Fred Wilson: Reading between the color lines

In the survey exhibition of mock museum displays by New York Conceptual artist Fred Wilson, now at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, a row of five busts of fabled Egyptian queen Nefertiti demonstrates the range of reverberations Wilson can get from a simple gesture. Physically, the display is terse. Conceptually, it’s discursive, offering an open-ended analysis for which answers are both provocative and elusive.

Titled “Grey Area” (1993), the piece features five shelves attached to the wall. Each holds a plaster copy of the famous sculptural head of the wife of the New Kingdom pharaoh Akhenaton, which occupies pride of place in the collection of Berlin’s great Egyptian Museum. The sculpture’s significance is slyly underscored by the shelves’ placement high on the wall: Automatically, you look up to it.

Or, rather, you look up to them, since the five heads are not quite the same. The bust at the left is painted white; the bust at the right is painted black. In between are three stages on the gray scale -- pale, medium, dark.

The actual bust in Berlin, which has reigned as a standard of beauty for centuries, is famous in part because it retains its original, unrestored colors from more than 3,000 years ago. Wilson, too, has color on his mind.

From a Eurocentric point of view, Western civilization’s ancestry in Egypt is traced to rulers who were white. From an Afrocentric viewpoint, those rulers were black. In the original Berlin sculpture, Nefertiti has richly tanned skin. But is skin color the factor that determines race? What is race, anyway? Are such categories meaningful in any biological sense? Or are they cultural constructions, just like standards of beauty -- the kind that museums articulate and perpetuate, purposefully or not?

“Grey Area” was part of a much larger installation called “Re-Claiming Egypt” that was one of very few highlights in the otherwise disastrous 1993 Whitney Biennial. Wilson’s thoughtful attention to nuance is seen in the pointed hyphenation of the word “reclaim.” Here is yet another claim about who we are and where we came from, the complex installation frankly declared -- a temporal assertion of considered belief, not an immutable truth.

Museums are built from works of art and artifacts that retain their own authentic power and reality as material objects; however, the ways in which museums deploy those objects are far more uncertain and equivocal. Wilson’s mock museum displays tell stories, just as real curatorial displays do -- his just tend to raise fascinating and important questions, a practice that runs counter to our typical expectations of authoritative museum practice.

One inevitable limitation of the show, which was organized by the University of Maryland and is now three-quarters of the way through a three-year national tour to smaller institutions, is that a traveling survey only has room for fragments of Wilson’s often elaborate installations. “Grey Area” survives as a kind of sketch from “Re-Claiming Egypt,” which was a big installation occupying more than one Whitney gallery. At the Santa Monica museum, where “Grey Area” and a second component share a single wall, the full “Re-Claiming Egypt” would have eaten up most of the available gallery space.

Better that than nothing, though. Since 1987, Wilson, 49, has created some three dozen installations utilizing art and artifacts in assorted American and foreign museums of art and cultural history. None has been in Los Angeles.

At least none that I’m aware of. He might have done some we don’t know about. How? The show’s useful catalog recounts Wilson’s inadvertently sardonic “Comment Book Project,” begun in 1996.

“When Wilson visits art museums around the United States, he writes lengthy remarks in the comment book explaining a particular issue, often about cultural sensitivity, that could be improved in the museum,” the catalog explains. “He leaves an anonymous e-mail address and sometimes a telephone number.” As of 2001, when the catalog was published, he had received not a single response to his comments from any museum -- despite the obvious difference between his thoughtful jottings and the usual comment-book exhortation, like “Great show!” or “Ugh!”

Admittedly, some of Wilson’s work seems simplistic. “Friendly Natives” (1991) is a group of glass display cases holding a family of skeletons, each one carefully labeled. The labels don’t identify anthropological epoch or geographic locale, but instead blithely state “Someone’s Mother” or “Someone’s Grandfather.” With typical Wilsonian care, each skeleton gets more than one label -- Mom is also “Someone’s Sister” -- since multiplicity inheres in any issue of identity or cultural history. But it’s a one-hit piece. Once the sudden surprise of reading the label passes, the sculpture doesn’t have anywhere to go. It’s a lot of labor for a minimal payoff.

Most projects are more resonant. Perhaps Wilson’s most widely known work is 1991’s “Guarded View.” (It was included in the 1994 exhibition “Black Male,” which traveled to the UCLA Hammer Museum.) In it Wilson, who is African American, took note of a common phenomenon. The work consists of four brown-skinned mannequins dressed in the uniforms of Manhattan museum guards. Headless, the mannequins aren’t individualized. Their identity is instead limited to their uniformed employment -- minorities paid to protect the (mostly white) cultural patrimony of society. The social dignity of labor plays off the injury of cultural invisibility.

A related theme is encountered in “Cabinetmaking, 1820-1960” (1992), a quietly disturbing work that sets elaborate period furniture from the Maryland Historical Society against another item from the museum’s collection -- a 19th century whipping post, which was in active use for public floggings until the 1950s. Four delicately carved and painted chairs, which would have been domestic treasures in their day, are set on low white pedestals in two rows. They create an audience for the sturdy, rough-hewn whipping post, which stands on a proletarian base of wooden planks like a silent actor on a public stage.

Photocopies of “Wanted” posters for runaway slaves adorn a side wall, although who was whipping whom for a couple of hundred years needs no explanation. But other things do. Privilege and powerlessness stand in stark opposition to each other in this work, while a subtle subtext floats to the surface.

The whipping post has a cruciform shape, like a cross without the body of Jesus. The rows of chairs suggest pews in a makeshift church. On one hand, the installation’s design recalls the resilience and struggle against oppression historically located within the black church. On the other, it recalls use of Bible texts by white Christians to justify black slavery. One man’s paradise is another man’s hell.

Wilson engages in the extremely difficult art of institutional critique, but he avoids the sanctimonious moralizing that sinks so much art in this genre. His mock-institutional displays are not dedicated to therapeutic treatment for the viewer, but to the soul-stirring enlightenment located within sensual and intellectual play. Plainly, Wilson is crazy about museums and the treasures they contain. But that doesn’t mean he’s a fool for love.

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Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979-2000

Where: Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica

When: Tuesdays-Saturdays,

11 a.m.-6 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 7

Contact: (310) 586-6488