January 10, 2005

Playing on Black and White: Racial Messages Through a Camera Lens

hat are we to expect when we walk into an exhibition titled "White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art"? First of all, a phrase like "race in contemporary art" almost always means that the race in question is nonwhite. As the show's curator, the art historian Maurice Berger writes in his introduction to this show, at the International Center of Photography: "In mainstream American society and culture, whiteness remains an ever-present state of mind and body, a powerful norm so pervasive that it is rarely acknowledged or even named."

In the 1990's, this awareness gave rise to an academic field called whiteness studies. The subject extends from history to culture, but the visual arts in particular seem ripe for analytic pickings. Now that the world is overpopulated by images, we have started to examine just how they shape our most basic modes of thought and feeling.

This is the second show at the International Center of Photography since 2003 to trace racial messages through the medium of the camera. Does that mean it is fashionable? Oh yes. Does that make it any less valuable? No, given the many conundrums of race. Start with history and politics, move on to class and ethnic differences, conclude with sensory pleasure and sexual fantasies. And don't forget that all of this is taking place on both sides of the camera.

Two years ago, the superb exhibition "Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self," took a far-reaching historical approach; it encompassed anthropology and commerce along with self-conscious art. Mr. Berger's excellent show is much smaller, and his focus is on contemporary artists who deliberately examine racial myths and constructs.

In these works, assumptions clash with ambivalence; facts merge with imagination, and familiar sights fire off unexpected questions.

Take the eight photographs that look like studies for a portrait of Jesus. In 2001, the artist Nancy Burson placed an advertisement in a newspaper asking to interview men who thought they resembled Jesus. She ended up with five white men; each had the long hair, oval face, pale skin, and in some cases, the beard of the figure we know from centuries of Western art. (Who painted the first of these canonical portraits?)

Ms. Burson also included one black, one Asian and one Hispanic in her lineup. I instantly began trying to pick out the Hispanic, for of course, he did not stand out from the non-Hispanic whites. I was relieved when the white person I queried could not identify the Hispanic sitter either. But what about Hispanic viewers? Would they feel, like many blacks I know, that some tiny sign - a tilt of the head, length of the nose, shape of the mouth - was the giveaway no outsider could perceive? The complications of racial profiling never end.

Ms. Burson ends with two composite photographs: one made from European, one from Semitic faces. This was a game, and it worked like a game; a puzzle with a two visual solutions.

The South African artist William Kentridge offers something different. He works with strong dramatic narratives and compressed visual power. His short animated films show us a world where crises mutate as quickly as images do.

In one film, Mr. Kentridge's stout white Johannesburg magnate, Soho Eckstein, lies in bed smoking and drinking his morning espresso. The smoke rings turn into a wake-up bell for his mine workers. The espresso machine turns into a drill that moves down into the mine, giving off sparks. We move back to Soho's bed, and it becomes a tickertape machine that takes us to the mine again, where we see the hunched backs of black laborers.

In another film, Soho mourns his wife, who has left him for Felix, a much poorer man. We see a long line of blacks, walking slowly up a road. Soho eats greedily. The words "Feeding the poor" appear onscreen, and pieces of food fly from his mouth to splatter the clothes of the empty-handed blacks. Meanwhile, Felix and Soho's wife make love in a pool of water that starts to rise as the blacks begin to march purposefully. Personal betrayal intensifies political cruelty; sexual passion rises alongside the demand for social justice. Artists from Daumier to Käthe Kollwitz have taught us the power of charcoal drawings with their many shades of black, white and gray, and their blend of force and subtlety. Mr. Kentridge's films are charcoal in motion and thrilling to see.

There is a bit of overlap with the earlier show at the International Center of Photography. The photographs of Germans masquerading as American Indians by Max Becher and Andrea Robbins look even better now because there are more of them. They document modern festivals at which Germans gather in the countryside to wear Indian dress and play at Indian ways of life. Mostly middle-aged, they stand in front of teepees. Some slouch a bit; some smile self-consciously the way tourists being photographed do. One man is clearly wearing a black wig with long faux braids. Another has a potbelly beneath his buckskin and clasps his hands behind his back like a businessman, not a tribal chief. It is refreshing to see no triumphant cowboys. There is sweetness here, not aggression. But the smugness is overwhelming. These Germans have turned themselves into Indian tourist artifacts.

There are disappointments, too. Cindy Sherman, also represented in "Only Skin Deep," has early work on display here, a series of 15 black-and-white photographs from 1976 in which she impersonates black and white bus riders. They are male and female, young and aging; they are street kids, workers and yuppies. But the blacks are all exactly the same color, the color of traditional blackface makeup. They all have nearly the same features, too, while Ms. Sherman is able to give the white characters she impersonates a real range of skin tones and facial features. This didn't look like irony to me. It looked like a stale visual myth that was still in good working order.

But it strengthened some of the other works that played literally on black and white. Nayland Blake had fashioned three doll-sized rabbits with pitch-black faces and white rabbit suits that looked removable (rather like astronaut uniforms). On a nearby wall, photographs show Mr. Blake as a mixed-race child, a pale brown boy holding a toy rabbit, sitting between his slightly less pale "black" father and his cream-colored "white" mother.

Two white hands take up all of Barbara Kruger's large canvas. The right hand pulls a latex black glove off the index finger of the left hand. It looks phallic as well as racially charged. Her signature red rectangles were placed on the canvas like warning labels: "Thick skin," "Thin skin," "Under the skin," "Skin deep," "Skin tight." My favorite, which seemed to sum up the desired end of a show like this was: " "Skinned alive."

(here is the summary of the show from the web site of the International Center of Photography)

White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art

Issues around race and identity have been central to the work of critics and artists over the past twenty years, but only recently has the discourse turned to what many consider the central topic: whiteness. People of color have led the debate about racism and civil rights in part because in American culture they are forced to evaluate their status in relation to everyday experiences of prejudice. For most white people, the psychological and sociopolitical weight of their own color is assumed to be a nonissue. White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art asks all Americans—and especially white people—to take stock of the political, psychological, economic, and cultural implication of white skin, white entitlement, and white privilege. The exhibition features the work of eleven artists who explicitly address the issue of whiteness: Max Becher and Andrea Robbins, Nayland Blake, Nancy Burson, Wendy Ewald and Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Barbara Kruger, Nikki S. Lee, Cindy Sherman, and Gary Simmons. It is organized by Maurice Berger, Curator at the Center for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where the show originated.