http://www.haberarts.com/heavies.htm#
The New Black Heavies
The New Black Heavies
Hank Willis Thomas and Mickalene Thomas have crossed paths more than a few times. Both gained attention among emerging artists, at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2006. Both have solo shows in spring 2009. Their names alone are sure to link them in search engines and alphabetical listings.That year in Harlem, their work stood at opposite ends of the museum. One used painting to play against and pay homage to perhaps the most respected African American artist, Romare Bearden. The other used new media to appear almost artless. One showed a woman at ease in a bright interior. The other showed young men in action, on a playground at night. While the woman artist's work has grown glossier still over time, the male artist sends even more mixed messages.
http://www.colletteblanchard.com/exhibition/imageview/1602/4That group exhibition insisted on the diversity of black identity, art, and experience, and both artists have an uneasy relationship to that theme. They focus as much on gender as race—their gender. They both update African American art for street fashion, and they both show off. Mickalene Thomas this spring also curated "The New Black Heavies," and the show's title is only partly ironic. If the Studio Museum helped popularize "post-black" art, they could stand for a post-post-black art. Are heavies the new black?
I yam what I yam
Hank Willis Thomas can sure think on his feet. As usual, he races through enough sources, styles, and media for half a dozen artists, as if trying them on for size. As usual, too, he takes care to leave himself out of the picture. He could be denying an identity imposed by others or riffing on it. He could be a shape shifter—or just another young artist with a sudden reputation and a short attention span. Whichever I choose, he might well agree.Obviously the choices have special relevance for black identity. At the Studio Museum in "Frequency," Thomases stop-action video had the tensile movements of a street fight. And its playground confrontation ended with a death. The artist's career has had the same combination of raw materials and speed, even if it has not yet settled on something as memorable. Perhaps the ideal artist, like Miro in the 1930s, refuses to settle for anything, especially authenticity. When I look back at Thomas one day, will things become as clear?
I Am a Man sums it up twenty times over in black and white. Not for him the stark sobriety that Glen Ligon brought to the same title. The text takes off from the sign carried by striking sanitation workers in 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr., came in support to Memphis, where he delivered "I've been to the mountaintop" one day before his death. Thomas in fact appeared in "After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy," a show at the High Museum of artists born after that date. Here he runs through the text as question (Am I a man?), exhortation (Be a man), and even the boast of a stammering Old Testament god (I am I am)—before ending somewhere between assertion and resignation (I am amen).
Not that anyone will read the Liquitext on canvas from left to right. Other works mime much the same rapid-eye movements in neon. The elements of Pitch Blackness off Whiteness, for one, blink on and off in capital letters and in unpredictable combinations. At the other extreme, Thomas casts transitory or unsettled accounts in stone. He has incised both The Slate Is Clean and Everything Must Go in polished granite. They rest in the center of the floor, like stumbling blocks or tombstones.
These things flirt with identity, like Rashid Johnspn, but also with the meaningless. As far as I can see, an appropriated photo of Little Richard is meaningless. At other times, the artist insists a little too obviously on the message. Paired photos of women picking cotton come with the legend It Didn't Jest Grow by Itse'f. A view of the open sea, framed by the cutout of an Absolut vodka bottle, risks both at once. The Middle Passage stares down luxury consumers, like those who hang around with Chelsea galleries and emerging artists.
In the side gallery, John Bankston definitely stays on message. He just has not quite finished filling it in. He paints happy figures in a landscape, with the white spaces of coloring books. The figures seem to belong in the nineteenth century, and so do the stiff realism and the garden utopia. Are they Africans or newly arriving slaves, and how deeply does the irony of their good cheer cut? Perhaps the white spaces need some color by numbers.
Heavyweights
It took a long time to get from "Black Male," the Whitney's notorious 1994 show, to a black president. Does that leave a black woman to play the heavy? As it turns out, "The Brand New Heavies" look quite familiar and not even all that heavy. Deal with it.Jessica Ann Peavy, Lauren Kelley, and Deana Lawson invoke the usual choices—big mamas and invisible daughters, bitches and Barbie dolls, nuts and sluts. Peavy backs her star with the word BITCH, in hot pink on red. Kelley follows a black Barbie on stop-action video. Yet both actors have to look after themselves, without getting up on a pedestal or down in your face. Peavy's may well be bitching, but the soundtrack muffles her words. Kelley's Bay Area librarian has a long day ahead, through a risky male encounter and a troubled sleep.
The videos approach diaries, as with Sophie Calle, but they withhold audible confession. Mickalene Thomas, the curator, compares Peavy to Chantal Akerman. Both use pauses to arrest the progress of vulnerable lives, perhaps their own. Peavy's A Conversation Piece has two channels, intermittently sharing an image. A wall-sized video grid follows another tough woman through a day of obligations and pleasures, and who is to say how one counts cooking, smoking, alcohol, and sex? She stirs her food with a cigarette.
They can look after themselves, but within some serious constraints. That "bitch" is in close up, with huge hoop earrings, but her body is bound in yellow police tape labeled caution. Kelley's heroine has to do a lot of listening—to young men almost as constrained as she by a preposterous stack of books, their own predatory instincts, or her nightmares of revenge. Lawson's photographs come closer still to powerless heavies. Her black women may look surly, but also bruised, battered, and small—dwarfed by the space of a room and a sofa. Her Advertisement looks more like fashion shot, but spots mar the photo's surface.
In just three shows, the gallery has gone for photos that manipulate outsider stereotypes. Aaron Hobson a month before had too many men in cowboy hats and cars, although a yuppie somehow ended up with his tie loose in the East River. Maybe white men think they get to carry on.
Nearly fifteen years after "Black Male," black masculinity still gets more attention than it might well wish—and not just with Hank Willis Thomas. Kehinde Wiley and Barkley Hendricks, who appeared in "Black Male," have had the last two shows at the Studio Museum. Audrey Flack had to transform herself into Marilyn Monroe for "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution." Lorna Simpsomhas shown women playing house, but as history, as fugitive slaves. This time, black women do get a life. They just do not let on for sure whether to call it funny, sad, or defiantly vulgar.
