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Race results
‘The Space Between’ comes out on top at the Davis Museum
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

" The Space Between: Artists Engaging Race and Syncretism "
At the Davis Museum, Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, through June 8

We think of the African diaspora — the dispersal of African peoples to the New World created by centuries of slave trading — in ways different from the Irish diaspora or the Jewish or the Armenian. But the reason we think of the African diaspora as different has never struck me as being rooted in slavery per se. In terms of mortality rate, brutal impoverishment, and outright killing, the terms of emigration to our hemisphere for all those groups over the last centuries is probably on a par — if systemic, cultural cruelties can ever be equated.

No, what’s different about the African diaspora is what happened when African people got here. The legacy of racism, which is alive and well in 2003, is a function of the fact that the children of slaves stand out visually from the Europeans they were made to live among. The grandchild of the potato famine or the Warsaw Ghetto or the 1915 genocide can, with time, forget where he or she came from. White people who issue from destitution can pass; black people can’t.

Black artists in the United States — from colonial times to our own, from Phillis Wheatley to Kara Walker — frequently have taken as the subject of their work their continued alienation and disenfranchisement. That’s especially true of black musicians (it’s practically a definition of blues and jazz — think Louis Armstrong playing " Why Am I So Black and Blue " ), but it also applies to visual and literary artists. In figurative painting or collage (e.g., Jacob Lawrence or Romare Beardon), in dance (Bill " Bojangles " Robinson), in drama (Lorraine Hansberry), and in the novel (James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison), racial identity is often an ineluctable part of the æsthetic.

" The Space Between, " the current exhibit in the Davis Museum at Wellesley College (with its unfortunate subtitle, " Artists Engaging Race and Syncretism " — syncretism referring to the reconciliation of opposing principles), takes on the irony and pain and importance and even humor of what it means to be black in a white society. The show is, by turns, arresting, heartbreaking, eye-opening, and funny.

The videos are among the highlights (if one can speak of highlights when everything shines), beginning with South African artist Bernadette Searle’s gently shocking 2001 work Snow White. Searle sits formal yet naked, back perpendicular to the floor, derriere on her heels, knees extended straight ahead; if she were wearing clothes, you’d think she was praying. The camera is angled slightly above her head, so that the harsh light shining on her in the otherwise black, empty space makes her read like a specimen or a planet, something at the far end of a scope. Her only movement besides breathing is to blink, which she’s made to do often, since along with the white light that falls on her from overhead there’s a steady downpour of white flour. Searle is a big-boned, broad-shouldered, thickly set (not a euphemism for fat) black woman, so to watch her getting steadily dusted is like watching a monument being assaulted.

The tension is palpable, and it’s made even greater since she never moves. She sits for what feels like a very long time; the flour cakes up on her shoulders and breasts and legs. Gradually it circles her like a fitted carpet, and then suddenly the hushed sound of its sifting gives way to hard, raucous noise as water begins to rain on her as steadily as the flour had. She remains motionless but for her breathing and her eyes. Eventually the water pools in the flour she’s surrounded by, and then without warning she leans forward — deliberate, expressionless, resigned — and begins rhythmically folding the flour and water together. She’s kneading — turning the stuff of her mortification into bread. Watching Snow White through its three phases made me think of what it would be like to see the Sphinx shake itself off after a sandstorm; the perfectly natural registers as totally unexpected.

It’s hard to imagine a video less like Snow White than American-born Paul Vanouse’s The Relative Velocity Inscription Device. Where Searle is direct, iconic, and earnest, Vanouse is indirect to the point of abstraction, cartoonish and sarcastic. And video is just the beginning of his installation — it more closely resembles a crazy high-tech medical monitor.

Step into Vanouse’s darkened chamber and you’ll see a floor-length set of bubbling, lighted, whirring instruments. Projected onto the wall above them is a most unusual design in light: a stationary elliptical running track is positioned between two documentary films that appear to chart some medical procedures. Images of skin and blood and equipment come and go randomly. The track, however, is where the real action is: beneath four different labels ( " mother, " " father, " " sister, " " brother " ), faceless, undifferentiated cartoon figures run in place.

Eventually it hits you that the entire set-up is actually an elaborate pun on the word " race " — race as a fictive biological construct (the faux documentaries and Rube Goldberg instruments relate to the artist’s so-called mixed-race DNA) and race as a competitive sport. Suddenly the homonym seems a lot less accidental: race as a social construct has its own winners and losers, whereas the sport of running has become an emblem of biological differences reflected in ethnicity. But Vanouse’s elaborate installation delivers far more than a minor linguistic epiphany. I came away from the work with a sense of mystery and also the discovery that race means both more and less than I thought it did.

I had another favorite in the show, four etchings by Glen Ligon in which he subjects printed language — passages from Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison — to visual manipulations that complement and dramatize the text. Hurston’s sentence " I do not always feel colored " is repeated from top to bottom of a two-by-three-foot frame. The words begin as legible black lettering but slowly devolve into an illegible smudge. In the next frame, another Hurston sentence ( " I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background " ) is subjected to the same inky degradation. In the last of Ligon’s " Untitled (suite of four), " a signature passage from Ellison’s Invisible Man ( " I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood ectoplasms. . . .  " ) is rendered in black letters against a black sheet of paper. You have to bend and tilt and stretch to make out the words.

It’s almost impossible to make written language visually compelling, unless you’re a monk calligraphing the Book of Kells or Ezra Pound making corrections to The Waste Land. Ligon succeeds because his texts are so well known, you don’t need to read them. His energetic play with black print as a metaphor of being seen carves out its own niche between conceptual and visual art.

Also included in " The Space Between " are eight tender photographs by María Magdalena Campos-Pons depicting a child being embraced by his dark-skinned mother and light-skinned father, as well as Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Sisters (I-IV), in which photos of light-skinned black women are paired with images of Egyptian antiquity. Works by Ellen Gallagher and Adrian Piper round out the show.

Issue Date: April 17 - 24, 2003

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