Radical Presence / The Shadows Took Shape

Abstract

In Pretending to Be Rock (1993), an 11-minute video documentation of a two-hour performance action, artist Sherman Fleming, partially nude. is positioned on his hands and knees below a makeshift candelabrum. A pool of hot wax accumulates on Fleming's back, and an unnamed female collaborator in a brown unitard and harness hangs from ceiling as water steadily runs over her from head to toe. Herr. Fleming's back becomes a site of trauma, and scene a channeled expression of horrors of chattel slavery. But just as Fleming's male body registers scarring and wounding effects of bondage. it also bears weight of wax and. more importantly, representation--that is, expectations of blackness and masculinity. As camera pans, audience members look on in twe, recalling spectacles--arranged and spontaneous--that served as subjects of lynching photography. Fleming's performance activates tensions between body and American imaginary, and sets tone for Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporariy Art, a group exhibition curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver that originated at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2012. As first comprehensive survey of performance art by artists, Radical Presence chronicles work by thirty-six artists from 1960s to present. Presented in two parts, Part I was on view at NYU's Grey Art Gallery in fall 2013 and Part II is on view at Studio Museum in Harlem to March 2014. As Fleming's Pretending suggests. body as political tool and social signifier, exercises in endurance, and place of documentation within performance art practice all figure prominently in exhibition. Radical Presence asks, 'What is 'black' about performance art? while also calling into question if and how one performs blackness. As Cassel Oliver notes in her exhibition catalog essay, black visual artists have embraced expectations of blackness and performance to make something dim plays on existential nature of a historical spectacle [of chattel slavery]. (1) But rather than reinforcing a reductive link between cultural production and protest--black political speech as primarily didactic. for example works in Radical Presence break open easy elisions that seek to forestall expressive qualities of visual work. Along with Pretending, both Palm Cobs Superman 51 (1977) and Shaun El C. Leonardo's El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man (2004-07) interrogate how male body manifests within United States and diasporic contexts. In Superman 51, Colo, a contemporary of David Hammons, Pope.L, and Lorraine O'Grady to name just a few who are also featured in Radical Presence), drags fifty-one wooden sticks inscribed with names of each US state with addition of Puerto Rico (Cob's birthplace) behind him as he runs down a deserted West Side Highway in Manhattan. The action, performed several times in response to rejection of Gerald Ford's 1976 proposal to grant statehood to Puerto Rico, not only reveals how US nationhood is constructed but also who and what comprises US (black) body politic. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Similarly, El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man, performed thirty years after Superman 51, shows Leonardo, who is of Dominican and Guatemalan heritage, repeatedly battling metaphor of Du Boisian double consciousness; his fictional foe is at once present and absent, visible yet invisible. What's more, Leonardo stages his wrestling match through yet another spectacular arena in which racialization occurs: sports. And according to Cassel Oliver, Leonardo's attempts to conquer his unseen opponent echo the atrocities of Dominican Republic's version of limpieza de sangre (literally, cleanliness of blood) in its efforts to erase and eradicate vestiges of blackness among its own people. (2) Together, Colo and Leonardo represent generational approaches to blackness and maleness through a critique of what constitutes the nation. …