Wavelength (#2)
Horace Brockington
However, the artists in "Frequency " and reflect through their the works is less the need to correct black representation as it is to speak to they very issues of politics of dislocations, temporary experience of exile, displacement, authentic, in which race space is only one component. They argue that gender, and inner-racial class systems, sexual orientation, and economic factors can also affect conditions of "blackness". . In "Frequency " authentic blackness is a cultural complexity shaped by past and collective interrogations, but compounded by positions in the present. But while they embrace the present much of the work make connection to a black tradition through allusion to magic, dream folklore, heritage, legacy, and history. As such collectively the works are often a contrast of thematic juxtapositions of issues relating to domestic, urban, community, traditional, pop, folk cultures. Much of the work in the exhibition refer to issues of nuclear power, civil rights, alienation, commodificaton of daily life, social opposition, class distinctions, similar concerns since the black artists of 60s, a period that marked a turning point in society in very aspect, from daily life, popular music and television through the arts. But while looking back at earlier periods these emerging artists neither dismantle nor re-position the radical political legacy of the late 60. Even though the exhibition deals with "blackness", it answers fewer than it questions raises. However, the works are never sentimental or preachy their racialized discourse is filled with self-awareness.
These artists continue in the vein of black artists who as early as the l960s in their need to address minimalist aesthetic in order to deal real world concerns, they find means to subvert artistic strategies both in art making practices, and critical theory, looking to the religious, music, every daily life, to speak to the recognition and the need to create contexts where black artists work and live. However, this exhibitions is not a passive reiterations of past black artists’ concerns, collectively the works evoke pressing issues in recent art about practice and content. But they are as much part of the post 80s generation and their distrust of the rhetoric of modernism, the autonomy of the subject. These works are more than illustrations to theoretical arguments about black art. Rather the works are a hybridities of nuance relationship between the work of art and ideas and theories that artists have embraced since the late 20th century.
One of the fresh underlining subtexts that run through this exhibitions is ways in which class informs black artists, and internal politics of race but less confrontational. The gaze has consciously turned inward, few of the artists in the exhibitions challenge the way their positions as artists are perceived or criticize in larger art world. The art ultimately talks to a type of cultural mixing, rather than a singular vision. Herein, the art in this exhibition is good is when it presents works such where the exterior appearance play against interior essence of the subject which explains why works by Britto, Queenland, and Linzy are highlights.
"Frequency" is a complex collection of contemporary art "ism". As expected of a this post-modernist generation their work respond to a variety of hybrid practices, mixture of photographs and texts, performances and video, installations and painting, increasing use of new technology. Through a series of paintings, video, and a limited number of sculptural installations, the artists manage to dismantle some aesthetic order of simple categorization both in content and formal approach. Although the exhibition, is strong on formal painting, drawing, and sculpture the best part of the exhibition is its presentation of media works through video.
Diversity in themes and stylistic nuances run throughout the exhibition, the work alludes to historical figures such as Harriet Tubman and Oscar Micheaux, especially noteworthy is Michael Paul Britto’s "Dirrty Harriet Tubman" series a series of Video DVD or projections, which pushes the icon to rather delightful edginess, and is one of the highlights of the exhibition.
Cool Minimal /Conceptual art based works are few in this rather energetic works, but Adam’s Pendleton’s silk screen work which incorporate negative black and white images of race riots and Ku Klux Klan rallies and text that suggest post-like works or album cover hold their own, along with Michael Queenland’s "Untitled (RADICAL SINCE 1774) #2" a subtle work compose of graphite, paper, and photocopy.
Painting here predominates, which is no surprise, given strong presence of painting in the Freestyle exhibition, which generated breakout works, by Julie Mehretu, Mark Bradford, Senam Okudzoto, or Trenton Doyle Hancock. While a lot of the painting in "Frequency " is highly decorative, technically the artists clearly delight in handling the painterly medium Jina Valentine, and Paula Wilson are standouts.
Jeff Sonhouse is a young painter who can clearly handle paint. His "Inauguration of the Solicitor", 2005 is comprised of matchsticks, and painting on wood. It mask- like quality evokes references to cubism historical appropriation of tribal art forms. Sonhouse’s "Exhibit A: Cardinal Francis Arinze", 2005 is a large work in which the artist incorporate oil paint, cowries shells, matches and pumice gel on MDF In both of Sonhouse’s paintings there is a strong influence of the artist Barkely Hendricks, whose paintings have in recent years undergone as revitalized interested by young artists and curators.
Sedrick E. Huckaby a young painter from Fort Worth Texas. "A Love Supreme (Summer) 2003, a large oil painting on canvas is a powerful statement in this exhibition. It talks to the richly textured tonality of John Coltrane famous musical score of he same title, but it equally echoes aspects of the complex patterning, of the Gee Bend quilts works form the artist native Texas region. Stylistically the painting echoes the tradition of Afro- American modernism fusing aspects of the abstraction of Charles Alston and Hale Woodruff, but the work is squarely plants it self in the presents.
Adam Pendleton silkscreen on canvas paintings, " Concrete", 2004, and "History", 2005 are unique text based works whose ground in 80’s and 90’s conceptual pre-occupation with text driven art and Pendleton’s concern with historical literary works. In a recent exhibition at Yvon Lambert, New York, Pendleton’s painting hold their own, here placed between Huckaby’s power painting, and the work of Paula Wilson, one of the strongest works in the exhibition, Pendleton’s work impact is somewhat diminished.
Paula Wilson’s "Turf" is a large mixed media – wall work incorporating woodblock, ink, oil painting, and four lithograph on paper, with video, is a delightful departure from much of the historical, and pop content driven work in the exhibition. Wilson fuses formal abstraction with a conceptual re-invention of the landscape tradition. The work subverts the landscape genre fusing the new media with a rich painterly context, not unlike the works of Mary Lucia, or Ann Hamilton but the artist’s terrain is clearly the painterly recalling works by artists such as Janis Provisor or Joan Snyder, mainly because similar to these artists, Wilson’s delights in manipulating materials and handling paint. Both her stylistic approach and the unique manner in which he incorporates the video is so subtle that it never seems gimmicky or forced. "Turf" is a powerful works that break out of the limited paradigms of the exhibition, but manages to feel part of it never the less.
William Villalngo’s "The Abduction of Bacchus", 2005 a large work of acrylic and paper on velvet, in the use the painterly approach to subvert the context of its object hood. The construction strategies speaks to the ability of a young artist creating art that reveals it own power imaginary as a unique vision.
The powerful young abstract painter Mike Cloud who currently has solo painting exhibition at P.S. One Museum, this season reflects a strong emerging young painter is represented by a series of collage works, which are included undoubtedly because they make sense in the large context of the exhibition narrative, However, he a painter who recent works large scale abstract paintings suggest promise of a breakout career.
Zoe Charlton’s" Undercover Series", are highly sensual drawing. These mixed media on vellum are highly erotic charged images echoes the 60’s pup fiction paperbacks covers. While seductive they need a little further development.
Several photographic based works are included in the exhibition, but with the exception of work of Hank Willis Thomas, whose works I have seen in other context, and who manages to stand out form a hosts of rather uniformed and rather derivative photographic strategies in the in the exhibition. Even Thomas’s work by the very nature of its own self-consciousness can’t help but run periodically towards the topical, whether intentionally or not such as Thomas’ " "Liberation of T.O.: Aint no way I’m go’n in back ta work fa ‘massa in dat dame field."
As a result much of the photo —based art appears too easy in my view. Demetrius Oliver digital c-prints are perhaps too processed, while remaining beautiful digital prints they falter blackness, but perhaps they’re seductive beautiful clouds the content. Wardell Milan’s "Stargazing at Mapplethorpe’s Black Book; Love pt. 3", and " Burning Giraffe; Love pt. 4". Digital C-prints are accomplished work. Their cleverness comes from asking the viewer to reflect art about art, but they don’t really lead us anywhere? Leslie Hewitt, "riffs on real time" a series of c-print while highly minimal in content, echoes the early photographic stills of Stan Douglas. Hewitt ‘s works keep a type of emotional distance, which is surprising for an exhibition that is overflowing with intimacy and urgency. As result Hewitt’s images read as conceptually void. Perhaps the artist should look to artists such as Sophie Calle, or Gilliam Wearing for alternative and rewarding results to his approach.
However, Michael Queenland’s "Untitled (RADICAL SINCE 1774)#2", 2005, a working comprised of photocopy, graphite and paper, works for the exact the opposite reasons of Hewitt. Queenland’s use text and conceptual practices results in a highly competent work. He easily becomes another of the standouts in this exhibition, essentially because the artist appears to be moving in his own direction. It’s smart conceptual work.
Queenland who recently had a solo exhibition at the Maine College of Art, works in a host of mediums, including sculpture and installations. His works often explore concepts between the ideal and the real, material and immateriality. The artist is highly concerned with atmospheric aspect of his work. Queenland’s works are loaded with formal inventiveness that gives the work a rich psychological depth,
Like Queenland, Marc Andre Robinson’s "Crusade Fragments" series, works of charcoal on paper are surprises here. Although they initially remind me of Glen Ligon’s early works, they also have a quality of Richard Serra’s prints and the expressionist quality of the painting of DeKooning and Kline while their minimalism makes for standout engaging smart works.
Sculpture simply is lost in this exhibition. One reason for this is that space limitations, but equally the curators seem to be a little in doubt how to transfer their thematic intent to sculpture. Similar to much of the photo-based work, it sculptural works are too derivative, as such Rodney McMillan, "chair" 2003, just fails because it been done by the best of installations artists, and the generation of young British contemporaries. While its "urban" and decay is there, the works offers not new information. While I wanted to like Kianga Ford "Urban Revival" mixed media sound installation consisting of red velvet sofas, with audio that hums various vocal groups, the listening room concept has been done better by artists such as Camille Norment, Laurie Anderson’s sound furniture and Franz West. Shinique Amie Smith, "Bale Variant No.0006", 2005 is another works, creating mounds of binding clothing has that various contemporary artists including African artists, such as Yinka Shonibare has taken on. This work just doesn’t have the visual impact that it should even if its metaphoric implications in the context of the exhibition are clear.
Rodney McMillian, "Untitled" construction of latex, charcoal, on un-stretched canvas is a misfire, mainly because unlike un-stretched works on canvas by various artists since the early works of Sam Gilliam, Joe Overstreet, or Frank Stella, it does not succeed as either painting or sculpture. Operating on this conceptual middle ground, and allowing viewers to walk on it is simply not enough.
I wanted to like Nick Cave’s "Sound Suit" series, large mannequin figures endowed with founded beaded and sequined garments, held together by a metal armature but after you get over their fashion mannequin affects there just nothing there. I also was having a problem relating to the work, because I kept reflecting on the beaded works of Kori Newkirk’s the "Freestyle" exhibition and the paintings of John Torreano which are both highly more unique beaded objects in which the artists are able to push the use of similar material means l beyond the decorative. Cave’ is undoubtedly a talented young artists, but these works, ultimately would have been better in the ‘Black Romantic " exhibition.
However, Jina Valentine’s "Appetite for Destruction: Expulsion", 2005, and "Appetite for Destruction: Top 40 Best Selling Albums Ever" reveal an intriguing sculpture vocabulary. . In the series the artist manipulates the means such that in "Top Best Selling Albums" the cuts-out play against the very objecthood of the work. The works appears both delicate and smart, but whose complexity play off a type of inside /outside, nothingness, and surface that makes for subtle but skillful work. I Valentine’s work takes from a tradition of drawing, while echoing aspects of contemporary flexible terrain of sculpture.
The video segments of "Frequency" is its most comprehensible because their selection appears rather focused, while speaking to the increasing turns by artistic to use media/ video technology and large format installations to question identity and history. Structurally the works explore a host of video/film strategies, such as repetition, fragmented narrative, attention to the very media which results in works that reveal fresh views to the video/film form, and the issues that it address resulting in new conjectures and. Here the medium never overwhelms the message. Here, videos highlight the role film and media has long played in constructing cultural identity In "Frequency", forms and structures of films influence examine the juxtapositions of fact and fiction, and in process provide an interesting platform on the complex dynamics of the representation of race, gender, class and sexuality. The works address the concept of the construction of different kinds of identity and the gap between lived experience and the kinds of image presented as desirable by media, advertisements, television reality shows, broadcast news, and recent music video fusion.
The curators have wisely placed the video works within the context of their own media room, which allows for continual viewing and offers the spectators a chance to sit for a long time and experience the works providing for possible connections to be made between the works. Unfortunately one of the curious works in the exhibition Jefferson Pinder and Jeff Stein ‘s "Car wash Meditations", 2005 a video works which has been installed in the center of the main gallery and not in this "viewing room" and as a result appears lost and out of place, and perhaps suffers from it location. Pinder’s "Invisible Man", 2005 based on the famous literary work by Ralph Ellison fare betters, although it somewhat derivative of Jeff Wall more powerful work that treat the same subject.
The true highlights of the video segments are Michael Paul Britto’s " Dirrty Harriet, " series, Kalup Linzy, "Conversation wit da Chureen III; da Young and da Mess", a break out work, and Wayne Hodge, "Doppelganger."
Michael Paul Britto’s "Dirrty Harriet Tubman (Dirrty Harriet Trailer and I’m A Slave 4 U Music Video), is rich in its nervous humor. The dancing slaves are riotous, it such a turn for the exhibition filled with 60’s black revolution rhetoric. It literary turns all that political correctness on it head in a good way. The two works also pulls the entire exhibition together, setting the stage for Kalup Linzy ‘s ‘Conversation wit de Churen III." and Wayne Hodge "Doppelganger" While the three artists works are dissimilar in their technically approach, collectively what they achieve is a sophisticate handling of video and film rich potential to address serious issues.
Recent projects by Britto including his "blaK in AmeriKKa’, series and his "Ghetto Games" are work loaded with social commentary while speaking to an unique visual perspective fusing the use commercial and pop cultural forms to penetrate and highlight important social /political concerns.
Kalup Linzy." Da Young and Da Mess (2005) re- creates a visual conception of a racialized self that moves beyond gender. Linzy’s work play off of Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard ‘s conception of hyper reality in which life becomes a series of unending images and projected identities are fused together. His work speaks to the notion of shifting understanding one’s ability to observe and self-representation in relationship to a type of " commercial culture of the television soap opera". But Linzy wants more, namely desires to blur the boundary between interior and exterior that had limited a lot of recent video perhaps with the exception of artists such as Gillian Wearing, or Steve McQueen, Eija-Liisa Antila.
Linzy is interested in visually mapping identity but he equally wants his art to move beyond limited identity frames. Since artists plays various roles in his works he proposes a new mode of portraiture in which the visual —self-perception and artistic production become one. "Da "Young and Da Mess" takes on the quality of a subversive quality of linking the gay, and masculine gaze with an feminine aesthetic in which the soap opera becomes a type of conceptualized feminine spectacle.
Linzy’s works have been described as lampooning and satirizing various forms of film and television as such Hollywood and soap operas with a strong subcontinent of exploring issues related to gender, sexuality, race, class and popular culture becomes his point of departure or rather his point of entry. Often working simultaneously as writer, director, actor, and editor, his film approached is multi-layered. Often characters and subjects in his work offer powerful critiques on the nature of contemporary romances, desire, and conditions of family life. But instead of being negative sermons, they are humorous works, which talks to a unique trust in the subjects and deep human faith in mankind.
Wayne Hodge,’s video explore film history, but unlike the work of fellow artist, Steve McQueen, he is less concern with the language film and its techniques Rather Hodges’ concerns are based in his mediations of its performative aspects, which is directly aligned to his own interest and background as a media and a performative artist. The use of a type of double imagery in his projections is directly related to the tile of his works "Doppelganger", which is derived from German to describe a type of alter ego, or ghostly double of a living person. Metaphorically this concept can be extended to black culture the associated reference with DuBois’ concept of Double Consciousness.
"Frequency" ultimately addresses the range and possibilities that Black artistic l which was has been to long, been placed in restrict boxes both inside and outside black culture/political conditions are now able to move. Although no critical edge is pushed in this exhibition collectively the works reveal the potential of contemporary art system to absorb artists from places and direction outside the traditional European and American traditions, in which hybrid forms of art based on other traditions can coexist. " Frequency" remains an important exhibition because it continues to address the ideas of new constructs in art making and exhibition strategies.
As John Tomilinson observes: "Culture simply does not transfer in this unilinear way, Movement between cultural /geographical areas always involves interpretations, translations, mutation, adaptation and "indigenization " as receiving culture brings its own cultural resources to bear, in dialectical fashion, upon imports"
Blacks artists and their work remains in a process of continual construction, being renegotiated and repositioned," Frequency" is another extension of this cultural practice, keeping the work and the artists in a delightful cultural flux. While the terrain in this exhibition remains squarely black stereotypes and racialized self a few few artist emerge that subversively push the canons. While the apparent disinterest in abstraction and more other categories of art taking place among black practitioners are not reflected here, I choose not to hold that against the exhibition organizers. Theirs is only one vision; the responsibilities for offering other points of view must rest in other curators and art historians, as well as willingness on the part of institutions to open up the limited view of "black art". Curators are ultimately guided by their own concerns, no one vision should and can be central. For their part Ms Golden and Ms Kim offer only one voice, abet a powerful and important one.
Golden and Kim’s concern here is to present a view of blackness as a continuing critique of people of color as constructed according to new and traditional conventions of literature, film, psychoanalysis, advertising, television, and other forms of cultural productions along side their ideological constructions. They are not recycling 90s race representations; rather they are ascertaining a new relationship between the ideological and the material means that makes the art fresh.
For the artists, they are trying to revitalize forms that were beginning to viewed as trivial at a point at which the black iconography, but the historical pop culture is moving towards a state of "crisis". These artists reject the modernism myth that only good art is one hermetically sealed form social and political circumstance and devoted only to itself and it own neutrality. While their work talk to one particular tendency, of ‘ethnic markers are sensitive that the work must operated outside of a limited artistic context. By extension keeping the works in flux they achievement move being viewed as merely satisfying the possibilities of descriptive or sociological based practices but one that use radical artistic investigations to push their works squarely to the center.
"Frequency" must be read as one curatorial viewpoint of contemporary artistic preoccupations by Black artists. For what it wants to highlight it has done very well, and that is all we can expect of any exhibition project, namely it achieves its own agendas. Contextually, the exhibition is loaded with a host of thematic paradigm that will be or have been expanded by the individual artists in solo projects and future works, While "Freestyle" may have been the point of entry for this exhibition, "Frequency" remains for the most part a singular unique exhibition in its own rights. Both curators have proven from past projects that they have the insight and ability to mount intriguing exhibitions, so that was never the issue for this project. Many of the artists have shown locally and are presented commercial galleries which speaks to the ability of a younger generation to navigate the very difficult terrain of the commercial arena, but also the work of many young Black curators, and historians to bring the works of a new generation of Black artists to core of post-modernist art making, both critically, and aesthetically.
The show focus on a series of related debates in art making and content, a rather open-ended discourse that Ms Golden first posed with "Freestyle" and continued through the "Black Romantic". "Frequency" can be seen as a continuation of this debate which when observed from a future perspective will undoubtedly reveal a critically and aesthetically crucial period for Black artists and their production. Collectively all three exhibitions have been guided by an uneasiness in the larger artistic and cultural communities in addressing, social, class, political frictions, transitions, high and low culture, and institutions within a "black" racial context. In Golden ‘s vision of this dynamics, artists and their creative production from places traditionally outside the network of " high" traditional production and exhibitions are allowed to play along those squarely centered in the galleries and museum system of mainstream art worlds. Is she posing for a new model of exhibition practices, and structures, the question has yet to be answered?
The richness of ‘Frequency" is its diversity. It never tries to be definitive, or all encompassing, no such exhibition could make such a claim. It is never is dull and dogmatic. What it offers is a range of rather talented artists who both a question engaging artistic strategies, but the very content driven nature of their concerns offers up fresh possibilities.
