O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Seeing in Black and White

Warning: This art review is likely to show an insidious form of bias.

As the curator of “The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism,” at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery, Charles Gaines makes a compelling case against the ways white critics analyze work of black artists.

Gaines, an artist and faculty member at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, obviously values the work of the 11 black artists he has selected. But in this show, the art serves--alongside excerpts from critics’ writings--as prime exhibits in a trial of mainstream bias.

Most of the artists--particularly Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems--can be said to have “made it” in the overwhelmingly white world of the art establishment at major art museums and art magazines. That’s certainly an improvement over the bad old days, just a couple of decades ago, when black artists were overwhelmingly excluded from this world.

Yet inclusion, Gaines argues (in an essay for the forthcoming catalogue) has brought new problems, rooted in the rigid ideology of postmodernism. In the postmodern era, to be a black artist is to be scrutinized by whites primarily as “the Other,” as a representative of a “marginal” culture.

Whites may praise you for presenting your ideas in an aesthetic form they find pleasing. They may criticize you for making work that seems too narrowly limited to racial issues. But They always keep the upper hand by implicitly denying the intrinsic, central importance of your subject and your identity except insofar as it relates to Their culture, which, of course, is the source of all important aesthetic trends and movements.

Just as a riverbank cannot be formed without a river to carve it out, there wouldn’t be a “margin” without a “mainstream.” So your work essentially has no meaning apart from the one They give it. And your personal voice (to change the metaphor) isn’t heard distinctly, because Their headsets only receive the big, undifferentiated chorus of black-artists-as-a-group.

That appears to be Gaines’ central argument, if I can decipher his unintelligible post-structuralist jargon, seemingly a prerequisite for being taken seriously in academic circles these days.

In the exhibition, numerous wall-mounted quotes from reviews of (and interviews with) each of the artists in the show are meant to illustrate critical shortsightedness.

Some of this material is simply appalling. A writer for Women Artists News magazine scolds light-skinned artist Adrian Piper--whose work frequently deals with white reaction to blackness--for making such a big deal about “her own obsession with race.” (In fact, this type of denial on the part of whites is exactly what her work is about.)

The writer remarks that people she knows “would be . . . enchanted to discover a friend or acquaintance who had a little something exotic in her background.” Exotic, indeed.

The bias in other excerpted reviews is more subtle.

Certain critics praise artists’ achievements specifically in terms of the “black experience” their work appears to convey, while others limit their discussions to stereotypical issues such as the degree of “primitivism” expressed by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s expressionistic paintings.

Other critical writing celebrates certain black artists whose style seems fresh and evocative--mostly because it recalls work by prominent white artists.

Brought to our attention, these tactics seem misguided, even if well-meaning. But what is the solution? Ironically, here’s where Gaines’ jargon (“ . . . identity is deterritorialized, producing a dynamic marginality”) becomes almost impenetrable.

What he seems to be proposing sounds like little more than basic good advice for art critics: Maintain a constant state of self-critical alertness, and an awareness that buzzwords such as mainstream and marginal may obscure the real issues artists are investigating.

In an Art in America magazine interview three years ago, Pat Ward Williams remarked: “Once again, it’s a problem of African-Americans being effectively invisible. White people often see a color instead of a person; they think that being black is a condition rather than a racial difference.”

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So what about the work in this show? Well, let’s look at Gary Simmons’ piece “Us/Them,” two white terry cloth bathrobes hanging on hooks. One is embroidered in gold with the word Us; the other, with the word Them. The reference, of course, is to kitschy His ‘n’ Hers accessories, but the lighthearted division between the sexes is translated into a racial division: whites/blacks.

My first thought (when I saw the piece a couple of years ago in a Santa Monica gallery) was: “How simple-minded!” As critic Susan Kandel wrote in Arts magazine, “The trouble with Gary Simmons’ mixed-media work on racism . . . is that it sees the world in black and white . . . , compelling the viewer to line up on one or the other side of the divide.”

In his essay, however, Gaines reminds us that just because Simmons used “clean lines and minimal forms” (Kandel’s words) to make his piece, his politics are not necessarily so cut-and-dried. It is mistaken, Gaines writes, to believe that “there is no difference between aesthetic judgments and political judgments.”

OK, then, let’s try to think freshly about the piece: Terry bathrobes are used every day, worn briefly and then hung up, ignored, only to be worn again the next morning. Isn’t that casual, habitual but sporadic use akin to the way all prejudice operates?

Your feelings about the “Other”--whether They are of a different race or sexual orientation, or simply of the other sex--probably lie dormant until you have some contact with Them, when you automatically exhibit the same old unexamined behavior. Isn’t this ritual at least as outworn as gag-monogrammed bathrobes? (A colleague suggested the garments also look like terry versions of boxers’ robes, which would add a further racial component to the piece--boxers being overwhelmingly members of minority cultures--and emphasize the way prejudice still simmers during “time out” periods between major confrontations.)

Looked at this way, Simmons’ piece lets no one off the hook.

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Or consider Hammons’ hanging fabric piece, “African American Flag,” in which the stripes are red and black, and the stars are black, on a green field.

Like all flags, the American flag--with its stripes representing the original freedom-seeking 13 colonies that broke away from England--is highly symbolic (red for courage, white for purity, blue for justice). Hammons’ stripes, on the contrary, represent the absence of freedom implied in the master-slave relationship (red flogging stripes on black backs). The stars recall agricultural servitude (black bodies toiling on a green field).

You might say, “Oh, that’s not too subtle.” But flag symbolism isn’t meant to be subtle. Flag symbolism is emotional, meant to appeal to the knee-jerk sympathies roused by parades and anthems and Fourth of July speeches. Hammons has made plenty of deft and savvy works praised by the art press. This piece is savvy in another way. It offers an alternative populist symbol at a time when the power of politically charged symbols has never been higher.

Piper’s extraordinary body of performance, video and photo-and-text work from the past 20 years--all focused on racial issues--have made her, in my view, a major contemporary artist.

In “Free No. 2,” from 1989, she juxtaposes two blown-up black-and-white photos and a text. One image shows a black man hanging from a tree (“Land of the free”); the other image shows a white policeman with a dog tackling a black man while another cop looks on (“Home of the brave”).

These two photographs are, if anything, overly familiar. How many black images of lynch victims and police brutality have we seen? Piper, a professor of philosophy, is well aware of this fact. She’s interested in picking our brains.

Who is free and who is brave? Well, the cops are free and probably think of themselves as brave. The black guy on the floor and dead black man may have been brave, but look where it got them. You may say, “Well, these are just worst-case scenarios. There are plenty of law-abiding blacks who aren’t being treated this way by whites.”

So are they free? Yes, so long as they act within the boundaries of the law.

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But how are these laws enforced, and whom are they supposed to protect? And aren’t there many other ways of denying people basic freedoms, carried out on a subtle basis in polite society? Aren’t there invisible forms of bravery that have a lot to do with strength and endurance? In the end, doesn’t this seemingly stereotypical pair of images really still speak to the institutionalized and socially ingrained racism of American culture?

Of course, the obligation to look again without “mainstream” blinders doesn’t mean that all critical bets are off. In my view, some of the works in this show (like Weems’ piece) do not represent the artists’ best efforts. Sandra Rowe’s “The Slave Theory” leaves me baffled and unmoved. Would Gaines agree that’s just the rough-and-tumble of critical taste at work--or would he inevitably lay the blame at my faulty attitude?

Still, the limitations of his prescriptive advice (as well as his turgid writing and the didacticism of the exhibition as a whole) do not detract from the impact of his point of view. The prosecution rests, the defense’s case is feeble at best, and the jury will probably be hard put not to enter a guilty verdict.