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ART

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Faith Finggold's Atlanta: Style and subject cry out an angry mourning.

FRED W. MCDARRAH

Color Scheming

By Lucy R. Lippard

Racism takes two main routes in the art world. The first is outright bigotry, as in the indefensible "Nigger Drawings" show. (I'm writing this on the anniversary of the lockout of black and white protesters from Artists' Space.) The second is a not-so-simple exclusion-as when museums don't consider third-world art "fine art," but ethnography. Both routes raise cries of censorship as well as complex questions about selection, boycott, and First Amendment rights.
Minority art groups over the years have been torn between responding to the antagonistic or the exclusive manifestations of racism-to hostility or to omission. One view holds that the exposure of any kind of art by minority artists is a political act. The other-not necessarily contradictory-holds that the art itself should be critical about the situation. Inherent in these choices are others: should minority groups focus on art or on politics? Should minority exhibition spaces be separatist sanctuaries, tenderly nurturing endangered cultures? Or should they forgo "ghettoization" and risk demanding their share of the status-and-money-pie-and of the co-optation?
These are in fact false options, imposed by the dichotomy that governs our cultural expectations. They prolong the competition fostered by the current system of getting art seen, which is grounded in fundamental racism. Rasheed Araeen of London's Black Phoenix (in a broadside headed "No Liberal Sympathies, Please!"), observes angrily how in Britain, as in the U.S.:

"It is commonly believed that the predicament of the black artist is entirely due to the failure of the individual who is from a different socio-cultural background and who has not come to terms with the values of this industrial/capitalist society. But can one really explain this 'failure' without considering the socio-economic and in fact ideological context within which this 'failure' occurs, and particularly when we don't even know what actually has been produced by the black artist?"

Minority art has to be seen to be understood at all, and funding, of course, is a decisive factor. As artist Janet Henry has pointed out, minority art groups "have been asked to jump through hoop after hoop in the name of quality, cost efficiency, good management, accountability, and are still given peanuts with which they're supposed to accomplish" everything the white groups do with "twice the panache." Richard Goldstein's account of NYSCA funding [Artbeat, Voice, April 2, 1979] was an eyeopener. In 1978-79, "three leading spaces for minority artists received $18,500 for exhibition from NYSCA's Visual Arts Services budget; for its various programs Artists Space got $74,000." While these figures don't give the whole picture, they don't lie either, and the wounds will get deeper when Reagan's and Koch's cuts go into effect.
All this to provide a framework through which to look at a curious new genre of exhibition which is, actually, not new and should not be considered curious-the "mixed-but-mostly-third-world" group show which casually combines styles, levels of development, political consciousness, and skin colors. The function of such shows is simply integration, or perhaps reverse integration. The mainstream art world having failed to welcome third-world artists, some minority groups have taken up the challenge, along with a few mixed groups like JAM, Cayman, the Alternative Museum, Fashion Moda and ABC NoRio. The New Museum's "Events-Artists Invite Artists" last month paralleled the larger "Voices Expressing What Is" at Westbeth, organized by the AARA. And currently, there is the Kenkeleba House's "Installations in the Five Elements," selected by Camille Billops.
The "Elements" show is not on the surface "political," though it is difficult even to get to the gallery without strong emotions; Kenkeleba House is located deep in one of Manhattan's East Side war zones. On the other hand, the show is not apolitical either. The 24 participants are all women; the majority are women of color; and the theme is incorporative rather than neutralizing. Most of the artists made pieces specifically for the show, adapting personal styles to new content. Betty Blayton's Zero Sum Game... Return is a "black hole" of fabric stiped with bursting rays of multicolored metallic type, garish and ferociously beautiful. Vivian Browne's double-vision drawing repeats lyrical imagery on three near-transparent fabric hangings in front of panels. Tomi Arai's Winter/Spring, modeled on the Japanese tokonoma, an alcove for scrolls and flower arrangements, isolates architecture as sculpture. Zarina's tender brown abstraction is simply captioned "I whispered to the earth." Diane Hunt's Written Falls is a vertical, near-abstract photo scroll of a rocky riverbed, seen aerially to expose the female forms in nature. Camille Billops's photo-series, The Ashing of a Bird, combines urban violence with magic and chemical mystery. I also liked Sandra Payne's sharply graphic "bland hand" collage, Jeannie Black's photos of childbirth, and Janey Washburn's scary I Hate my Mother; I'm Afraid of my Rage.
I hope this gives some sense of the variety involved. The three pieces that most moved me had nothing else in common. Virginia Jaramillo's abstract three-panel piece "on metal" is quite literally that-hard, shiny, a powerful fusion of medium and metaphor. Kazuko gently energized her tiny room with an erratic border of twigs surrounding a circular floor piece of branches, bound together in a ritual process. Faith Ringgold's Atlanta in rows of stylized fabric dolls tagged to identify each one as a murdered child, overseen by a weeping couple, draped in green ribbons. ('Atlanta is more horrible than anything that's happened to us since slavery," she writes.) The heads are wrapped stones (earth); the bodies are metal cans filled with newspaper accounts of their deaths; they stand on a wood shelf; fire is represented by lighted candles on a window-sill altar. Ringgold has long dealt with this difficult synthesis of emotionally loaded subject matter and a style verging on cuteness; this piece particularly succeeds in making its contents felt.
Atlanta is not an easy subject. Howardena Pindell (in the AARA show), in her collage printing The American Way, made a formally forceful statement on violent disenfranchisement by scattering the disembodied children's heads upside down on a white field. Out at SUNY Old Westbury last month, there was a devastating Atlanta installation by David Hammons, in "Spaces V" (Hammons, Charles Abramson, and Jorge Rodriguez)-one of the most dynamic shows I've seen in a long time, because the quite different artists struck a unique note between individual and collaborative work, flowing in and out of each other's territories with images and ideas that allowed each to be himself, as well as the others. Hammons' piece was a semi-urban vacant lot in winter-dead leaves, branches, trash, and children's clothes tramped into the underbrush. It sounds obvious, but it was haunting, like a photograph come to life-real and unreal, distant and too close, subtle and unrelentingly critical.
During the "N----- Drawings" controversy, a group of white critics accused the protesters of "exploiting this sensitive issue as a means of attracting attention." Damn right. Another white critic said "It's damaging to think about political issues and not the work." Damn wrong. A case in point being the press coverage of Mike Glier's passionately political show on the theme of White Male Power that just ended at Annina Nosei. It was seen in the context of apolitical New Wave art and thereby deprived of much of its impact. Even white male artists can suffer from the kind of "media insensitivity" that can totally whiteout a third-world artist's intent.
Art could be a decisive tool for unlearning racism, given its fusion of individual and social experience. Yet it is difficult to overcome cultural differences and form coalitions when white artists are still saying things like: "I don't think people won't show blacks because they're black, but because they don't do interesting work. It's like women. Women happen to be inferior artists to men and it's the same thing with blacks. They happen to be better at peddling dope."(Quoted in the Voice, March 31, 1980). Access to the media is a major issue. As Richie Perez of the Committee Against Fort Apache has observed about the lack of positive images of third-world people in the mass media, "they don't call it censorship,, they call it 'nobody-is-interested.' Freedom of speech is meaningless unless you have the ability to have people hear you." Linda Bryant, director of JAM, talks about the "selective censorship" (usually called curating") that "prevents me as a minority from defining myself effectively and within the larger context of this society."
If the idea is to leave the selecting to those already in power, even boycotting becomes tabu. I can't get into the whole issue here, but I did want to make the point that while the manifestations of censorship-before-the fact may be different in the mass media and in the "fine arts," the ramifications are the same. Inaccessibility to exhibition space or to the media is, in effect, a denial of freedom of speech which should be protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools because they violated the 14th Amendment by generating among children "a feeling of inferiority ... that may affect their minds and hearts in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Art seems to fall between these two freedoms. Art is not separate from the rest of life, so this applies equally to artists' lives. As Hentoff, who does not agree with me, said in these pages two weeks ago about the lack of press coverage of third-world concerns: "That we remain two nations is due at least as much to the press as to those in political power; ... Even if some journalists wear a touch of green these days for the dead in Atlanta, it don't make no difference in what we print about where we are."
OK. Mea culpa. But you can't work politically out of guilt. And as Ad Reinhardt said, "Actions speak louder than voids." Go see Candace Hill-Montgomery's performance-Teamwork the American Way-at Franklin Furnace, Thursday, April 23, and continue the dialogue, (Kenkeleba House, 214 East 2nd Street at Avenue B; Friday-Saturday, through June 14)

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VOICE APRIL 22-28, 1981