Lorraine O’Grady. Untitled (Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire and her Master of Ceremonies enter the New Museum), 1980–83, printed 2009. Gelatin silver print. 7 1/4 x 9 1/4 in. Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York. Included in Radical Presence at Grey Art Gallery.

#race #ethnicity #gender #institutions #access #identity

Since the Civil Rights Era, it has become commonplace for marginalized ethnic communities to instate their own institutions of sociological and cultural study such as university Ethic Studies departments and museums like Brooklyn’s Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts. In the face of extreme prejudice and exclusion from the discourses of history and art, many have felt the necessity and urgency of race-focused research. Nonetheless, in a global art market such as we have today, the existence of numerous star artists of color has prompted some to ask whether the race-based exhibition has run its course as a format for relevant artistic exchange. Recently, Adrian Piper’s request to withdraw her work from the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery stirred up debate around ethnocentric exhibitions once more.

Piper’s request that documentation of her work The Mythic Being (1973) be pulled from the exhibition was executed with high drama, coming after the show had opened and the work was already on view. The timing of her withdrawal is inexplicable considering the work had been included in the full run of Radical Presence at its originating institution, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Her request read, in part: “Perhaps a more effective way to ‘celebrate [me], [my] work and [my] contributions to not only the art world at large, but also a generation of black artists working in performance,’ might be to curate multi-ethnic exhibitions that give American audiences the rare opportunity to measure directly the groundbreaking achievements of African American artists against those of their peers in ‘the art world at large.’”[1] For her part, curator Valerie Cassel Oliver has said that Radical Presence intends to “resist reductive conclusions about blackness”[2] and to present a version of performance in black history that transcends traditional categories of music, dance, and storytelling. Seeking to define African American art practice as more than theater or folk art, Cassel Oliver has opted to locate recent art by black artists within a conceptual framework.

Leaving aside the question of why Piper chose this late date to register her objections[3], is there merit to her claim that African American artists would be better served by inclusion in “multi-ethnic exhibitions”? For an artist of her stature, there is far more cachet in appearing in Documenta or Performa than in an exhibition devoted to African American art history. However, for the younger and less acknowledged artists in Radical Presence, a show of this kind offers an opportunity for their work to be seen in the company of artists who have successfully crossed over to the mainstream, and so to be introduced to audiences that otherwise don’t seek out black artists. By withdrawing, Piper is essentially pulling up her coat tails and leaving the next generation of black performance artists to fight the same battles for recognition anew, without the benefit of her hard-won prominence to direct attention their way.

The question remains, how is it that so many artists are still so marginalized by race, ethnicity, and even gender when many celebrity artists are women and people of color? When Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith are given solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum or the Museum of Modern Art, why is it still necessary to have exhibitions such as the recent Les Papesses in Avignon or institutions like the National Museum of Women in the Arts? To give another example, when Subodh Gupta shows with Hauser & Wirth and Anish Kapoor creates a public sculpture for London costing over 30 million US dollars, why does nearly every presentation of an Indian artist in the United States appear in the context of a “contemporary art from India” exhibition? Do these groupings of artists by demographics rather than technique, subject matter, or formal concerns inadvertently limit the artists’ narratives to their biographies rather than their artistic accomplishments?

Anish Kapoor with engineer Cecil Balmond, Group Arup. ArcelorMittal Orbit, 2012. Steel. 376 feet tall. Olympic Park, London, UK.

Rather than answer these questions—because there is no single answer—let us instead consider why the art world continues to rely on these categories rather than simply represent a diverse spectrum of artists in the majority of exhibitions of any type. Certainly there is a marketing imperative, as shows of women, African Americans, Latinos, or artists from China and India draw audiences whose interest is in regional and social issues as well as those who support the arts. This is cause for concern only because it would seem that ethnicity and gender-specific exhibitions have not yet had a significant effect on the exhibiting or collecting practices of mainstream art institutions in the US. If 30 years of gains made by artists of color are not reflected in the constitution of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, does it stand to reason that the ethnicity exhibition is a space that is separate but not equal?

It also bears questioning whether the audience for these exhibitions is comprised of people who identify with the demographic or nationalist categories on view, or whether these shows are configured to introduce the typical white, upper-income art viewer to a broader scope of art. In either case, it is possible that the category in which the artist is placed is of more concern to the institution than the artwork itself. Artists from marginalized communities struggle to have their work taken on its own merits, free of essentializing rhetoric about the kind of art that people like themselves are expected to make. White, male artists, after all, are rarely if ever described as making white, male art, nor are they consigned to White Male shows (although the majority of shows remain just this). As such, exhibitions based around ethnicity reinforce the notion that whiteness is an absence of race, rather than a racial category itself. This supports the conclusion that racially-marked shows are marked as such for the benefit of white audiences and institutional power players.

J. G. Ballard. The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990 revised and illustrated edition published by RE/Search, San Francisco.

As Sara Ahmed says, “of course whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it. For those who don’t, it is hard not to see whiteness; it even seems everywhere. Seeing whiteness is about living its effects, as effects that allow white bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape, spaces in which black bodies stand out, stand apart, unless they pass, which means passing through space by passing as white.”[4] If the imperative to define ethnic histories is mandated by ongoing white supremacy in the historical and cultural mainstream, then the ethnicity exhibition operates similarly to the “Atrocity Exhibition” described by J. G. Ballard. Excluded from society and from their own artistic discourse, the asylum-bound artists whose work Ballard describes experience their prophetic visions reduced to amusements for the chattering classes. The artists remain marginalized and dehumanized to the extreme while their creative output is lauded for its raw, unconscious power. Such a condition is opposite to the intention of a curator such as Valerie Cassel Oliver, who seeks to amend the historical record to recognize the myriad contributions of black artists to the history of performance art. Even so, Piper’s response speaks to an unfortunate and ongoing reality of widespread historical marginalization on the basis of race.

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art was on view at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery through December 7, 2013, and at the Studio Museum of Harlem through March 9, 2014.

 #Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

[1] Cembalest, Robin. “Adrian Piper Pulls Out of Black Performance-Art Show.” ArtNews (October 25, 2013). http://www.artnews.com/2013/10/25/piper-pulls-out-of-black-performance-art-show/

[2] Ibid.

[3] As for whether Piper would ever withdraw her work from a show that was not ethnically focused, she did withdraw the work The Hypothesis Series (1968-69) from Joseph Kosuth’s 1970 exhibition Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects as a means of protest against the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings. http://www.adrianpiper.com/art/g_hypothesis_text.shtml

[4] Ahmed, Sara. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism.” Borderlands e-journal (Vol. 3, No. 2, 2004). http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm

Tseng Kwong Chi. New York, New York (World Trade Center), 1979, from the East Meets West series; gelatin silver print, printed 2014; 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York

Tseng was born in Hong Kong in 1950. His father had served in the Nationalist army in the war against China’s Communist revolutionaries and later fled to escape the new regime. When Tseng was a teenager, his family immigrated to Canada. He went on to complete his art education in Paris and then moved to New York City in 1978.[1] This international upbringing no doubt informed the project for which the artist is probably best known, East Meets West (1979–1984), later called the Expeditionary Series. In all of the self-portraits that compose this series, Tseng photographs himself standing in front of major landmarks in the Western world, including Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, Disneyland, and the World Trade Towers.

Tseng Kwong Chi. Niagara Falls, New York, 1984, from the East Meets West series; vintage gelatin silver print; 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia.

In every setting, the artist adopts the same persona of a visiting Chinese Communist government official. He wears a Mao-style suit, mirrored sunglasses, and an ID badge. Many of the images feature him holding the release cable for his camera, revealing the self-sufficiency of the project. Tseng examines the experience of being caught within the tropes of Asian identity that are rampant in U.S. culture: the outsider, the tourist, the Communist, the obsessive documentarian. The time invested in the project and the repetition of the gesture speak to how common this must have been for Tseng in the late ’70s and early ’80s in the United States. The potency of these portraits’ humor is not in their incredulity or exaggeration, but rather how descriptive they are of being Asian under the Western gaze.

Tseng Kwong Chi. Art After Midnight, New York, 1985; vintage gelatin silver print; 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York.

Much of East Meets West is set in New York City, where Tseng was a documentarian of the ’80s Lower East Side art scene, serving as eager witness, archivist, and attendee to many a nightclub opening, art exhibition, and posh social gathering. Dozens of Polaroids and party photos are on display, many of which are composed as sets for each event. All of these works testify to Tseng’s earned “insiderness” within an exclusive and dynamic moment in New York City art society. He took portraits of his artist friends in their studios or home spaces, capturing the heat and mythos surrounding figures like Haring, Basquiat, and Warhol. He was also the most prolific documentarian of Haring’s graffiti practice across the city, with tens of thousands of images of Haring’s early work credited to him.

Tseng Kwong Chi. William F. Buckley Jr., 1981, from the Moral Majority series; gelatin silver print, printed 2014; 10 x 10 in. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York

Other extremes of the ’80s drew Tseng’s attention as well. The 1981 Moral Majority series documents a range of far-right conservative political figures posing in front of a crumpled American flag. In a trip to Washington, D.C., Tseng dressed himself in a seersucker suit and feigned his sympathy for conservative causes, convincing men like William F. Buckley Jr. and Jerry Falwell to pose in front of the wrinkled prop, assuring them it was meant to look like it was “blowing in the wind.”[2] This was no small feat for the times, especially when you consider the vehemence with which moral-majority leaders denounced the homosexuality and gay activism that were thriving in the New York City arts community Tseng was a part of. This is a core strength in the artist’s practice: a deft utilization of his perceived position as an outsider in order to gain access and record opposite poles of the Reagan-era culture wars. Tseng’s manipulation of his performed identity enabled him to document the excesses and hypocrisies of American culture.

Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing For the Camera is on view at the Grey Art Gallery of New York University through July 11, 2015.

[1],  [2] http://www.creativephotography.org/study-research/educators/tseng-kwong-chi

Since the Civil Rights Era, it has become commonplace for marginalized ethnic communities to instate their own institutions of sociological and cultural study such as university Ethic Studies departments and museums like Brooklyn’s Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts. In the face of extreme prejudice and exclusion from the discourses of history and art, many have felt the necessity and urgency of race-focused research. Nonetheless, in a global art market such as we have today, the existence of numerous star artists of color has prompted some to ask whether the race-based exhibition has run its course as a format for relevant artistic exchange. Recently, Adrian Piper’s request to withdraw her work from the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery stirred up debate around ethnocentric exhibitions once more.

Lorraine O’Grady. Untitled (Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire and her Master of Ceremonies enter the New Museum), 1980–83, printed 2009. Gelatin silver print. 7 1/4 x 9 1/4 in. Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York. Included in Radical Presence at Grey Art Gallery.

Piper’s request that documentation of her work The Mythic Being (1973) be pulled from the exhibition was executed with high drama, coming after the show had opened and the work was already on view. The timing of her withdrawal is inexplicable considering the work had been included in the full run of Radical Presence at its originating institution, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Her request read, in part: “Perhaps a more effective way to ‘celebrate [me], [my] work and [my] contributions to not only the art world at large, but also a generation of black artists working in performance,’ might be to curate multi-ethnic exhibitions that give American audiences the rare opportunity to measure directly the groundbreaking achievements of African American artists against those of their peers in ‘the art world at large.’”[i] For her part, curator Valerie Cassel Oliver has said that Radical Presence intends to “resist reductive conclusions about blackness”[ii] and to present a version of performance in black history that transcends traditional categories of music, dance, and storytelling. Seeking to define African American art practice as more than theater or folk art, Cassel Oliver has opted to locate recent art by black artists within a conceptual framework.

Leaving aside the question of why Piper chose this late date to register her objections[iii], is there merit to her claim that African American artists would be better served by inclusion in “multi-ethnic exhibitions”? For an artist of her stature, there is far more cachet in appearing in Documenta or Performa than in an exhibition devoted to African American art history. However, for the younger and less acknowledged artists in Radical Presence, a show of this kind offers an opportunity for their work to be seen in the company of artists who have successfully crossed over to the mainstream, and so to be introduced to audiences that otherwise don’t seek out black artists. By withdrawing, Piper is essentially pulling up her coat tails and leaving the next generation of black performance artists to fight the same battles for recognition anew, without the benefit of her hard-won prominence to direct attention their way.

The question remains, how is it that so many artists are still so marginalized by race, ethnicity, and even gender when many celebrity artists are women and people of color? When Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith are given solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum or the Museum of Modern Art, why is it still necessary to have exhibitions such as the recent Les Papesses in Avignon or institutions like the National Museum of Women in the Arts? To give another example, when Subodh Gupta shows with Hauser & Wirth and Anish Kapoor creates a public sculpture for London costing over 30 million US dollars, why does nearly every presentation of an Indian artist in the United States appear in the context of a “contemporary art from India” exhibition? Do these groupings of artists by demographics rather than technique, subject matter, or formal concerns inadvertently limit the artists’ narratives to their biographies rather than their artistic accomplishments?

Anish Kapoor with engineer Cecil Balmond, Group Arup. ArcelorMittal Orbit, 2012. Steel. 376 feet tall. Olympic Park, London, UK.

Rather than answer these questions—because there is no single answer—let us instead consider why the art world continues to rely on these categories rather than simply represent a diverse spectrum of artists in the majority of exhibitions of any type. Certainly there is a marketing imperative, as shows of women, African Americans, Latinos, or artists from China and India draw audiences whose interest is in regional and social issues as well as those who support the arts. This is cause for concern only because it would seem that ethnicity and gender-specific exhibitions have not yet had a significant effect on the exhibiting or collecting practices of mainstream art institutions in the US. If 30 years of gains made by artists of color are not reflected in the constitution of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, does it stand to reason that the ethnicity exhibition is a space that is separate but not equal?

It also bears questioning whether the audience for these exhibitions is comprised of people who identify with the demographic or nationalist categories on view, or whether these shows are configured to introduce the typical white, upper-income art viewer to a broader scope of art. In either case, it is possible that the category in which the artist is placed is of more concern to the institution than the artwork itself. Artists from marginalized communities struggle to have their work taken on its own merits, free of essentializing rhetoric about the kind of art that people like themselves are expected to make. White, male artists, after all, are rarely if ever described as making white, male art, nor are they consigned to White Male shows (although the majority of shows remain just this). As such, exhibitions based around ethnicity reinforce the notion that whiteness is an absence of race, rather than a racial category itself. This supports the conclusion that racially-marked shows are marked as such for the benefit of white audiences and institutional power players.

J. G. Ballard. The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990 revised and illustrated edition published by RE/Search, San Francisco.

As Sara Ahmed says, “of course whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it. For those who don’t, it is hard not to see whiteness; it even seems everywhere. Seeing whiteness is about living its effects, as effects that allow white bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape, spaces in which black bodies stand out, stand apart, unless they pass, which means passing through space by passing as white.”[iv] If the imperative to define ethnic histories is mandated by ongoing white supremacy in the historical and cultural mainstream, then the ethnicity exhibition operates similarly to the “Atrocity Exhibition” described by J. G. Ballard. Excluded from society and from their own artistic discourse, the asylum-bound artists whose work Ballard describes experience their prophetic visions reduced to amusements for the chattering classes. The artists remain marginalized and dehumanized to the extreme while their creative output is lauded for its raw, unconscious power. Such a condition is opposite to the intention of a curator such as Valerie Cassel Oliver, who seeks to amend the historical record to recognize the myriad contributions of black artists to the history of performance art. Even so, Piper’s response speaks to an unfortunate and ongoing reality of widespread historical marginalization on the basis of race.

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art is on view at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery through December 7, 2013, and at the Studio Museum of Harlem through March 9, 2014.

 #Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

Maren Hassinger performing in Senga Nengudi’s RSVP (1975–77/2012) at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, November 17, 2012. Courtesy of the Artists and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Photo: Max Fields.

Touchstones of the black performance history described by curator Valerie Cassel Oliver include Senga Nengudi’s RSVP (1975), a series of choreographed events she created in collaboration with fellow artist Maren Hassinger in which Hassinger’s body activates sculptures made from nylon stockings manufactured in “black” skin tones. Nengudi’s work operates as an African American Arte Povera in which mundane materials are invested with the experiences of common people, their abjectness an echo of disenfranchisement and poverty. Her medium, stockings, is a material that emulates the skin of black women while offering them an elusive promise of upward mobility and social acceptance. Her sculptures recall the work of Eva Hesse in their pendulous, organic abstract forms, acted upon by gravity so as to be in a constant state of tension. Nengudi rose to national prominence via 2012’s Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 at the UCLA Hammer Museum (which traveled to MoMA PS1). Here, her work is performed on scheduled dates by Hassinger and other dancers. Absent their bodies, as sculpture it is most effective when the viewer has the memory of her more ambitious installations in the earlier exhibition.

Another 1970s black feminist instigator is Adrian Piper, whose Mythic Being (1973) fused questions of Blackness, masculinity, and public space as she impersonated a black man in patrician Cambridge, Massachusetts. This work, which tested boundaries of social anxiety and privilege, was removed from the exhibition at the artist’s request (a circumstance I will skip over here to address in depth in my Hashtags column on December 2). Piper’s intersectional position as a mixed-race woman impersonating a black man gets at the core issue faced by Radical Presence—whether a construct of black performance can hold when the construction of Blackness is understood in its full and messy complexity. For the most part, the exhibition at Grey Art Gallery frames Blackness according to the oppositional politics of identity, establishing a fixed position from which to argue for the significance of black performance art but falling short of a truthful representation of the black experience.

Pope.L performing Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000), The Sculpture Center, New York, 2000. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Lydia Grey.

Pope.L’s Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000), which he re-created for the Grey Art Gallery installation, is an example of this kind of oppositional Blackness in action. The artist spent several days chewing and regurgitating pages of the titular newspaper while perched atop a toilet on an elevated platform, washing the pulp down with milk and ketchup, and expectorating it onto the walls and floor of the gallery. The scatological implications of this action combined with the literal ingestion of Whiteness make this work the clear front-runner for the most confrontational expression of the black experience on view. However, the work’s effectiveness is limited to its shock value, which wears off quickly for an audience accustomed to the extremism of 1980s and ’90s performance art.

Trenton Doyle Hancock performing Devotion (2013), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, January 31, 2013. Courtesy of the Artist and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Photo: Max Fields.

For the most part, this reviewer is restricted to understanding the work in its form as gallery objects, as I was only able to experience one live performance, Trenton Doyle Hancock’s Devotion (2013). In this performance, Hancock appeared blindfolded, wearing headphones, as a larger-than-life presence he calls “the Mound,” who was spoon-fed various colors of Jell-O by a slim, fashionable young white woman. Each serving of Jell-O would be rewarded with a verse of song taken from the spirituals that Hancock learned as a child, which the young assistant would then repeat to an older white woman emerging from within the Mound who would in turn transmit the verse to the audience. Rather than congeal into a transformative experience, the event was bewildering in the way of much de-skilled performance art but with an added racial twist. What was Hancock trying to say by enlisting these two white women of different generations to be his conduits? Did he expect that they would read as extensions of the audience, which was actually largely black and mixed-race? Was he making a comment about the role of white women as go-betweens in the struggle for civil rights? Once the performance was over and it was revealed that the women were an assistant at his gallery and the director of the Grey Art Gallery, the questions persisted. Were these women engaged simply because they were available to Hancock, or because he wished to comment on race relations in the sphere of the visual arts? The foregrounding of their Whiteness in a space devoted to Blackness seemed unlikely to be incidental, although documentation from the performance at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston would suggest that it was. These nagging questions remained inscrutable, and the work offered little by way of insight.

Jean-Ulrick Désert. Negerhosen2000/The Travel Albums, 2003. From a series of 40 digitally printed images, pigmented inks, and pencil on archival paper with mixed media collage. 11.75 x 8.25 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Artists of a younger generation take a more irreverent approach to the question of race. In the photo series Negerhosen2000/The Travel Albums (2003), Jean-Ulrick Désert modeled lederhosen custom-made in a color approximating the tone of white skin at various sites throughout Germany. The artist’s dark skin against the “nude-colored” lederhosen was an inversion of the traditional image of a white-skinned German in black or brown leather. Handwritten notes described the reaction of each individual or group with whom he interacted and took a picture. Some were dismayed by his appearance, others entertained, and a few recognized the social commentary in his actions. Sur Rodney (Sur)’s video Free Advice (July 6, 2008) (2008), a collaboration with Hope Sandrow, shows the artist set up by the side of a rural American highway with a table, an empty chair, and a sign reading “Free Advice.” Occasionally, passers-by stop their cars to take advantage of this opportunity, and Sur makes an effort to dispense his advice with thoughtfulness and respect. The questions can be self-serving, as when a young South Asian American man asks for advice on how to dump his girlfriend without having to feel bad as a consequence. These moments problematize the issue of race relations: People set aside their conditioned mistrust of African American men and lay out their personal baggage for Sur, who then takes up the caretaker role that black Americans have had to maintain at the other end of the social spectrum.

Kalup Linzy takes the queer sensibility of Désert and Sur to a histrionic extreme in Conversations wit de Churen II: All My Churen (2003). Enacting a dramatic narrative in the style of a soap opera or telenovela, Linzy’s multiple personae express desperation, desire, and ambition in the vernacular of southern blacks from the lower socio-economic spectrum. Linzy portrays all the characters in his female-driven narratives, and is especially partial to the archetype of a young woman with little education but big dreams of stardom and romance. While Linzy draws on the experiences of poor southern blacks and the vernacular of working-class serial television in his videos, Hennessy Youngman (Jayson Musson) plays directly to the art world. Embodying a hipster rapper in the vein of Ali G, Musson’s comical videos address art history, contemporary art institutions, and the art market with a racial undercurrent and a sardonic tone. Both artists have been embraced by the art mainstream, leading this reviewer to wonder whether art that is granted permission to transgress by social elites can truly be transgressive.

Ultimately, there are many strong works in the exhibition, but there is little in this survey that is both exceptional and under-recognized. Many of the lesser-known artists are represented with works of moderate accomplishment, while the standouts are generally from well-known names. Given that the contemporary art world has already embraced so many of the leaders of black performance art, it is hard to see why the racial classification is necessary or pertinent. It would be hoped that the much larger second part of the exhibition at the Studio Museum will respond to this question more directly.

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art is on view at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery through December 7, 2013, and at the Studio Museum of Harlem through March 9, 2014.