There's an old joke that, once upon a time, you could have heard
in many college towns. "What do you say if you meet a black
man on the street?" Answer: "Great game last night!"
Even now, on too many university campuses-where the only African
Americans in evidence are either dining hall staff, groundskeepers,
or scholarship athletes-the line would still be, like most good
jokes, funny because of its truth.
Michael Ray Charles's powerful and subver-sively ludic installation
titled The Property Of... addressed the exploitation of black athletes
by transforming Austin's dberman gallery into a sort of vaudeville
basketball court/cabaret. A gleaming baby grand piano sits in the
middle of an unpolished hardwood floor. A window hung from the ceiling
upside down recalls both the silkscreen apparatus that artist Charles
frequently works with and the backboard for a basketball goal-nowadays
made of transpar-ent material to accommodate the television broadcasts
that pour millions of dollars into the bank accounts of the college
teams that reach the annual NCAA tournament's "Sweet Sixteen"
semifinals.
The next element in the installation specifically expresses Charles's
uneasiness about the commodification of the individual that inevitably
occurs when athletics becomes big-money entertainment.
Burlap sacks that originally held rice or coffee for shipping across
the world are crudely cut so that they resemble basketball jerseys.
The unzdyed material reveals the original stencils from shippers
or producers, and Charles has added his own painted or stenciled
images, lettering, or numbers. The images are variously icons, corporate
logos, totems or stereo-types-and the occasional confusion of category
is clearly intentional. There is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln,
the Great Emancipator, taken from his likeness on the penny, a nearly
value-less coin that no one stoops to pick up from the ground anymore.
Another piece bears the standard image of a runaway slave, with
a staff and a budget (yep, that's the correct term for the bandana
that holds all his worldly belong-ings) on his shoulder-an image
that, curiously enough, can be seen in the abstract geometry of
the corporate logo for Dynegy, one of Enron's chief competitors.
Suspended from the ceiling on wires, the hanging sacks rhyme with
retired NBA jerseys-the heaven that all backyard bailers, in endless
lonely hours of practicing set shots, dream of attaining someday.
Sometimes two or three bags are sewn together-as in the piece titled
(Forever Free) Jersey # 15 (Bars and Stripes)-and the resulting
object resembles the long sacks dragged by pickers in cotton fields.
By rilling some of these with raw cotton, Charles makes his point
even more forcefully. One piece bears a logo that can be deciphered
to read that the NCAA player is literally "behind the 8 ball."
In the background one hears classic jazz-Ella Fitzgerald and Billie
Holiday, the silken voices of Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughn swirling
in Hal Mooney's lush big band arrangements. The sound is a reminder
that the aesthetic of collec-tive spontaneity that has always shaped
African American music is also the same principle that informs the
gravity-defying prowess-indeed artistry-of a Kareem Abdul-jabbar,
Michael Jordan, or the ill-starred Connie Hawkins.
This exhibit has many implications for art and American society
but it speaks directly to the situation of young African American
men and their life chances. Fans of a certain age will remember
how Connie Hawkins, a legendary
schoolyard phenomenon, became entangled in NCAA rules when a $200
"loan" caused him to be expelled from college and banned
from the professional game for almost a decade. The whole story
is told in Charlie Rosen's The Wizard of Odds (2003). And one should
not think that current high school star Lebron James's decision
to skip college and go directly to the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers
(and a $90 million Nike contract) means the problem is solved.
Wait a minute. Did I hear $90 million? Considering that this nation
has seemed intent upon dismantling affirmative action in college
admissions and shuttling African American males into what is aptly
termed the "prison-industrial complex," a person more
cynical than I am might argue that basketball provides the only
court in the United States where young black men might expect a
favorable outcome.
An interesting aspect of this show is the way it recalls the origin
of installation art in creatively chic department store windows
and cheeky clothing boutiques. In 1964, of course, we had Andy Warhol's
stacks of carefully crafted Heinz Ketchup and Brillo boxes that
turned New York's Stable Gallery into a reason-able facsimile of
the stockroom at Gristede's supermarket. Not only was it a clever
and attractive installation, all of the items could be sold separately-which
might be a testament to Warhol's true genius.
Much of Michael Ray Charles's earlier two-dimensional work defied
the black community's desire to suppress the most egregious anti-black
racist images of the 19th and early 20th centuries, recasting them
in what German critic Sabine Sieike called a "provocative poetics
of repetition." The question, on which the jury is still out,
is whether forcing us to view those images again shows us how damaging
they can be or merely re-empowers them. These new works do not send
such mixed messages and viewers don't need art history degrees to
deconstruct them. The Property Of... offers us a Hiphop-ready, Bebop-influenced
semiotics suitable for a postmodern media-ridden environment where
metaphor collapses.
Bars and Stripes? Are we talking Old Glory, UPC code, detention-or
all of the above? Michael Ray Charles has managed to devise a code
that is simultaneously nonverbal and punishingly eloquent. Pun intended.
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