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art reviews from around new york

Is blackness invisible? Maybe literally so, and maybe so for African Americans everywhere who ask to become fully visible to white eyes.

The twenty-eight artists in “Going Dark” demand to be seen—not as targets for the police, but as individuals with human needs. They demand to be seen as artists, too, shaping what it means to be an individual. Much the same demand underlies the electrifying opening of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as well, and several here take its title for theirs. Still, the show’s title continues, this is “The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility,” and every one of them contributes to the darkness. Just how they seek invisibility is more than half the point. That alone keeps the show compelling the full length of the ramp, at the Guggenheim through April 7.

Not all its voices are black. Farah Al Qasimi, say, is from Abu Dhabi, but for her, too, It’s Not Easy Being Seen. The curators, Ashley James with Faith Hunter, do not make plain just when race informs their choices. They seek only invisibility—as sought, imposed, a form of inquiry, or a matter of perception. Each has its own tier of the ramp, although the art keeps pointing to all four. Still, this could be the perfect survey of currents in African American art. It leaves out most fashionable figure painting and myth making, but such is the price of going dark.

To be sure, black Americans are seen more than enough, as stereotypes and objects of fear. Blackness itself can become visible, as a barrier or as an invitation to find comfort in the dark. Stacy Lynn Waddell and Tariku Shiferaw take that as their subject in the galleries, and so do the artists here. Invisible Man for Kerry James Marshall reduces to white teeth and white eyes—somewhere between a stage villain and a minstrel show. Faith Ringgold leans for hers on the flat, mute colors of African masks. The Invisible Man series for Ming Smith leaves its actors out on the streets, metal gates down for the night and covered with graffiti.

Still, Marshall is never less than amused, and Ringgold’s faces acquire warmth and individuality as both men and women. Smith’s photos build a larger portrait of Harlem, from children at play to adults finding sacred ground, but still at risk and alone. Sandra Mujinga’s Spectral Keepers are at once larger than life and forever hidden. Nine feet tall, they tower over the viewer in loose green pants and green hoods. They might almost be emitting a green light from within. And they are not the show’s last hoodies.

Kevin Beasley dips his sweats in resin as sculpture, while photos by John Edmonds lend his accents of sharp color, and David Hammons takes an entire bay for a single hood. With her hoods, prints by Carrie Mae Weems, are just Repeating the Obvious. Hiding behind clothes may take other forms as well, in Camouflage Waves for Mujinga and camouflage colors for Joiri Minaya. Doris Salcedo needs only needles and thread, while Rebecca Belmore needs only hair. Belmore’s shrouded figure kneels, in prayer or despair. It has straight black hair, not dreadlocks, but then the hair is synthetic.

Of course, the easiest way to hide behind a photograph or video is in the processing. A blue light hides Chris Ofili, leaving only swirls like loose curtains. Glenn Ligon prints each of his fifty self-portraits in a different off-kilter color. Yet Smith blurs her central figures with nothing more than her command of lighting, while prints by Stephanie Syjuco take on the rhythms of her shutter release. Sondra Perry speeds things up instead. A dancer’s uncanny blur contrasts with the stasis of an unfinished Sheetrock wall.

At the same time, they gain in presence. That, after all, is the show’s central demand. There is no escaping faces emerging from the darkness in close-up from Lorna Simpson, Ellen Gallagher, and Titus Kaphar. There is no escaping, too, the materials—Kaphar’s asphalt paper, Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s leather (as in kinky sex), WangShui’s oil on aluminum, or Tomashi Jackson’s marble dust on PVC, even when their images fade to black. Photos may also show only backs, paired with the sitter’s front for Lyle Ashton Harris. Your phone and the FBI may not ditch face recognition anytime soon, but these backs are personal and real.

Charles White enters as a kind of father figure, although his hard-edged portraits in a sea of swirls look decidedly old-fashioned. History itself takes a back seat, apart from dark landscapes by Dawoud Bey, including the site of John Brown’s tannery. One bit of history, though, could sum up the vital paradox of the show’s demands. The 1995 Million Man March cried out for dignity, even as an individual had to surrender to a million. Ligon depicts it in a diptych that leaves the other half black, and Hank Willis Thomas calls for One Million Second Chances in images of the nation’s flag and Capitol with all else fading into white. When Sable Elyse Smith counts the days and nights for prisoners, she could be counting out America for all.

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Korea was changing fast back then, but not that fast. In his slideshow of life on the streets and in the news in Seoul, The Meaning of 1/24 Second, Kim Kulim does not come close to twenty-four frames per second. This is a photomontage, not a movie, and he knows it.

For all that, the world was spinning out of control, with only artists to give it substance and, just maybe, meaning. Does Kim exaggerate? Such is youth, and this is “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea,” at the Guggenheim through January 7, and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload. This was 1969, a time with a spectacular youth culture, the year of Woodstock and Abbey Road. Here in the West, too, late Modernism was coming under assault. If art in Korea from the 1960s and 1970s seems less familiar and less consequential, it more than kept up.

The very first work at the Guggenheim reels off the changes. Yet White Paper on Urban Planning, by Ha Chong-Hyun is neither white nor obviously urban. It is a colorful abstraction, on paper of course. It has no particular pattern holding together its soft curves, hard edges, and horizontal bulges, but then it casts doubt on the very possibility of planning. So does Kim, with The Death of the Sun and Tombstone. Someone must have planned for the future, but not for their thick, black, charred remains of vinyl, steel, and plastic.

Photographs next to both describe a newly westernized Korea, with only a touch of exaggeration, much like Kim’s slides. Fashionable young people crowd the streets, and black highways spin out from their intersection five ways. Whoever could plan for this? A Japanese invasion and World War II had left the peninsula divided, and the Korean War only confirmed the division. And those wars were only the start of an American presence. Global capitalism was bringing high rises, highways, industrial cities, and fashion.

Art responded, with its own scattershot attempt at organization. Movement after movement arose, with little to set off one from another. Kim helped found the Fourth Group, and I lost count after the Korean Avant-Garde Association, Space in Time, and whatever else. Their members made a point of not attending the official art show each year, although they had no qualms about exhibiting in biennials in São Paulo and Paris, where they made a hit. The madness leaves their retrospective with no clear themes or sequence. The curators, the Guggenheim’s Kyung An and Kang Soojung Korea of Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, have three tower galleries for eighty works by half as many artists.

Abstraction appears often, but as collage, like three rows of four creased circles apiece by Ha Chong-Hyun. Ha Chong-Hyun constructs his dense monochromes from acrylic, cigarette butts, and matchsticks. He also lays barbed wire over coarse jute rather like burlap. As art, it has its inclusions and exclusions, like the middle class, the Demilitarized Zone, or a barbed-wire fence. Kim makes his abstraction from rows of light bulbs that will never light up. As painting, these are forgettable, but the point is their tactile value and the remains of the day.

Can there still be a uniquely experimental art? Was there ever? Regardless, their interest in film anticipates younger Asian artists turning to video art, including Korean video. Credit them, too, with a fluid space between stasis and change, abstraction and performance. As I left, I passed Gego on the museum ramp, from Venezuela. In light of Korea’s experiment, half a planet away, her wire constructions seemed newly relevant.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.