ART REVIEW : Radical Differences in Two Black Artists

Suppose you’re a black artist and a mainstream museum asks you to create an exhibition choosing any artists you wish. Do you feel committed to selecting blacks only, or is your approach colorblind? At the Long Beach Museum of Art, this request inspired radically different responses from two artists.

Video artist Philip Mallory Jones is premiering “Icono Negro: The Black Aesthetic in Video Art,” which--as he writes in the exhibit brochure--”takes the position that a black sensibility in video art, as in other art forms, is distinct and definable.” His view is innately political; he believes that “as artists of color we struggle for survival and liberation.”

Showing simultaneously (to July 23), “Raymond Saunders: Some Choices” presents paintings, sculpture and works in other media by 12 artists with widely divergent styles. They are “some people whose work I like,” the Bay Area painter has said, and they include Caucasians as well as blacks. In Saunders’ view, the artist “doesn’t exist for the sole purpose of changing the world.”

In his own large, generous paintings, Saunders is alive to the bits and pieces of passing experience. On the black ground of “Present of My Past” he draws the markings on a city street, affixes a child’s painting, a want ad and a paper sign in Chinese characters, and adds--in delicate white outlines--a series of meticulous still lifes. There’s no sign of straining for effect; it’s as though each element of the composition just coasted down on the canvas when it felt good and ready.

Such finesse is a hard-won thing, and some of Saunders’ chosen artists are still in search of it. But he seems to have found in each of their styles a facet of his energetic, scavenger-hunt approach to art.

Works by Betye Saar and her daughter, Alison, are among the high points of the show. Betye Saar’s grave assemblages of tiny objects--vintage buttons, charms, bits of cloth--or even (in “Sacred Symbols”) a computer circuit board--create shy mysteries. Small roughly painted symbols--crescent moons, snakes, dice--evoke the aura of homemade magic.

Alison Saar’s three-dimensional figures are vivid folk who sing songs of experience. “Love Potion No. 9--Love Zombie” is the figure of a statuesque woman in a red dress. One breast has swung open to reveal a heart studded with nails.

A single untitled bronze wall piece by Martin Puryear reminds the viewer of his ability to imbue simple, unusual shapes with an elusive, evocative quality.

Oliver Jackson’s deft primitivist image hacked and assembled out of cheap-looking wood (“Wood People No. 3”) has an immediate appeal; an untitled figure of a male figure whose head is trapped in a block of wood seems to labor under the weight of an allegorical burden.

Carl Pope’s series of black-and-white photographs of his dying grandfather--torn, dark, poorly composed, anchored with fat pieces of surgical tape--represent a young artist’s deliberate and largely successful attempt to make the means of art production as raw as the grief that inspired them.

“Casters and Flyers,” a painting by Deborah Oropallo, gives a taste of her unusual blend of painterly skill and conceptual interests.

The most surprising works in this show--because they’re so uptight--are the rigidly structured paintings of Sanford Wurmfeld, which shift from one predominant color to another as a result of infinitesimally calibrated progressions of colored lines.

Saunders’ other choices embrace rather mundane paint-and-collage pieces by Maria Celeste Almeida; satirical fantasies based on newspaper ads and stories by Adrian Piper; sprightly shrines by Lauren Adams, and an embarrassingly bountiful display of homemade decorative items and paintings by Eva Ohman-Benjamin, which unwittingly seems to prove the adage that a little (art) knowledge is a dangerous thing.

In contrast to Saunders’ clear-eyed interest in matters aesthetic and broadly human, the eight videos in “Icono Negro” offer an oddly bifurcated experience. Although not all the videos are overtly political, the majority that are present sharply different points of view--from inspirational uplift to raw anger. At the same time, these are experimental art videos, not documentaries, which presumes a certain degree of visual and thematic sophistication.

Jones freely admits that the level of technical mastery in the works varies--a consequence, at least in part, of limited access to the costly equipment needed to make videos. For the same reason, it is not surprising that this compilation of “the African diaspora experience” is dominated by artists living in the United States, with one offering apiece from London and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The most sophisticated video, Tony Cokas’ “Black Celebration,” is possibly also the angriest. For 17 long minutes, black-and-white footage of riots--in Watts, Boston and Newark--are intercut with turgid printed statements about “worker-consumers” who are “hierarchically subordinated to commodity values.” The sound track features wild, growling pop music and snippets of dialogue (“What’s wrong with everybody in this crazy place?”) that sound as though they come from old B movies.

In his coldly enraged way, Cokas is doing a number on two much-discussed issues of our time--nostalgia for the ‘60s and the widening chasm between the haves and have-nots--by dealing with events of the ‘60s that people would prefer to forget and by offering images of looting that show the terrible birth of the “underclass.”

Lawrence Andrews’ “An I for an I” establishes its fast, tense rhythm of societal masochism with a rapid-fire prelude of TV consumer imagery. Then come views of a fist hitting a stomach, a black exploitation movie fight, a knife slapped against a hand, an AK-47 rifle in action, the spiraling view down the stairway of the San Francisco courthouse. “OK, hit me,” says a voice. “Again . . . Again . . . Again.”

“Blue to You,” by Peter Harvey and Mario Thomas, also takes a dark view, but in a more fitful and disjointed fashion. Harvey’s cheerful guitar playing gives way to jungle imagery intercut with footage of black demonstrations and police retaliation. A narrative about unemployment in London peters out and some of the imagery has the indistinct look of work that hasn’t been sufficiently thought through.

Clunky visual effects mar “Concepts,” a poetry recital by Thulani Davis, shot by Doris Chase. Images such as masklike stills of Davis’ face superimposed over her moving head bog down her skittering imagery about love and death.

Instant uplift comes via Johanna Sophia’s “Freedom.” She plays a woman about to give birth who relives key moments of her life--her mother telling her childhood self never to “accept anything that’s inferior,” her involvement in a peace march, her imprisonment after a riot. Secure with her man and her new baby, she finds the world “beautiful.”

Jones’ own work is low-key. In “What Goes Around / Comes Around,” he offers a wry Jules Feiffer-style persona--a hand-drawn figure who grieves over a lost love. “Dreamkeeper,” a three-channel video installation, offers an open-ended series of images shot in Africa, accompanied by West African drumming.

Jones and Saunders make strong cases for their own perspectives. The viewer’s gain is to be able to chew on a range of styles and attitudes without losing sight that there is a world out there whose long-brewing problems are always with us.