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In the Orbit of Funk and Hip-Hop
January 18, 2002
By ROBERTA SMITH
When the interplay between rap music, hip-hop culture and
contemporary art gets the exhibition it deserves, it will
probably be a show that picks up where the Bronx Museum of
the Arts' "One Planet Under a Groove: Hip-Hop and
Contemporary Art" leaves off.
"One Planet" takes its title from a late 70's Funkadelic
song, "One Nation Under a Groove," and includes more than
50 works by 30 contemporary artists, nearly half of whom
live in California, Texas, Japan or Europe. Organized by
Lydia Yee, the museum's curator, and Franklin Sirmans, an
independent critic and curator, the show concentrates on
art, as befits its setting. Thus it automatically comes
much closer to doing its subject justice than "Hip-Hop
Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage," a show at the Brooklyn
Museum of Art in 2000, which was largely devoid of art and
swamped with ephemera, memorabilia and clothing.
It also concentrates almost exclusively on work that refers
directly to hip-hop or black urban culture, encompassing
painting, sculpture, photography, video and a great deal of
Conceptual-based art. The show's starting point, both
chronologically and emotionally, is Adrian Piper's 1983
videotape "Funk." It shows the artist teaching a mostly
white audience how to dance the Funk, and it exudes an aura
of bygone innocence. One of the show's most recent works is
Nikki S. Lee's far more calculating "Hip-Hop Project," a
series of photographs in which the artist poses (with real
rap stars) as a seasoned B-Girl.
Presiding above it all, and unfortunately only
intermittently accessible to the public, is Renée Green's
"Import/Export Funk Office," an archivelike display of
books, newspapers, photographs and listening stations that
document the role of black music and black power in recent
American history. For those who found it difficult to
assimilate this work in the midst of the 1993 Whitney
Biennial - and I include myself - this is a chance to see
it again.
Everything in "One Planet" makes thematic sense, although
sometimes that's all the sense that is made. The simple
Surrealist wordplay of Mel Chin's "Night Rap," a
microphone-tipped police stick, and David Hammons's "In the
Hood," which consists of a sweatshirt hood, minus its
sweatshirt, tacked to the wall. Mr. Hammons's appropriation
of the work of Christo, who might be called a wrap artist,
is much stronger; one of the artist's hair, wire and
chicken-bone assemblages, noted in Mr. Sirmans's catalog
essay, would have been even more to the point.
The exhibition revolves around two issues: sampling - or
appropriation - as a aesthetic strategy, and marginalized
identity as an artistic subject. Neither is very new.
Nearly all black music and much of its best-known
derivative, rock 'n' roll, has reflected the identities and
often the disenfranchisement of the people who created it.
Musical sampling has been around for centuries; the visual
arts' use of found or pre- existing images or materials has
been a part of modern art since Cubist collage.
It is not by chance that appropriation became the dominant
artistic technique in the 1980's, at the same time that
hip-hop became a global phenomenon.
Some would argue, Ms. Yee and Mr. Sirmans included, that
sampling and identity came together in a new, liberating
way in rap music, with a social urgency and anger and an
aesthetic éclat that have had a profound impact on popular
culture and contributed importantly to the often vital
blurring of high and low. Their show captures some of its
metastasizing energy.
Sidestepping graffiti art as a subject worthy of its own
exhibition, "One Planet" includes healthy amounts of
graffiti-inspired art, and at its best reflects a world in
which music, language, image and dance continually change
places.
Visually the exhibition is bracketed by Jean-Michel
Basquiat's "Toxic," a 1984 painting of a scarecrow-like
figure surrounded by the chatter of words, and Chris
Ofili's "Afrodizzia (second version)," with its
hallucinatory patterns of colored dots punctuated by tiny
cut-out faces of black hip-hop artists and celebrities.
Other works whose visual magnetism approaches that of the
best hip-hop are Erik Parker's erupting hip-hop genealogies
and Brett Cook-Disney's rapid-fire line drawings of rappers
and break dancers, shown here on the museum's windows.
Another standout is Martin Wong's radiant and witty "Sharp
Paints a Picture" from 1997-98. Completed a year before the
artist's death, it shows Sharp, a first-generation graffiti
artist, standing, as if in his studio, before an elegant
white-on-white graffiti canvas in a city park.
Two relatively unknown young artists, who are among the
show's finds, join sampling and direct references to
hip-hop with quieter or more oblique results. Dario
Robleto, one of several emerging Texas artists specializing
in visually appealing, conceptually based work, recycles
vinyl records into cast and sculptured plastic music boxes
that play hip-hop music. He adds record dust to the recipe
to make a minute log cabin overseen by a puffy cloud of
smoke whose largest dimension seems to be its poetic title:
"Sometimes the Top 40 Makes Me Feel Like an Empty Maine
Coastal Cottage in the Dead of Winter."
Bea Schlingelhoff, 31, a German artist who went to art
school in Los Angeles, renders hip-hop lyrics in
eccentrically fanciful script on ephemeral site-specific
graffiti drawings that consist of hip-hop lyrics rendered
on adhesive paper. Each piece is installed in response to
one of the other artworks in the exhibition; one of her
pieces, for example, quotes Queen Latifah at the entrance
to Susan Smith-Pinelo's video "Cake," a dubious attempt to
explore hip- hop's tendency to objectify women.
Some works provide vivid glimpses that could be explored
more, like the effect of hip-hop on Japanese visual
culture. This point is raised by Hisashi Tenmyouya's
graffiti-peppered, ultra-refined paintings on paper of
emblematic Japanese subjects like samurai and sumo
wrestlers.
Other works adapt familiar strategies - often with tired
Neo-Geo results, despite the addition of hip-hop relevance.
In this category are Maxine King Cap's embroidered hunting
jackets, Nadine Robinson's modernist plinths accessorized
with speakers and turntables (remember Wallace & Donahue?)
and Juan Capistran's "Breaks," 25 photographs showing the
artist break dancing on a Carl Andre sculpture.
Ms. Yee and Mr. Sirmans try not to make hip-hop completely
heroic, acknowledging its commercial reach and the frequent
misogyny, materialism and machismo of its lyrics and
lifestyle. In the show, these tendencies are gently
lampooned in Luis Giuspert's lavishly customized go-cart
and Kori Newkirk's remakes of hip-hop jewelry in foil and
plastic. At the same time, the show's narrowness can make
hip-hop seem all- powerful, obscuring the ways its visual
repercussions are part of a much broader pervasive cultural
atmosphere.
Even though hip-hop's visual repercussions were part of a
much broader, possibly unavoidable, cultural environment.
Still, "One Planet" is very impressive. With minimal
resources, and maximum diversity, it has roughed out much
of the scope of its subject. It's easy to imagine filling
it in with more, and better, works or giving it a broader
artistic backdrop. But for now it is the Little Exhibition
That Could, and a benefit to both the art audiences of
today and the curators of the future.
``One Planet Under a Groove: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art''
will remain at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand
Concourse, at 165th Street, Morrisania, (718)861-6000,
through March 3. It will travel to the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis (July 14-Oct. 13) and to the Spelman College
Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta (spring 2003).
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/18/arts/design/18SMIT.html?ex=1012343946&ei=1&en=bd8a57722a2ec658
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