A meandering sun-bleached trek forms the exterior presence of Wardell Milan’s exhibition adjacent to the recently completed art museum at the oldest of the seven Claremont Colleges—an academic plantation that sprawls over 500 acres and eagerly sends clever children abroad, hoping that they should one day become captains of industry and richly reward their alma mater. Scattered across campus this collection of pictorial billboards—drawn, collaged and photographed imagery of figures in hiding, torment, labor or desire—demonstrate an intentional contrast to their location; the meticulously manicured lawns and well-kept streets of the pristine village bear the names of posh and aspirational institutions of higher learning: Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard. One is directed through the campus by map or compass toward Milan’s large billboard imagery. However, Milan’s work is anything but posh.
The Migrant Body (all works 2022) illustrates fieldworkers toiling among the rows of produce that will soon garnish our tables, The Trans Body is a human/bird transformation that suggests escape and rebirth as a swan, and The Female Body is a pile of indeterminate refuse beside a transformed split-gender figure cradling an incipient child that may defy conventional description. The Quarantine Body has the haunting gaze and the bodily contortions of a Francis Bacon bathhouse vision so disconcerting that a peeping tom would turn away. The last and by far the best of the billboard series—The Black Male Body—is fragmented and suggestive of a figure already transitioned as constellation and waterway, figure and ground, past and present; a transformation wishfully reminiscent of Juliet: “and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine, That all the will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun.” This work is much more inviting, far less direct than the previous images and allows the viewer to immerse themselves in the possibility of magic and transformation, no matter how far-fetched, in such wonderment.
Wardell Milan, The Trans Body, from the series “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” 2022. Fund for Art in Public Places. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy of the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College.
Inside the new museum is an equally new artwork that has a lengthy title but a succinct message—My knees getting weak, and my anger might explode, but if God got us then we gonna be alright (2021). The messageis old and unforgettable while being simultaneously brand new, speaking another language that is equally understandable and tragically memorable. The figures here constitute a mortal pile suggestive at first of the horror and desperation in Delacroix’s Raft of the Medusa, but more readily and evocatively reveals itself as a recognizably 20th-century horror. It draws to mind a writhing cone of naked humans, old and young, mouths screaming wildly and flesh scrumming hopelessly, climbing upon one another toward an empty, frightening, breathless salvation in a death chamber.
Three movement artists—Maria Gillespie, Nguyên Nguyên and Kevin Williamson—are grandly projected on as many walls but revealed in divergent locations. The panoramic videos depicting the bodily trials of these artists in demanding landscapes envelop the 2800 square-foot gallery as the performers shift from wall to wall and location to location; climbing, crawling, rolling. Yet, like memory and expectation, they each take their unnamed yet recognizable landscape with them. They are far from home, evidenced by the three cubbies on the unprojected wall, where the performers are seen in a miniscule video reflection of their endurance travels.
Williamson tramps through snow and stumbles over bogland as location dictates his path ultimately toward the sea, a desired target that appears to relocate in response to his approach. There is a painful yet elegant endurance in his earnest trek aimed at an unknown terminus. His no doubt painful contortions are his chosen demands upon his elbows, knees and hips as he slides down hills, sometimes tumbling, often reaching for the few and small brittle shrubs around him that offer little purchase. Perhaps his journey is as much one of remembrance as rigor, for opposite the vast panoramic projections are a trio of small compartments, open closets of mementos. In one of the compartments, where fragments of broken crockery are strewn over shattered bark, viewers may watch miniature videos of the alternating performers, in and out of their exertions. Williams is first seen shaving away the ragged beard suggestive of his marshland trials, then coloring his lips a gleaming ruby red and blowing us a kiss.
“to get there from here,” still, 2022. Photo credit: Gillespie, Nguyen, Williamson. Courtesy of the artists and Williamson Gallery, Scripps College.
Gillespie, hair gone white in search of her past, visits an abandoned home then turns away as if the past is no longer able to reveal its secret histories: a pity and a mercy. It is too weatherbeaten, too desiccated to speak. She moves on, rolling herself upward then downward over stone stairs, toward and away from the sun, climbs a shifting and indifferent sand dune, then digs in the swollen earthen muck, yet the vast emptiness withholds its secrets. Her corresponding cubicle is walled with abandoned shoes, tattered and unlaced, large, small and lost.
Between standing stones Nguyên slithers with eyes closed, his hands smoothly feeling his way over the wind-worn surfaces. He uses his outstretched arms, pliable not stiff, to navigate a sightless path between the menhirs. In another scene, this one distinctly man-made, the artist runs his fingers and tilted shoulder along a cement wall while his long shadow protrudes before him like a divining rod. Once more, this time in a location that suggests the border between city and wilderness, Nguyên comes to a barrier fence and follows along it, where it leads is unknown. The last cubicle—perhaps his, possibly all of theirs—is laced with disparate curtains, and a crudely layered shrine holding mysteries that continue to deepen. The projections then repeat their stories, as if the aching figures having clearly been given one lesson cannot help but ache and yearn for one more.
This edition of Pope.L’s thinning theatrics presents a series of immaculate white shacks, their size of a two-holer, containing a carpeted bench, where viewers may test the limitations of their endurance. An unsuspecting and luckless couple may sit together in one of these dark and claustrophobic huts and view a bizarre rendition of themselves that makes Edward Albee’s Martha and George seem frothier than Ozzie and Harriet. It will leave the viewers nonplussed and ears aching, for the videos presented in these cramped and darkened sheds are willfully eccentric and the audio overwhelmingly loud. The back of the shacks reveals the black mechanical side of the video monitors. This aspect is far more peculiar, in its technical necessity, and far more intriguing than the hut and the films shown within. The rear end of a TV is the hands-down winner in the exhibition, in that it retains mystery and is not overbaked.
The former beating heart of this sideshow, a single final shanty, seemingly dismembered, appears as a wizard’s rubbish-strewn lair, exploded and abandoned until so much byzantine effort is realized as a fool’s errand. The projector is feathered with Post-it notes and stands outside the three-walled open shack like a broken-down
kinetoscope; vinyl tubing lies on the floor. The rubber-masked actors, the bee-keeper-suited experimenter, the fortissimo audio, are all more than a viewer should be forced to endure. But there’s more, in the form of beans: low- priced Sainsbury baked beans.
Pope.L, September 19, 2020 (e), 2020. Courtesy Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo by Jeff McLane
These beans litter the gallery walls as well as the huts and bear the signature and seal of the artist. Their vitrines—resembling miniature bank vaults—are spot lit, as if ready for their close- up. If so, much patience will be required. Their shape has a familiarity, much like the “Break glass in case of fire” alarms that once dotted the halls of middle schools. The cans are misshapen, suggestive of spoilage, as if their gaseous interior breakdown threatens to overwhelm their metal seals and escape in a vitrine-soiling explosion. Such a result would have been welcome, giving some life and interest to the repetitive and underwhelming array.
Also included are some of the colorful and crudely lettered text works on paper for which the artist is best known. They are mounted daintily, almost as an afterthought, and seem embarrassed by the lack of subtlety and depth in the rest of the exhibition. Some of them are missing, leaving only an illuminated empty bracket on the gallery wall; a deliberate escape should be presumed. The exhibition’s entry work is a pedestal with a Plexiglas box atop it, stickered carelessly with saran wrap, giving it the look of a Halloween decoration. Inside the box is a schematic of the sheds. Its revelatory dimensions add nothing to the exhibition.
Russian exile Lev Rukhin creates grand works of realism tinged with just enough peculiarity to suggest doubt. They are dreamlike—much of the imagery is suspended in a nimbus—and implies both memory and trickery. This device is quite intentional; the exhibition is titled Dreamscapes.
Pressed together in scores of photographic tiles, these large-scale images are a peripatetic narrative echoing both his contemporary travels and his fragmented memories, of things firmly recollected and those hazily recalled. In Hero’s Journey, 72” x 96” (all works 2020), sits a Pittsburgh factory devoid of workers, a skeletal remnant of the former smoke belching Eastern powerhouse so fearsome that it had been referred to as “Hell with the lid taken off.” In the triptych, Homage to David Hockney, 72” x 144”, Rukhin’s silhouette can be seen illuminating a tall spiny yucca as waning sunlight rims the horizon. The artist is visible in many of the works as if assuming the role of tour guide and eager to reveal the singular beauty of the unvarnished.His comparable yet much smaller Dunes places a similarly solitary tree in a much emptier landscape, isolated with an expectant or communicating human figure; the towering Brooklyn Chimney, 48” x 48”, becomes an obelisk worthy of homage as it watches over the sprawling boroughs.
Lev Rukhin, HERO’S JOURNEY, 2020. Laminated archival dye-sublimation photographs, layered, cropped into circles, hand-mounted onto aluminum honeycomb substrate.
The gallery’s darkened rough-hewn floor lends a melancholy and contemplative aura to the works that are already doleful. Masonic Lodge, one of the smallest works in the exhibition, is a genuine haunter, suggestive not only of ghosts but advantages pressed, opportunities denied, and stratagems contrived. For an artist expelled from a homeland where subterfuge was a national obsession the ghosts of the past and the apprehension of the future are fraternal twins. Umbrella Man—part of his Los Angeles series of diverse figures—walks swiftly by in his shimmering suit, a wary eye ever cast behind him, his wide umbrella disguising his shadow.
The progress of his career has been a methodical march; carefully scripted, stubbornly stage-managed, and precisely choreographed—each subsequent exhibition enhancing the shudder of an already disconcerting thrum. The result of such a steady and painstaking pace has delivered an exhibition catalog worthy of MacArthur, yet his current exhibition is no laurel-chasing spectacle, it is a personally brazen and bitter step forward. Not satisfied to merely convey pathos, or defy hoary convention by shouting Macbeth! backstage, the artist is concerned with far more pressing matters. Gary Simmons is here to bring the pain.
Comedic, vulgar and unsettling, these apparent cartoons appear buoyant and frivolous. One might associate his imagery with graffiti (one would be wrong) or the vacuous fluff committed by Banksy (another misapprehension despite its uncanny fluence). Yet despite their varied black and white backgrounds, with wittily minimal accents of color—these characters force-feed the viewer mouthfuls of chalk dust. The fresh canvases on the wall are large (all 2020–21), the wall paintings larger yet, but the characters spit a comical bile, an intentionally acidic hocker in the eye of the beholder. These are ghost paintings, with characters that continue to haunt. They are dead and yet they live: in our bitter racist politics, our unequally funded schools, our trigger-happy policing, and freelance “white replacement” spree killers. Lynch Frog, features a character haplessly hanging, a peril no doubt brought on by his own darned foolishness. 88 Fingers Fatsis so eager to entertain that he spirals himself into tar and turpentine. The paintings have the patina of the ancient but maintain an ever-potent bile, pantomimes that so tickle the funny bone of the secret cracker that the Warner Brothers’ Censored Eleven have risen from the grave and are once again enjoying distribution. These cartoons—a vile hoot for the unreconstructed—feature Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarves, where the mean old queen is nothing but impossible bosom, saucer eyes and face enveloping lips; Jungle Jitters, with a plump googly-eyed native whose nose ring is so expansive it does double duty as a jump rope; The Isle of Pingo Pongo, bone-coifed natives with lower jaws so extensive they serve as dinner plates; finishing with Goldilocks and the Jivin’ Bears, where a black wolf in grandma drag is chased up the chandelier by a telegram porter who pulls a gat and speaks in the voice of Jack Benny’s Rochester. Compared to the more egregiously bigoted imagery contained within, the titles and show descriptions seem downright elegant.
In a long career that has paced steadily toward a potent display of Black visibility through a rendering of its absence, Simmons has employed minimal tools to create elemental imagery. His 2010 exhibition titled “Black Marquee” featured sparse text on blank walls at Anthony Meier gallery in New York, a haunting contrast to the space’s renaissance revival interior. Rooms and corridors were emptied, leaving only the white arches and columns contrasting the near matte black walls. Streaked upwards and downwards the nominal white lettering described Blaxploitation films, creating an elegant accompaniment of X-ray reversal to Marcel Broothaers’ La Salle Blanche (1975).
Star Chaser, another of the sweeping paintings, is a tapestry of black—of eager hope tempered by bitter disappointment. His vast rendering of night is full of stars but all of them seem to be dying, not shooting. It is a stargazing portrait of embittered aspiration, the Pecola Breedlove knotted fitfully inside us, imbibing exterior resentment, and believing it porridge. It echoes in sentiment the artist’s Balcony Seating Only (2017), his polished floor reflections at Regen Projects, where segregated cinema reveals its aspirational dead end by the stairway to the Colored section, a steep and unsteady climb leading nowhere. Jittery lovers enact a romantic ritual in the 44-foot chalkboard fit of erasure, Lindy Hop. He presents a posy; her bowed hair reacts. They don’t yet know that this will be their high point, that ever after will reek of torment. Their youth is a buoyant ignorance and hard lessons are on the horizon. As in his Fade to Black (2017) at the California African American Museum, hopeful fantasy is again tempered by heartbreak in the race films Souls of Sin and Murder on Lenox Avenue. Cinema, a variety to which the Simmons imagery belongs, is a global language, and his figures are richly illustrated and quiveringly alive in the grandest of the rooms in the Hauser & Wirth depot; Lindy Hop, Star Chaser, and 88 Fingers Fats dominate the show as if in an arena. They silently overwhelm.
The circuitous walk-through ends at the gallery’s garage door exit; it is more than suggestively the end of the road.In this final work, a subtler and damnably haunting installation, fairly spits its defiant title, You Can Paint Over MeBut I’ll Still Be Here, which could address both itself as well as the hung canvases and wall paintings previously viewed, of no longer living yet never dying stereotypes. In this purposely less elegant expanse, the artist has suggested a school lunchroom. Its dining tables, however, are not laid flat and ready for mealtime, they are folded and foodless, closed for business; no lunches are to be served here. Not only are they barren, they are festooned with crows, reminiscent of the Bodega Bay playground in The Birds. Fragments of graffiti can be seen but most of those pleas of remembrance have been erased or painted over. Those who once sat there are willfully forgotten. Those kids. The troublemakers. The ones that receive far greater punishment than the white kids for the same schoolhouse infractions. And the girls get it worse than the boys. As The New York Times has pointed out, “recent discipline data from the education department found that Black girls are over five times more likely than white girls to be suspended at least once from school, seven times more likely to receive multiple out-of-school suspensions than white girls and three times more likely to receive referrals to law enforcement.” And they are sent home, expelled, lost, forgotten, carelessly abandoned as carrion for the crows to feed upon.
This is the America that Simmons portrays. Well-meaning white folks will tut-tut and say how sad it all is, and perhaps make a donation to something or other that is vaguely related to a cause the name of which they cannot remember. And that is why this exhibition is so vigilantly defiant. Those antique references the artist has made are living yet. “No, White folks,” it says, “you don’t get a pass for that.” Because Black folks are not prepared to wallow, to drown in your partitioned mire of inescapable Blackness.
Commandeering a mere 180,000 square feet the of the Los Angeles Convention Center’s 760,000, the LA Art Show Modern + Contemporary, resurrected after last year’s COVID cancellation, offers a brief glimpse of the offerings of more than 80 galleries—foreign, domestic, and spendy.
While up-to-the-minute ornaments are understandably present—NFTs (non-fungible tokens for those of us a few minutes behind) and flexing shapes in colorful digital video, there are others that are overexposed to the point of invisibility. A pair of tiny Banksy prints are virtually wallpaper, and a gallery full of Basquiat homages are exactly as vacuous as one might imagine.
At the Rebecca Hossack booth are two elegantly rendered and transparently layered drawings by Nikoleta Sekulovic, large-scale in acrylic and graphite. With an anatomical elegance that nods to the masterful Euan Uglow, a pair of nude female figures look toward and away from the viewer. Opposite these are the oversized book spines of David Morago at Pigment Gallery. Several works, about four-feet tall, are enlarged with horizontal titles that reveal an eclectic library, some volumes are spiral bound while others are clearly graphic novels; an overall tint of age suggests a collector’s obsession.
Antoaneta Hillman’s thickly encaustic abstractions, at Cinq Gallery, have the peculiar simultaneity of both age and immediacy. Slathered, scraped, and incised, the works nod to earlier postwar movements while remaining refreshingly current. More accessible viewing can be had at the Beatriz Esguerra booth—graphite and watercolor hauntings of pensive young girls show them with their heads lowered, examining invisible futures. Just south of them are girls and boys in authentic angst at Connect Contemporary, presented in immerging and disappearing split-flap portraits with hopes and consequences underlined. Beneath one portrait reads “70% OF FOSTER YOUTH HOPE TO ATTEND COLLEGE.” Below another, “3% WILL GRADUATE FROM COLLEGE.”
The photographic work of Reynier Leyva Novo at Lisa Sette Gallery is a rich reversal of damnatio memoriae, a traditional tool of tyrants to erase their competitors from history. The young Cuban artist (b. 1983) has turned the tables on the hagiography of Fidel Castro. In a series of old photographs, the artist has erased Fidel; in one image a blind woman attempts to touch the face of the revolutionary hero, she is left grabbing air. In another photo set in a conference room he is literally and figuratively out of the picture—Khrushchev is left talking to an empty chair. Another portrait, this one redemptively transcending the deliberate and racist mistreatment of one of America’s finest athletes, reveals Jack Johnson so ennobled that he appears ready for the Smithsonian. Tim O’Brien’s small painting, more richly and gallantly rendered than either of the Obama portraits, shows the heavyweight champ serene, confident, and fearless. It has the Americana richness of a Grant Wood or Elizabeth Catlett and is a rendering that will endure as a synonym for fighter—an urgent need in these turbulent times.
There is a single painting that dominates this exhibition, a painting—if one can describe it so—of such singularity that it renders the other works as experiments, exercises, considerations. All are lesser and unworthy contenders. Its only and quite distant challenger is a mere study, of similar technique but diminished comparison.
Titled “States of Matter,” this exhibition is a collection of decorative abstractions. They indulge in a melding of metalwork and painting, employing silver leaf and black clay or iron filings and jute, to produce a series of bas-relief ornaments that neither excite nor awe.
The materiality of the compositions is indeed striking, as the numerous works luxuriate in a game of periodic table hide-and-seek; palladium over here and silver over there, yet the culmination of all this alchemy produces distinctly less than the sum of its parts. The ingredients of its craft fair conjurings are even set on a display table to prove that only pure constituents were used in the production of these grand baubles, as lacquered hardwood blocks (Pour Box and Red Pour Box, both 2021) appear to ooze gold as well as puns that become distinctly less humorous mere seconds later.
Nancy Lorenz, Flight, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles | Palm Beach.
A pair of grand vertical works slathered in gold leaf, Moon Gold Mountain (2018) and Lemon Gold Sunlight with Rain (2017) both measure 102”x72” and are less suggestive of works of art than the doors of a local house of worship. The artist no doubt employs the lavish use of gold leaf as a critique of consumerist indulgence—particularly in the art market—as gilded age impersonation is a gratification that never seems to go out of style, but such a conceit rings hollow in a commercial art gallery, where sticking it to the man is less a consideration that crushing one’s competitors.
The lone painting of import—a grand princessing of its stunted little sister Mercury (2021) that features mother of pearl inlay—and the worthiest of these works is titled Flight (2021) and hangs at the end of the hall, nearly filling the wall at 96” X 132.” It is the work to which one’s eyes are immediately attracted and appropriately so: nothing else approaches its scale, confidence, complexity or conviction. It is also the only work that delivers the elemental exuberance at which the other paintings swing and so badly miss. Featuring ingredients that include gold leaf, lemon gold leaf, resin, iron filings, pigment, lacquer, and gilder’s clay on wood panel, it is materially complete and completely successful. The imagery is equally indulgent and complex, suggesting a cosmos richly envisioned, liquid and gaseous and full of elemental wonder. It is here that the members of the periodic table play hide-and-seek, combine and transform, and where the artist has most successfully captured the ideas that have been suggested but not fully realized in any of the other works in the exhibition. It proposes the antique and the contemporary, the here, the now, the ever after.
Not front of house, with its symmetrically billeted art objects reflecting in its polished concrete floor, these rawboned works by HK Zamani are arrayed deep in the back, in a brick and concrete garage, its loading dock and ramp illumined by dangling warehouse floodlights. And it is exactly where they belong, because pretty they ain’t.
While there are only four works presented, Inadvertent Protagonists I, II, & III, and Fashion Erasures (all 2021) the exhibition is an enveloping and disconcerting experience. All are large; the slightest dimension of Inadvertent Protagonists is an 8-feet width, while Fashion Erasures, a series of 39 smaller works little more than 45-inches high, is 11-feet wide. The latter is a series of framed figures, magazine layouts with the imprimatur of high-end couture; yet these figures of fashionista idolatry, once envied and beatified, are transformed in Zamani’s cameos. These icons of desire and emulation have been distorted, becoming abominations of their former selves, misshapen silhouettes of the beastliness within that we so desperately fear confessing. The beautiful models have been transformed into horned and blackened cutouts, tentacled creatures with fins for ears, razors as elbows, pickaxes for tongues. Arranged as they are, like a series of film stills, they suggest a disturbing Muybridge or broken zoetrope, and in this metamorphosis names like Galliano, Valentino and Gucci become Manticore, Basilisk and Chimera. The artist suggests that we see ourselves, our true and unglamorized selves, as part of this shameful vanity, and realize our presumedly well-deserved desires as little more than a humbug.
HK Zamani, “Inadvertent Protagonists,” installation view, 2021. Photo By Carl Berg. Courtesy PRJCTLA.
The Inadvertent Protagonists, three larger works on unmounted canvas, are even more fearsome yet. Scraped and weathered, these paintings—a moniker they might dispute—release their shadows to crawl along the crackled floor toward the viewer as if eagerly bearing a message. Each one is a deformed triptych, a sandwiched cut-out of a painting in shallow relief. Two layers of canvas are devised into three, each contrastingly painted. The top layer has been scissored and folded over to reveal blackened profiles, far more ominous than those seen in Fashion Erasures, and these “shadows” appear eager to envelop the spectator. Protagonists II and III lie on the floor and give the impression of the long remnants oozing inexorably forward, while Protagonists I is wall-mounted and its figures appear to have fallen forward with an almost audible slap, exhausted and resting in anticipation of the bell that signals the next round. In each work the painted surface is raw and scraped, their colors faded and mottled, and each creature/figure/memory/shadow seems locked in irrevocable conflict with its partner/opponent/reflection/distortion.
The theatricality of the installation makes for a stunning experience as the artwork and its setting could not have been more suitably paired; grim and bleak have combined to summon a visual and sensory experience rarely found in the anodyne and moneyed ambience of the art gallery. The cement floor echo and the aged crumbling brick have assembled a chorus for painting stripped bare.
Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, 2020
By Okwui Enwezor
264 pages
Phaidon/New Museum, New York
In a pivotal scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Godfather a Mafia don grieves over the body of his dead son. “Look how they massacred my boy,” the weeping father intones, and the audience grieves with him. A worldwide audience is moved by the pantomime death of a handsome movie actor.
Another dead son, this one truly dead and made so just a few years after the theatrical death, is viewed in an open coffin. He is just a boy, and he is disfigured, gruesomely distorted. He is missing an eye, he is swollen, and he is, was, real. Upon the perpetrators there is no comeuppance visited. There is no justice.
“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” 2021. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni
In Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America—a piercing title that recalls the Reagan era—the late author and curator Okwui Enwezor had envisioned an exhibition where writers and artists excavate, examine and enliven the antithetic of Black and America. His death at age 55 prevented his completion of the project but it has been dutifully and beautifully realized by Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon and Mark Nash.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden, THE FULL SEVERITY OF COMPASSION, 2019 in “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” 2021. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
The book by Phaidon and exhibition at the New Museum feature the work of essayists and artists whose work is both moving and haunting. Considering the historical similarities between Black deaths in the antique and the contemporary, Saidiya Hartman, in her essay, Dead Book Remains, conflates the horrors visited on past and present Black bodies as being something to be expected; that while their labor may have value their personhood does not. In My Soul Looks Back in Wonder Naomi Beckwith records the evolving status of images of negritude, from persecution to resistance, and specifies how the co-option of Black pain as seen in the Whitney Biennial’s choice of artist Dana Shutz’Open Casket (2016) painting of the decomposed Emmett Till was so cack-handedly considered; a throwback souvenir for unreconstructed white folks, like baseball manager John McGraw’s lynching rope souvenir, or dreadlocked ski-bums in Vail.
The artworks featured include The Full Severity of Compassion (2019) by Tiona Nekkia McClodden, a fully blackened cattle squeeze chute, suggestive of bodily coercion, experimentation and consumption. Similarly haunting is Drainer (2018) by Julia Phillips, a ceramic cast of a woman’s torso suspended above a concrete shower drain, a peculiar bodily dissection of unknown or willfully dismissed history.
Julia Phillips, Drainer, 2018 in “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” 2021. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Many of the artists included are so widely known that their contributions become less powerful. Celebrity transforms their work into spectacle, clouding the visceral bite they might otherwise convey. The majority of works and essays, however, reach deeply into our sensibilities, insisting that we either embrace or dismiss, to vehemently choose sides.
Yet the rise of righteous protest and demand versus the naked and eager retaliation that it faces has not prefigured a concluding détente but a death spiral of the republic, suggesting that any hope of equity will ultimately devolve into a tense and simmering stalemate.
This exhibition is simply horrible: a catalog of horrors, a parade of barbarism made all the more wretched because we have become inured to atrocity, our attention spans irredeemably vaporous. It is both commonplace and theatrical, a fleetingly addictive entertainment. For this particular presentation, Rodney McMillian is our impresario of the Grand Guignol: he presents for all-comers. Most viewers will consider themselves informed after viewing such provocative work and refer to it conversationally, while others might nod. For a very small minority of patrons, however, the horror remains and resonates long after leaving the exhibition because, for them, it is a wound that never heals.
McMillian has traditionally considered race in his varied works—abstraction, installation, video, sculpture—and those works are incisive and dolefully contemplative, but this exhibition, symptomatically titled “Body Politic,” is rawly unmediated. It seethes. There is revulsion, there is contempt, there is distrust, and nothing is held back.
Many of the paintings include text—shakily lettered and slashed with color—and nonchalantly recite atrocities committed upon Black bodies. These are works of anger and disgust but it is the works done in all black—mute and imperious Rorschachs— recite that are most arresting and lastingly communicative.
Rodney McMillian, Mississippi Appendectomy,”2020. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo by Brica Wilcox.
Cell I (2017–20) a crushed smoky butterfly, and Cell II (2018–20) a broken crystal, are dense matte black schematics that swallow light. They suggest both architectural plans of secret and forbidden locations; sites where inhuman actions are performed, and human biological cells, polygons of our very humanness laid out and schematized. It is in these suggestive fragments, both as visibly microscopic and structurally fabricated, that McMillian excavates the cornerstone of American history with an appetite for the ruination of Black bodies, minds, economies and futures.
Similarly harrowing, but extruded and eerily present are Untitled (Heart) (2018-19),Untitled (Entrails) (2019–20 )and Black Dick (2017–20), all configured of fabric, chicken wire and historical taint. Heart, a crumpled valve coarsely folded in upon itself, suggests not only a statistical report on racial disparities of life expectancy but the daily uptick in heart rate at the near-daily suspicions and discourtesies regularly encountered. Entrails is a snare, a serpent and long tether that harnesses and binds in employment, advancement and trust. Black Dick is a dehumanization, a fetishization, and with apologies to the BBC, a traditional lynching souvenir.
There is a rage in this exhibition but few will become enraged by it. Only those very few, that small segment of the population for whom this exhibition is a historical ID card.
And if you are of the mind that “You people should just get over it, that was so long ago” try remembering an earthen dam in Mississippi and three dead civil rights workers with upstanding citizens looking down at their murdered bodies, then recall a street in Minneapolis.
Guggenheim Fellow and native Angeleno Todd Grayis a visual artist whose work is in the collections of MOCA, LACMA, the Whitney, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. While mostly photo-based he also presents performance works; that is how we first met and collaborated. We recently spoke over the phone for a couple of hours, talking about food and his career, in no particular order.
AUGUST 2020: The quality of my work as a Black artist could reasonably be questioned; taste, trends, events, politics, all influence reactions to cultural artifacts and their respective makers. Yet it came as a surprise to me, early and repeatedly, that my very Blackness itself was also interrogational, and that I would become one of its chief examiners.
JUNE 2004: The “California Missions” project was a stab at the colonial history of my native state. Too immersed in the cultural windfall of Southern California and still too angry to assess my own colonization, I created a series of enormous photographs of landscape as guillotine, a symbol of the proselytizing missionaries who sliced a cultural before/after through the people, their land, their traditions. Half a horse protruded from a forest while the other side of the photo was a gleaming mirror finish so the people, newly redeemed in Christ, could see themselves reborn as saved souls.
JANUARY 1996: While drinking cocktails at Shoshana Wayne Gallery—the show would soon be closing, this new series of vulgarizations of Disney characters—I was invited by another artist to drop by his studio when I was next in New York. I didn’t remember until I was in Little Italy later that August. At dinner I learned that a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, had been beaten by officers in a police station, sodomized with a broken broom handle which one officer hoisted in pride, blood- and feces-stained. I thought, “They’ll get away with it.” But what a surprise, they didn’t. Perhaps there is some hope for the future. So much for my prediction.
APRIL 2018: I learned I won a Guggenheim Fellowship. It had the sort of prestige I was looking for, an elevation, rather like one of those orders the Queen of England gives out. David Bowie refused his. But tacking “Sir” onto David Bowie would have been a lowering. No way, of course, that I would decline. I worked too long and hard for this.
OCTOBER 1989: Things had been picking up but I wasn’t in any significant collections when I was approached by a fellow who convinced me that being bundled into a gift to the museums would be a sure way in. I believed him. By 1996 I was in both collections but I wasn’t paid for my work. In the museum, they had donor names of people unknown to me. I thought I was in control of the transaction but I clearly wasn’t. I felt like one of those iconic blues musicians robbed of their royalties, enticed, and bamboozled. Later at MOCA, I saw a White man contemplating my darkened image of Goofy, much longer than average (I time these things). I asked him why. It frightened him; like a Black thug, he said.
AUGUST 1998: I scored a tenure-track job at Cal State Long Beach mainly because of a photo shoot I did years earlier with Eazy-E. He and his NWA crew had nothing but disdain for me. I was a White boy to them. I had no credibility; working as a photographer for a record company meant I was one of them. They also had brought guns to the shoot. Not prop guns, real guns. For authenticity in the photos. Similarly, MC Hammer and his entourage had been unimpressed with the spread I laid for them. Apparently, they didn’t like sushi. White boy shit. Sneering at me, they appointed a deputation for fast food. I seriously thought, “Please, Hammer, don’t hurt me.”
JULY 1972: I got one of my photos in LIFE magazine. The Rolling Stones. My stunning childhood achievement. I thought, Okay, here I go. There would be a long dry spell.
MAY 2019: Oddly, the work that I did with Michael Jackson that I had tried to put behind me resurfaced in the work that was chosen for the Whitney Biennial. I didn’t want to be that fellow who photographed Michael Jackson, a yoke, I thought, once harnessed, would never leave my neck. Although he is obscured in my current work, I thought it tragic as I watched him change, a soul in search of himself.
FEBRUARY 2004: Which paralleled in form a discussion I had with an art critic concerning my “Conjur Man/Shaman” series in which I photograph myself as erased from mediation and moralizing, a creature of pure id. I thought I was successfully disappearing, making myself invisible, primordial. She disagreed, assured I was dealing with my Whiteness, the same thing that Eazy-E and MC Hammer had seen in me—middle class, middlebrow, self-puppetry. Perhaps there was more Michael in me than I had imagined.
NOVEMBER 2014: On the first anniversary of his death, I began my year-long performance wearing the clothes of Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. In his haute-couture garments, I was often presumed to be a collector; the armor of apparent wealth. In 90 days John Crawford III, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice—all unarmed—have been murdered by police officers.
APRIL 1977: “Your thinking is muddled,” Baldessari said. He hadn’t yet achieved the look of a Tolkien wizard; his hair was still dark but the style was already cemented. Advertising, he assured me, could never be the subversive instrument that I imagined making it. “You are not a spy in the house of Saatchi.” Forty-two years later I got into the Whitney. I meant to tell him, still seeking his approval, but things piled up. Then it was too late.
JUNE 1983: I was plastering enlargements of my photos onto the walls of downtown Los Angeles, photos of boxers, giant boxers, Black and Brown, punching skyscrapers, like heavyweight Godzillas animated by rage. I had frustration. I needed my work to be seen, appreciated, admired, adored. I was so hungry then, and I had energy, I could wake early after working late into the night. I had the buzz of youth, the hum of arrogance, the belly of fire. Now, my knees ache, I misspell words. As my years increase so will the number of required assistants (inadvertently, I originally wrote assassins).
After German reunification the remains of the famously incinerated Reichstag were first Norman Fosterized, then draped by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and finally repurposed as the Bundestag—the lower legislative body of German government roughly equivalent to the U.S. House of Representatives. Across its Greek Revival entablature, above the Corinthian columns but below its figured pediment is written the proclamation, Dem Deutschen Volke, (To the People of Germany) a 1916 dedication of the building to the German people. This sort of revivalist architectural pantomime is common for civic structures. It compares (insert your country/city here) to the great civilizations of the past, the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians and accounts itself their equal.
Inside the Bundestag, at the base of its towering atrium, rests a narrow but lengthy indoor plot of shrubbery, a bit of the outdoors brought indoors. This is not uncommon in federal, state, and municipal buildings; it is aspirational. Chicago’s motto is Urbs in Horto, (City in a Garden) a tribute to its parks, lakefront and incessant tree-planting. The city was consecrated in 1837, only to burn to the ground in 1871. These mottos, these proclamations allow the cities and buildings to speak for themselves, in the proud voice of the people. But who are these people?
The Reichstag building seen from the west. Inscription translates to “For/To the German People”
The long verdant patch in the Bundestag is covered with flowering plants from all over Germany. Parallel with the ceiling and glowing with white neon faces tall black letters grow upward in the same font as the building’s pediment inscription, but this time spelling out Die Bevölkerung, 2000 (To the Population). It embraces all those who reside in Germany: Jews, Muslims, Africans, Asians, even refugees from the Americas. It is an elevated canal, a flowerbed, a mass grave, and a wonder, and also a needed corrective because the word Volk(e) has a long and troubled history.
It is equivalent to race. It is a blood and soil code word to the German born and bred of German exceptionalism, and suggests the festering Germanic fever dream of Wagnerian fantasy, a people of racial purity, a people uber alles; hence the Nazi era slogan, Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer, (one people, one empire, one leader). Yet octogenarian artist and provocateur Hans Haacke is a courter of trouble and has built a career on discomforting the comfortable. It was his social justice artwork that led to his Guggenheim exhibition being cancelled 49 years ago, although his dyspeptic fist-shaking exhibition at the New Museum was able to finish just under the pandemic wire. It included his Gift Horse (2014), a skeletal stallion holding a stock-ticker, demonstrating the intoxicating worldwide pastime of economic inequality (in German gift means poison).
The Reichstag building with the Victory Column on the Königsplatz, c. 1900.
This virtuous plea for inclusivity, Die Bevölkerung, was (and remains to some) a controversial and contentious work. The fractious parliamentary argument—more representatives attended than for debating German peacekeepers in Kosovo—ended favoring Die Bevölkerung by the barest possible margin; 260 aye, 258 nay. And that was 20 years ago. In 2019, there were over 22,000 hate crimes in Germany.
No wonder your president has to be an actor. He’s gotta look good on television.
Emmett Lathrop “Doc” Brown, Ph.D. Back to the Future, 1985
It stands triumphantly—a voracious junkyard goat surmounting a catafalque of the written word, a bier of gibberish, a babel of ancient symbols. Pen pals, gone; cursive gone, love letters now exchanged in childish icons. Having eaten everything we said, consumed everything we heard, it has trod upon the leftovers and smiles, faced rouged like a drunken courtier, still hungry. It took four years, an entire presidential term, for the goat to finally surrender its meaning but since then, 60 years and counting, it has done nothing but reiterate its prophecy.
While Cold War paranoia was a fog that settled upon nearly every aspect of American life, from the modernity of its kitchen appliances to the quality of its rocket ships, one aspect of U.S. culture was irredeemably doomed despite educationalist fist-shaking and hosannas to its import—the American literacy rate. Invisible Soviet chicanery or celebrity Hollywood pinkos did not doom Johnny to illiteracy; it was a homegrown and eagerly awaited advent, and Vice President Nixon, although he didn’t know it at the time, was its turning post.
But he should have known better.
He was a cautious and successful poker player, and a decorated war veteran—just like his upstart rival if not so gaudily decorated. While some people were convalescing, writing books and winning Pulitzer Prizes, Richard Nixon was dutifully fulfilling his obligations in the senate. And had he not been Vice President of the United States, a heartbeat away from the most prestigious position on the planet? How could he lose? Although he knew not to underestimate his opponent he measured himself against Kennedy, honestly and soberly, and saw that on every metric of suitability for the nation’s highest office that he, Richard Milhouse Nixon, was the more prudent presidential selection. And that the debate between the two candidates would take place on a live television broadcast assured Nixon that the American people would be able to make a choice based upon the merits and experience of the competing candidates. He had full faith in the intelligence and fairness of the American people. This was not the high school debating society from which the rich kids had barred him, this was the serious business of the greatest country in the world. Nixon was no stranger to television. He had confronted and defeated suspicions of financial dishonesty with his televised speech about his everyman bona fides, his wife’s cloth coat, and their distinctly non-kennel club dog, Checkers. He had even bested Nikita Khrushchev on television.
While it would have made a fine coat, one that Mrs. Nixon might have worn quite smartly, Robert Rauschenberg’s goat was meanwhile giving him fits. In the various iterations of Monogram (1955–59) Rauschenberg sought to elevate the angora goat—spotted in an office supply resale shop—to a component in one of his combined artworks but struggled to find an appropriate usage. The goat was too much itself and would not surrender its aura. “First, I tried to put it on flat plane, it was obviously too massive. It had too much character. It looked too much like itself.” Then was a drawing of a vertical plane with the goat raised and placed transparently behind a ladder, with the painting behind. No dice. It then had been hoisted and hung on a shelf attached to a painting, like a hunting trophy on the wall; he removed it and let that painting live a life of its own as Rhyme (1956). “So I took it off the wall, put it in the room and built a (narrow) upright panel, but then it looked like he was a beast of burden. He kept looking as though he was supposed to pull it.”
Rauschenberg in his Pearl Street studio with Satellite (1955) and the first state of Monogram (1955–59; first state 1955–56), New York, ca. 1955. Image courtesy of the Rauschenberg Foundation.
The presidential contest was also a struggle. On substance, the debates were neck and neck. Nixon had significant White House experience and was a knowledgeable attorney. But he had been ill. After two weeks in the hospital, he was some 20 pounds underweight; he looked pale and weak. While the Museum of Broadcast Communications allows that on the substance the debates were extremely close—radio listeners called it a draw—the 70 million viewers who tuned in by television could not have avoided noticing Nixon’s sickly appearance. Still recovering from the nasty infection in his knee, exhausted by a speech to a labor union earlier in the day, and refusing the cosmetic essentials offered repeatedly by television professionals, Richard Nixon looked less like the man who indicted Alger Hiss, than the reputed communist himself. It was a disaster. Nixon recovered, less exhausted and wearing makeup for the three subsequent debates, but it was too late, by then he looked as if he were a trickster, despite woolen coats and fluffy dogs. Advantage: Kennedy, 49.72% to 49.55%.
Nixon hadn’t lost because he was unprepared for the debate; on the contrary, he was eminently qualified for the job. His next step should have been the oval office. His loss was a matter of style over substance. His expert words were tainted by his inept appearance. And as countless grandmothers have told youngsters again and again, one never gets a second chance to make a first impression. His first impression as a candidate was a failure not because of words but pictures. Words had become subservient. It was a bitter lesson that Nixon would not forget; eight years later it was his presidency that established the White House Office of Communications, a professional media operations division, with television as its prime concern.
This should come as no surprise. The advantage of pictures over words was already clear. The written word. The spoken word. William Conrad, who was a sinister standout presence in the Burt Lancaster films The Killers and Sorry Wrong Number, was for a decade the star of the hit radio series Gunsmoke. But he did not make the transition to television in 1961; too short, too portly, too balding. The role went to the less talented but better looking James Arness, who played the space monster in the classic sci-fi film, The Thing. While the cinema required us to remove ourselves from our homes the television indulged our tendency, even preference, for indolence. And, so that we didn’t miss a thing, we even invented provisional furniture to replace the dinner table so we would not let slip a moment. It was a trend with legs. Our growing physical indolence—the average American man gained 30 pounds between 1960 and 2017— paralleled our intellectual torpor; by 2017 Americans were averaging 166.2 minutes per day watching television, outpacing their reading time—16.8 minutes—by nearly a factor of 10.
Monogram, like Nixon, was initially passed over. It was first shown in 1959 by Leo Castelli Gallery. Robert Scull, New York taxi king and noted art collector, was so impressed and certain of its iconic future that he suggested it should immediately be accessioned by the Museum of Modern Art. He would buy the work himself for the collection. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of MoMA and author of the white-cube exhibition aesthetic, was less impressed with the work and the offer. Now, one the most important works of postwar American art makes its home in Stockholm, at the Moderna Museet.
The postwar economic boom fueled job growth and with it, product purchases. While in 1947 there were just 14,000 televisions in America by 1962, 90% of American families owned one; some 56 million homes. In order to finance content for all of the programs on all those televisions Madison Avenue dutifully supplied the advertising. They sold the products that sold the programs. They were the purveyors of entertainment by way of marketing and their contributions to the medium of television were nearly as important as the characters in the programs themselves. Everyone profited from television—the actors, the sponsors, and the advertising executives but it was the clever ad-makers who fired a consumer culture that kept America spending by telling us what to buy. They had become economic soothsayers. These Madison Avenue hotshots wore the Madison Avenue look and one haberdasher was particularly preferred, Brooks Brothers. Midtown, Uptown, Downtown, the iconic brand was omnipresent in Manhattan and their ancient and now legendary logo, as clothier to ivy leaguers and presidents, was readily recognizable. The Brooks brothers had stolen it, of course, in order to give themselves an instant pedigree but as the mediaeval Duke of Burgundy who started the club was not using it (dead for the last 403 years) there was no need to find a cash-poor Count willing to sell his title. Why not just take it? They did. In this way a man and his counter-jumping sons invented on-the-spot ancestry for themselves and became suit sellers to the soothsayers. It was Philip the Good who had in 1430 founded the knightly Order of the Golden Fleece—its symbol a golden ram suspended from a chain of order—and the wool merchants guild had used the symbol first anyway, since 1182, albeit without the ribbon.
Both Rauschenberg and his colleague, friend, and partner, Jasper Johns, both featured texts and objects significantly in their works and the Brooks Brother’s logo, the lamb suspended by a ribbon, as if a baby hanging from the bill of a stork, was already iconic. Brooks Brothers was by then 147 years old and founded just a mile away from their Front Street studios. With their Gatsbyesque cash-flows the admen were media princelings and needed the clothes befitting their station. What better badge could signal their arrival.
Rauschenberg, with his eye attuned for media imagery, could hardly have been unaware of the smart gents sporting the lamb logo, or the dozens of billboards featuring the suspended bovid and it was through this that his problematic goat-in-the-studio mystery had been solved, the hirsute horned creature would become his contemporary golden calf; un-look-away-able, ready for worship. The horizontal plane, that he had previously rejected, returned. It now made sense. No incised tablet, however sacred, could take the place of this ravishing golden-haired beauty. No words would ever upstage it. Let it stand upon the painted word, ready for its star turn. Like the Hollywood royalty who now gave us audience in our living rooms, Rauschenberg—like Brooks Brothers—awarded himself, and us, the Order of the Golden Fleece. He girdled the goat with a tire, for by then it had become gospel that what was good for General Motors was good for America, and upon the collaged and painted deck with discarded remnants of movable type it became another kind of beast, inviting and reveling in our gaze, surmounting print—words now subservient to images. Elevated. Historical. Mythical. Mercantile. Ever ready for its closeup. The passing resemblance to Satan was added value; better the devil you know.
Shortly afterward, in California, an actor began dabbling in politics. When his new hobby began conflicting with his television day job, as host of General Electric Theater, he retired from show business. A handsome man with a personable delivery, he was not idle for long. Four years later he was elected Governor of California.
The path through this darkened labyrinth is reminiscent of the Haunted House; the viewer is made to follow a path through concocted fear toward anticipated relief. Chiron, Adelita Husni-Bey’s immersive environment, however, refuses to allow the visitor to leave so easily. Her horrors are real, historically, contemporarily real and the exit is much farther away than it appears, if there is an exit at all—emerging into the light does not necessarily illuminate.
Assembled in three distinct chapters, the installation includes Chiron (2019), a video projection flanked by a sculptural text component; 2265 (2015) a speculative fiction concerning imperialism/capitalism performed by high school students, presented on facing monitors; and Postcards from the Desert Island (2011) a workshop with French elementary school students debating the best strategy of making a new and more equitable civilization. Linked by social justice, or the lack of it, the overall manifestation is one of hopeful simplicity and tragic realization.
Adelita Husni-Bey: CHIRON (2019). Installation view at REDCAT, Los Angeles. Photo: Brica Wilcox
Chiron, named after the wise centaur from Greek mythology who rejected the raucous self-indulgence of his fellows and became a teacher and healer, introduces itself through a cataract of banners stretching from ceiling to floor, text-laden and glowing in the darkness. Reading them is an education (or more likely a reminder of things which we were well aware of but have little time to contemplate because they don’t affect people like us) in the selective legal policies that have manipulated the number of and conditions regarding immigrant acceptance and residence in the United States. These texts, their luminous letters glowing under ultraviolet light, include the Scott Act of 1888, a sequel to the Chinese Exclusion Act of just six years before, disallowing the prospect of return should one of these aliens ever travel outside the U.S.; the Page Act had banned Chinese women 13 years prior. The opposite side of the gallery features banners of more recent anti-immigrant lawmaking, featuring enhanced death penalties and deportation provisions. Additionally, a video shows immigration lawyers participating in a workshop to more fully understand the mental toll that afflicts people trapped in the willfully capricious maze of immigration.
The high school students in 2265 step away from the present and into a fantasy future that initially promises a benefit from lessons learned. This notion is short-lived as even their brave new world is born as a more virulent, technological dystopia.
Postcards from the Desert Island provides a less cynical outcome: our grim today becomes these children’s complex but hopeful tomorrow as they debate egalitarian economy, create trade and infrastructure, and even confront growing greed and inequality. They, sadly, will be Orpheus, resigned to the fact that Eurydice is forever lost.
Inter Milan, an Italian football powerhouse, recently endured another racial incident. It is common for Italian fans, and other football teams’ supporters, to throw bananas at Black players on opposing teams. This latest insult, however, came not from fans but an on-air football analyst. When discussing the impressive play of Inter Milan’s Belgian striker Romelu Lukaku—born in Antwerp to Congolese parents—the analyst suggested the player was so powerful that the only way to slow him down would be to throw “him ten bananas to eat”. Clearly, a single banana would not do. This is not an Italian peculiarity: one can find similar actions taken by the British in Bill Bufford’s book, Among the Thugs, which features scenes of football hooligans moshing at a National Front disco night. The Children of Ham deserve all they get, it appears—Even an American President has been demeaned as the cartoon monkey Curious George, predictably eating a banana.
In the work of the Nigerian/Scottish artist Jebila Okongwu, the symbol of the banana becomes particularly fruitful; as a corrosive sexual stereotype, as a metaphor of incarceration and bondage, and as a symbol of corporate piracy, exemplified by the United Fruit Company and Dole.
Jebila Okongwu, Painting for Los Angeles, 2019, courtesy the artist and Baert Gallery, Los Angeles.,photo by Joshua White—JWPicture
Bananas are referenced throughout, in stylized illustration or text works, in variably sized paintings or constructed objects, by mimicking banana shipping boxes. The paintings also feature a chain motif of not just shackles but ships’ anchors. The chain (rusted, bloodied?) in Product of Cameroon (all works 2019) is so subtle that it takes a moment to appear; similarly, with Premium Bananas (Study). The links in these chains are essentially footprints, traceable not only to the pillage of human cargo but to goods: the ore, the diamonds, the oil, the fruit. Simba (Study) suggests that Hollywood continues to profit from Africanized confections, notably, Simba, the princeling in Disney’s The Lion King.
The oversized fruit boxes are particularly striking, (Five Banana Boxes).They mimic genuine corporate packaging design (French, Compagnie Fruitière; Italian, Fratelli Osero) with perforations to aerate the fruit. Over six feet high, one stack three boxes tall, the other just two, they are scaled to contain not fruit but humans. Peering inside reveals bondage gear, a suspension harness and a human cage.
Might such prolific usage of the banana increase its vulgar symbolic power? The answer can be found in James Baldwin’s short story, Going to Meet the Man, about a Southern sheriff who is unable to satisfy his spouse. It is only when recollecting a lynching that he can perform his husbandly duties. Brutality is not only profitable, it is also erotic.
After success and critical acclaim, Philip Guston somehow bravely abandoned his signature style. His transition from abstract expressionist to neo-expressionist (before there was such a category) was heretical. In ab-ex lockstep he had been part of the American exhibition that toured Europe; as Eva Cockroft had documented in Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War the exhibition was as propagandist as Radio Free Europe. Guston’s annis mirabilis was 1971, and Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition dedicated to the artist documents that year.
Philip Guston, Untitled (Roma), (1971), 49.5 x 68 cm, oil on paper mounted on panel. Courtesy of the Estate of Philip Guston.
Guston’s rejection of painterly orthodoxy could be told in a pair of works on view—just two of the more than 150 on display. Made during Guston’s fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, the foot rendered in Untitled (Rome) appears classically regal yet fractured and weathered. It references a fragment from the Colossus of Constantine, a former four-story statue of the Roman emperor who converted to Christianity. Untitled (Orange Shoe), however, is a vivid rendering of a scuffed and clunky hobnail boot. These two oil-on-paper works could serve as icons contrasting the vain and humble ambitions of the two; the emperor who dreamed of being a god and the princeling who chose to be a laborer.
Philip Guston, Untitled (Roma), (1971), 55.3 x 73.7 cm, oil on paper mounted on panel. Courtesy of the Estate of Philip Guston
In addition to the Roma series are the disturbing caricatures of Richard Nixon, the Poor Richard drawings. His ambitions are also made apparent. In one of these ink drawings (there are seventy-four of them), Nixon and Agnew are shown as colossi, grand as pyramids upon a sandy plane. Another has Nixon sleepless, his blanket pulled nose high while he stares at his Whittier College pennant. His blanket is tent-poled by his enormous erection as he plots to avenge every slight that was ever made against him. Tricky Dick is also one of Guston’s infamous Klansmen, recognizable beneath his hood as there is no hiding his priapic nose.
Philip Guston, Poor Richard, (1971), 26.7 x 35.2 cm, ink on paper. Courtesy of the Estate of Philip Guston
Few large oil paintings are included, yet his oil sketches and ink drawings make their absence nearly unnoticeable. What stands out is Guston’s insistent devotion to dissatisfaction, whether in the Klan images—first begun in the 1930’s—or to political commentary and resistance that remains achingly raw and minute-ago contemporary.
