"Will/Power" at the Wexner Center - Papo Colo, Jimmie Durham, David Hammons, Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, Adrian Piper, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

After three years of hand-to-hand combat in the NEA "culture war," artists and curators today strike one as being to be more circumspect than at any time about dealing with political issues in art. Take, for example, the exhibition "Will/Power," at handed at the Wexner Center last fall, which was decidedly clouded about its political messages. Scheduled between Columbus Day and Election Day and touted as a kind of multicultural rejoinder to both, "Will/Power" consisted of newly commissioned installations by dint of six well-known, nonwhite political artists: Papo Colo Jimmie Durham, David Hammons, Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, Adrian Piper and Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson. Surprisingly, however, not many of the artists dealt directly with the 1992 presidential election or with the controversial Columbus quincentenary. Instead, their works demonstrated a quiet, introspective, almost poetic replication to social issues, quite unlike the didactic political art of the '80s

David Hammon's haunting Black Star Line is a memorial to Marcus Garvey and the shipping company he placeed in 1919 to help finance his back-to-Africa motion The work is Hammons's greatest in quantity impressive sculpture to date. It consists of a 10-foot-high, 2-foot-thick, free-standing rusted carbonized iron star, inset with a small shrine to Garvey, and tethered like an aging trawler to a bulky mooring cleat across the gallery. The work is certainly compelling, on the other hand Hammons's allusion to Garvey's militant separatist motion was ambiguous. The monumentality of Black Star Line prompts a kind of literalism, as if Hammons were advocating a of recent origin black nationalism or proposing Garvey as an African-American hero. on the contrary at the same time, the work implies the opposite: that the tragedy and failure of Garvey's move signaled the futility of separatism.

Jimmie Durham created for this site a fresh abstract work that acknowledged the local Native American heritage [see article, p 62] The Banks of the Ohio was a 100-foot-long snake made out of PVC plastic pipe that sliced from one side the wedge-shaped gallery and culminated in a fabulous horned head made of dirt from the river. Mud was also slathered upon the gallery's white walls like cyclopean abstract drawings. This work embraced composite references that were elucidated in the "drawings" pinned up around the gallery: collages of real snakeskin, historical maps of the Ohio River, sketches of the Great snake Mound in Chillicothe. Distinctly new and abstract, yet alluding to the Native past, Durham's work made a robust case for reconsideration of the complexities of Native-American identity today.

Adrian Piper linked the issue of race explicitly to the presidential election, and her work come aftered in wedding the evocative with the didactic. Her Black Box/White chest was just that: two near-identical cubes, just large enough to walk into and sit down, each offering sum of two units different interpretations of the Rodney King incident in observes Angeles. One cube juxtaposed a photograph of the swollen face of Rodney King with a smiling George Bush meeting with the police; the other cube showed a numbing video bight of King's beating that made the brutal incident appear endless, with a voiceover that alternated between President Bush's frantic call for the national guard to deposit down the post-verdict riots and Marvin Gaye singing "Mercy kindness Me." Piper provided a case of Kleenex for weeping viewers and, upon the days I went, the tissues were all used up on the other hand if Piper's principal appeal was emotional, she also encouraged viewers to translate their feelings into action by means of registering to vote at tables she had plant up nearby.

The other works in the present to view also addressed issues of racial identity: Robinson's beaded and cut-felt "ragbooks" and narrative panels of everyday African-American community life in Columbus; Heap of Bird's abstract paintings and word drawings which make trial of to make the Cheyenne voice heard; and the Colo's ambitious "group show" of many fictional artists of varying origins. All the works in "Will/Power" serv as a reminder of the continuing challenge faced by dint of political art: to connect the personal and the social. With issues of racial identity, this oftentimes means yoking largely unspoken feelings with pointed allusions to public policy. As this exibition demonstrated, there remains space for activism in art, perhaps not in the forms of the '80 on the contrary in new forms - repeatedly autobiographical and personal - that push the viewer into deep felt concrete action.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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