Confronting history

Author: Robert McKay

A pastiche of visual and rhetorical styles, "Confronting History: Contemporary Artists Envision the Past" - the exhibition now on display at the Kevin P. Mahaney '84 Center for the Arts - features reinterpreted historical images confronting the issue of race in various print media. Featured artists include Enrique Chagoya, Ellen Gallagher, Robert Gober, Glenn Ligon, William Kentridge, Adrian Piper and Kara Walker.

Walker's series puts her own silkscreening atop enlarged lithographs from "Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War." The artist has said that her earlier cut paper panoramas are "all about an absence," and the exhibit's curators suggest that the images are meant to fill in the blanks that previously stood behind her silhouettes. Walker's signature, darkly comic figures lope in silkscreen across the enlarged historical lithographs. The figures - all of them black caricatures - draw attention to their interloping status. They are in the foreground, and yet they often seem to be acting out their own scene, disconnected from the narrative in the lithograph. They are almost always in motion, striding from one side of the frame to the other, off on some other business like shadows blundering across a cinema screen. In "Bank's Army Leaving Simmsort," a bent figure drags what looks like a length of fabric across a long view of troops arrayed beneath stately trees. He looks intently ahead, out of the frame, ignoring the scene behind him. In "Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-Boats," a girl kneels, as if looking for a lost trinket on the foreground of a scene of confusion. She too seems unperturbed by the events behind her.

In other prints, such as "Cotton Boards in Southern Swamp," the silhouettes join in the fun of their backgrounds: a white man and two simian blacks float in a skiff beneath branches dripping with rags of moss in a lithographic swamp where a giant, his arms similarly dripping, wades through the water. The figures in the boat are almost looking at him, but not quite. It's unclear whether they've failed to spot their approaching doom or whether the giant is simply ambling past like the figures in the other scenes.

In one of his visual remixes of Goya's satirical prints, Enrique Chagoya reiterates the familiar critique of instrumental reason's role in the creation of modern horrors. He surrounds Goya's snoozing figure with its original epigraph, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters," and with images of warplanes, missiles, nuclear cooling towers, a satellite, three bats and two owls. The inserted images swirl around the original sleeping figure like dreams. The bats, typical nightmare critters, lend a playful air. The owls might symbolize reason, not asleep but awake. The technological wonders are, of course, reason's "monstrous" creations.

Ellen Gallagher's massive collection of jerry-rigged magazine ads will delight lovers of Dada and Robert Raschenberg with its texturally fascinating, punchy and playful reworkings. The vintage colors and graphic layout are pure eye candy, and the array of processes involved is a litany of virtuoso multimedia printmaking. Despite her alluring presentation, Gallagher's technique of obscuring the figures' eyes carry darker undertones of the media's tendency to dehumanize on the racial as well as the universal level. Tech support for the work came from the Two Palms Press print studio.

Glenn Ligon's "Runaways" uses authentic-looking nineteenth-century typography in fake runaway slave posters describing the artist himself, ostensibly to assist his potential capturers. The self-descriptions, always beginning with some permutation of "Ran Away - Glen, a black male," proceed into rather droll and anachronistic observations: "Very articulate, seemingly well-educated, does not look you straight in the eye when talking to you."

As diverse and intricate at the past it aspires to represent, "Confronting History" emphasizes humor as a way of processing traumatic histories.

The exhibit is on view until April 19th, and can be viewed Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and weekends from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m..