A Met Installation Heavy on Provocation, Light on Vision

One of the essential aspects of art is that it transcends its subject matter and culture. In an artwork it is not really important what or who is depicted — or if, as in some works of art, no thing is depicted at all. No matter what it is, where it came from, or who made it, art engages us on many levels across cultures and through millennia.One does not have to believe in Christ, or even in God, to be mystified by Duccio’s “Madonna and Child” (c. 1300), a recently acquired masterwork in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. One only has to have faith in painting, and to trust one’s own eyes, to begin to get at the larger universal meanings in the Duccio — a small work that, although its focus is the complex subject of the Virgin and Christ child, explores fully the nature of faith and spirituality, as well as the relationship between mother and child; love and sacrifice; life and afterlife; what’s known and what we refer to as mystery.But art isn’t like that anymore — or so the argument goes. The trend now is to express the self, rather than the universe. It is more important now that artists confront or provoke us, rather than engage us. It is more important now that artists allude to, challenge, or comment on the art of the past, rather than further it. This about-face is fully evident in “Provocative Visions: Race and Identity — Selections From the Permanent Collection,” a small, long-term installation of 13 sculptures, prints, and drawings made during the past 16 years by seven Contemporary African-American artists.Organized by Lisa Messinger, an associate curator in the Met’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, “Provocative Visions” includes works by Chakaia Booker, Willie Cole, Glenn Ligon, Whitfield Lovell, Alison Saar, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker. The show’s artworks, all of which push the issues of race, gender, slavery, and African-American identity up onto a soapbox front-and-center, are sometimes clever, sometimes mildly interesting. But they all might have come from the same art world factory to satisfy the same knee-jerk need.Mr. Cole’s playfully inventive “Shine” (2007), a headdress made out of women’s black, spiked high-heeled shoes, suggests an African mask, the devil, and Darth Vader’s helmet. Ms. Booker’s black headdress “Raw Attraction” (2001), made out of steel shards, wood, and her signature pieces of rubber tire, suggests a burning bush, a horned creature, a flower, and a vagina dentata (it refers to African masks and to the pronged complications of male-female relationships).Ms. Saar’s “Sweeping Beauty” (1997), one of the best works in the show, is a carved and painted wood sculpture of a nude black woman with a broom for hair, who is trussed upside down from an ornamental, wrought-iron shelf bracket. The sculpture flirts with form. However, although it conflates fetish, an old hanging sign, a lynching, and the stereotype of African-American woman as housecleaner, “Sweeping Beauty,” like most of the works in “Provocative Visions,” ultimately stumbles over its need to make a statement. Despite its shortcomings, however, “Sweeping Beauty” towers aesthetically over other works in the show. Mr. Lovell’s “Wise Like That” (2000), an academic charcoal portrait based on an old photograph of a black man in his Sunday best, drawn on an old wood panel, from which hang metal tools and cooking utensils, is all gimmick. So, too, are Mr. Ligon’s tongue-in-cheek prints that refer, mostly through text, to slavery and African-American identity; as well as Ms. Simpson’s collages, made out of appropriated text and photographs, that, according to the comfortably ambivalent wall text, challenge “how [African-American women] perceive [themselves] and how others perceive [them].”Coming on the heels of Ms. Walker’s enormous success, “Provocative Visions” implies that to be a successful Contemporary African-American artist is to engage with an artistic process in which you start with the African-American self, focus on the African-American self, and end with the African-American self — a process that doesn’t leave much room for universality. The show encourages artists to shut themselves off, narrow their sense of what it means to be an artist (as well as African-American), and to act out in the museum. “Otherwise,” the Met’s show seems to say, “we’re not interested. Either be racially provocative or be gone.”Walking through this exhibit of artworks that, according to the Met’s Web site, “confront issues of racial heritage and identity,” I felt bored by its dead-end monotony. I felt that the artists had been pushed into a corner in which heritage and skin color trump all else. I was hit not with confrontations but with all-too-familiar museum-sanctioned racial cliches — pandering artworks that can allow people (artists, viewers, and curators alike) the false satisfaction that they are addressing and grappling with serious issues.The artworks in “Provocative Visions” don’t inspire dialogues about race. Merely skimming the surface of what it means to be an African American, and of the heritage of African art (to which some of the pieces ignorantly nod — check out Mr. Cole’s African headdress made out of bicycle parts), the works in this show speak more to issues of Contemporary art (irony, appropriation, and the challenge of tradition). Sound bites that do not transcend their subjects, they merely nod to — rather than explore — slavery, racial oppression, and African-American identity.Seeing Ms. Walker’s lifeless, 5-foot-wide linocut “African/American” (1998), of a black silhouetted nude that, according to Ms. Walker, is “your essentialist-token slave maiden in midair,” I was reminded of the aggressive, hot-button subjects manipulated by Ms. Walker in her recent retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Many of these same issues are brought to the fore at the Met.At the Whitney, while watching Ms. Walker’s shamelessly irreverent cartoony videos about the horrors of the slave trade, I saw a white, Upper East Side matronly type cry quietly into her handkerchief and shake her head up and down in seemingly white-guilt-ridden agreement. She had clearly gotten Ms. Walker’s message.And that same message is writ large across the walls at the Met. We know who made the art in “Provocative Visions,” why the artists made it, and exactly how it is provocative. The show’s wall text tells us so. And when art provides us with this many easy answers, why should an audience bother to ask questions? Why should an audience expect, let alone look deeper for, the mystery?Until March 8 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).

A Met Installation Heavy on Provocation, Light on Vision

A Met Installation Heavy on Provocation, Light on Vision

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