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Grace Under Pressure
John Haberin New York City
Grace and Ina Archer
Charles Long and Hannah Starkey
For as long as people have staked their lives on family, tribe, religion, or saluting a flag, identity has been a matter of pride. In photographs now, it is also a matter of "Grace."
Must identity politics, though, always be graceful? Must art? Either can come across as awkward, torn, funny, or in your face. Ina Archer traces African American identity to the movies, and she is not altogether pleased. Charles Long has trouble getting past his penis, while Hannah Starkey captures a woman's self-assertion, but half in protest and half in darkness. Who would you rather picture you? 
From pride to grace
Shows of Black Power, gay pride, a feminist revolution, indigenous peoples, and identity have become so common that one can almost forget the reason or the need, and here comes yet another, this time in photography. "Grace: Gender – Race – Identity," though, does not stake everything on glitz, affirmation, and political correctness. It takes grace cleverly enough as a near acronym, but not only that. Grace, after all, is a gift—in the sense of an athlete's natural talent or rather of clemency. It can be a lasting gift, like physical beauty, or just a grace note. For many a Protestant, it is always unearned, but for anyone it may not come cheap.
The packed group does take pride in nonconformity, as with transgender adults for Jess Dugan or, not in the show, Edie Fake. Just as often, though, it displays vulnerability, uncertainty, and fear. The black lesbians in South Africa for Zanele Muholi certainly know them. Even Dugan, for all her cheerleading, sticks to older adults who have lived through them all, and her photographs come with lengthy text in the first person to attest to it. Fatemeh Baigmoradi sets fire to family photographs, just as her parents had to burn their archives to survive under an Islamic state in Iran. Still, she displays the remnants rather than hiding her fears or burying her traces.
The work consists mostly of portraits, because what is identity if not a story about who one is? Still, the stories get messy. They include a token representation of Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol in drag as a reminder of just how messy. Mostly, though a mix of modern and contemporary photographers brings postmodern strategies into history and up to date. Robert Calafiore uses decorative backdrops, intense colors, and a pinhole camera to keep the naked body at a ghostly distance, while Dennis Farber and Val Telberg do much the same with photocollage in black and white. Gary Brotmeyer adds false noses in plastic to his art-historical pastiche.
You do not have to be a Trump supporter who thinks of whites as victims to know that they have their stories, too. Just to the left of Dugan and Muholi, Bruce Wrighton captures middle-aged couples in upstate New York. They stand in front of their homes, like more human and casual versions of American Gothic by Grant Wood. Others take their stories personally. Julie Mack traps herself in a car with her family, like extraterrestrials on their way to earth. Amy Ritter photographs herself in the nude, with the slats of mobile homes behind her and the shadows of trees across her loose breasts.
Melanie Walker makes a game of it, in a checkerboard dunce cap under a checkerboard sheet. Could this be the real America in black and white? Neal Slavin makes it instead a record of devotion, with groups in prayer. They include Lubavitcher men, a Hindu temple, and Muslim women, all of them (surprise) in Brooklyn. Are they individuals or a party-colored mass? Whose story is all this anyway?
It is never just about pride—not when those who rescued Jews from the Holocaust shrug off their heroism for Gay Block. It may not even be the story that one hears first. A young man waves his hands for Denis Darzacq, with his back to dreadful paintings of soft-focused women. He could be a politically incorrect white male parodying or indifferent to them, but he only using sign language. Another person with disability walks just apart from half a dozen others, as if unable to lead refugees to safety or to grace. These huddled masses may assert their identity, but an unstable identity not content with yearning to breathe free.
A slap in the face
If you ask Ina Archer, white America could use a slap in the face, maybe even you. She delivers, too, repeatedly, with a little help from the movies. Back in In the Heat of the Night, Sidney Poitier and a plantation owner confront one another without so much as sharing the frame. As if taking its heat from the movie's title but in broad daylight, the scene builds to a slow boil. And then the white man slaps Poitier right in the face, and for once a black man slaps back—for the first time, Archer points out, in an American movie. In her edited version, the boil continues, too, as the slap comes rapid fire, again and again.
It was 1967, at the optimistic heart of the civil-rights movement, but the heat of the culture wars has only increased in fifty years, and so has the slap's urgency. If you are a white man and part of the problem, it supplies a rejoinder. If you are part of the solution, in sympathy with Black Lives Matter, it could serve as a wake-up call. Is Archer relying a bit too much on Hollywood for her solution, or is she correcting it? Her ambivalence gives the show a greater depth, if not always a greater coherence. But then Poitier himself, in the role of a Philadelphia police officer accused of murder in Mississippi, has more than one correction to give.
Slow boil or rapid fire, video's extended moment seems larger and better than life or, for that matter, than an earnest old movie. So, too, are drawings in a fine pen and ink. Roses surround the head of James Baldwin, while another intricate floral arrangement graces a single male eye. Archer is giving America a black eye, with pride, but elsewhere collage adds the detritus of real life, including a coaster, magazine clippings, and more than one image of Uncle Tom, a staple for Kara Walker as well—much as Aunt Jemima performs for Betye Saar. A title expresses both sides of the picture, Jimmy (The Devil Finds Work). The show's title, "Osmundine (Orchid Slap)," embellishes the slap similarly, where "osmundine" refers to the murky roots and soil that nurture orchids.
Archer's ambivalence has been building since the mid-1990s. Another garden, but of TV monitors, plays scenes from still older movies, starting with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Do the frolicsome black characters cheer or disgust her? 
Maybe both, and the twenty-minute video opens with bare-boned letters spelling out what made a person black in the state of Virginia. They also give the work its title, 1/16th of 100%!? As more text makes plain, Virginia also outlawed "miscegenation"—which, you might think, would have precluded that fraction of blackness.
By 2003, the TV garden has grown, and the long video has become a continuous loop, as Hattie McDaniel: or A Credit to the Motion Picture Industry. Here clips focus on black maids, like McDaniel in Gone with the Wind. She also comes to dominate the installation, with her acceptance speech for an Academy Award—or another clever bit of staging and editing, as no recording of her moment in the spotlight survives. Halle Berry turns up briefly, too, accepting an award just a year before Archer's work, when a black woman's lifetime of achievement was harder to overlook. Still, the press dismissed her speech as frantic, and, to add to the irony, she won for her part in Monster's Ball. McDaniel looks dignified by comparison.
She was, no doubt, a punning credit to the industry—which, by implication, sorely needs one, but what am I to think of the roles through she suffered? What am I to think of the movies, period, or the loose connections within the videos? And what do they say about race in America? Archer can seem at once too settled and too confusing, but she gets one feeling and thinking. With each step over twenty-five years, she is also more focused. You can cheer Poitier on, but you may still feel that slap in the face.
Stumping for men
Charles Long has his soft side, although one might not always know it. He used his 2012 contribution to New York summer sculpture to simulate a petting zoo in Madison Square Park. Kids could get a head start on art appreciation, while adults could rediscover their inner child. Since then, though, the boy from New Jersey has retreated to the San Gabriel Mountains, where he has rediscovered instead the outer signs of his gender—what he calls his "anatomical and chemical self." He describes it as confining, but one might never know that either. His latest work may depict not his macho but the "aftermath of a patriarchal apocalypse," but women, children, and art lovers beware.
He made his discovery, he says, while sketching trees near his mountain home, a subject that such women as Anya Gallaccio and Babs Reingold have made their own. He interrupted the tree rings with a "human penis," and, voilà, they became art. To be generous, do your best to set aside the implicit sexual fantasies or the suppression of gender in his description of a penis. Could this recall the bad old days when "all men" stood in for humanity and the human was a cover for male norms? Could that explain the show's title, "Paradigm Lost"? Maybe not, but those norms do take over the joint, in a giddy but confining installation.
Tree stumps in white serve for what sure look like seats along the gallery's desk, although one might hesitate to park one's butt. Others lie upturned and scattered about, along with more white sculpture as a bundle of kindling. The fire is only starting, but Long already has the means to put it out. An entrance wall has a row of fountains—unless, with deference to Marcel Duchamp, one sees only urinals. An erect rod rises up from a rusted cart, sexualizing its model in Alberto Giacometti. The gallery notes other influences in Philip Guston, Edvard Munch, and Constantin Brancusi, although they might not appreciate the compliment. The stumps could be just the pedestals that Brancusi abandoned for sculpture.
A huge face emerges from a wall hanging, somewhere between an ogre and an emoticon. A mural extends the apocalypse to an imagined city, where the Twin Towers, for now, still stand. An arced window of stained glass consecrates them all by casting its light on the floor. Then again, as with the ogre, Long might not have dismissed his inner child after all. He appeared in 2013 in a show on the theme of "A Disagreeable Object," but he cannot bring himself to be all that disagreeable, apart from his male ego. As in Madison Square Park, he risks just as much the cutes.
Upstairs, Hannah Starkey comes off as a rejoinder or an antidote—much as she did alongside Phil Collins in 2009. Starkey's photographs then wrested women from the male gaze by distancing them from the viewer. She showed them on balconies and through windows, going about their business as themselves. She is still using distance as a marker, and it still has its unsettling side. If one cannot quite discern where they live and what they do, can one ever hope to know them? Just to ask gives an added dimension to what could otherwise be more simple-minded than she might like.
Her new work includes portraits with undoubted pride in a woman's presence. More striking, it also documents a woman's march in her native Britain. (How nice to know that the massive January march went well beyond my home country with its groper-in-chief.) Starkey blurs the background, so that only faces and protest signs pierce the darkness. She may mean a greater focus on their anger and autonomy, with nary a male marcher like me in New York City in sight. They gain poignancy, though, by taking action with no firm ground on which to stand.
"Grace" ran at Laurence Miller through February 22, 2019, Charles Long and Hannah Starkey at Tanya Bonakdar through February 9. Ina Archer ran at Microscope through September 27, 2020.