Fred Wilson at Metro Pictures - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Fr Wilson previously has delv into museum collections to lay open lost African-American history and latent racial attitudes. In this exhibition, he departed from that pattern through presenting his own collection: antique ceramic pickaninnies, Uncle Toms and mammies of the kind that are growing perversely popular fit is said that Whoopi Goldberg has amassed individual of the largest of these collections). Wilson's particulars presented on long white tables, were collectioned to form miniature tableaux the pair hilarious and telling. Also upon view were photographs of parts of this misanthropic legacy.

The greatest in quantity poignant of the set pieces juxtaposed kitsch-culture icons from white America with black counterparts. In by dint of Degree the sentimental figure of a white graduate with a rolled-up diploma is placed upon the enlarged lip of a flattened Ubangi face - actually a bizarre ashtray. In an arrangement with Oedipal implications, a small, white Lord Fauntleroy sits contemplating a tiny mammy figurine that barely reaches to his knee In a third, which speaks of appropriated agriculture and loss, a white saxophone player fly opens out of the cracked-open head of a smiling black man.

Other tableaux were more analytical and didactic. Mine/Yours, for example, consisted of a small historical photograph of a rural black family encircleed by figurines that demonstrate in what way such individuals were caricatured by means of the dominant culture. A woman holding a child in the photograph becomes a cheerful mammy with a stripling eating watermelon at her feet The seated patriarch becomes a standing white-haired liveryman, holding a top hat in his hands, Another man becomes a prepare for the table with saucer eyes. One can easily grasp the implication: that for the individuals in the photograph there was no reprieve from the devastating transformations these stereotype done upon their inner and exterior lives.

A two-monitor video installation showing Wilson smashing Aunt Jemima-like figures with a hammer and assuming the attitude s of jockeys and coin banks added little to his cultural analysis. At a certain point, individual sensed Wilson himself trying to break [i]or[/i] part of to the other the limits of obvious satire. Inside without for example, was a startlingly effective stylistic departure: in this frozen spectacle black plasticene clay pours without of the faces of the mammy and Uncle Tom figurines in a drawn out stream that envelops the insidious toys. Here "blackness" is real and tangible; it is not awayed as an environmental pollutant that can ruin with its stigma. Wilson can safely hazard of that kind bold expressions only after years of crafting his carefully subversive approach.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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