Published 07.12.2006
Lorna Simpson's mid-career survey at the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Los Angeles (2006) dazzles and disappoints in
equal parts. The traveling show, composed of work from the last
twenty years of Simpson's practice, largely consists of
photographic image/text pieces and video work accompanied by
stills. The driving conceptual force behind the work is the
intersection of subjectivity as filtered through the black American
experience with its particular issues of representation. Simpson
engages these issues with varying success, and the show, mirroring
this, moves from the emotionally and conceptually potent in pieces
like The Park (1995) and Easy to Remember (2001),
to the philosophically obvious and formulaic in work such
asUntitled (guess who's coming to dinner) (2001) and
Corridor (2003).
A review of Lorna Simpson's retrospective would be remiss in not
mentioning her iconic images of headless anti-portraits of black
men and women with their (often cryptic, and sometimes repetitive)
accompanying text. These quiet, minimalist pieces manage to comment
upon and commodify the experience of black American women by
draining them of any identity. Simpson's mannered approach to
representation and figuration, specifically in relation to black
identity, creates iconic images. But where they succeed in
iconography, they fail in nuance; their cold attempts at sublimity
stiffen on the wall.
The best of the photo/text pieces manages to subtly allude to
layered narratives and nuances of observation and perception.
The Park, a large six-panel serigraph on felt, presents a
night view of New York's Central Park seen from above, with an edge
of buildings looking down upon it, a sweeping urban landscape that
captures the simple beauty of the view while flagging the sinister
or transgressive activities that may occur within its darkness. One
text piece, resembling a shorthand diary entry, tells the brief
story of unpacking a telescope and pointing at the park to see a
lone man watching 'figures from across the paths'. The other text,
to the right of the six-panel park scene, outlines the mission of a
sociologist studying the 'private acts in the men's public
bathrooms', adopting the role of voyeur 'in order to go noticed and
unnoticed at the same time'. The sociologist records the activities
of the men who frequent the public bathrooms, as well as their
license plates 'when applicable for later'. This piece functions in
breathtaking layers of observation, concealment, participation, and
sexuality. It presents the ethical dilemmas and ambiguities when
the public and private bleed into one another. And although no
figures are readily perceptible, none of the actors is allowed true
anonymity. Even the viewer is implicated, a voyeur to the intrigues
alluded to in the text.
In contrast, the most ineffective of the photo/text works,
Untitled (guess who's coming to dinner), part of a series
of similar pieces, has the same elegant, mannered aesthetic
delivery that's characteristic of Simpson's work with none of the
subtlety that makes a piece like The Park so engaging.
Forty-two three-quarter back cameo photos of a young black woman
are unevenly displayed and cut out of milky, semi-transparent
Plexiglas. These cameos are juxtaposed with the vinyl lettering on
its surface enumerating the titles of black and blaxploitation
films in alphabetical order starting with 'guess who's coming to
dinner' and ending with 'sweet jesus preacher man' (both titles as
they appear in the piece). This juxtaposition comes off as a
sophomoric gesture taking obvious (and lifeless) notions of
identity and placing them side-by-side for effect,
A similarly weak comparison is made in Corridor, a double
projection video installation of the two women on both screens
enacting the mundane motions of everyday life, one in 1860 and the
other in 1960. The women (played by the same actor) do their
toilette, communicate in their respective historical modes
(hand-writing and telephone), and look contemplatively off into
space. And although I appreciate Ms. Simpson's attempts to respond,
it fails to make any substantive political critique. In other
words, her recording of the mundane activities of two black women
in pivotal moments of African-American history is, well, mundane.
And although there is doubtlessly some political statement beyond
neat clichés on the surface, I neither know nor care to pierce
these superficial tropes to find out.
Overall, Lorna Simpson's aesthetic practice is pleasingly tranquil
and composed, but these measured pieces only succeed politically
when they connect to the uneasy ambiguities of real human
experience, and fail when they only gesture towards those
ambiguities with pretty and cryptic language lacking true critical
engagement. The self-consciously poetic text only serves as a mask
to the easy platitudes that may have seemed sexy in the halcyon
days of multiculturalism, but now come off as tinny.
But whereas certain pieces hit false notes, the unified humming of
a video piece like Easy to Remember is in contrast deeply
moving and distinctly human. Easy to Remember manages to
celebrate the individual differences of its subjects with tonal
variation from the fifteen sets of highly different isolated sets
of black lips, while still acting in aural and aesthetic unity.
This piece accomplishes wholly what is dealt with varying success
throughout the retrospective, in turn throughout her career, which
is the aesthetic unity of the individual and the universal, through
the filter of black American experience. The unequivocal success of
this piece redeems any other misgivings or failures found in the
other work. And it in fact, (almost) justifies the necessity and
importance of this retrospective to the current social, political
and artistic conversation surrounding the show.
- Andrew Berardini
