“Undercover: Performing and Transforming Black Female Identities”

SPELMAN COLLEGE MUSEUM OF FINE ART
350 Spelman Lane SW,
September 10–December 5

Nandipha Mntambo, Europa, 2009, archival ink on cotton rag paper, 39 1/2 x 39 1/2".

Physical representation of the black female is explored in this thoughtful and thematically rich exhibition. Curators Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Karen Comer Lowe have brought together more than seventy-five often-challenging examples of video, painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography that explore how black women sometimes disguise, adorn, and otherwise manipulate their appearances in an effort to conceal or reveal their identities.

The cross-referencing of voices throughout the show—which, crucially, are neither just black nor just female—is fascinating. The legacy of blackface performance runs through the work of Lyle Ashton Harris, Ellen Gallagher, and Cindy Sherman. Yet Harris’s cross-dressing as female also speaks to Emma Amos’s poignant self-portrait as an artist wearing a jumpsuit painted with a nude male body. Gallagher’s work simultaneously explores the identity issues behind black hair, a concern evident in both Lorna Simpson’s multipaneled study of wigs and Mequitta Ahuja’s exquisite wall-size drawings of black tresses. Sherman’s black-and-white self-portraits initiate an interesting conversation with James Van Der Zee’s and Doris Ulmann’s early black-and-white photographs of African Americans. And Ulmann’s portrait of a young black nun in her habit connects to the costuming of Renee Cox in upper-class trappings, Nandipha Mntambo in home-cured animal skins, Sheila Pree Bright’s portrait of herself morphed into a black Barbie, and Nick Cave’s richly decorated full-body sound suit. These overlapping themes occur across genres and generations, bringing together old favorites and new voices in what is clearly a continuing conversation.

— Rebecca Cochran

Hank Willis Thomas

BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART
10 Art Museum Drive
July 29–November 29

Hank Willis Thomas, “I AM A MAN,” 2009, Liquitex on twenty framed canvases, 25 1/4 x 19 1/4".

Moving seamlessly across media, Hank Willis Thomas’s meticulously crafted works employ the formal language of late Minimalism to produce graphic, historically steeped meditations on imaging blackness in America today. The exhibition’s strongest moment, a series of twenty canvases titled “I AM A MAN,” 2009, typifies Thomas’s modus operandi of trawling through the archives of American literature, visual culture, and advertising for source material: in this case, Ernest Wither’s famous 1968 photograph of striking sanitation workers all bearing signs with their iconic, eponymous message. Forming a dynamic working improvisation on Wither’s work, Thomas’s painted texts—I AM HUMAN, I AM THE MAN, and YOU THE MAN—roll around the quiet gallery like a piece of jazz.

The Day I Discovered I Was Colored, 2009, also speaks to us from the under the dust of the historical archive. A printed cartoon of three children talking beneath the fiery orange canopy of a tree, it is the only work to feature vivid color. And it does so precisely to illuminate the distance between the formal and political valences of the word colored, between the hidebound categories of race and the broad range of human diversity. That every other work in the small exhibition is visually structured by the stark play of black pigment against white ground, or vice versa, highlights the politics of color that is Thomas’s subject here, while functioning, too, as a metaphor for the codependence of racial categories: the idea that blackness is culturally readable only against a conceptual ground of whiteness. Thomas’s lenticular, with its two declamatory phrases—BLACK IMITATES BLACK and WHITE IMITATES WHITE, wherein one statement shifts to the other with the movement of the viewer—further emphasizes this point by refusing to resolve these two extreme readings. As the sclerotic logic of the binary prevails, the work becomes literal “writing on the wall,” asserting the intractability of the issue of race in America today.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

Omer Fast

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
2626 Bancroft Way
October 25–December 17

Omer Fast, Nostalgia, 2009, four-channel color video. Production still.

Omer Fast’s Nostalgia, 2009, produced by the South London Gallery, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Nationalgalerie at the Hamburger Bahnhof, is a video installation in three parts. The first depicts a man building a trap in the woods while in voice-over another man speaks to his life as a former child soldier, segueing into an incidental description of the trap’s construction. In the next video, two actors take up the story in the form of an interview that loops through conversations about the trap, the man’s quest for asylum, and fractured memory of his childhood, as well as the fact that the film itself will be based on the interview. The third video, transferred from 16-mm film, is a series of vignettes, set in a future seemingly projected from the past, in which interconnected characters—a refugee, his caseworker, her lover, his child—alternate between recipient and informant of how to engineer the trap. As the cycle progresses and the story repeats, authorship, and subsequently authority, become more elusive.

Fast not only disconnects the story of the trap––which never quite coheres into a clear image––from its original narrator, he strategically creates a distance between each segment of the installation and fractures the continuity between image and cinematic construction. The trap is both a metaphor and a framework for experiencing the piece. It is almost immediately evident that we will not arrive at conclusive positions around the larger political issues of race, nationality, or asylum unfolding in the work. Instead, the artist lures the viewer further and further into personal narratives, each time creating a more familiar but less certain understanding of the individual authors. Similarly, Nostalgia leads one away from authoritative knowledge toward individual testimony and unloosens these stories from documentary’s voyeuristic demand to locate larger truths in personal reality.

— Patricia Maloney

David X. Levine

STEVEN ZEVITAS GALLERY
450 Harrison Avenue, #47
October 22–December 5

David X. Levine, James Brown, 2008, colored pencil and collage on paper, 23 x 20".

Despite the fact that both his relationship to his idols and their rapport with him is completely projected, David X. Levine’s exhibition of drawings, “Brian Wilson Loves You,” is a confession of the musical devotee’s intense closeness to his subjects. In fact, while the viewer of Levine’s homage to musicians like Chuck Berry, Janis Joplin, and Amy Winehouse may imagine that the “You” in the title is directed at them, it seems more likely that it is the artist’s wishful desire for a reciprocal affinity with the performers.

Yet much like that of Andy Warhol, the ultimate fan, Levine’s work communicates more broadly because of the artist’s ability to transform his emotive effusion into an aesthetic labor of love. Though most of the works contain collage elements, they are grafted onto variously sized sheets of paper colored entirely with pencil. The extreme manual labor and repetitive gestures necessary to achieve each expanse’s uniform and almost waxy sheen are temporal testaments to Levine’s devotion.

However, Levine is interested not just in exploring the visual fabrication of intimacy with a gamut of public figures, some lesser known than others (Beach Boy sensation Brian Wilson and Carol Mountain––an old classmate and love interest of Wilson’s––receive equal treatment), but also in the possibility of turning abstraction into a similarly cherished object of desire. In some of the best works, such as James Brown, 2008, and Super Black . . ., 2009, Levine presents an overlay of recurring patterns (reminiscent of Russian Constructivist textiles), zones of pure color, and collages framed within monochromatic planes. In these, the artist lavishes the same attention on the language of abstraction as he does on his heroes, suggesting that they are sites for both the creation of desire and the constitution of the self.

— Nuit Banai

Damián Ortega

THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, BOSTON
100 Northern Avenue
September 18–January 18

Damián Ortega, Resting Matter (Brazil), 2004, set of twenty digital prints, 11 x 14" each.

Damián Ortega practices a sculpture of ingenious dis-engineering and gentle explosions. In it, the laws of physics––motion and rest, gravity and centrifugal forces––function as compositional devices, tentatively cohering objects into an aesthetics of suspense. Energy coils out of these works: Witness the drunken spinning of Union-Separation, 2000; the tumbling, clattering release of falling bricks in Nine Types of Terrain, 2007; and the painfully slow unfurling of a golf ball’s insides in Liquid Center, 1997. Sometimes dynamism remains incipient, sucking in its breath and holding gravity at bay in piles of virtuosically balanced furniture, rotating oil barrels, or—most spectacularly, in 2002’s Cosmic Thing—a dissected classic VW Beetle whose insides are strewn through space. Even static materials, like inert heaps of bricks, are titled “Resting Matter,” as if to emphasize how the jumpy flux of constructive––and destructive––energy underpins all matter. In the gleefully twisted and tweaked forms of Ortega’s vitreous meditations on a Coke bottle in 120 Days, 2002, such dynamic processes of deformation are paraded before us.

Ortega’s interest in systems and in the dynamic energy of process art explains his affinity for the work of Robert Morris and Carl Andre. The former’s felt sculptures are recast as droopy saddles tattooed with the plans of utopian buildings. Sagging down from the ceiling, Skin, 2006–2007, playfully threads global strains of modernist architecture through the leathery filter of local economies of labor. In “Resting Matter,” a series of photographs from 2004, it is Andre’s trademark bricks that Ortega transforms from generic building blocks into culturally specific products of Mexico and Brazil, just as he unravels Andre’s orderly, generic grid with the idiosyncratic slump of individuals’ brick heaps. Both works tie labor, materials, and process to the specificities of place, leaving as universal only the cosmic state of deferral that seems to accompany the prospect of home renovations––the ostensible reason for massing these bricks outside people’s homes.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

“Heartland”

SMART MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
5550 South Greenwood Avenue
October 1–January 17

View of “Heartland,” 2009. Left: Cody Critcheloe, Boy, 2009. Right: Carnal Topor, Purifications of the CalmDome, 2009.

This eye-opening group exhibition highlights the work of visual artists and other cultural producers who take tactical advantage of their peripheral geographic relationship to major urban cultural centers. From its title onward, “Heartland”—a collaboration between the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands—simultaneously embraces and debunks regional clichés. The independent spirit, bootstrapping gumption, and friendliness often attributed to midwesterners, for example, here takes the form of a determined DIY mind-set, a willingness to collaborate, and a savvy ability to get the job done by “making do.”

Such methods are certainly not exclusive to this region, but they are arguably most prevalent (and essential) in cities like Detroit, Kansas City, Chicago, and Memphis. Falling real estate prices have enabled the Detroit-based, community-minded collective Design 99 to purchase studio and storefront space, while Lowndes County, Alabama—the birthplace of the first independent African-American political party—provides a rich vein of unwritten sociopolitical history for artist Jeremiah Day to tap. Oral histories and other forms of storytelling enable artists to situate a dislocated present in terms of a shared past or an imagined future, although sometimes, as in the comics-style drawings of Chicagoans Kerry James Marshall and Deb Sokolow, such place-based narratives can take surreal, truth-twisting turns.

The Chicago iteration of “Heartland” wisely includes smaller ancillary exhibitions of paintings by self-taught artist Joseph Yoakum and the Chicago Imagists, ensuring that the unique contributions of the city to the region’s art are not overlooked. Overall, however, the focus is on shared practices rather than common stylistic attributes.

— Claudine Ise

Allan Sekula

THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY
The University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall #418
September 20–December 13

Allan Sekula, My Father with His List. Sacramento, December 1979, black-and-white photograph, 24 x 36".

In “Polonia and Other Fables,” photographer Allan Sekula documents Polonia, the diasporic zone of expatriated Poles—an “imagined community,” in Sekula’s words—in which he immersed himself during the past three years. The forty pictures in the exhibition, a joint commission of Chicago’s Renaissance Society and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, plumb the links between the two cities—migration, hibernal light, hardscrabble working-class conditions—through a mosaic of fragments.

“Polonia” finds Sekula modulating fluidly between street photography, aerial surveillance, and hagiographic portraiture, his subjects linked by his ethnographic sensibility and a centrifugally propelled cloud of association. Although its style is ostensibly documentary, the exhibition has the feel of an imperfect archive, the pictures that of extant evidence of a rapidly shifting place. Diaspora is territory that has been aggressively intellectualized in the past decade, but it is presented here as memories at once lucid and surreal.

Hence instances of Sekula’s now-familiar concerns: post-Soviet landscapes updated in flimsy Western dress, pig farmers displaced by industrial agriculture, and ominous military installations cropping up throughout New Europe. These more global issues are tempered, however, with hints of the autobiographical—Sekula’s father holding a list of names alluding to the family’s contested Catholic and Jewish heritage—and the local, in pictures of Latino workers in Chicago marching on May Day or a middle-aged black woman warily smoking. These sorts of pictures push Sekula’s cartography to its extremes but also render his ideologically rich survey both poetic and grounded.

— Ian Bourland

Thomas Baldischwyler

GALERIE CONRADI
Schopenstehl 20,
November 6–December 19

Thomas Baldischwyler, Die Spiegel (Physik), 2009, collage, glass, paint, 22 x 16".  

Visions of social upheaval and cultural touchstones are painted with a rosy, muted palette in Thomas Baldischwyler’s solo exhibition. Over a series of collaged images culled mainly from vintage mass-market news publications, Baldischwyler elegantly paints Rorschach-blot-like abstractions with thick acrylic, resin, and glitter glazes and employs silk-screen patterns against heavy, occasionally blistered glass panels. The few instances of strong color in the compositions are softened by the thick glass, and the dominant colors on view include sweet, minty green, light yellow, lavender, and rose. The images themselves range from a photograph of a German tank in Kosovo (ironically or unself-consciously named Sancho by the soldiers inside) to a dreamy publicity snap of Olivia Newton-John perched in a tree, next to a small, rarely seen portrait of Joseph Beuys intently staring out a window, and a black-and-white concert shot of Mudhoney performing.

Similar colors flash in the front room of the gallery, where a program of random light patterns plays underneath glass floorboards that the gallery staff discovered after removing the former tenants’ carpet. The lights weakly replicate a disco floor, which Baldischwyler offers as a symbol of the first freedoms enjoyed by East Germans after the fall of the wall. In contrast to the potent, energetic primary colors usually used in disco floors, the shades that flash from Baldischwyler’s work are pale, and their melancholy glow is only faintly comforting, rather than electrifying and erotic, as their pretty patterns summon up feelings of nostalgia for bygone days that were defined by an intense hope for the future.

— Ana Finel Honigman

Dieter Balzer

GALLERY SONJA ROESCH
2309 Caroline Street
November 7–January 2

Dieter Balzer, Skoop, 2007, MDF foil, 37 x 37 x 3.5".

Precision in reductive-themed art is not merely essential but also the means and the end of such work. Dieter Balzer’s recent exhibition on view at Gallery Sonja Roesch exemplifies the genre’s correlation between presentation and execution. His elegantly constructed, wall-mounted linear sculptures are a delight. Brightly colored monochromatic bars overlap, intertwine, and obfuscate in prescribed rhythms that uniquely balance each piece. The artist displays an understanding of the logic of randomness, as it were, in that his creations hold steady to a purpose that is self-contained—playfully executing their own systemic patterning with grace and authority. Balzer exemplifies a mature understanding of spatial depth, both illusory and real, that makes the complicated works appear at once effortless and fully realized. References from Sol LeWitt to Jo Baer come to mind but fail to fully capture Balzer’s unique configurations, which have freshness apart from historical precedent. The wise decision to include relatively few forms in the show strengthens the presence of the artworks—each of which displays its own syncopated trajectory.

— Garland Fielder

Greely Myatt

MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM OF ART
1934 Poplar Avenue
August 15–January 3

Greely Myatt, I gotta learn to talk (detail), 2006, steel, acrylic on paper on canvas, 106 x 65 x 7".

To mark Greely Myatt’s twentieth year working and teaching in Memphis, his work is featured in nine venues around the city for nearly four months. This proliferation of exhibitions offers a vast retrospective view of his output, much of which suggests or actively engages in dialogues––between the artist and art history, the art and its imagined audience, or notions of fine art and the craft tradition.

One motif that appears repeatedly in Myatt’s work is the cartoon speech bubble. He fashions these from found pieces of wood, scraps of metal from discarded signage, old cookie and baking tins, and even false eyelashes. In Talking, 2006–2009, an installation that was on view at Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery, eleven speech bubbles hung on a single wall, containing fragments of brand names, embossed architectural decorations, or a zipper or ruler embedded in their surfaces. The speech bubble appears again at the Memphis Brooks Museum in I gotta learn to talk, 2006. Here, instead of recouped materials mounted on wood, Myatt has meticulously assembled 156 paper rectangles, each containing a comic strip, their surfaces whitewashed save for a single statement in a bubble. Each seems to represent dramatic introspection by the artist––NOBODY APPRECIATES THE WORK I DO or MY NAME WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY––if not gentle mockery of art criticism or a reaction from a blasé audience––DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHER IDEAS? or WE DON’T GET IT EITHER.

Myatt’s role as a southern artist facing the canonical works of art history is never far from his mind, as works including Roomrug, 1999, demonstrate. The combination of multicolored broomsticks fashioned into a fragment of a rug and reflected into a right-angled mirror re-creates a Smithsonesque non-site, though the site represented is that of the domestic sphere. The playful attitude and meticulous rigor with which Myatt handles his materials might be considered a mask that hides a deeper understanding of the roles and restrictions of regional artists in a universal context.

This exhibition is also on view at the Art Museum at the University of Memphis until November 7 and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens through November 14. It was recently at the Clough-Hansen Gallery at Rhodes College, the Metal Museum, Power House Memphis, David Lusk Gallery, P & H Center for the Arts, and the On the Street Gallery at the Memphis College of Art.

— Chelsea Weathers

Io Palmer and Modou Dieng

THE ART GYM AT MARYLHURST UNIVERSITY
BP John Administration Building, 17600 Pacific Highway (Hwy 43),
November 8–December 13

View of “Io Palmer and Modou Dieng,” 2009. From left: Io Palmer, Artstar #4, 2009; Io Palmer, Artstar #3, 2009; Io Palmer, Janitorial Supplies #7, 2009; Io Palmer, Janitorial Supplies #4, 2009.

Io Palmer’s ongoing work Artstars, 2007–, comprises a team of players represented, in absentia, by a collection of white “uniforms” paired with common cleaning tools (mops, brushes, and brooms) that have been radically accessorized with artificial hair, bobby pins, and barrettes, transforming them into radically hirsute tools. The Artstars are Palmer’s Dream Team—heroic amalgamations of the artist’s friends, family members, and sports heroes––and brilliantly synthesize haute couture, feminist art history, professional sports, and domestic servitude.

In the artists’ hands, a plain maid’s smock is sexed up into a flowing linen gown that opens across the gallery floor in a corona of petal-like teardrops. Palmer references labor and women’s work while raising African-American identity politics to glamorous new heights of Jugendstil panache. In one instance, Palmer exhibits a cape made of leather that is covered in bobby pins and patterned after former Detroit Piston Allen Iverson’s cornrows. The piece reads like a chain-mail cuirass lying in wait for its commander.

In the Art Gym’s second gallery, Senegalese artist Modou Dieng exhibits a series of new mixed-media wall works inspired by African cloth, African-American musical history, and sexy Blaxploitation graphics. Dieng works the canvas with a rigorous ease, incorporating vinyl LPs into the work and slathering them with iridescent paint and collage elements. In hello mom, hello dad, 2009, Dieng overlays silk-screened images of Malcolm X with actual albums (and their covers) by Louis Armstrong, Aretha Franklin, and Isaac Hayes. The albums transmit a vibrant, kinetic energy and hark back to Marcel Duchamp’s Rotorelief devices. Yet Dieng takes on the history of the readymade and Pop art with a fresh attitude and finesse.

— Stephanie Snyder

Arnold J. Kemp

PDX CONTEMPORARY ART
925 NW Flanders Street
November 2–November 28

Arnold J. Kemp, Recant, 2009, watercolor, acrylic paint, Flashe, mixed media on linen, 14 x 18".

It is tempting to view Arnold J. Kemp’s new work strictly in formal terms: modest collages with black paint, glitter, and googly doll eyes that form abstract patterns and pleasant landscape arrangements. Yet the paint used in each piece seems not simply an aesthetic choice and suggests further musings on the elasticity of Black representation, as well as the personal biography of Kemp, an African-American artist. In several small monochromes, such as Vampire (Titled), 2009, one can see evidence of bright primary colors that were applied prior to the surface coat, a black “skin” of paint. In other works, Kemp affixes groups of googly eyes together, which rummage through the picture and impede on dense patches of black glitter, the mixture both kitschy and mildly foreboding.

The title of the exhibition, “This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen,” is an adaptation of an Emily Dickinson poem. Dickinson’s original line reads, “This Quiet Dust was Gentleman and Ladies,” implying quiet dust is the resting ground where men and women now lie. The slight alteration in the text wryly casts Kemp as a host, announcing the entrance of the dust to the audience.

In another series, “(Them) Changes and (Them) Trees,” 2009, photographs extend for the length of a wall. All the images depict a dense crowd of tangled, leafless tree branches at the top of the sheet and reaching beyond the pictures’ frames, as well as a muted sky in the backdrop. Each offers a different composition of the same branches, implying a shift in perspective as one strolls along. The subject might also be someone lying on the ground, gazing at the varied configurations on an overcast day. Or perhaps Kemp is trying to mimic the perspective of the actual ground, the quiet dust exerting its own point of view, after its proper introduction.

— Micah Malone

“Broadcast”

RONNA AND ERIC HOFFMAN GALLERY OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Lewis and Clark College, 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road,
September 8–December 13

Chris Burden, TV Hijack (detail), 1972, panel 1: three gelatin silver prints and one photocopy on mat board, 20 1/4 x 38"; panel 2: three gelatin silver prints and one chromogenic print on mat board, 24 1/4 x 45 5/8".

“Broadcast” brings together artists who have, according to the exhibition’s press release, “engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio.” Whether attempts to engage with mainstream media are hostile, indifferent, judgmental, passive, or proactive (all of which attitudes are documented in the exhibition), the strategies employed say much about the political potential of art but also about each artist's proclivity for confrontation.

For The Amarillo News Tapes, 1980, Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and Jody Procter became “artists-in-residence” at station KVII-TV Channel 7. The Tapes show the anchors at Pro News, along with the artists, reading bizarre copy and inconceivable weather reports (all written by the artists), in the manner of charming small-town anchors. Most important, though, the artists' relationship with Channel 7 was jovial and respectful, yet they still managed to disrupt the presumed authority of the newscasters.

Chris Burden’s TV Hijack, 1972—documented here with video stills—occupies the opposite side of the spectrum. On February 9, 1972, Burden held TV interviewer Phyllis Lutjeans hostage with a knife to her throat during their interview. It remains a bit troubling to learn that Burden’s act—confrontational in form—was a response to his TV programming proposals having been repeatedly turned down. Was Burden simply acting out, behaving like a petty artist who had his suggestions rejected? Whether vengeful or critical, Burden’s strategies hardly seem viable for challenging mass media.

A different strategy, one that circumvents any obvious critique of power structures, opts for a live relationship with broadcast media. For Telemistica, 1999, Christian Jankowski repeatedly called phone-in psychic shows in Venice, asking “Will I be successful?” and “What will the public think about my work?” Perhaps Jankowski was sincere when he went looking for answers by way of kitsch broadcast. Rather than employing deconstructive strategies, Jankowski suggests that an artist’s role in mass media is best defined by performing within the parameters put forth by the broadcasters.

— Micah Malone