This Really Is a Body of Work Hers

You could say the video is about breasts. Except that to say so sounds terribly crass, and pandering and provocative. But it is what it is: postmodern body parts filtered through the prism of hip-hop and misogyny, “identity politics” and the commodification of the artist.

Filmed in tight close-up, they bounce and jiggle to the beat of Michael Jackson’s “Working Day and Night.”

The use of “Working” was a calculated choice because, to hear D.C. video artist Susan Smith-Pinelo tell it, artists are for sale, particularly female artists and their sexuality. As she struggled to get her work noticed, doing the starving-artist hustle in an endless round of meet-and-greets with New York galleries, Smith-Pinelo felt as if she--and more specifically, her anatomy--was on the auction block.

So she turned on the camera, pumped up the volume and started jiggling.

As often happens, it got her noticed. Her sardonic video installation piece, titled “Sometimes,” earned her a place in the Studio Museum of Harlem’s hot “Freestyle” show last June, which then traveled to the Santa Monica Museum of Art in October and November. Critics from publications ranging from ArtForum to the New Yorker watched her video and gave praise. New York’s New Museum even placed “Sometimes” in its window on Broadway.

Smith-Pinelo is highly amused--and gratified--by the goofiness of it all. Now she’s scheduled to appear in a one-woman show in New York and at the Fusebox Gallery in Washington, both in January. Currently her work can be seen at the Bronx Museum in “One Planet Under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Culture.”

“I have no problems with using my body. This is conceptually based work,” Smith-Pinelo says. “Everybody gets the first layer, the glossy, easy-to-digest layer. The numbers decrease as they go into the piece more.”

The critic for ArtForum weighed in: “The artist’s enormous breasts are shown jiggling from one side of a television screen to another. The display is blunt: it’s fun and crass. The lack of any other focus than Smith-Pinelo’s bosom forces the viewer to look, and to feel self-conscious or happy--or whatever.”

“Whatever” is the key here. Smith-Pinelo traffics in ambiguity. At 32, she’s a black feminist who came of age when Eric B & Rakim were laying down beats. She loves the rhythms, the rhymes, the sheer bravado of hip-hop. Rap videos are on a constant loop in her home; she’s mesmerized by them. But what mesmerizes also troubles. She finds herself at odds with the often misogynistic images so prevalent in music videos today: breasts and buttocks served on a platter--the black woman as compliant sex object.

“I’m definitely not getting on a soapbox and attacking hip-hop,” says Smith-Pinelo, who teaches at the Corcoran College of Art. “Not when I have all these CDs in my collection.... I know it’s evil. I’m supposed to be this ‘educated feminist’--why do I own all this stuff?

It’s too simplistic to talk about the evils of rap. She’d much rather work through her issues via her art, using humor--and the female body--to explore her conflicted feelings about her musical love affair.

In her latest work, “Cake,” the television screen is split in two. On the left, the latest videos ranging from Dr. Dre to Jay-Z play in slo-mo, sans sound--glossy images of dozens of beautiful models silently wrapping their lissome bodies around the rappers. On the right, a crasser version is juxtaposed against the fantasy playing on the left: snippets from Snoop Dogg’s Hustler video “Snoop Dogg’s Doggy-Style,” where women who look as if they’ve seen better days offer themselves up to a variety of men as Snoop looks on.

In “Dances With HipHop,” three televisions are stacked on top of one another. On the highest screen, the artist’s head is seen, bobbing to an unheard beat. On the second, a woman’s torso (not Smith-Pinelo’s), clad only in a sheer bra, gyrates. On the third screen, a woman’s bikini-clad hips sway back and forth. The effect is at once disjointed and strangely synchronized: the head oblivious to what the body is doing.

“A lot of video artists seem to be making videos that want to be films,” says Franklin Sirmans, co-curator of the Bronx Museum show where “Cake” is exhibited. “Susan is really conscious of her medium. She jumps off some really simple gestures, like in ‘Sometimes.’ Very, very simple, but so powerful. She manages to say so much by doing so little.”

“I think she’s one of the best video artists working today,” says Fusebox co-owner Sarah Finlay. “She’s addressing something with humor and intelligence that’s so pervasive and we just haven’t looked at: the way women are presented in hip-hop culture ... woman as icon, fetish objects. She does it with this wry, subtle kind of humor, using the media itself to examine it.

“It’s not a peekaboo kind of thing,” Finlay says. “It’s like that annoying thing when someone is looking at your breasts. She’s in control of that situation. She’s saying, ‘Look at me. I can make you uncomfortable.’ She’s controlling the view.”