Arts Energy Is Never Lost in Studio Show

The Studio Museum in Harlem is nearby, intimate, and free for Columbia students. It is the perfect venue for busy Columbia students who frequently lament they have no time for art in their busy schedules and wish to do something more original than visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

¡§Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction¡¨ is the second show I¡¦ve been to at The Studio Museum this year, the first being ¡§Frequency¡¨¡Xa survey show of emerging contemporary African-American artists¡Xwhich was exhilaratingly new and dynamic, both aesthetically rewarding and conceptually fresh. While the shows are radically different in content (¡§Frequency¡¨ looked at the present with reference to the future, while ¡§Energy/Experimentation¡¨ engages with the past), they are similar in their curatorial perspective. We are used to art shows making a statement, but both ¡§Frequency¡¨ and particularly ¡§Energy/Experimentation¡¨, curated by Yale professor Kellie Jones, are loaded with contradictions to the assumptions the audience comes with when they know the author of the work is a minority, the same interrogations minority artists working in America perennially face.

In many ways, this show¡Xand the omission of these artists from a retrospective understanding of the abstraction period¡Xsignals that whatever minority artists want to say, be it politically engaged or indifferent, is overruled by assumptions. In the tricky world of modern art, where interpretation plays a particularly important role in decoding sometimes difficult meaning, minority artists were again marginalized to the role that was ¡§intelligible¡¨ to the established order. This exhibit seeks to show that the African-American art in the 60s, though known primarily through collage or the literary work of the Black Arts Movement, was rich and pluralistic.

This is a particularly interesting topic when viewed through abstract works which, at least conventionally, deny content and hence readily intelligible political meaning. When we think of political art we think of iconographic works such as Picasso¡¦s Guernica, the profoundly disturbing silhouettes of contemporary artist Kara Walker, or the institutional critique of Hans Haacke that refer explicitly to the outside world. The paintings in ¡§Energy/Experimentation¡¨ are arresting, conceptually interesting, and deny us the footholds of content. For instance, William T. Williams¡¦ Trane engages with a playful dichotomy of color fields that creates a suspended sense of flatness creating dynamic space. Painting is not the only medium privileged in this exhibition. Melvin Edwards¡¦ Cotton Hang-Up is a sculpture in welded steel which, in its inclusion of absence as a central part of its composition, and its mix of an austere color against a structurally flamboyant construction, was an intriguing work that played with expectations of space and color.

Contrary to early reviews of the work, not all of black abstract artists have been ¡§forgotten¡¨ by art history. Notably, Barbara Chase-Riboud, a well-known author as well as artist, made it into one of the later editions of the Janson Art History books¡Xpossibly the art canon of all canons. Her sculpture is wonderfully arresting in the way she interjects silk into a sculpture of hard metal for an interrogation of medium.

Admittedly, abstract art is often cryptic, making this show difficult at times, but its interest is in the challenge it posits to our expectations of art. What this wonderful show conveys is that this cluster of artists were staying true to tenets of the art practice they were involved with: denying the expected and expanding the repertoire of the possible.