Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum, Bridget R. Cooks, 2011.

By Franklin Sirmans

Jacob Lawrence, The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, 1938, Panel #7: As a child, Toussaint heard the twang of the planter's whip and saw blood stream from the bodies of slaves. Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, New Orleans.

Over the course of about 200 pages, Bridget R. Cooks lovingly and critically maps out a well-read course of African American art exhibitions in the 20th and early 21st century. That her work is held close to home is apparent through the cover of her book. There we are confronted by a figure of the author, blurred beyond recognition. In a way she is a bridge and this work is her story. It becomes more so when we understand the other elements of her cover image. On her right sit her parents, back to back, with their gazes drawn to separate paintings. They are at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Cooks first began to look at art as a child. On her left is Abraham Agonafir, a gallery attendant who the author befriended while working at the museum several years ago and subsequently learned much about the collection and the museum’s visitors. Her mother’s eyes fall on Mary Cassatt’s Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child (1880) and her father stares at Winslow Homer’s The Cotton Pickers (1876). Though both paintings are pillars of the museum’s American Art galleries, one can imagine the significance for Cooks as a young woman finding her way as an art scholar.

Surely these two paintings must have spoken volumes to Cooks, and they are the perfect starting point for her discussion, which has as much to do with artists as it does viewers, and that is a good thing. Who needs another survey through the work of the usual suspects of African American art history? Actually, I take that back, we all do! I can remember having no problems lugging my entire semester of books on “Afro-American Art from 1850 to the Present” around campus. While that was long ago, a quick view of similar syllabi hasn't made that bag much heavier.

In Exhibiting Blackness Cooks lays out a history, not artist by artist, as in many standard academic texts, but by telling the story as a curator, one who has identified pivotal exhibitions worthy of extended exploration. Those exhibitions are not limited to African Americans in scope or representation. Her purview is refreshingly broad. We learn the significance of Edward Steichen’s groundbreaking Family of Man exhibition (MoMA, 1955) on the controversial Harlem on My Mind show at the Metropolitan Museum, in 1969. Early American art, like that of Cassatt and Homer provide the backdrop and they are joined by black contemporaries like Edmonia Lewis, Robert Douglass and Henry Ossawa Tanner.

The first chapter delves into the solo exhibition of William Edmondson at MoMA in 1937 and the group show Contemporary Negro Art (1939) at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Questioning the concept behind the two different modes of curatorial address, Cooks raises questions around the outsider and naïf Edmondson in contrast to the young, though already highly-trained Jacob Lawrence, “whose forty-one panel General Toussaint L’Ouverture (1937-38) was called ‘easily the most remarkable exhibit,’ of all.” The debate around outsider and insider continues but at the dawn of the discussion it is easy to see how the stakes were higher when questions of intellect were so tightly bound to the reception of Negro art.

Chapter two, focused on the Harlem on My Mind exhibition, illuminates how closely tied the art was to the larger societal discussion around race and culture. Organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, under the directorship of Thomas Hoving, the show purported to be about Harlem while involving no one from Harlem. Questions of cultural license and awareness led to a galvanized civil rights movement of artists aimed at opening up the discussion in the museums. This would lead to a host of changes that continue to reverberate today in terms of the presence of blackness in our museums, amongst artists, curators and viewers.

A detailed discussion of one of those shows that occurred after the groundswell of demand led by black artists and activists is Two Centuries of Black American Art (1976), organized by the eminent curator and artist David C. Driskell. His exhibition, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, travelled to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Museum. One of the most important aspects of that show was the fact that Driskell mapped African American art as an extension of African art thus giving the subject a sense of tradition that had eluded all previous discussions in the curatorial dimension. While Alain Locke exhorted artists to represent Africa in their work, Driskell’s selection of paintings and sculptures showed how abstract and conceptual such an idea could be rather than simply filling a painting with empty signifiers.

Cooks concludes with commentary on the exhibitions Black Male and The Quilt’s of Gee’s Bend, returning us again to where she opened, with the now universally resonant question of intent versus intuition and insider versus outsider. It’s a good place to be and the artists discussed along the way are an interesting and diverse group. Yet, one must note that two immensely important shows go missing in the discussion. I would love to hear Cooks’ take on Some American History (1971) and The Deluxe Show (1971), both organized by the Menil Foundation in Houston. The former was curated by Larry Rivers and included his own work amidst that of black artists including William T. Williams and Joe Overstreet, among others. The latter was organized by Steve Cannon, a New York poet, and a motley bunch of artistic personas including Clement Greenberg, Sam Gilliam, Peter Bradley and Ken Noland. The show was about abstraction and was probably one of the first instances of aesthetics being the only line of inquiry for an exhibition that included several black artists. And, I think that is the future Cooks alludes to in her conclusion, African Americans After the Art Museum. She talks of an expanded American Art and that seems to be the direction we are heading.

Franklin Sirmans is the Terri and Michael Smooke Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sirmans is also the Artistic Director of Prospect.3 New Orleans.

---

Ben Brandt
Co-Lab Project Space, Austin
Closed May 26

By Thao Votang

Ben Brandt, All_Over (exhibition view)2012, Site-specific installation. Photo: Madison Morals.

The instant I stepped through the threshold of Ben Brandt’s installation All_Over at Project Space¹, I entered another world—and stood completely at the mercy of his environment. Brandt’s installation successfully demonstrates his thoughtfulness and marks the completion of his M.F.A. at The University of Texas at Austin. It is a loud announcement of Brandt’s push from the safe docks of school.

All_Over represents a contemporary look at the ancient grottoes that “served as oracle temples and garden decorations”² and establishes a space viewers enter physically, mentally and spiritually. Like gardens or cloisters, viewers enter an environment in which the outside world might as well not exist. Brandt’s grotto comes complete with the cave-like sensation of entering through a gaping mouth and squeezing through an exit. While the large north door invites visitors inside, they must slip through a small opening cut into plastic to exit the south door. As darkness falls, clip lamps placed through the space provide limited light. These don’t function as pointers but rather add to the illusion of spelunking or deep sea diving.

Inside, sound is muffled; the white cube is terrifically gray. Blown insulation lies piled on the floor, clings to the walls, sticks to objects placed around the room and floats in the air. Wooden planks (construction material that are a common thread through Brandt’s larger body of work) lean against walls, old artwork sits on the floor, a shirt hangs off a peg on the north wall and a worktable stands near the center of the room. Busts fill a bookcase in the south west corner—opposite to it a string and wood sculpture rests. Five painted wood planks rise from the insulation on the floor up to the ceiling. These planks are striped hues of blue and red and lack a dusting. Additionally, insulation also does not completely cover the ceiling, giving a sense of movement to the work. The insulation seems to still be creeping upward, and Brandt catches it in mid-motion.

A path forms as foot traffic flattens the soft and lumpy insulation and marks the presence of others after they have left. Similarly, the hanging shirt on the north wall is not simply the abandoned workspace of an artist, but a gesture of things we all leave behind. By including the busts, Brandt refers to forms found in ancient grottoes. These remnants, the abandoned sculptures and the footprints of others, create an archaeological site for visitors to explore. The oppressive heat and impure air within the installation make it physically difficult to tolerate; however, the beauty and eerie quiet of All_Over ask the viewer to stay and consider their own memory and subconscious.

Brandt’s influence from Buontalenti Grotto in Boboli Garden and his other works Apoxyomenos (The Scraper), Plaid Apoxyomenos³, and the humorous video projected outside at Project Space bring the installation beyond a superficial use of an apocalyptic theme to a meditation of time. By displaying a forgotten space in which blown insulation usually inhabits as a grotto or place of meditation, Brandt asks visitors to reflect upon their own buried sculptures.

All_Over’s success lies in Brandt’s ability to completely utilize Project Space and present guests with an installation that transforms the room and changes as visitors pass through. The competence shown in using a material such as blown insulation, creating a sensual impact that surrounds visitors, demonstrates Brandt’s potential as he moves forward.

Thao Votang writes fiction and helps organize Tiny Park in Austin, Texas.

_________________________________________

1. The new name for the east 7th Co-Lab Projects location.
2. http://colabspace.org/#21443714123
3. http://benbrandt.net/html/Home_Thumbs.html

---

Kevin Cooley
Marty Walker Gallery, Dallas
Through June 16

By Catherine Caesar

Kevin Cooley, Skyward Installation (in situ), 2012, 9 min 45 sec HD Video, Installation. Copyright Kevin Cooley. Courtesy of Marty Walker Gallery, Dallas, TX.

When first entering the video room at Marty Walker Gallery, one is struck by the unusual orientation of the projection: Kevin Cooley’s appropriately-titled Skyward (2012) is cast onto the ceiling of the room rather than the wall. Even once we are seated, there remains a certain discomfort—reticent to deviate from the seated position, we strain our necks in attempt to take in the ceiling screen. It is only once we give in to the experience by lying back on the beanbag chair that we can begin to embrace the serene blue sky projected above. Cooley’s camera is indeed directed skyward, capturing a seemingly uninterrupted vista immediately recognizable as Los Angeles, thanks to palm trees, highway overpasses, airplane contrails and helicopters that periodically flash across the lens. The greater part of the video definitely embodies L.A. car culture, since our beanbag perspective mimics the viewpoint of a reclining automobile passenger gazing through the sun roof at the cloudless sky and the edges of scenery flickering along the perimeter of the road. The faint hum of a car engine and its shifting gears narrates the road trip, which the artist has composed by uniting different segments filmed during a journey from downtown L.A. out to the Palisades.

Our expedition is both mundane and graceful. We routinely observe our surroundings from the inside of a car, yet that view is rarely unimpeded, due to the noise and threats of urban traffic. Cooley’s Skyward allows us to relish in this metropolitan oasis, imagining the wind blowing our hair during a trip to the beach on a cloudless day. To further this sense of quiet serenity, Cooley intersperses moments of timeless poetry into an otherwise real-time trip. Fat bumblebees hover leisurely over our heads while a series of blimps silently traverse the sky. These brief respites suggest that the rapid speed of our everyday travels hinders our ability to perceive the beauty and grandeur of what is always present (I began wondering why I rarely see blimps—are there more in Southern California than Texas?). This sense of wonder culminates when a bunch of pink balloons enters the lens, and the car-camera quietly comes to a stop so we can take it in. Although the balloons are the oddest vision we encounter during the journey, they are still commonplace—like a marker of a birthday party or a new baby girl tied to a suburban streetside mailbox. But here the balloons are singled out from their surroundings, backed only by the intense blue sky, allowing the suggestion of a birth of a brand new year of life to shine unhindered by a prosaic context.

Much of Cooley’s previous work explores the juxtaposition of the natural and the manmade, the latter often signaled by the shock of the color pink against a landscape. In his Devil’s Churn, a hot pink inner tube spins and rocks, seemingly ad infinitum, within a tumultuous Pacific Coast inlet, while the pink balloon motif from Skyward may originate in Cooley’s Saguaro, where we await its demise as it blows dangerously close to an enormous prickly cactus. This 2011 series, entitled Primary Forces, plays on the power of the four elements, here water and wind, while celebrating the majesty of the Western United States from the perspective of the artist: an Oregonite now displaced to New York. It is this ingenuous Pacific Coast joy that pervades the denouement of Cooley’s Skyward, when the viewpoint of the automobile sun roof is replaced by that of the small aircraft window, and the urban road gives way to the ocean and shore, with the L.A. skyline visible in the distant haze. Already slightly lightheaded from lounging in the beanbag and gazing at the ceiling, Cooley’s viewer is doubly dizzied by the airplane’s loop-de-loop, which creates a momentary dislocation akin to the experience of Robert Smithson’s circling Spiral Jetty helicopter. The boundless urban sky that predominates the first seven minutes of Skyward dissolves into the boundless Pacific Ocean during its remaining moments, and the infinity of nature seems to triumph over the manmade structures.

Yet there is something naggingly familiar about Cooley’s viewpoint; perhaps its scope and disorientation recall an IMAX movie, but that reference to popular culture hearkens back to the realm of the prosaic, always lurking in Cooley’s work. To Cooley, the pink balloon may be as cheap and transient as the urban vista or, alternately, it can be perceived with the wide-eyed joy of a little girl playing at her birthday party, or of a Brooklynite revisiting the azure intersection of the West Coast skyline and the Pacific Ocean.

Catherine Caesar is an art historian specializing in American art of the 1960s and 70s, and Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Dallas.

---

Jacob El Hanini
Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas
Through June 16

By Benjamin Lima

Jacob El Hanini, Star Line, 2010, 18 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas.

Seeing the ten examples of Jacob El Hanani’s Linear Landscape series of ink drawings at Holly Johnson Gallery is a special event. El Hanani has worked steadily and consistently for years (with works collected by MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum among many others), yet, positioned apart from any particular group and the trends of the moment, his work may be unknown to those who are not specialists in drawings. Although the small scale, detail and repetition of his work resembles that of his colleagues Marco Maggi or Astrid Bowlby, it also contains a historical dimension in relation to medieval Jewish manuscripts.

Each of the Linear Landscapes, at 18 inches square, practically demands up-close attention to discern even a few of the details. All of the forms are generated by the meticulous repetition of tiny shapes. Sometimes, the unit of repetition is a single mark or hatch; sometimes, it is a letter or series of letters. (The latter technique, known as micrography, in which tiny letterforms become abstract decorations, derives from medieval Jewish manuscripts.) The initial challenge, then, can be to discern whether the drawing is based on text or not. After that, one might search for specific references to establish a scale of view. Are the landscapes cosmic, microscopic, human-scale or otherwise? Often, this is left ambiguous. In Leaves (2011), overlapping diagonals blanket the main field, as darker areas fill in the upper right and lower left corners. In Triangle Landscape (2011), gently curving rows of small triangular marks create billowing cloudlike forms across the top two-thirds of the frame, while darker, angular shapes crowd around the bottom.

Micrography is an especially historically resonant aspect of El Hanani’s practice. According to an online exhibit at the Jewish Theological Seminary, micrography developed in medieval Jewish communities within the broader Islamic world, where it was frequently used for Bibles in codex form. Without oversimplifying the situation, micrography could be seen as characteristic of traditions—such as those of both the Jewish and Muslim communities—that included both a reverence for sacred scripture and certain prohibitions on divine images. El Hanani’s work is not explicitly devotional, but his biography does refer to the influence of this cultural context; he was born in Morocco in 1947 and moved to Israel as a child. Later, when he moved to New York, he found affinities with artists such as Sol LeWitt, whose work also incorporated highly repetitive patterns at a small scale. I am not sure, however, whether El Hanani’s work bears a closer affinity to one or the other of these models. The sheer individuality of his work makes it difficult to glibly categorize in this way.

If both medieval and contemporary, sacred and secular references are important to El Hanani’s work, is it possible to define how they work in combination? One idea is that the state of reverie, induced by contemplating the vast number of tiny repetitions, is shared across the sacred and secular contexts, simply as a result of their scale. If so, this would show that in some cases, formal resemblances can overpower differences of context. However, insofar as each of El Hanani’s works creates an absorbing microcosm with its own inherent interest, questions such as these recede into the background.

Benjamin Lima is assistant professor of art history at the University of Texas at Arlington.