Post-black #2: Kerry James Marshall and William Pope.L

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The top three photos are from Kerry James Marshall’s show Dollar for Dollar at Jack Shainman this past fall, and the bottom photos from William Pope.L’s show that was up around this same time at Mitchell-Innes and Nash.  (Also, make sure you check out Pope.L’s cool website.) I was thinking about these shows because of my recent post on Rashid Johnson. I got hung up on the term “post-black” a few months back (and actually ended up writing one of my research papers for grad school on Glenn Ligon because of it). In my last post, I wrote about post-black in generational terms. Both Marshall and Pope.L were born in 1955 to Ligon’s 1960, making them of the same generation, prior to Rashid Johnson’s “post-black” work. The immediate implication of that statement being that the work of these artist is about blackness in a direct, intentional way, which, while no doubt true, seems like an unfair simplification of a complex theme.

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When Thelma Golden wrote about post-black for the exhibition she curated at the Studio Museum in 2001, I don’t think she meant to imply a post-racial world (which was Time Magazine’s interpretation of her phrase) as much as that a black artist of my generation could make work unlimited by being made by a “black artist.” Maybe, but I don’t think that the Rashid Johnson show displayed that kind of freedom. Don’t get me wrong: I wish we had all moved into Pope.L’s alternate universe of various rainbow-colored people, although certainly without the darker, satirical side of these stereotypes writ large.

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Andrea Dezsö’s Tunnel Books: Interior Worlds

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I remember seeing a model of a stage set as a child, and being fascinated with the elaborate world created when elaborately painted scenes were dropped in at the top, and peering in through the front of the box a fantastical miniature world was created backdrop by backdrop. Andrea Dezsö‘s surrealist cut-paper tunnel books reminded me of it, except her work speaks to a decidedly wilder and darker place, a garden run riot after the fall of man. This work was up at the Nancy Margolis gallery in Chelsea earlier this year (better late than never has become my grad school motto).

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Claudia Wieser: The Mirror

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Words cannot tell how much I enjoyed this show, so I am posting all my pictures of Claudia Wieser’s show at Marianne Boesky gallery that ended recently. The Berlin artist’s work reminded me of the mystic side of this year’s Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which opened with a darkened round space of Carl Jung’s Red Book drawings that journeyed deep into the psychoanalyst’s subconscious. Yet The Mirror contains itself in structured geometric forms, and a seemingly endless chain of art historical references whose multiplicity is reinforced by the patterned mirrors.

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The mirrors, prints, tapestries, and leaning wood elements, taken to the height of wallpaper, enforced through their flatness the artificial construction of the space even as they beguile the viewer. The size contrasts with the small drawings on paper aligned in rows on the wall. The artist cites the influence of Kandinsky and Klee, which is apparent, and takes her title from Tarkovsky’s film, which shares a dreamlike sense of non-linear time.

Per usual lately, I’m posting this after the show has already closed…but otherwise I would definitely recommend checking it out.

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