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Firing B(l)ack
John Haberin New York City
Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Ella Walker
Tiona Nekkia McClodden is quite able to look after herself, thank you. Guns at the ready in the galleries or ankles in chains at MoMA, she can handle it or even desire it. Only with dance at The Shed can she afford to relax.
By the time of her triple opening, the Supreme Court had struck down New York's ban on concealed weapons, but she was ready. On video, a young black male comes straight at you, slipping a gun in and out of his waist band. It is a nervous gesture, frightened and restless, but no less a threat. So, too, she implies is blackness for white America, even as African Americans live under a constant threat of violence, from the police and from others. For a feature in The New York Times, she took the interviewer to a firing range. Quite apart from blackness, can Ella Walker fire back in her own "theater of desire? 
A shot in the dark
For Tiona Nekkia McClodden, an entire show is a shot in the dark, as "Mask / Conceal / Carry." The installation itself teases out degrees of darkness, from black shades on the back wall to eerie blue lighting. It consists largely of firearms and untidy fragments of firearms, in low relief and on pedestals, between painting, sculpture, and absence. Molded in black leather and thermoplastic, they seem impossible to conceal but meant to be carried. The one exception, a fragile hood in threads of gold and silver, is literally a mask. It looks like armor out of the Dark Ages, but still shining.
Will that be enough? The hood cannot offer much protection, and neither can art. It puts McClodden herself on the spot, like shackles for Melvin Edwards. A second video promises a visit to her studio, although her digital curves have a life of their own. Based on the course of her firing practice, they look back to abstraction's classic "drawing in space," but in the space of the studio's leather and her body. The two remaining works, in black weave on white linen, do not sound optimistic. One spells out the show's title, the other My Trace / My Ruin.
African American art may have to accept the risk of ruin, in order to leave its trace. Another video has entered the Museum of Modern Art, on view with its collection in what, no doubt, will become its 2022 "fall reveal." Here McClodden recites poetry by Brad Johnson while hanging upside-down. All I could think of was the black-hooded figure under torture at Abu Ghraib. And that figure got to stand erect. The rest of the installation leaves more traces of the artist, in fragments on the wall and floor.
Still, she is looking after herself. She gets to recite poetry, after all, and she can choose her weapon. She appeared in 2021 in her home town, in the reopened Philadelphia Museum. Born in Arkansas, she has adjusted well to the city. She has her target practice, starting without ammunition to get the feel for a gun. She also connects that practice, "dry fire training," to a weightlifter's "training to failure," or pushing past one's limits.
Convincing or not, the connection sees strength in the risk of failure. The video of a black male cuts off his head, an act of dehumanization but also concealment. And, unlike a victim of torture, McClodden can speak for herself, in and out of verse. Previous work, modeled after cattle restraints on their way to death, has turned the weapons of brutality on other species entirely. One such appeared at the New Museum, in "Grief and Grievance," where she had no time for grief or grieving. There is too much to handle in the headlines and in art.
Plainly she is having her moment—and not just thanks to a right-wing Court. She is also in a group show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and in mixed media, including a stage set for dance, at the Shed in Hudson Yards. She has had other recent gallery exhibitions in New York and a spot in the 2019 Whitney Biennial—and all that on top of new representation in Chelsea. She brings diversity and a shifting identity, as Afro-Cuban with a penchant for black boots and kinky sex. Take it all if you like with a grain of salt, and I dismissed the guns on first visit as crudely obvious. Yet she keeps firing back.
Breaking the Silence
"Silence is my soul," but "anger is what I do best." The words speak to African American experience, and they may resonate all the more when McClodden puts herself on the line. For The Brad Johnson Tape, X from 2017, she eschews silence and can only bottle up her anger. She recites Johnson's poetry even while suspended upside down. And then she vanishes, leaving only dried rose petals at one's feet—on video and in the gallery at MoMA. The artist who has found herself and her latest art in a firing range can only wish that she had a gun.
She speaks, too, on TV resting on the floor, this time reading (if I understand right) from Audrey Lorde, the black lesbian poet. All the viewer can see, though, is a black man's face with anger enough for them both. Yet he, too, knows that his identity as a black male turns on restraint, with blackness itself a mask. Here such abstractions as freedom "will happily keep their mouth shut." Johnson's 1988 poem is, after all, "On Subjugation," and McClodden has chosen him for his "embrace of violence, sex, cruising, and, more importantly, . . . love." The remainder of the installation testifies to at least the first three, including black spandex and a belt.
As in the poem's title (also the work's subtitle), the violence could just as well be political, if sexuality were not political enough. Do the two connotations cut in very different ways, and is either altogether positive? To McClodden's credit, her ambivalence and contradictions enrich the work. She adds a copy of The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes. In context of BDSM and poetry, it may cut more than one way, too. She throws in a second paperback as well, by Julian Jaynes, who outlined an alternative history of human consciousness, before left- and right-brain thinking grew apart—but it is never too late to embrace both.
If McClodden with a loaded weapon is in your face, McClodden in subjugation is in her own. How then has her art become no more than The Trace of an Implied Presence? She has opened it at The Shed to presences in the plural, for a history of black dance. Her chief collaborator is Mikki Shepard, a founder of Dance Black America at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but there are many more, maybe even you. The installation has a wide-open gallery, for four large screens—for four movements in a four-hundred year history. The floor in front of each video becomes a dance floor as well, to continue that history into the present.
On the wall outside, in place of a logo, the Shed displays a ragged but suggestive silhouette, a shadow that also casts its shadow on the wall. The traces come alive on-screen in interviews with the principals in each movement, dancers in rehearsal, and a performance. From a distance, their voices and images create an intriguing cacophony. Within the large square space of a dance floor, though, one can make out each one—or undertake a dance of one's own. McClodden has chosen rubber floors for concert and modern dance, wood for tap dancing and Philly bop, the last new to me but just the thing for a night on the town. You could, though, cut against the style on video or just improvise on your own.
A mirror at one corner lets you lose yourself in performance—or sit back and watch, much as McClodden chose to listen. (You can also duck behind the big screens, for a swing-era dance in DBA's collection and a contemporary recreation.) The near empty floors, though, have their temptations, especially after her measured assaults in the galleries and at MoMA. What makes for a good or bad dance floor? For one speaker, it is a good floor if you no longer think about it. And McClodden may well be overthinking, but not at the expense of collaboration, much as Robert Rauschenberg and Noa Eshkol before her have collaborated on art and dance. Could those gentle, incomplete scrawls on video in Tribeca also be choreography for a dance?
Crisis and response
Ella Walker reveals more than you may be comfortable seeing, but she must first confront a woman's reserve. One woman shows longing in her eyes as she turns toward another opening her robe. The latter makes quite a show of her private parts, and the painting is Walker's Theater of Desire. Still the desirer wears lily white, like an innocent, while the desired looks away. When a woman in another painting dresses for kinky sex, she runs up against a look of confrontation or dismissal. Elsewhere limbs run over one another, in a compressed space that never adds up.
Not that this is a morality play for Christian conservatives. Walker's eight paintings take desire for granted, if only to mess things up. A third figure in Theater of Desire spreads her arms like the Madonna della Misericordia (or Madonna of Mercy) by Piero della Francesca in 1445. If the women she embraces cannot agree on what to make of desire, she welcomes and encompasses them all. Walker has no shortage of reference points at that. To trust the artist, they include modern dance, commedia dell'arte, Federico Fellini in his movie about unfulfilled desire, 8½—and, first and foremost, the very birth of the Renaissance.
Just once, Giotto allowed himself an absence of human feeling. He had no other choice—not because Jesus transcends his humanity, but because he is dead. Jesus is still the central figure at the Crucifixion around 1300, but his sheer passivity brings the displays of feeling to every side that much more alive. Where other artists show agony still written across his face and flesh, even in death, Giotto sees a terrifying lack of response. It drives home what Mary, too, finds inescapable as she collapses at the foot of the cross. And it is all the more inescapable in a fresco cycle filled with moments of revelation and a fully human response.
Back then, Giotto had to invent the means to convey humanity and reserve. Walker takes off from a mere sideline for him in Padua, the virtues and vices, while making it hard to know which is which. Even then, her set does not match Catholicism's or his. She has, in short, mixed feelings. Just one figure rises above them all, but with a gap for a face, and she is Queen of the Night. If that sounds a touch theatrical, Walker's theater plays out as a woman's desire, and her cast is all women.
Yet she, too, has ingenious means for conveying desire, including raw pigments to match raw feelings. And then she throws in acrylic dispersion, pencil, chalk, and marble dust. Their warm tones, cool grays, and textured patterns leave no trace of Giotto's blue skies. A woman's brown top could almost be the gory details inside her chest. Walker also anchors her linen not directly on the wall, but between wood horizontals at top and bottom. One could call it unstretched or stretched taut.
The carpentry in place of stretchers comes on the heels of constructions by Cindy Ji Hye Kim in the same space a month before. And now the desired and desiring lead right to Judith Eisler in the back room. As ever, Eisler begins with screen shots of iconic women, and she sees her own feelings through them. If the perspective of the "Pictures generation" is dating a bit, I have new respect now for her heightened realism. Can it deliver the intensity and artifice that she finds in TV? Trust Walker for a proper crisis and response.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden ran at David Zwirner in Tribeca through October 8, 2022, at The Shed through December 1, and starting in August at the Museum of Modern Art. Ella Walker ran at Casey Kaplan through July 29.