C E R A S O L I g a l l e r y Presents
In the wildly popular television drama about advertising executives in 1960's Manhattan, Mad Men, the main character Donald Draper tells one of his mistresses, "the love you want was created by guys like me ... to sell nylons." Images in mainstream media have long been driven and mediated by political, social and economic motivations. Notions of race and beauty, like the false love Draper struggles with, have also been influenced and molded by images that inundate the visual landscape. In her essay, "Racial Time, Racial Marks, Racial Metaphors," Coco Fusco reminds us that not only does the visualization of race have political power but that there is also a mainstream, multimillion-dollar entertainment industry that has continuous economic interests in the visual representation of race. The stakes are high: Images do not just record race and beauty; they have a hand in its production, too. In "Black is Beautiful", his current show at Roberts & Tilton Gallery in Los Angeles (June 13, 2009-August 1, 2009), Hank Willis Thomas considers beauty as a politicized act by surveying the prevalence of African American pin-up models in the media.
From a distance the installation feels like a large-scale map, charting the topography of an unknown and barely recognizable landscape. Yet, upon entering the gallery's project room, one is overwhelmed by the 3,000 pictures that wallpaper the space, mapping an entirely different sort of landscape. Thomas has chronicled the shifts in beauty (and by default, desire) of the representation of raced female bodies, spanning half a century. There is a feeling of time passing -- decades left behind, changes in technology and desire bleed into one another as the photographs shift from black and white into color.
Yet, what is compelling about Thomas's installation is how the visual tropes of desire, beauty, and race so often stay the same. Once the changing styles, hairdos and fashions of the times have been stripped away, what is left? This excavation of thousands of images feels ominously repetitious as the female body is arranged in certain positions and within particular contexts that has varied little over half a century; a span of time that has included the Civil Rights era, women's liberation, multiculturalism to now, a moment where powerful and influential women such as Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey are household names. And yet, the desire to see beauty defined through sexualized representations of women of color still holds its ground.
Concurrently "Black is Beautiful," suggests a level of empowerment in the ability to re-appropriate what might otherwise be seen as objectified images of the black female body. This line is precarious, however, and often fraught. The force of the collection of images not only questions the lineage of using the raced body in media but also asks about what meaning is produced when the representations of beauty are not as diverse as the groups that it claims to represent-the troubling idea of difference within the context of sameness.
The contemporary visual landscape is a contested site in which more illusory, yet popular anxieties about race, gender and sexuality often manifest. "Black is Beautiful" asks viewers to begin questioning their own role in this cyclical relationship in dynamic exchanges that allow them to re-appropriate, challenge, or reject these conventions. Although there may be political agendas to advance and advertising accounts to land, the viewer and the everyday consumer hold a greater stake in this transaction. And if beauty is a politicized act, then Thomas succinctly reminds us that passive participation is still participation, regardless of the intention.
[Hank Willis Thomas, Black Is Beautiful (1953-2008), 2009, nkjet print on adhesive paper, Variable dimensions. Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY. For more on Hank Willis Thomas, read Art in America's interview with the artist on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Jack Shainman gallery in March 2009.]
History has a certain way of being selfish-the past is often understood through its inequities and linear narratives, static lines marching forward that are capped by dates, deaths, and wars -- by way of the winners and occasionally, the losers. Personal and collective trauma can be difficult, if not impossible to articulate, as many are left out (sometimes, on purpose). When those who have lived through history are gone and the voices of their retelling have long faded past fables and cautionary tales, how will those lessons be recounted? Will they fall into the vast fissures of histories lost? In "History in the Making," on view at the Seattle Art Museum, artist Titus Kaphar's sculptural paintings challenge canonical representations of history and memory by collapsing past into present.
Kaphar first pillages, then recreates paintings from the art historical canon: Copley, Eakins, Delacroix. With the deliberateness of a surgeon coupled with a slightly maniacal urgency, Kaphar first paints the canvases, before erasing, slicing, cuting, whiting-out, and shredding them before rearranging the pieces into new works. Sometimes he even dips the paintings in tar. The open areas in the canvas become active absences that are jarringly suggestive of alternative narratives. Stretcher bars are exposed. The gallery wall, seen through the holes in the canvas, becomes part of the work. The structures that are typically "invisible" underneath, behind, or inside of the canvas lay bare, as if to suggest that exposing the blood and guts is necessary in order to build something new.
And rebuild he does: Kaphar performs what he critiques. It is not a new idea to combine two-dimensional surfaces with three-dimensional relief, or to engage in the materiality and physicality of paint and canvas; painters have long turned paintings into objects. Yet, Kaphar's practice is more than a modernist revision or a redux of the dichotomy between painter and painting. Instead, he creates new historiographic artifacts built from the physical residues and inadequacies of the past. There is a sense these works are a deeply personal response to imagined memories turned into unrecognizable histories long ago. Perhaps they are a nod to collective histories yet to be discovered, or a reconciliation for those that never will.
Mother's Solution... is one in a series of three paintings based on a fictional narrative about a light-skinned African American couple and their four children. One daughter‘s skin is so fair that she could pass as a white person. Unsure of how to navigate the extreme racism for seemingly mixed-raced children, the daughter is sent away. It is the "mother's solution." The story, though fictional, could have easily been taken from 18th or 19th century American history (though most likely not the histories one learns in school). This disparity forms Kaphar's point: Which stories are told? Why are they told, and how? He continues on to physically cut the image of the daughter out of the large portrait of the four children posing together; she remains present only in the haunting silhouette made by her cut-out absence. Flanking this portrait are two paintings, one of the mother and the other of the father. Each has piles of shredded canvas attached to and spilling off what are literally both the face of the painting and the faces of the parents who are, in effect, gagging on the absence of their missing daughter sent away and removed from this familial history because of the sociopolitical and racial ills of the times. The missing daughter -- from both the fictional family and the physical painting -- is symbolic of those who are habitually absent from, or written out of grand historical narratives.
Kaphar confronts the way history is represented. Yet, he does more than just expose historical imbalances or racial inequities. "History in the Making" does not just ask for more accurate or "truthful" constructions of history. It is the acknowledgement that history often fails, but within that failure there is agency to rebuild, refigure, or remake. He creates a space that offers room for histories to be the tangled, overlapping, and contradictorily ripped canvases they often are. The success of the exhibition lies in that it does not suggest resolution, as much as reclamation. Kaphar's work is a call to boldly face and dismantle the past for the sake of new beginnings, even if those beginnings are born of conflicting times. It is in this moment, between history and memory, that one may choose to rearticulate the past, reinvest, or possibly to reinvent meaning.
["History in the Making" remains on view at the Seattle Art Museum through September 6, 2009. Right: Titus Kaphar, Mother's Solution, 2009, oil on canvas, 106 x 78 in (269.2 x 198.1 cm); Left: Titus Kaphar
All We Know of Our Father, 2008, oil on cut canvas, 48 x 36 in (121.9 x 91.4 cm); all images courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA.]
We are not new to the idea of building homes -- places that make us feel like we "belong" there. Yet recently, the media has been inundated with television shows, magazines, websites and blogs dedicated to the idea of creating a "home" for oneself or family. One might repaint a neighbor's living room on a home makeover show, or have one's closet raided by the fashion police turned pseudo-celebrity. In the west, our identities have always remained connected to physical space. But for San Francisco-based artist Stephanie Syjuco, the sense of belonging hangs in limbo, positioned in relation to -- though sometimes in reaction against -- her distant homeland in the Philippines. This is a place she has an ostensible relationship with through birth but feels disconnected to when she is actually there. She is a tourist at home.
These questions of belonging and identity permeate and are keenly exposed in Syjuco's The Village (Small Encampment) a work currently on view at James Harris Gallery, in Seattle. She appropriates downloads of strangers' tourist photos, liberally exhumed from the graveyards of Google image banks. Syjuco then arranges and re-shoots them within the context of her personal domestic space, in her San Francisco apartment. Her use of found tourist photos combined with her own also speaks to the distance between herself and the place she seemingly should know. Syjuco is a tourist in her own homeland, until she literally brings the homeland home.
Pairs of photographs hang on the walls, along with a slide carousel that flicks through a round of 80 slides that offer close-up views of these small dioramas of homeland-within-a-home. They are coupled with wider shots of Syjuco's apartment where sometimes, if we look close, the small cutouts are found (and sometimes, they're not). We search, too. Syjuco forces us to travel with her as we zoom in and out of her dioramas. We traverse pixilated and canned photos of the way a stranger wants to remember or understand the Philippines (or maybe wants us all to remember or understand the Philippines). We are with her on this negotiation of represented and lived experience.
In Bedroom/Jungle Valley, the rich greens of an indistinctive tropical canopy are barely visible between the dark pillows of Syjuco's bed; the exposed sheets are still imprinted with the echoes of a night's rest (or unrest) while the covers remain haphazardly thrown and kicked back. One must look close. Without the partner photo, which shows a close-up of the cutout jungle tucked within the rolling mountains of flannel sheeting, we might misunderstand it for something else, or miss it altogether.
Things are not what they seem: Syjuco exposes the frailty in the notion of an "authentic" homeland and the idea that she should know it. By default, she begins to unravel the lackadaisical assumptions of racial and ethnic connections to what are often diluted cultural representations of distant far-off lands. That farmer is actually ploughing a shag carpet; those beachgoers are really posing on a sandy colored terry cloth towel. The strength of Syjuco's work lies in the fact that even she is unsure of the line between fact and fiction in her own narratives of the Philippines and Filipina identity formation.
In Skyscraper, snippets of a metropolitan city, high-rises and city streets, are literally excised from their original context and carefully placed in what could be Syjuco's kitchen. This found bit of geography peeks out from behind what might be a garbage can, and leans close to the floor molding. An electrical cord cuts across the entire photograph, trailing in front of the appropriated cityscape placed within a home, as crumbs lay scattered across the linoleum floor. The pixilated, roughly cut edges are left as such; there is no attempt to "hide" the imperfections that expose the dioramic piecing together of this psychic space.
With her process revealed, Syjuco also shows us that the negotiation between home and homeland is not always neat and clean. Searching for and building such spaces is a messy process and may often seem quite different than what it is, or what we think it should be. We are reminded that after the reality show is over and the fashion police have moved on to the next closet, one must continue to build and complete their own stories -- their own home.