The vote is in!
By request, and in no particular order, our standout exhibitions and other things from around the planet in 2008.
Top 5 Exhibitions (International)
- Louise Bourgeois (Tate, Pompidou, Guggenheim NY, MOCA LA)
- Juan Muñoz Retrospective (Tate, Guggenheim Bilbao)
- Wolfgang Tillmans - 'Lighter' (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin)
- R. Buckminster Fuller - 'Starting with the Universe' (Whitney, NY)
- WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (MOCA LA and P.S.1 NY)
and... The Whitney Biennale
Top 5 Exhibitions (Australia)
- Biennale of Sydney
- Tim Hawkinson - 'Mapping the Marvellous' (MCA Sydney)
- Gordon Bennett Retrospective (NGV Melbourne, GOMA Brisbane, AGWA Perth)
- Ai Weiwei (SCAF Sydney and CRG, Campbelltown)
- Optimism (GOMA Brisbane)
- and not forgetting: Bill Viola: The Tristan Project (AGNSW and St Saviour's Church, Redfern) and 'Lines in the Sand' at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Sydney.
Top 5 commercial gallery shows (International)
- Cy Twombly 'Three Notes From Salalah' (Gagosian, Rome)
- Jake and Dinos Chapman (White Cube UK)
- Richard Serra (Gagosian UK and USA)
- Damien Hirst’s Sotheby’s auction
- Antoni Tapiès (Lelong Paris)
Top 5 commercial gallery shows (Australia)
- Stuart Ringholt (Anna Schwartz, Melbourne)
- Mitch Cairns (MOP, Sydney)
- Newell Harry (Oxley, Sydney)
- Guy Maestri (Tim Olsen, Sydney)
- Patricia Piccinini (Oxley, Sydney)
Top 5 English language movies
- Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sydney Lumet, USA)
- In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, UK)
- Burn After Reading (Coen Bros USA)
- The Visitor (Tom McCarthy, USA)
- Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, UK)
and La cânard award goes to:
- Australia (the movie) - for the movie most likely to acquire bad taste camp classic status
Top 5 English language novels
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz)
- The Believers (Zoë Heller)
- Netherland (Joseph O'Neill)
- Breath (Tim Winton)
- What is the What? (Dave Eggers)
Heureuse nouvelle année, nos lecteurs.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Monday, December 15, 2008
Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool
BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: BIRTH OF THE COOL
EXHIBITION TOUR
February 7, 2008 - July 13, 2008: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
November 12 - March 15, 2009: Studio Museum in Harlem
May 16 - August 22, 2009: Santa Monica Museum of Art
October 17 - Jan 3, 2010: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
January 30 - April 18, 2010: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Above: © Barkley HendricksFela: Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, oil and variegated leaf on canvas, handcrafted burned frame and embedded computer camera
Following a recent post on Kehinde Wiley, the man sometimes cited as his artistic progenitor is showing at the Studio Museum, Harlem. From the Nasher Museum website: Barkley L. Hendricks. Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Hendricks's unique work resides at the nexus of American realism and post-modernism, a space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. He is best known for his stunning, life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast. Cool, empowering and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks's artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists. This unprecedented exhibition of Hendricks's paintings will include work from 1964 to the present. Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum, is organizing the show. The exhibition catalogue, distributed by Duke University Press, will include contributions from Schoonmaker, Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection.
Martha Schwendener, wrote in the Village Voice (August 19, 2008):
Wiley, though, isn't even in the first generation of black men to paint the figure. Kerry James Marshall's patchwork compositions are subversive confections of Eisenhower-era vignettes filled with tar-baby black figures and jarring texts. And then there's Barkley Hendricks—in fact, Wiley's paintings are a kind of juiced-up redux of Hendricks, with similar centralized figures and an emphasis on pattern. A recent painting by Hendricks of Nigerian Afrobeat star Fela Anikulapo Kuti showing him as a haloed saint has a yellow-wallpaper background that competes with the figure in the foreground, just as in Wiley's compositions.And despite the surface swagger, Wiley is a much tamer painter than either of these two artists. Marshall's paintings carry titles like Black Power and By Any Means Necessary; Hendricks's subjects range from women with foot-tall Afros and T-shirts that read "Slave" and "Bitch" to Fela, a musician whose 1977 hit album Zombie was an attack on the Nigerian military. (Hendricks's Fela painting shows the musician grabbing his crotch—something that, despite the infamous lewdness of hip-hop, Wiley avoids.)
EXHIBITION TOUR
February 7, 2008 - July 13, 2008: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
November 12 - March 15, 2009: Studio Museum in Harlem
May 16 - August 22, 2009: Santa Monica Museum of Art
October 17 - Jan 3, 2010: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
January 30 - April 18, 2010: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Above: © Barkley HendricksFela: Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, oil and variegated leaf on canvas, handcrafted burned frame and embedded computer camera
Following a recent post on Kehinde Wiley, the man sometimes cited as his artistic progenitor is showing at the Studio Museum, Harlem. From the Nasher Museum website: Barkley L. Hendricks. Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Hendricks's unique work resides at the nexus of American realism and post-modernism, a space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. He is best known for his stunning, life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast. Cool, empowering and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks's artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists. This unprecedented exhibition of Hendricks's paintings will include work from 1964 to the present. Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum, is organizing the show. The exhibition catalogue, distributed by Duke University Press, will include contributions from Schoonmaker, Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection.
Martha Schwendener, wrote in the Village Voice (August 19, 2008):
Wiley, though, isn't even in the first generation of black men to paint the figure. Kerry James Marshall's patchwork compositions are subversive confections of Eisenhower-era vignettes filled with tar-baby black figures and jarring texts. And then there's Barkley Hendricks—in fact, Wiley's paintings are a kind of juiced-up redux of Hendricks, with similar centralized figures and an emphasis on pattern. A recent painting by Hendricks of Nigerian Afrobeat star Fela Anikulapo Kuti showing him as a haloed saint has a yellow-wallpaper background that competes with the figure in the foreground, just as in Wiley's compositions.And despite the surface swagger, Wiley is a much tamer painter than either of these two artists. Marshall's paintings carry titles like Black Power and By Any Means Necessary; Hendricks's subjects range from women with foot-tall Afros and T-shirts that read "Slave" and "Bitch" to Fela, a musician whose 1977 hit album Zombie was an attack on the Nigerian military. (Hendricks's Fela painting shows the musician grabbing his crotch—something that, despite the infamous lewdness of hip-hop, Wiley avoids.)
Saturday, December 13, 2008
De Stijl or just stale? ... on museum architecture
Startling architectural juxtapositions can be beautiful and inspired. Consider the Piazza San Marco in Venice - the Basilica San Marco in white wedding-cake high Byzantine style, the Doges' Palace in terra-cotta Ottoman-Venetian gothic, the austerely 'Florentine' brick Campanile and the Napoleonic arcades all seem to hang together with a beautiful, crazed logic. Or perhaps we're just used to them because they're so old?
Well, what about Richard Rogers' Lloyd's Building, or 30 St Mary Axe (the gherkin) in London? Or Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao? The juxtapositions are startling, yet hugely successful. There are many other examples, and Utzon's Sydney Opera House could be considered one of them, although there is no juxtaposition... just a ship assail on a low-slung sandstone harbour. Zaha Hadid's ill-fated Cardiff Opera House, Gehry's Venice Public Library and Rogers and Piano's Centre Pompidou are further contemporary examples.
The reason these buildings are so successful is that each of them is utterly innovative and uniquely of their time. Can, or will, the same be said of the proposed new wing for Sydney's MCA by Sam Marshall? Phillip Cox has already has his spray, and reluctantly, LF agrees. It's not that we are advocating some sort of match-up with the MCA's existing facade, just that a Rietveldian assemblage of boxes is NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH!
Above: MCA proposed new wing: 2 views, courtesy MCA
Gerrit Rietveld, Schröder House, 1924
LF hasn't studied the interior plans, and we're persuaded it will be a lovely series of spaces inside, but Cox is right - this is a missed opportunity to do something innovative and daring, to create an entirely new architectural conversation between the orderly deco rhythms of the Maritime Services Building and a new wing. What we have with Marshall's facade is not a 'Rubik's Cube' (as it has been instantly dubbed by the press) - A genuine Rubik's cube (in those garish colours perhaps?) might actually be quite interesting. Marshall's unsettling jumble of intersecting rectangles owes everything to 20th Dutch 'de Stijl', and nothing to the surrounding sandstone vernacular, or its maritime setting. Deliberate, obviously, but willful in its refusal to have a decent conversation with its neighbours. And the there's that ghastly clocktower from the cheap, faux-historic shopping centre behind, raised above the edifice like a sore thumb. This is suburban 'try-hard' architecture upped to a monumental scale, and we don't think it works. Please re-consider. Maybe get Zaha Hadid to do a couple of concept drawings after a stroll around the precinct? Or Mr Murcutt perhaps?
Or Richard Johnson, whose firm Johnson Pilton Walker designed the new national Portrait Gallery, below. Low-slung, single storied, yet quietly distinctive, it sits near the half-decent legal catheral of the High Court, and Colin Madigan's flawed concrèt brut NGA, itself in the throes of building a promising new wing by the able Andrew Andersons, which will fix the disastrous entrance and add light and space.
Above: Street Facade and Interior (lobby) detail, NPG Canberra, courtesy Johnson Pilton Walker
It's not just the NPA's street facade, with its distinctively cantilevered concrete blade, that works. The spaces inside are lucid, humane and allow us to follow an instinctive journey around the collection. The finishes, in a variety of materials, have a restraint and simplicity - polished terrazzo, blackbutt (?) floors, unadorned concrete, simple diffusing blinds... we recognise this style from Johnson's serene Asian extension at AGNSW - a translucent lantern. It's like an architectural version of the best mod-oz cuisine - Asian inspired, yet imbued with a uniquely Australian modesty.
More soon on the collection.
Well, what about Richard Rogers' Lloyd's Building, or 30 St Mary Axe (the gherkin) in London? Or Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao? The juxtapositions are startling, yet hugely successful. There are many other examples, and Utzon's Sydney Opera House could be considered one of them, although there is no juxtaposition... just a ship assail on a low-slung sandstone harbour. Zaha Hadid's ill-fated Cardiff Opera House, Gehry's Venice Public Library and Rogers and Piano's Centre Pompidou are further contemporary examples.
The reason these buildings are so successful is that each of them is utterly innovative and uniquely of their time. Can, or will, the same be said of the proposed new wing for Sydney's MCA by Sam Marshall? Phillip Cox has already has his spray, and reluctantly, LF agrees. It's not that we are advocating some sort of match-up with the MCA's existing facade, just that a Rietveldian assemblage of boxes is NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH!
Above: MCA proposed new wing: 2 views, courtesy MCA
Gerrit Rietveld, Schröder House, 1924
LF hasn't studied the interior plans, and we're persuaded it will be a lovely series of spaces inside, but Cox is right - this is a missed opportunity to do something innovative and daring, to create an entirely new architectural conversation between the orderly deco rhythms of the Maritime Services Building and a new wing. What we have with Marshall's facade is not a 'Rubik's Cube' (as it has been instantly dubbed by the press) - A genuine Rubik's cube (in those garish colours perhaps?) might actually be quite interesting. Marshall's unsettling jumble of intersecting rectangles owes everything to 20th Dutch 'de Stijl', and nothing to the surrounding sandstone vernacular, or its maritime setting. Deliberate, obviously, but willful in its refusal to have a decent conversation with its neighbours. And the there's that ghastly clocktower from the cheap, faux-historic shopping centre behind, raised above the edifice like a sore thumb. This is suburban 'try-hard' architecture upped to a monumental scale, and we don't think it works. Please re-consider. Maybe get Zaha Hadid to do a couple of concept drawings after a stroll around the precinct? Or Mr Murcutt perhaps?
Or Richard Johnson, whose firm Johnson Pilton Walker designed the new national Portrait Gallery, below. Low-slung, single storied, yet quietly distinctive, it sits near the half-decent legal catheral of the High Court, and Colin Madigan's flawed concrèt brut NGA, itself in the throes of building a promising new wing by the able Andrew Andersons, which will fix the disastrous entrance and add light and space.
Above: Street Facade and Interior (lobby) detail, NPG Canberra, courtesy Johnson Pilton Walker
It's not just the NPA's street facade, with its distinctively cantilevered concrete blade, that works. The spaces inside are lucid, humane and allow us to follow an instinctive journey around the collection. The finishes, in a variety of materials, have a restraint and simplicity - polished terrazzo, blackbutt (?) floors, unadorned concrete, simple diffusing blinds... we recognise this style from Johnson's serene Asian extension at AGNSW - a translucent lantern. It's like an architectural version of the best mod-oz cuisine - Asian inspired, yet imbued with a uniquely Australian modesty.
More soon on the collection.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Kehinde Wiley's Blak irony
"RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture"
The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC
February 8–October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
THE WORLD STAGE: AFRICA LAGOS~DAKAR
The Studio Museum, Harlem, NYC
July 17—October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
DOWN
Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster Street, SoHo, NYC
November 01 -December 20, 2008
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Notorious B.I.G., 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: LLCool J 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet, courtesy the Artist and Deitch gallery
Kehinde Wiley seems to have been ubiquitous in the USA this past year. 2008 has been a big one for the LA-born, gay African American painter, best-known for his hip-hop stars and homeboys, as seen in the recent exhibition 'RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture' at Washington's NPG. His exciting new show 'DOWN' is on for one more week at Jeffrey Deitch's Wooster St space, featuring his usual suspects in pièta-like poses, again echoing, or interrogating, great Western history paintings, including Mantegna's foreshortened Christ. A high-camp homoeroticism has always been present in Wiley's work, and this time it's a little more overt, as widely noted. (See below).
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008, Oil on canvas, 132 x 300 inches (335.3 x 762 cm), Source Imagery: Jean-Bernard Restout, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Christian Martyr Tarcisius, 2008, Oil on canvas, 83.9 x 180 inches (213.1 x 457.2 cm), Source Imagery: Auguste Falguiere, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Lamentation Over The Dead Christ, 2008, Oil on canvas, 131 x 112 inches (332.7 x 284.5 cm), Source Imagery: Mantegna, Photo credit: Max Yawney
And then there's his ongoing 'World Stage: Africa, Lagos ~ Dakar' project, for which he's been traveling two years and creating some of his trademark epic paintings in different African countries, recruiting young men off the streets to pose for him. The paintings from this project, shown recently at Studio Museum, Harlem, continue his exploration of 'heroic art poses', here referencing not European paintings, but the poses of African public sculpture. Young men dressed in Western clothes—jeans, shorts, soccer jerseys, button-down shirts—assume the positions of a 'Dogon Couple' or a sculpture in the Place Soweto (National Assembly). The catalog to shows photographs of the original sources, which range from tribal/pre-colonial to quasi-modern. See below.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Flashy eye-candy: Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, 2008
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley: Rubin Singleton, 2008, Courtesy artist and Deitch Projects
Critics and audiences, especially white ones, are somewhat conflicted about Wiley - on the one hand there are delicious layers of political and social irony in his huge paintings, and he's undeniably an icon-maker of considerable skill and visual audacity. On the other hand his work sails perilously close (stylistically) to slick album-cover art. That's the whole point, really, we think... he's mining a rich vein of popular 'blaxploitation' art that goes way back... consciously using the techniques of commercial illustration and photography to manufacture his latter-day heroes. But art aficionados are never quite sure where the joke ends, and whether it might ultimately be on them.
There are strong echoes of Yinka Shonibare's sophisticated deconstructions of Western Art in Wiley's approach, and like Shonibare, he is highly articulate about his work. Talking recently to New York Magazine's 'Vulture ' blog, he had this to say:
Q: This work seems to have a more sexual and exposed feel to it.
Wiley: I believe it's the repose. Historically, we're used to female figures in the repose. It was designed as a type of early pornographic image in which the body in repose was laid bare for the male gaze. I think we're almost trained to read the reclining figure in painting within an erotic state. There's a type of powerlessness with regard to being down off of your feet, and in that sense, that power exchange can be codified as an erotic moment.
Q: Is the very nature of art political?
Wiley: I remember in my early education having to deal with why I choose to paint black subjects rather than choosing models of different ethnicities, which laid bare that question wasn't being asked of the rest of the student body as to why they were choosing to paint people in their own group. The black body is inherently political. Insofar as I have goals, which perhaps go in a more personal and poetic direction, it should never ignore the large social and political implications of pairing images of strength, domination, and control with the black body, which by and large has been defined by a type of hypersexuality and propensity toward antisocial behavior. It simply posits a big question mark into the world — how do we look at these bodies? How do we respond to them and their history? How do they build a sense of wonder and loss?
Q: This country has been at war with itself and with others? How does "Down" come into play?
Wiley: This body of work concentrates on a genre of painting that has to do with honoring leaders and religious figures in moments of death and also repose. So much of what turns me on about some of the great, strident figures that I've painted in the past, great military leaders, had to do with a sense of vulnerability that undergirded a lot of that artifice. There almost appeared to be a soft spot at the belly of those paintings that reveals a great insecurity that gave rise to need. This show is a part of that dynamic: how we stave the fear of death and the fear of loss of control, the loss of people.
Martha Schwendener, writing about the Studio Museum show in the Village Voice (August 19, 2008), nicely expresses the critical dilemma:
Wiley's version of neo–Black Power is complicated, since it centers on the corporatized fields of sports and entertainment, and captures Africans dressed in the cheap outfits (born out of sweat shops and globalized commerce) that mean a young man in Lagos wouldn't look out of place on 125th Street. Only one painting, Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, finds Wiley's subjects dressed in African attire—well, African tunics worn over jeans.
Wiley's work is also nearly devoid of women. He did a painting of the rappers Salt-N-Pepa and Spinderella in 2005, but the African canvases are like Elizabethan stage plays, with young men taking the place of women in paintings like Place Soweto and the even more clearly feminized Benin Mother and Child. Wiley's work may be "about representation" and power, but the women who exist in the public spaces of African cities are dismissed from "The World Stage."
There's a reason for this. Wiley himself states that the works are about a kind of coded homoeroticism. (In some of his paintings, vegetal patterns in the background wind around the figures in the foreground, replicating sperm.) But in a catalog interview, when curator Christine Kim tells Wiley that one of his American models "left the building" during a panel discussion in Columbus when gay sexuality was brought up, Wiley backtracks, stressing that, in the studio, he attempts to create a "neutral environment." You can't have it both ways, however, and this neutrality spills over into the paintings, which feel most of the time like a hedging of bets between multicultural political correctness and messier gay/black politics.
In many ways, Wiley is a symptom of the age—or maybe a victim of the era and his own success. He shows with Jeffrey Deitch, the impresario whose mission seems to be to fuse art with entertainment. Like much of Deitch's youth-culture-heavy stable, Wiley's flashy eye-candy painting is framed as edgy and subversive, but it sidesteps the heavyweight, head-on politics of artists like Glen Ligon. By comparison, Wiley is glossy, market-ready, and safe—unless the feel-good, one-world/one-love vibe is a ruse, a way of making a large population fall in love with paintings that they might, under clearer circumstances, reject.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Petrus Blackenheim and Saint George, 2006, Oil and enamel on canvas, 6 x 8 feet (182.9 x 274.3 cm)
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Officer of the Hussars, 2007, Oil on canvas, 9 x 9 feet (274.3 x 274.3 cm)
Go see, or visit:
http://www.kehindewiley.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/572111
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/10/artist_kehinde_wiley_on_his_ne.html
http://www.deitch.com/projects/sub.php?projId=252
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/
http://www.studiomuseum.org/the-world-stage-africalagos-dakar/
The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC
February 8–October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
THE WORLD STAGE: AFRICA LAGOS~DAKAR
The Studio Museum, Harlem, NYC
July 17—October 26, 2008
Kehinde Wiley
DOWN
Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster Street, SoHo, NYC
November 01 -December 20, 2008
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Notorious B.I.G., 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: LLCool J 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet, courtesy the Artist and Deitch gallery
Kehinde Wiley seems to have been ubiquitous in the USA this past year. 2008 has been a big one for the LA-born, gay African American painter, best-known for his hip-hop stars and homeboys, as seen in the recent exhibition 'RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture' at Washington's NPG. His exciting new show 'DOWN' is on for one more week at Jeffrey Deitch's Wooster St space, featuring his usual suspects in pièta-like poses, again echoing, or interrogating, great Western history paintings, including Mantegna's foreshortened Christ. A high-camp homoeroticism has always been present in Wiley's work, and this time it's a little more overt, as widely noted. (See below).
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008, Oil on canvas, 132 x 300 inches (335.3 x 762 cm), Source Imagery: Jean-Bernard Restout, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Christian Martyr Tarcisius, 2008, Oil on canvas, 83.9 x 180 inches (213.1 x 457.2 cm), Source Imagery: Auguste Falguiere, Photo credit: Max Yawney
Above: © Kehinde Wiley, Lamentation Over The Dead Christ, 2008, Oil on canvas, 131 x 112 inches (332.7 x 284.5 cm), Source Imagery: Mantegna, Photo credit: Max Yawney
And then there's his ongoing 'World Stage: Africa, Lagos ~ Dakar' project, for which he's been traveling two years and creating some of his trademark epic paintings in different African countries, recruiting young men off the streets to pose for him. The paintings from this project, shown recently at Studio Museum, Harlem, continue his exploration of 'heroic art poses', here referencing not European paintings, but the poses of African public sculpture. Young men dressed in Western clothes—jeans, shorts, soccer jerseys, button-down shirts—assume the positions of a 'Dogon Couple' or a sculpture in the Place Soweto (National Assembly). The catalog to shows photographs of the original sources, which range from tribal/pre-colonial to quasi-modern. See below.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Flashy eye-candy: Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, 2008
Above: ©Kehinde Wiley: Rubin Singleton, 2008, Courtesy artist and Deitch Projects
Critics and audiences, especially white ones, are somewhat conflicted about Wiley - on the one hand there are delicious layers of political and social irony in his huge paintings, and he's undeniably an icon-maker of considerable skill and visual audacity. On the other hand his work sails perilously close (stylistically) to slick album-cover art. That's the whole point, really, we think... he's mining a rich vein of popular 'blaxploitation' art that goes way back... consciously using the techniques of commercial illustration and photography to manufacture his latter-day heroes. But art aficionados are never quite sure where the joke ends, and whether it might ultimately be on them.
There are strong echoes of Yinka Shonibare's sophisticated deconstructions of Western Art in Wiley's approach, and like Shonibare, he is highly articulate about his work. Talking recently to New York Magazine's 'Vulture ' blog, he had this to say:
Q: This work seems to have a more sexual and exposed feel to it.
Wiley: I believe it's the repose. Historically, we're used to female figures in the repose. It was designed as a type of early pornographic image in which the body in repose was laid bare for the male gaze. I think we're almost trained to read the reclining figure in painting within an erotic state. There's a type of powerlessness with regard to being down off of your feet, and in that sense, that power exchange can be codified as an erotic moment.
Q: Is the very nature of art political?
Wiley: I remember in my early education having to deal with why I choose to paint black subjects rather than choosing models of different ethnicities, which laid bare that question wasn't being asked of the rest of the student body as to why they were choosing to paint people in their own group. The black body is inherently political. Insofar as I have goals, which perhaps go in a more personal and poetic direction, it should never ignore the large social and political implications of pairing images of strength, domination, and control with the black body, which by and large has been defined by a type of hypersexuality and propensity toward antisocial behavior. It simply posits a big question mark into the world — how do we look at these bodies? How do we respond to them and their history? How do they build a sense of wonder and loss?
Q: This country has been at war with itself and with others? How does "Down" come into play?
Wiley: This body of work concentrates on a genre of painting that has to do with honoring leaders and religious figures in moments of death and also repose. So much of what turns me on about some of the great, strident figures that I've painted in the past, great military leaders, had to do with a sense of vulnerability that undergirded a lot of that artifice. There almost appeared to be a soft spot at the belly of those paintings that reveals a great insecurity that gave rise to need. This show is a part of that dynamic: how we stave the fear of death and the fear of loss of control, the loss of people.
Martha Schwendener, writing about the Studio Museum show in the Village Voice (August 19, 2008), nicely expresses the critical dilemma:
Wiley's version of neo–Black Power is complicated, since it centers on the corporatized fields of sports and entertainment, and captures Africans dressed in the cheap outfits (born out of sweat shops and globalized commerce) that mean a young man in Lagos wouldn't look out of place on 125th Street. Only one painting, Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, finds Wiley's subjects dressed in African attire—well, African tunics worn over jeans.
Wiley's work is also nearly devoid of women. He did a painting of the rappers Salt-N-Pepa and Spinderella in 2005, but the African canvases are like Elizabethan stage plays, with young men taking the place of women in paintings like Place Soweto and the even more clearly feminized Benin Mother and Child. Wiley's work may be "about representation" and power, but the women who exist in the public spaces of African cities are dismissed from "The World Stage."
There's a reason for this. Wiley himself states that the works are about a kind of coded homoeroticism. (In some of his paintings, vegetal patterns in the background wind around the figures in the foreground, replicating sperm.) But in a catalog interview, when curator Christine Kim tells Wiley that one of his American models "left the building" during a panel discussion in Columbus when gay sexuality was brought up, Wiley backtracks, stressing that, in the studio, he attempts to create a "neutral environment." You can't have it both ways, however, and this neutrality spills over into the paintings, which feel most of the time like a hedging of bets between multicultural political correctness and messier gay/black politics.
In many ways, Wiley is a symptom of the age—or maybe a victim of the era and his own success. He shows with Jeffrey Deitch, the impresario whose mission seems to be to fuse art with entertainment. Like much of Deitch's youth-culture-heavy stable, Wiley's flashy eye-candy painting is framed as edgy and subversive, but it sidesteps the heavyweight, head-on politics of artists like Glen Ligon. By comparison, Wiley is glossy, market-ready, and safe—unless the feel-good, one-world/one-love vibe is a ruse, a way of making a large population fall in love with paintings that they might, under clearer circumstances, reject.
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Petrus Blackenheim and Saint George, 2006, Oil and enamel on canvas, 6 x 8 feet (182.9 x 274.3 cm)
Above: © Kehinde Wiley: Officer of the Hussars, 2007, Oil on canvas, 9 x 9 feet (274.3 x 274.3 cm)
Go see, or visit:
http://www.kehindewiley.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/572111
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/10/artist_kehinde_wiley_on_his_ne.html
http://www.deitch.com/projects/sub.php?projId=252
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/
http://www.studiomuseum.org/the-world-stage-africalagos-dakar/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)