Lyle Ashton Harris: CRG Gallery - New York

above the course of his career, Lyle Ashton Harris has mov among installation, video, and photography, oftentimes combining the three. His greatest in quantity recent show found him focusing upon a single medium, however, and his favorite subject: himself. The twelve large-format Polaroid photographs upon view (all works 2002) were all titled "Memoirs of Hadrian," after a novel by dint of Marguerite Yourcenar that takes the form of a alphabetic character from Emperor Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius. In eight of the photographs, Harris postures as a pugilist, bruised and bloodied, wearing boxing glove and a white jockstrap. (Signifiers of imperial Rome are nowhere in sight.) In the quiet he appears as a shadowy figure, photographed behind a sheet of Plexiglas overlayed with drips and smears. Tacked to the Plexi in the photo are smaller Polaroids of existences (mouthpiece, boxing gloves).

Each large-scale Polaroid bears a distinct painterly quality. The surfaces are flat but from a short distance they direct the eye like expressionist canvases of more [i]or[/i] less kind. The Polaroids within the large scale Polaroid create a collage issue in tire final product that mimics the layering of pigment upon canvas. But unlike a painting, each successive layer is transparent, because a photograph of a photograph adds rather titan conceals visual reformation.

Taut and lean and lustrous, these images of Harris call up historical discharges of black athletes, and the evident reflexivity-shading-into narcissism signals an ongoing engagement with a put of issues the artist has explored before: black male and/or black gay identity. But--aside from homosocial/sexual considerations of hand-to-hand combat--somehow those issues were not explicit enough in this material part of work. Clues that Harris has many times included elsewhere (from family photos to respects to Jeffrey Dahmer) are absent here, and a greater hind is placed upon the shoulders of Harris as subject

In three of the works, Harris appears almost as if discharge through a sheet of ram. This blurring or semi-erasure is reminiscent of whole bodies of work that strive to address issues of visibility vis-a-vis race and sex Just as Yourcenar's letter recipient is not at any time given a voice, Harris's antagonist in the ring is not ever shown. But in fact, naming the shoot forward after Vourcenar's text hinders rather than helps, and the putative imperial Harris/boxing/Rome connection at no time justifies itself at all. (Learning that Harris worn out a year in Rome as an American Academy companion adds nothing.) The idea of the artist as battered boxer is at one time imprecise and heavy-handed; the works leave us to awe how the images relate either to their stated respiration or to Harris's cast more generally.

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