Wavelength�
Horace Brockington
"I heard the voice of America
Callin’ on my wavelength
Tellin’ me to tune in on my radio
I heard the voice of America
Callin’ on my wavelength
Singin’ "Come back, baby
Come back
Come back, baby
Come back"
-"Wavelength "Van Morrison
Contemporary art is as simple as it is complex. The exhibition "Frequency" presented at the Studio Museum in Harlem is only one recent exhibition that continues to reinforce why and how we must continue to interrogate who and what our society values and why. "Frequency" presents more than 85 works by 35 emerging artists from across the United States. Ranging in age from 25-46, it becomes difficult to define the group as young artists. Rather, as the museum curatorial team of Thelma Golden and Christine Y. Kim suggest, they are indicators of the current creative diversity among contemporary black artists.
Hal Foster, in his 1983 essay "Postmodern Culture," notes: "In cultural politics today, a basic opposition exists between a postmodernism which seeks to deconstruct modernism and resist the status quo, and a postmodernism which repudiates the former to celebrate the latter; a postmodernism or resistance and a postmodernism of reaction"
"Frequency" continues this curatorial team’s preoccupation with construction and transformation of identities in the 21st century. Early on, the team stated that this exhibition is really an extension of an early exhibition "Freestyle" mounted by the Studio Museum’s new director, and at the time Chief Curator, Thelma Golden. But as I will discuss, this exhibition has to be seen as more than just an extension of that enterprise.
In a wall text installed in the museum, the curators state:
"Frequency exemplifies the non-thematic, non-linear climate of contemporary art today…’Freestyle’ had an immense impact on the understanding of contemporary black art and this museum’s relationship to it. …It bought into the public consciousness the concept of ‘post-black,’ it identified a generation of black artists who felt free to abandon or confront the label of ‘black artist,’ preferring to be understood as individuals with complex investigations of blackness in their work. Post-black art became a stance in this transitional moment in the quest to define ongoing changes in African-American art, and ultimately became part of the perpetual redefinition of blackness in contemporary culture. This widely debated idea took on a life of its own in the public realm not only in contemporary art, but also in popular culture and cultural studies. ‘Frequency’…continues this tradition with a new group of artists… There are no prevailing themes in this exhibition, except perhaps an overwhelming sense of individuality. As its title suggests, ‘Frequency’ pinpoints and assimilates divergent sounds, situations and phenomena…"
What both exhibitions aimed to achieve is a re-affirmation of those distinct essences of racial and ethnic markers–negative and positive–that have allowed blacks to achieve a sense of "race." Of course, the assumption that "racial" types can be systematically identified and codified runs the risk of containment and limitation. A similar concern has been expressed by Walter Benjamin, who writes in One Way Street and Other Writings: "Sudden shifts of power such as now overdue in our society can make the ability to read facial types as a matter of vital importance. Whether one is of the left or right, one will have to get used to being looked at in terms of one’s provenance. And one will have to look at others the same way."
Thus "Frequency" walks this line very delicately. If a visual code remains in tact between the two exhibitions, it is perhaps the curators’ own interest in art playing off the ethnic identity as separate but equal to any aesthetic marker in an art-making process. The internal discourse within this exhibit is conceptual and experimental, versus those that are less centered on formalist issues of art-making. It’s an exhibition in which clear distinctions are drawn between artists working rather self-consciously with external signs of blackness, and those seeking to work in imaginative new ways, through new approaches and technologies. "Frequency" through a group of intriguing art works, presents an inter-related series of ideas and practices in which material means and artistic strategies worked together to reinforce a tendency in hybridity in which art moves from specific ethnic, psychic identity markers towards more reflexive and complex categories.
Paul Gilroy has noted that "The theorization of crealization, metissage, mestizaje, and hybrdiity, from the viewpoint of ethnic absolutism, would be litany of pollution and impurity. These terms are rather unsatisfactory ways of naming the process if cultural muttion, and restless (dis) continuity." Still such terms could describe a lot of the work in this exhibition.
Since "Frequency" never take itself serious as a definitive statement of what Black artists are doing, but offers only a view of one direction it succeeds on it own grounds. With the proliferation of exhibitions both solo and groups projects most noteworthy the "Double Consciousness " exhibition in Houston, "African Remix" in London, the" Sam Gilliam Retrospective" at the Corcoran, Fred Wilson project at the Aldrich Museum, Yinka Shonibare at the Copper Hewitt, and recent exhibitions by Julie Mehretu, Kehinde Wiley, Mark Bradford, and Byron Kim, all attest to the fact that artists of color are active and productive. "Frequency" is closest in conception to the recent exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, "Back to Black-Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary" which defined it intent to trace the cultural impact of the Black Arts Movement through painting, sculpture, photography, graphics, and film. An exhibition that explored themes directly related to black popular culture and politics. "Frequency" is far more ambitious, while it embraces, blackness as it thematic ground, the exhibition is ultimately by the diversity and richness of new art making by a host of young artists who speak to unique relationships artists make about art and time in different ways.
What is "Frequency" does best to highlight artistic diversity and the points at which artists and their works intersect, diverge, and challenge explicit and codified conditions of post-modernist artistic practices and concerns. Similar to its earlier counterpart, ‘Freestyle," the exhibition benefit is that it will give a group of young artists a major amount of exposure from which they can hopefully develop rich and important artistic careers, while fostering a certain degree of connection between artists of color.
"Frequency" reveals that there are no new paradigms and that thematically the surface signs in most of this work offered by this group of emerging artists remain race logistics, social hierarchy, immigration, multi-ethnicity, national and local identity, cultural origins of artists, the legacy of the colonial relationship, history and legacy of slavery in the USA, notions of "otherness", codification of images of racial "types", and how forms of power and are established and challenged through visual means. What is new in the work one might then ask? This could be defined as new codes to shape and direct the discourse that give meaning. The artists through their works achieve the continuation of the dialogue, opening up larger questions. By creating works with constant shifts they raise concepts of art versus beauty, history and memory, class and race issues often loaded with contradictions of reality that mass culture and ideology work to conceal.
Through this focus the exhibition appear less about the "new" rather is seeks to suggest ways in which new artistic practices produced the very subjects continue to expose issues of social power or dis-empowement, gazes, and cultural concepts informed by visual metaphors. With few exceptions these works continue to speak to the convergence, tension and transformation of self and race intertwined through new twentieth first century paradigms.
Curators Thelma Golden, and Christine Y. Kim continue philosophical directions offered by bell hooks, and Cornel West giving visibility to black voices in art and aesthetics, an aesthetics which hooks has offered referred to as one of difference. "Frequency" offers up a series of reflections upon the promises of postmodernist artistic practices to adapt to postcolonial concerns, in which the center is essentially localized and internal and less Euro/western-centric.
As reveal in early projects such as the "The Black Romantics", and the historic "The Black Male " exhibition curator Golden’s interests tend to embrace works, and artists who talk to the very value systems of black life, both national and globally. As such it is not surprising that many of the works are in the "Frequency" exhibition are emphatically loaded with roots in black culture. In many cases the works while preoccupied with post-post modernist artistic strategies shift the center towards visual politics as central concern that reprioritize blackness. Through the context of "blackness" the curator has selected works that speak to cultural condition, psychic malaise, commodification and social transmutations, multinational consumer iconography, legacies of slavery and colonialism in both the oppressed and oppressor, media-broadcast, as entertainment and information.
In "Frequency", the artists have been selected whose works cleverly intertwined, serious social —political problem with issues of aesthetics. Here the avant-garde is less conceived as explicitly oppose to the ethical and political values of the dominant culture, rather these artists are asserting aesthetic values that are somehow more integral to their own self as such more important to them. Various artists in the show are represented by prominent galleries and have had numerous exhibitions attesting to the fact that their art is not radical, but rather incorporated into the fabric of dominant culture fighting one could argue to maintain a critical distance that might not appear immediately apparent. The artists in "Frequency" are not trying to transform the existing structure, but propose an alternative to it. By maintaining an intentional distance these young artists are making a contribution to making an artistic culture that more open and inclusive. By localizing their arguments, they are equally pushing them into the larger discourse of art at the start of the 21st century.
The Black artists included herein have essentially reoriented art practices toward pursuits that are highly personalized, less is the concern about a progressive notion of artmaking, for they break few new grounds. The artists bring thematic concerns to their work that decode and reveal their significance, and equally open them up to cultural and artistic analysis. They interrogate black traditions through a conscious re-appropriation of pop and ethic cultural markers creating in the process a new hybridity in post modernism. Many make "black content" their concern without having to neutralize their artistic practices.
What unites them to their contemporary counterparts is perhaps the willingness to move form any notion of a hierarchy of form and strategies. As such the work is rich in its artistic freedom, that results in works filled with rich formal shifts, and loaded with fresh ideas in the us eof material means, and often disregard for formal strategies. These artists have given great attention to the physical aspects of the objects and the conditions under which they are to be viewed. As such the works while loaded with structural innovations that are essential and inseparable from "cultural "critique, social and political conditions, and their perception of the world encoded within the content of the works.
continues on https://nyartsmagazine.net/pages/nyam_document.php?nid=1343&did=3204
