Howardena Pindell. Carnival at Ostende, 1977; mixed media on canvas; 93 ½ x 117 ¼ in. Courtesy of the Artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

The modest scale of Spelman’s galleries allows for close viewing of Pindell’s canvases—a complete luxury when looking at early paintings such as Carnival at Ostende (1977), where paint and paper cut-out seem to engage in a vital but smooth dance across the uneven layers of surface and tactile difference. Pindell has spoken often of her powerful encounters with the work of Eva Hesse and Rae Morton while she was completing these early works, and one cannot help but make connections between each artist’s own engagement with the fragilities and strengths inherent in their chosen materials.[2] Small gestures seen in the careful assemblage of tiny dots across long horizontal bands subvert the language of minimalism by opening up the vocabulary to something more specific, worked, shaped.

Howardena Pindell. Film Still from Free, White, and 21, 1980; color video with sound. Courtesy of the Artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

Examining the attention and handling brought to bear on these surfaces, one is surprised to remember that much of the discourse surrounding Pindell’s work and practice revolves around her “violent” tactics and her harnessing of “black rage.” This “rage” is powerfully present, and punctures the exhibition like a blast in the side—most specifically Pindell’s powerful video work from 1980, Free, White, and 21, in which the artist recounts for the camera racism she has experienced throughout her life (from childhood to working professional), and then switches into the guise of a blonde white woman who reprimands Pindell for her paranoia and ungratefulness. Assured in vocal tone and gaze, Pindell confronts her (white) audience, pressing them into a space of discomfort that leaves little room for anyone to overlook their complicity in the ways in which society manages the behaviors of black minorities. Whether through paint or video, Pindell squeezes the spatial and temporal attributes of aesthetic experience, and finds new ways to disorganize, or at times even suffocate, the space of aesthetic contemplation.

Howardena Pindell. Untitled, 1975; mixed media on board; 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

While there is no doubt that Pindell’s practice embodies the traumatic collective and personal histories of African American life—the rough surfaces and undulating textures seem to animate the rhythms of rupture and chaos that have long structured black experience—one cannot ignore the range of other possibilities that the rich surfaces of these early works express so profoundly. Why must critics continually pin Pindell’s work to expressions of anger and grotesqueness—why is there no space for celebration or joy?[3] Looking at Pindell’s careful handiwork and the breathtaking consistencies drawn up out of the foundations of an untitled work from 1975, it seems right to align these pictures with the utopian concerns of craft traditions, processes built on mending fragments, embroidering flourishes, and suturing gaps with care that only human touch can provide. Rage not only consists of explosive reaction, but also gathers within itself a strength to overcome systems that privilege white fear over black sorrow. Think back to Lauryn Hill’s powerful anthem of black rage: “Black rage is founded on blatant denial/Squeezed economics, subsistent survival/Deafening silence and social control/Black rage is founded on wounds of the soul.” [4] Viewing Pindell’s beautiful accumulations of crinkled confetti—canvases that seem to breathe and sigh according to your proximity to them—it is clear that these works mark more than an aesthetic exercise. They are homages to a wounded soul—pictures caught in tension between celebration and chaos, spatial coverings for a community living in permanent conflict with the world around it.

Howardena Pindell is on view at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta through December 5, 2015.

[1] The writing of this piece is in many ways indebted to my conversation with the director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Dr. Andrea Brownlee. I thank her for her considerate responses to all my questions and comments about Pindell’s work and the discourse that surrounds her practice.

[2] See Pindell’s interview with Lynn Hershman from May 9, 2006, for Women Art Revolution!. The transcript of this interview can be accessed here: https://lib.stanford.edu/women-art-revolution/transcript-interview-howardena-pindell

[3] See John Yau’s review, “The Beauty of Howardena Pindell’s Rage,” for Hyperallergenic, published May 11, 2015: http://hyperallergic.com/125403/the-beauty-of-howardena-pindells-rage.

[4] Lauryn Hill’s lyrics were culled from the powerful article by the writer and philosopher Myisha Cherry’s entitled “Holla If You Hear Me: Baltimore, Riots, and Black Rage,” for the Huffington Post, published May 1, 2015: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/myisha-cherry/baltimore-riots-and-black-rage_b_7160916.html

Daly Barnett. JEF+KEV//SIM, 2014 (still); performance; 40:00. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Joelle Ballam-Schwan.

In JEF+KEV//SIM, Barnett conjures three personas: Jeff, a saltwater aquarium enthusiast (who may also be Jeffrey Dahmer); Simon, a meth-addict soothsayer wired into the cybernetic subconscious; and Kevin, an overgrown child of privilege leeching a living in the empty mansion of his dead family. Kevin is also the only victim that serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer let go free. Barnett’s Kevin is actually based on the true story of one of Dahmer’s first abductions, and it evokes the oft-hushed queer aspects of the Dahmer narrative. The horror of Kevin’s near miss plays on cultural fears about the dangers of cruising, and Barnett’s Kevin lives under the thumb of this trauma, laughing it off even as it seeps into the texture of his other sexual encounters, festering like the described rotting fruit on the kitchen counter of his dead parents’ mansion.

Barnett’s performance successfully implements the refined tools of traditional theater (including the power of camp, of character, and the allure of a compelling story), but the most significant aspect of her “play” from a theoretical standpoint lies within two particular actions that fissure the fiction of his storytelling. “Simon,” the meth prophet, looms atop a red square sigil, terrifyingly obscured behind a cloth gimp mask, delivering diatribes about the blazing, apocalyptic landscape of a queer dystopia. During one such tirade, Barnett forces a viewer to stand on his sigil and charge an unlit match with energy and “an intention.” During a commercial for Barnett’s premiere performance staged at The Bureau for General Services Queer Division in August, the participant lights the match and Barnett—we are suddenly snapped into awareness that it is Barnett herself who performs the action—stubs it out on her own flesh. At the performance’s full premiere at United Solo Theatre Festival, the participant’s match remains unlit and Barnett eats it. The next move is gross, fetishistic shock value: as Simon offers up a prayer in ritualistic homage to self-destruction and the ingestion of one’s own filth, one’s own trauma, the character pisses in a glass and drinks his own urine.

Curtain call from JEF+KEV//SIM, 2014; Left: performer Daly Barnett, Right: sound designer Mehron Abdollmohammadi. Courtesy of the Artist and Mehron Abdollmohammadi. Photo: Joelle Ballam-Schwan.

By forcing us to uncomfortably witness these abject affronts to the performer’s body, Barnett transfers the trauma of her characters onto her own flesh. These actions, surrounded on either side by Kevin’s self-deprecating admissions and his humorously recounted tale of Dahmer’s attempt to pick him up at a gay bar, shocks us out of the alternate reality of fiction. Faced with the abjection of Barnett’s appetite for destruction, what she willfully does to his own body to upend her narrative, we are forced to know that the fantasy lives in the present tense. The trauma to which Barnett alludes—one of secrecy, depravity, mortality, and the complicated and terrifying search for desire with little more than a match in the dark—takes place not in an adjacent fiction but rather happens in our world, right now, as we watch it.

JEF+KEV//SIM was performed on Sunday, September 21, 2014, at United Solo Theatre Festival in New York, NY.