5/15/2017 Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

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July 30, 2015
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Contemporary Art The newsletter of the
Exhibition Reviews
Exh. cat. Houston: Contemporary Art Museum Houston, College Art Association
2013. 144 pp.; 50 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95
Essays (9781933619385) Review Categories
Exhibition schedule: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston,
Recent Books in the Arts
Houston, November 17, 2012–February 16, 2013; Grey Art
Gallery, New York University, New York, September 10–
Dissertations December 7, 2013; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York,
November 14, 2013–March 9, 2014; Walker Art Center,
Supporters Minneapolis, July 24, 2014–January 4, 2015

Diane Mullin

View CAA Journals CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2015.90

Visit the CAA Website Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and presented by
Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, Radical
Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art
opened at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in a
festival­like manner and included two densely
installed museum galleries and a plethora of
performances presented in the sculpture garden.
Girl (Chitra Ganesh and Simone Leigh).
At the Walker, Radical Presence featured thirty­six
My dreams, my works must wait till
after hell . . . (2011). Digital video. artists—one less than the original showing in
7:14 minutes. Courtesy the artists. Houston due to conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s
public and controversial self­removal from the
exhibition. Predominantly hashed out during the New York leg of the exhibition’s tour,
not much beyond posting the ARTnews article on the subject was made of the missing
Piper in the Twin Cities venue.

From Jamal Cyrus’s frying of a tenor saxophone on the field’s patio and the
unexpectedly posthumous performance of Terry Adkins’s Last Trumpet (1995) to
Trenton Doyle Hancock’s meditative Mound (Devotion, 2013) in the Walker’s Cargill
Lounge and Coco Fusco’s lecture/performance Observations of Predation in Humans: A
Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist (2013–present) in the guise of Dr. Zira, the
chimpanzee psychologist who studies humans in the original Planet of the Apes film
(1968), in the Walker Cinema, live performances spanned the duration of the exhibition
and the space of the institution. Benjamin Patterson reengaged his 1962 Pond in the
gallery where its remnants, proxies, and didactic explanation were installed. Theaster
Gates’s See, Sit, Sup, Sing: Holding Court (2012) was centrally located in the exhibition
and fully utilized by the Walker throughout, bringing a variety of guests to the table to
hold court, including high school students, choreographers, and Minneapolis U.S.
Representative Keith Ellison, who is African American and a Muslim.

The exhibition’s introductory text stated the project’s goals and ambitions, which were
wide­ranging and somewhat fraught (or charged) with loose ends. Noting elsewhere
that she was surprised and dismayed that no full history of the subject had yet been
presented, Cassel Oliver identified the endeavor as a survey of the subject of black
performance in the field of visual art over the last half century. The text was careful to
assert that the work separates itself from the more abundant and popular forms of
black performance such as minstrelsy, pop music, and improvisational dance, while
often referencing them. The heart of the exhibition’s introductory text, however, speaks
to the common strains that bind the broad, intergenerational swath of artists on view:

Although the artists span three different generations, they share a number of
approaches. Many make durational works that unfold over several hours or even
days. Some employ everyday, transitory materials such as newspapers, food,
snow, and bodily fluids. Others intervene into public spaces, from the street to
the Internet, to spark interactions between viewer and performer that may
range from confrontational to humorous, politically motivated to mystical. Some

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5/15/2017 Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art
of the artists have collaborated with one another; others make direct reference
to the work of earlier generations. Seen together, the works enable us to trace
lines of influence.

Since the approaches mentioned here are the same as those of the most enduring and
challenging performance art of the last half century, this statement does not single out
or sequester the uniqueness of the black artists’ contribution to that history, but instead
places the heretofore generally missing (from art history, that is) figure of the black
artist squarely in the game. Cassel Oliver does not shut down the notion that there may
in fact be a distinct black voice to be heard and mined, but she does not carefully define
or analyze it, leaving her first shot across the bow one of unearthing what she shows to
have been a burial of the living.

The exhibition’s organizing thesis that art criticism and art history unfairly passed over
a particular group of individuals based on skin color and cultural affiliation looks much
like the early feminist strategy of showcasing the achievements of women artists
seemingly lost to history. It was this exhibition strategy that ultimately precipitated
Piper’s rejection of the project. In her letter requesting removal she suggested that a
better strategy would have been a “multi­ethnic exhibition” that would provide the “rare
opportunity to measure directly the groundbreaking achievements of African American
artists against those of their peers in ‘the art world at large’” (Robin Cembalest, “Adrian
Piper Pulls Out of Black Performance­Art Show, ARTnews [October 25, 2013]:
http://www.artnews.com/2013/10/25/piper­pulls­out­of­black­performance­art­show/).
To this Cassel Oliver responded, in part: “It is my sincere hope that exhibitions such as
Radical Presence can one day prove a conceptual game­changer” (ibid.). It is my
contention that Radical Presence may indeed, in the end, be a game changer, though
perhaps not exactly in the manners intended.

The “radical” in Radical Presence would seem to refer to both blackness and
performance. As such, the viewer is presented with an assertive dose of corrective in
the form of re­presenting the black artist within the history of performance art and also
a critical strategy for the presentation of performance in the museum setting—a topic
Cassel Oliver herself addresses in the exhibition’s introductory wall text. The text posits,
“both the live events and the art objects call attention to the possibilities and limitations
of the active body, and the installations reflect some of the myriad ways in which
museums have exhibited this ephemeral medium.” While not calling for a new
presentation strategy per se, this mention at the very least makes material the issue of
the possibilities and limitations of the museum corpus for the presentation of
performance art, a topic one hopes will be pondered more by curators now and going
forward. Seriously addressing this question, even if seemingly an internal professional
discourse, could precipitate an important “game changer” in the presentation of
performance.

In her noted text Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004), Michelle M. Wright posits that the modern idea of
blackness as a separate consciousness was invented in nineteenth­century
Enlightenment discourse. That discourse constructed a unity out of the diverse field that
makes up the African diaspora and construed it as absolute other to white Western
identity as understood by that culture. Significantly, the writers of this discourse were
Western white men—key of which for Wright are Thomas Jefferson, G. W. F. Hegel, and
Count Arthur de Gobineau. Wright asserts that there is a lineage of black voices that
offered a true counter discourse to white Enlightenment versions of black
consciousness, including thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Léopold
Sédar Senghor, and Frantz Fanon who assertively critiqued the dominant discourse’s
construction of black identity while concurrently assuming a place at its tables. While
acknowledging the power and value of this black counter discourse, Wright argues that
it ultimately, in keeping with the culture to which it sought entrance, defined the center
of black consciousness as male and nationalist.

Wright’s model can illuminate much of the work by men in Radical Presence. With its
spectacular offensiveness, Pope.L’s ingestion and regurgitation of the Wall Street
Journal, for instance, is an example par excellence of such coopting and critiquing of the
dominant discourse. Literally eating the master’s words and then spewing them back at
him (in the metaphorical form of the average museumgoer) is shocking in its
visceralness and dark humor. Although not noted, one thinks of Piero Manzoni canning
his own waste or John Latham eating and spitting out Clement Greenberg’s Art and
Culture. Yet these cases seem tidy compared to the raucous and raunchy action
performed by Pope.L—even the traces left behind in the gallery reek of it—if not
literally, certainly metaphorically. Jayson Musson also digests and spits back current art
theory through his invented persona, Hennessy Youngman. The persona’s name
references the comic, Henny Youngman, along with hip­hop culture’s liquor of choice:
cognac.

This, in turn, prompts the question: why are there so few women in Radical Presence?
Even with Piper included, the ratio is 3:1, 27 men to 9 women. Is this reflective of the
actual field? If so, how should we approach that history? Is this meant to announce a
real lack of presence? If so, what strategy is offered for that factual void? If not, then
why is there such a paltry tally? Across the field of female participants, there is a play
with uncertainty and an uneasiness around the issue of identity, articulated through

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5/15/2017 Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art
both savvy humor—think Fusco as Dr. Zira, the post­human ape human researcher, and
Lorraine O’Grady’s museum­ and gallery­crashing Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83)—
and more serious reflections such as Fusco’s mock documentaries a/k/a Mrs. George
Gilbert (2004) and Sightings (2004), which hinge on real­life mistaken identity cases,
and Maren Hassinger’s Women’s Work (2006). Possibly one of the most perplexing and
compelling works in the exhibition, Girl’s My dreams, my works must wait till after hell .
. . (2011), offers a quiet, slow video in which very little happens over the course of
seven minutes. The larger­than­life­size projection is a straight and fixed anterior shot
of a woman’s bare torso with her head buried in rocks. Throughout, the woman’s chest,
seen from behind, rises and falls with a steady, consistent breath. The image of the
buried head is at once startling and provocative. A reference to a classic black trope,
according to Wright—the mask/veil? Or maybe this is an image of someone buried alive.

Produced by a pair of collaborating artists, Chitra Ganesh and Simone Leigh, neither of
whom is predominantly a performance artist, this newer work’s presence in the show—a
self­proclaimed survey of the field—raises a number of important questions. These
include what constitutes a contemporary survey, what are the parameters of
performance art, and what in the end can the viewer make of the question of black
performance art? While such overarching concerns lurk, the very fact that they have
been posed by Radical Presence can be seen as a triumph. Now that this groundwork
has been laid, one hopes there will be more curatorial and scholarly work on the
exhibition’s subject resulting in game­changing ideas that might satisfy Cassel Oliver,
Piper, and so many more.

Diane Mullin
Senior Curator, Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota

Please send comments about this review to [email protected].

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