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/
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