ART REVIEW : Identity Crisis : ‘Black Male’: Art Is Sometimes Lost in the Issue

Here are three things I like about “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,” the much argued exhibition from New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art that opened Tuesday at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood:

* While the show was assembled to combat and dismantle mass-media stereotypes, it smartly refrains from erecting an equally bogus and restrictive conception of social and cultural role models for black men. One-dimensionality is routine in pop culture, but this show puts its faith squarely in the complex ambiguities of art, where uncertainty is both life-affirming and contrary to the mummification required of a role model.

* In choosing artists, Whitney curator Thelma Golden did not restrict herself to African American men (although, appropriately, black male artists are in the majority). The decision pointedly recognizes that representations of black masculinity are both self-generated and socially fabricated.

* In addition to artists you’d expect to see in a show on this theme--Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, Lyle Ashton Harris, Robert Mapplethorpe, Adrian Piper, Andres Serrano, Fred Wilson--it also includes at least one notable revelation: Barkley L. Hendricks. An artist who is new to me, Hendricks is a realist figure-painter whose full-length, slightly smaller than life-size, sharply observed portraits from the late 1970s assert the artistic centrality of imaginative, highly specific, individual experience. Hendricks doesn’t come across as an overlooked major artist, but he’s a distinctly under-recognized one.

Now, here are three things I don’t like about the show, which includes more than six-dozen paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and installations by 29 artists (Gary Simmons’ full-scale boxing ring, “Step in the Arena (The Essentialist Trap),” is the most prominent work that didn’t travel to L.A.):

* With rare exception, the show’s selection is drawn from a pool restricted to those artists who have had some impact in New York in the last decade or so, which makes its meditation on recent representations of African American masculinity too parochial. The story is much bigger than that.

* David Hammons, who is probably the most important artist in the exhibition, is represented by two early, interesting, but relatively minor examples of his work. A minor Hammons can equal a major effort by another artist, but that’s not the point. The point is that a major Hammons would galvanize the show, while its absence whispers that an eloquent artistic voice is missing.

* Several works come across as pop-culture wanna-bes--Carrie Mae Weems’ commemorative china plates, inscribed with heroic names; the media-minded installation by the collective X-PRZ, whose video component aspires to MTV; Gary Simmons’ illustrational “Lineup,” which translates the popular identification between black men and crime or sports into a smart graphic design; Mel Chin’s phallic basketball shoes, and others. These are clever, one-look, where’s-the-beef works, committed to selling back to the audience what the audience already knows.

I could easily add to both these lists of Likes and Don’t Likes. It’s that kind of show--an “on the one hand this , on the other hand that “ rumination on a socially charged and pressing subject.

This structural flaw is not quite fatal, but it is certainly a flaw. You sometimes feel as if you’re mulling over arguments in an analytical, academically minded inquiry requiring a decision.

No definitive conception of African American masculinity can be made, of course, nor is it actively being sought by the show. “Black Male” wants to particularize the experiences of African American men in the late-20th Century, but it doesn’t try to lay down the contours of a fundamental, absolute essence required to fit the bill. (To see why not, make your first stop Adrian Piper’s installation “Four Intruders Plus Alarm Systems,” a hilarious and harrowing projection of white fears and fantasies onto black male faces.) The show is hardly an essentialist tract.

The subject of black masculinity in contemporary society, however, seems best left as a provocative question, one that could be posed as an open-ended range of possibilities. For all its diversity, “Black Male” doesn’t manage that.

Like most exhibitions that grapple with identity, “Black Male” feels laborious and dutiful rather than playful and engrossing. As if trying to cover bases, it seems burdened by its subject rather than buoyed by it.

Identity shows tend to be “about” identity, and they fail because of it. By contrast, “In a Different Light,” an examination of gay and lesbian identity recently at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, was a rare success because it didn’t try to be about queer experience; it sought, instead, to be an expansive, multifaceted example of it.

As a viewer, you didn’t engage identity as that amorphous entity called an issue--which, like a shimmering desert mirage, evaporates into the ether the closer you get to it; at Berkeley you engaged concrete works of art. That kind of substantive engagement can be life-altering.

“Black Male” is not. It’s over-intellectualized, fueled by an academic, hothouse assumption that “dealing with an issue” is the same as making and experiencing art. Symptomatically, too many artists selected for the show, such as Renee Cox, Dawn Ader DeDeaux, Lorna Simpson, Christian Walker and the late Robert Arneson, also merely deal with issues in their exhibited work.

I think one big problem is that a typical New Yorkishness pervades the Hammer’s galleries. There’s a myopic lack of awareness that, while black men as a whole certainly comprise a beleaguered and abused minority in American social life, a not-unrelated fate describes the lot of artists , in what today passes for American cultural life.

Because New York ranks as art’s company town, that fact is easy for New Yorkers to overlook. But it seems critical nonetheless. “Black Male” is thorough in addressing the social construction of human identity, but it doesn’t consider the identity of art.

American artists of any ethnicity are, like black men, summarily relegated to the indifferent margins of this society. The reasons may not be the same, and the effects are surely not. But any museum show concerned with a social issue should be organized from an artistic perspective, not a sociological one. The analogousness between the marginalization of African American men and of all American artists does establish common ground.

Somewhere in that overlapping terrain might be found the ingredients for an exhibition that could achieve what this noble attempt leaves undone. Such a show would embody, not merely be about, multifaceted black-male experience, which keeps disappearing into the ether as you navigate the issue-laden galleries of the Hammer Museum.

* UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7020, through June 18. Closed Mondays.