Glenn Ligon, Love and Theft

Gallery walking in Memphis can be a depressing experience, filled with cynical thoughts of paintings as suburban sprawl wallpaper: unchallenging landscapes, fake rachenburg, and decorative Demask floral pattern. However, one gallery lives up to its (otherwise) presumptuous title, the Powerhouse located in the South Main district downtown.

In Glenn Ligon’s Love and Theft, I feel privileged to be viewing such an important work by this artist, but also because of the location in Memphis it feels like it existing in the historical context. On the first floor is an installation of black and white wallpaper and gold canvases containing Richard Pryor jokes. On a conceptual level, the idea is interesting because Pryor’s Black Dick Jokes are in the form of long, enthusiastic stories, and here we are reading a few fetish cheap-spay-can-gold rebirths. In Kobena Mercer’s essay, Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary, she features Ligon’s recreation (1988) of the I AM MAN protest sign of the late sixties. However some of her questions that are present in this essay when she is reacting to Jean Genet’s Black panther speech seem to resonate with my own question with that were raised with the exhibition:

“Under what conditions does eroticism mingle with political solidarity? When does it produce an effect of empowerment? And when does it produce an effect of disempowerment? When does identification imply objectification, and when does it imply equality? I am intrigued by the ambivalent but quite happy coexistence of the fetishized big black dick beneath the satin trousers and the ethical equivalence in the struggle for post colonial subjectivity… The death of the author doesn’t necessarily mean mourning and melancholia, but, rather, mobilizing a commitment to counter-memory.”

Kobena Mercer
Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary
Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America


When I walked downstairs I saw a flickering neon AMERICA confronting the room about twelve feet from the floor of the industrial building. Outside of the window, our red white and blue is waving outside, self-doubting in the foreboding Memphis weather. Conveniently, and to my delight, I was experiencing this installation with a gentleman who helped install it. And, apparently, the fag was a happy accident, but if it wasn’t outside Ligon was going to bring a flag inside. Around the corner was a listening station of Martin Luther King and other auditory politically historical audio enhancements.

I don't think we can ever convulsively answer Mercer's questions, even a decade later. But the greatest thing about the show is that it made you question, and leaves you wanting to know more, to understand the greater complexity of race relations in Americas past. The history is long, and complex but this show is like the writing of Hemingway: we are only given the tip of the iceberg, the rest is under the water ready to be discussed, and discovered. But to continue the analogy, one wonders if the passage of time has a global warming effect on the "iceberg": is the message diluted because of our exposer, are we desensitized? And for the first time, I would like to announce: that the effect of global warming has no effect on the timeliness of race relations in America.

High Society, C. Brown

Writhing bodies, swirling paint, gargantuan size, and intrusive color are just a few things we expect from a Brown painting. But in High Society, I am reminded of a joke: the Aristocrats. It's a sort of comedian's joke, said to one another as a sort of a "warm-up" before sets. Its about a family showing their act to a talent scout, and the result in bestiality , urine, incestuous pornographic sex, and probably some blood. at the end of the repulsive act, they announce the title of the family trope: The Aristocrats. High Society is in the same branch of social commentary, the upper class as barbaric and uncouth despite the the fact that they are fashionably clad in their top hats.

Snap Judgments: Desouza Focus

This exhibition was organized by the International Center for Photography, which is both a school of photography, and a museum. The show includes over 200 works and exhibits 35 different artists from dealing with African themes. The result was a mix of fashion, collective work, installation, video, but mostly large scale photography.

Because the aesthetic and conceptual angels varied so much between each artist, it was a bit overwhelming. I read all the information on the wall, and yet it was difficult to navigate. All the artists are of considerable fame, according to their resumes, and they all deal with the same continent. However, the transitions weren't smooth, or intentionally disruptive. Fashion photography was in the same room as feminist issues, which was cause for pause, while memory/time based work was along side work about over populated cities.

After some thought, I though it was best to focus on one particularly compelling series, that of Allan Desouza. Allan Desouza's resume is lengthy and impressive, he has had numerous literary works, fiction and nonfiction, published as well as fifteen years of exhibitions. His work displayed here represent a sample from his group of works call the Lost Pictures, where he uses technique to further the content and aesthetic of these "found" pictures.

Perhaps it’s my bias as a painter, but the surface quality of these forced you to stop, and look. It is not apparent what was done with these at the beginning; I detected some digital tampering, which made my heart sink. This is an example of what photographs can really be: frozen memories, or reminders of the absence of memory, and how we live with that, how we deal with the past.

Desouza used photographs that had been taken by his father during his childhood in Kenya. He used a scanned copy of the photographs and taped them within private places in his own home in Los Angeles: the kitchen, the bathroom, so on. Hair, food and other remnants of daily activity accumulated, creating the surface on these enlarged prints. What I don’t understand is the need to digitally work the photographs. Personally, that construes the authenticity of the experience, both on our part and on the artists.

WHITNEY (Bi) 2008

"The Biennial certainly matters to its principal curators, the Whitney's Henriette Huldisch and Shamim Momin, who, whatever critical hits they may take, join a small professional circle of people privileged to have cut very publicly their own cross section of contemporary visual culture. But mention the Whitney Biennial to a critic, dealer, collector or a curator from another institution, and the sighing and rolling of eyes will begin.

Bad memories of Biennials past account for some such responses, as must a hardening conviction of the futility of the program's brief to take a snapshot of art production now, or of the national prospect refracted through recent art, or ... something."

Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic

Unfortunately, I did not have the luxury to partake in all the controversy of the Whitney show. But I think it is perhaps more interesting to engage with the exhibition from a distance. Sitting in Memphis, looking at the images from a computer screen. To Whitney's credit, they included eleven two minute videos of the artist with the work, speaking accordingly. (available for free, on iTunes.)

Now, obviously this is no surrogate for real engagement, we have to still be aware that these videos are produced by the museum, and perhaps understand the function of them. As interesting as it could be to try and understand the performance of these exhibitions, that are largely viewed like Deb Balls for the art set: a fantastic display of talent, and the artists announcement into The Society.

Perhaps its becasue I am distanced from the art market, I am still in school, my dreams have not met reality as of yet. But, I may have to disagree with the cynical nature of criticism when pointed at these shows, a few of the artists are indeed dong challenging work. Others, like New York's esteemed Jerry Saltz cleaning observed:

"At the Whitney, 2008 is the year of the Art School Biennial. Not because the art in the new Biennial is immature or because the artists all went to art school—although I bet they did—but because it centers on a very narrow slice of highly educated artistic activity and features a lot of very thought-out, extremely self-conscious, carefully pieced-together installations, sculpture, and earnestly political art. These works often resemble architectural fragments, customized found objects, ersatz modernist monuments, Home Depot displays, graphic design, or magazine layouts, and the resultant assemblage-college aesthetic, while compelling in the hands of some, is completely beholden to ideas taught in hip academies. It’s the style du jour right now."

In fact, two of the artists make work that directly references the gallery experience, one with a literal white cube where he holds therapy sessions inside, another with a coy play on the salon style presentation as a way to depict her studio. I beg to argue that these ideas are not ground breaking in any form, based on the fact that I, a relatively novice character in the Art World, have had similar ways of thinking about representation.

Beyond that however, is something that as a painter, I find remarkably ironic. The shows lack of painting is nothing new, in fact it is expected. Installation and video are more sexy, but lets look at the presence of the cube. Three the Eleven chosen to be in the whitney focus are all dealing with the idea to represent their concept. Perhaps its just me, but that basically just painting cubed.

Mary Heilmann: "The Painter's Painter"

Yellow wave, 2007
Armoy show 2008 (right)
surfing on acid, 2005
"To Be Someone" retrospective (left)


There are several suspicious ways to understand the reason for Mary Heilmann's sudden presence on white walls. In 2007, she had her 1st retrospective starting at the Orange Country Museum of Art, and in November of 2007 she was simultaneously featured on the cover of both Artforum and in Art in America, now she is one of the only painters present in both the Armory Show and the Whitney Biennial.

The articles in both Artforum and Art in America, are unapologetically pandering to this idea of Heilmann as some survivor in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, or a platform to infer that painting as an archaic medium. To effect that the collective tone is: "Look at this nice womens paintings! they are so pretty, and playful!" It's almost like they are talking about a forgotten grandmother's "Sunday" painting.

Unfortunately, the atmosphere is far more elevated: this is a blatant example of white liberal guilt: a women who was working in a male dominated tradition was ignored by the art society. She is an educated women (MFA from Berkeley), who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. After her MFA in 1969, she moved to New York, after Rothko's suicide, after Agnes martin left for New Mexico, and when the AbEx was beginning to lose its cool. Too late. Missed the boat. Or, no. Wait a second... she must have be overlooked becasue she was a women, not because she makes decorative saccharine, and unoriginal work. That isn't fair, let's look at this through a larger lens. She has consistently been making saccharine, rip-offs for some some thirty odd years.

What I am trying to get at is the proverbial elephant in the room, her work is Rothko surfing on acid! I don't know if there is a reason why Artforum's contributor was a Berkeley Professor, but honestly, my guess is that they did the drug together in the sixties. These paintings serve a a nice reminder of the days when you "fighting the good fight", right Anne?

I was angry went back in November about the shameless promotion of this women, and I have a suspicion its not in her best interest. I have read interviews with Mary, and she appears to be down to earth and completely pleasant. Why are they exploiting this person? Is it because they need to put a women of the same (basic) generation as the dominant males in this aesthetic? I couldn't responsibly assert this beyond an assumption.
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Jedediah Caesar: the cube

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the cube, part two