ART REVIEW : Personal Views of the Black Experience

You notice a black guy and a white one standing on a corner casually chatting. You almost hear a voice saying: “You know the black guy is more likely to do drugs and violent crime. There is also a better chance he’ll abandon his kids, go to jail or die before he gets old.”

Tragically these statistical truths hang like a guillotine blade over the lives of African-American youth, according to New York photographer Jeffrey Scales, who directly addresses these grim facts in the images and accompanying wall text that make up his “Young Men Series.” Three pictures show members of the notorious Compton Crips looking as mean as myth can make them. Other subjects make us shudder at the innocence of their young manhood. These college students and clothes-horse dandies should have futures as safe as anybody else’s. They don’t.

Clarissa Sligh’s blue word-work photo collages include a snapshot of a portly middle-aged working class black who says every time he goes to the 7-Eleven he’s not sure he’ll ever see his wife and kids again.

Scales and Sligh are included in the traveling exhibition “Convergence: 8 Photographers” just opened in the art gallery at UC Irvine. It was organized by Deborah Willis, curator of photographs and prints at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. At more than 50 prints, the show is said to be among the largest surveys of photographs by African-American artists ever circulated.

It is worth seeing for that alone, but there are better reasons. The best one is that this work, while rooted in social conscience, does not feel like advocacy or special pleading, it feels like the profoundly personal view of each maker--like art.

Its styles range from classic portraiture to process art. Compared to the more elaborate photographic hybrids extant, this group clusters to the classic middle. That lends it a certain gravitas in the same way that the memory of gospel dignifies even the funniest rhythm and blues or the line of a standard tune keeps an improvisatory jazz riff on track.

We are not harangued about the black experience, we are opened a door that says, “This is what it’s like.”

Atlanta’s Christian Walker thinks it’s like living in “Another Country.” His set of tinted gelatin-silver prints have some of the flavor of Andy Warhol’s darker images but they are somber rather than violent. They seem to be based on vintage prints from the days when black people entered a movie house following an arrow whose shaft said: “Colored Admission 10.” It was a country where some white guy with a badge watched your every move whether you were naked, stevedoring bananas or being lynched for a trifle.

The feeling that you live in an isolated land within this great nation must impart a sense of being haunted and hounded. It affects L.A.’s Todd Gray so that even ordinary objects like microphones and TV sets take on an monstrous apparitional quality. The question is, what do you do about it? Gray’s “Phoenix Rising” shows a silhouette of legs inside a spiral of barbed wire. Heroic resurrection turns to imprisonment, tragedy to comedy and back--the mind set of people who have to practice double-think. The Soviets used to be good at it.

You can leave for a better place, of course, at least in your mind.

Elizabeth Sunday lives in Oakland but her mind is in Kenya and Mali and among the KungSan Bushmen people of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana. She saw their myth makers and story tellers through a distorting lens that makes them look elegantly woozy and hallucinatory, like mirages. There is magic there.

Magic is a good way out for people who feel helpless. Kids and shamans both like to think they can change things with the power of their minds. Down in La Jolla, Albert Chong’s been making photo-fetishes of ritualized rags, skulls and stuff. They have real power. Maybe the best one is of a kid’s passport surrounded by rocks and dreadlocks. An African puberty ritual meets European nostalgia and nostalgia wins.

The past is a good place to flee too, especially the real past where you can find things useful to the spirit. Wendell White found a cemetery not far from his home in New Jersey, a place called Port Republic. There is no African-American community there now, but there was for about 75 people after 1849 when Henry and Grace Boling bought some land for themselves and their eight children. White photographed the headstones of the black people and found out what he could about them. The texts read like the lives of ordinary folk visited occasionally by unwelcome and disruptive heroism. A number of the men fought in the Civil War. White’s elegy is not as imposing as St. Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial, but it’s a reminder that black people earned their place in history.

Coreen Simpson does a tough, moving job of wrapping the present in the past. She takes photographs that drape the mantle of 19th-Century Romanticism around contemporary portraiture. The Romantics made heroes out of outcasts, criminals, whores, drunks and mad folk. Her picture of people with names like Doo Rag and Ebony may be the shades of African Americans who will succumb to the predictions of the dark statistical oracle. Simpson’s pictures say if that happens, it will simply enhance the nobility of ordinary people forced to be larger than life.