that?

There is a long and sordid history of tension between police and Black communities, a history that stretches back to the plantation overseer. So much of law enforcement practice in the U.S. has been about managing the autonomy, self-determination, and individual freedoms in a society; so much about Black community life in the U.S. has been about fighting to reclaim those same rights from those who would like to take them.

The most morally repressed and vile among us maintain the belief that people are generally hard-wired to do good. Police are supposed to protect and help the citizenry, and each time one of their number does something to shatter that assumption, most of us are still taken aback. Overgrown bullies and would-be sociopaths do not become police officers, right? Is that why CNN looped that video of Mike Brown at the corner store allegedly stealing even though the video had not yet been authenticated? It is sadly ironic that 2014 is the 50th anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, during which the police and local Klu Klux Klan members colluded to cover up the murder of three Civil Rights workers, two of whom were White northerners.

Art critics are preoccupied with the connections between words and images and their connotations. We study, research, posit, analyze, reflect, and conjure, all in search of meaning. We know that while images are visual, they are emotive. We also understand that the way we see is different depending on how we feel or what’s happening around us. The events that seemed to culminate around Ferguson appeared so ripe for our critical eyes, but it’s been hard to fix our gaze there. Some of us may think it doesn’t concern us — that this isn’t about art — but we’re wrong.

Something about this cultural moment jolted our collective “we” to action. Americans are talking with strangers about the way they live their lives and we’re struggling to understand how others might experience the world. Art is a powerful tool for increasing understanding and bridging seemingly “un-bridgeable” gaps. As protests across the country continue, I’m hoping the art world isn’t caught sleeping again, but instead, makes room for more of its practitioners and participants to add critical perspective to the tidal change the entire world seeks. If art is who we are when no one else is looking, perhaps criticism can help reveal even more of what’s been hidden in the dark.

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Robert Gober’s work calls for spare words to match its minimalist form, quiet contemplation to match its understated yet striking affect. “The Heart is Not a Metaphor” is the artist’s first large-scale career survey in the U.S. It includes about 130 objects spanning mediums, including drawing and photography, and features a small selection of work by artists with whom he has worked or collaborated with as a curator. The exhibition is loosely chronological, following Gober’s development of ideas around home, the quotidian, violence and sex, faith, purification and ritual. And like the work, the exhibition design is didactically understated — there is only one panel in each gallery for general context — while the walls are unpainted, and in some cases unfinished, with panel beams exposed on one side making everything look and feel generic, like a television playing mindlessly in the background.

Gober’s meticulously crafted sculptures of common objects like paint cans, ice skates, or cribs are familiar, even though something is always a little bit off about them. These are things we use, things we have, things that are a part of us. But his limbs never seem to connect to complete bodies: they jut out from walls, contain odd protrusions and indentations, or end up where they normally would not be, such as a fireplace. The cribs are dangerously slanted, oddly shaped, and “butter” sometimes “sleeps” in them; the sinks cannot function, and closets are surprisingly shallow. He places us in the familiarity of the home — our private spaces, places where we cleanse, rejuvenate, define and refine ourselves. Through his work, Gober wants us to learn about the places where our hearts truly live.

Well, maybe not our hearts, but certainly his. The sculptures and environments as signifiers of origin and daily living are meant to be familiar, but too much of it feels willfully insular and self-focused. In Gober’s world, everything looks like a neutral, but not too much seems to match.

Gober came to prominence in New York during the 1980s when the city was being ravaged by the AIDS crisis. Much of his work responds to and comments on that moment. Two of his wallpaper installations are on view, and Untitled (1989 – 1996) still unsettles me years later upon viewing it in person again. A sketch of a sleeping man with brown hair alternates with the image of a man with dark brown skin and white knee-length pants hanging from a tree by a noose, over and over again from floor to ceiling. A white wedding gown hanging on a chicken-wire-frame seamstress’s mannequin in the middle of the room would seem to signify purity, promise, hope, passion, and violence. Sculptures of bags of cat litter are placed here and there against the walls. Gober has talked about this installation being inspired by the collision of our country’s shadowy past and present: the domestic terrorism of lynching and the denial of rights to same sex marriage. The work highlights the lengths to which we go to sanitize situations and make something undesirable tolerable and tame.

But I find it difficult to take these juxtapositions seriously as provocation. It feels like a curious “default” representation of queer history, which is often depicted through the experience of white gay men. I was much too young to really understand what was happening socially then, but I imagine that in the mid-1980s and early ’90s — the height of the American AIDS crisis — the right to marry was not the most pressing issue on anyone’s LGBTQ agenda, although it appears the issue was important for Gober. His environments created for the Dia Chelsea in 1992 that featured sinks with working plumbing, sculptures of rat poison boxes also included bundled stacks of photolithograph print newspapers interspersed with advertisements of him wearing a wedding dress. But while too many people were unable to share their last moments with their loved ones at this time, to compare the ban on same-sex marriage to the terrorism of lynchings doesn’t feel right. In fact it feels like privileged, self-referential navel gazing.

A response to the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks, Untitled (2003-2005) features a headless Jesus-like fountain from which cleansing water flows from the nipples into a gaping hole in the floor. Framed photolithographs of the September 12, 2001 edition of The New York Times line the walls, the pages having been overlaid with pastel drawings of humans embracing, and pallets aligned to recall church pews complete the space. If we are to seek comfort in times of sorrow, be washed by the holy water, and covered and cleansed by the blood of the lamb, why does this installation feel so cheeky? Gober was raised Catholic, but later left the church, disillusioned. Nonetheless he says he created this environment as a place for contemplation in a time of tragedy. This installation doesn’t offer comfort, however, but seems to provoke. This work isn’t about a collective spiritual crisis of “we,” but about something very specific to Gober’s experience.

As I wandered through the exhibition studying the early paintings, reference drawings, sinks, and other sculpted objects, I sighed deeply and repeatedly. Gober’s visual insistence on bland universal definitions of roots, home, values and mores, and even faith is exhausting. I can sense that the work is about him, that it is specific, but everything I see tries so hard to fade into the proverbial woodwork while coyly inviting me to acknowledge and congratulate its difference.

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