Scrawlspace is such a provocative title for an exhibition that earlier than I noticed it I assumed it needed to be good. In some methods it’s — deeply inquisitive the place too many up to date artwork exhibitions are merely declarative and nicely researched quite than organized willy nilly — however the premises of this present are in some situations cliché and a bit contradictory.
Scrawlspace was conceived by Emily Alesandrini when she and her co-curator, Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh, have been each incomes their grasp’s levels at Tulane College. The time period combines two phrases to counsel an space for writing that offers entry to hidden elements of our areas of habitation. Theirs is an easy curatorial proposition, as they clarify of their brochure essay. The featured artists “examine the historically charged relationships Black Americans have maintained with writing, reading, and language, revealing new possibilities for and beyond words.” Actually, in a present the place the hypotheses are so exacting, these phrases matter, they usually articulate a worthwhile aim. However this emphasis on “new possibilities” for language reveals up in too many press releases and exhibition essays. Modernism received drunk on the concept of estrangement with the intention to make issues new, and writers deal with up to date artwork’s hangover by ingesting the identical whiskey. Exhibitions can produce other goals: exploration; reminding viewers of forgotten issues; sensitizing us to what could also be ignored; fashioning one thing that sustains us.
Sadie Barnette, “FBI Drawings: Very Truly Yours (New Years Eve 1968)” (2021), powdered graphite and spray paint on paper, 60 x 48 inches (152.4 x 121.92 cm) (courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, photograph by John Wilson White)
Alesandrini and Momoh additionally root the work in a very Black quest for freedom. Once more from their essay: “Black artists have located room for resistance in writing—scrawlspaces, through which liberation can be felt and fostered.” They surmise from their analysis that the time period originates in some misplaced or undocumented communication between cultural theorist Fred Moten and poet Harryette Mullen discussing the work of the Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers in an essay inspecting oppressive language techniques. So, the perfect of emancipation is entwined with the time period. Nevertheless, why is Blackness, which is a political designation, a cultural locale, and, most basically, a state of being, confined to being an emblem of resistance and liberatory methods? This affiliation is asserted so steadily and extensively within the up to date artwork scene that it goes unquestioned. Sure, Blackness allows the nation’s most self-serving PR statements — the Preamble to the Structure and the Declaration of Independence — to method being true. However as a lot as being Black shouldn’t be restricted to the trope of the magical negro, it ought to equally not be constrained to the position of the poet warrior determine. Some Black folks simply need to make good meals and watch their kids develop.
However, in some methods it is sensible that this exhibition is caught up on this confinement/liberty incongruity, provided that writing is itself contradictory. To “write” means to compose a coherent textual content that’s meant to be learn and understood by others. But it additionally means to merely make marks — letters, phrases, or different symbols on a legible floor with an implement. It’s about each making sense and making traces or imprints which will imply nothing for these apart from the author, and typically, it’s coded and will be learn solely by a choose group.
Shinique Smith, “Juice on the Loose” (2003), bleach and ball level pen on denim, approx. 61 x 78 inches (154.94 x 198.12 cm) (courtesy Shinique Smith Studio)
Shinique Smith’s “Firedog” (2006) makes use of the latter tactic. This work of ink, spray paint, and collage on paper depicts the sweep and rhythmic calligraphy of graffiti. Whether or not this can be a doc of precise graffiti inscribed someplace or simply an instance of the extremely stylized ligatures and curlicues of the writing is unclear. However I think about somebody who grew up tagging, as Smith did, recognizing issues right here that I can’t.
I do acknowledge the textual content in Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo’s “collective survival part one: won’t you celebrate with me” (2022). On a sandwich board with black lettering overlaid by multicolored chessboard motif on one facet and many-hued letters interrupted by a black background on the opposite, the areas usually current between phrases are gone, so it’s difficult and enjoyable to learn, in the way in which that Christopher Wool’s work will be. However after I decipher it I’m introduced again to the wonder and bravado of Lucille Clifton’s lyric poem: “won’t you celebrate with me / what i have shaped into / a kind of life? i had no model.” The phrases are interspersed with the patterned motif in such a manner that they collectively learn as a sort of linguistic/design mosaic that is likely to be its personal dialect or idiolect. Regardless of the ponderous premise, within the present there are different moments like these which can be celebratory, carefree, even spendthrift.
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, “collective survival part two, we lend our power to each other’s spell” (2022), acrylic paint, flashe, wooden, {hardware}, 48 x 24 inches (121.92 x 60.96 cm) (courtesy the artist)
Glenn Ligon’s “Study for Negro Sunshine #150” (2023) manipulates the shut relationship between written and uttered phrases, displaying how the phrase “negro sunshine” repeated begins to clump up within the area of the body and lose maintain of its sense. You recognize what that is like if you happen to’ve stated a phrase or phrase time and again till it dissolves into an audio mist through which that means is barely recognizable. This mixture of oil stick, coal mud, and gesso on paper glints subtly as if the devolution from one state to the opposite have been throwing off sparks within the transition.
I additionally discover myself appreciating Renee Gladman’s ink, acrylic, and pastel compositions on paper as a result of the writing is so small that it’s illegible. It jogs my memory of how folks typically whisper to themselves, intoning a koan, or a poem or affirmation. In her “Space Question Vector” (2021) I think about that she is murmuring the placement of those celestial our bodies or the secrets and techniques of orbital patterns. Typically the gesture of getting written is sufficient to point out severe engagement, severe thought.
Renee Gladman, “Space Question Vector” (2021), ink, acrylic, and pastel on paper, 30 x 44 inches (76.2 x 111.76 cm) (courtesy the artist, photograph by Filip Wolak)
Against this, some works are so archly mental that they depart me chilly, corresponding to Jamilah Sabur’s work, through which neon letters and phrases are hooked up to a area of shade that comprises one smaller photographic picture. And there are artists who I’ve been thrilled to come across previously, however whose artwork on this present will not be as enthralling. That is the case with Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s items, corresponding to “Each Sentence Is a Sponge” (2023), which, the caption tells me, has to do with the spiritual ecstatic expertise of talking in tongues or automated writing. The issue is that the scribbles don’t come collectively as a coherent (that phrase once more) story or documentation of an occasion. I don’t thoughts being trapped in an artist’s thoughts, however I want a little bit of cheese to tempt me there. Making a case that the work means a sure factor when this factor isn’t in proof paradoxically will get on the alchemy of language, however the artist doesn’t try this. As writers and readers, we’re all the time conjuring issues into existence that weren’t there a second in the past.
Now I consider Audre Lorde’s poem “Coal,” and her clarification of the distinction between sorts of writing:
Some phrases are openLike a diamond on glass windowsSinging out throughout the crash of passing sunThen there are phrases like stapled wagersIn a perforated ebook—purchase and signal and tear aside—And are available no matter wills all chancesThe stub remainsAn ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
I imagine that Alesandrini and Momoh have been after this ragged fringe of language, the place it falls aside into characters and types hinting that one thing else was there, one thing impelling the act of writing. By exploring how this inflects Black expertise on this nation, the present at its greatest creates a sort of portal to elsewhere.
Glenn Ligon, “Study for Debris Field #38” (2020–21), etching ink and ink marker on canvas, 40 x 32 inches (101.6 x 81.28 cm) (© Glenn Ligon; courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Tasks, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, photograph by Ronald Amstutz)
Jamilah Sabur, “Mnemonic Alphabet (P/Prédio)” (2019), neon, transformer, archival inkjet print on cotton rag paper, acrylic, Honduran mahogany, 44 x 54 x 3 inches (111.76 x 137.16 x 7.62 cm) (courtesy the artist)
Set up view of labor by Tony Cokes, Dia Bridgehampton, New York, 2023–24 (courtesy of the artist, Dia Bridgehampton, and Greene Naftali, New York, photograph by Invoice Jacobson Studio)
Kameelah Janan Rasheed, “Redacted Annotations” (2023), dye Sublimation Print on Aluminum, 48 x 30 inches (121.92 x 76.2 cm) (courtesy artist and NOME Gallery)
Scrawlspace continues on the eighth Ground gallery (17 West seventeenth Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) by way of December 7. The exhibition was curated by Emily Alesandrini and Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh.
