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Beware of Darkness
John Haberin New York City
Lorna Simpson: Gathered and Darkening
Alexandria Smith
Lorna Simpson will always have me humming along but unable to sing. It is my fate, as a white male standing apart from the black men and women in her art. It is their fate, too, in her 2001 video grid of lips humming "Easy to Remember," by Rogers and Hart.
That video attests to the urgency of memory in a country still marred by racism. It also attests to the studied reserve in much of her work, just as one will never see the entire faces. I kept encountering it in an earlier review of Simpson at the Whitney in 2003 and, four years later, in retrospective. Still, she was taking the viewer all along into private lives, including the daily routines in a video calendar. 
Could she be losing much of that reserve herself? Here I follow her first to the Brooklyn Museum, with her own additions to found photographs and lost memories, and then into paint—before turning to African American history for another woman, Alexandria Smith.
Hard to remember
For Lorna Simpson, the black middle class has a history—more often than not a woman's history. In one video installation, she imagined a woman navigating the duties and confines of an early American home. The woman could have been seeking a life or trapped in one. She could look forward to the woman in a second projection, at home in a classic of modern architecture. Simpson described the first as a fugitive slave in the moments before recapture, but one might otherwise never know it. All one can say for sure is that simple pleasures come with forgotten stories, and both are easily snatched away.
For Simpson parallel lives do not easily meet. They include days spent on the phone or filling the spaces in a calendar. She identifies with them, but they would not be half as poignant or as distant if she could not leave herself out of it, give or take a sometimes chilly inscription. Or so it seemed until 2011 in Brooklyn. With the photo sequences in "Gathered," men and women pose for themselves as well as others, although others may still have the last look and the last word. This time, too, she allows herself to appear.
She again mixes staged and found work, from flea markets and eBay, and she again juxtaposes past and present. An alcove also has her Easy to Remember, because African American stories are all too easy to forget. One long wall has well over a hundred photographs, from 1957 in LA. Mostly women, the models pose in the seductive conventions of fashion and style shoots. The facing wall has head shots from old photo booths. Yet Simpson doubles the first, and she intersperses tiny framed sketches with the second.
She has allowed herself to be drawn in, and the change is striking. It did not come all at once either, and with accretion comes a greater spontaneity. One can see it in the titles of successive additions. The series began with a demand, Please Remind Me of Who I Am. They continued with Instantaneous, Standstill, and finally just Untitled. The urgency of the title first masks the greater detachment, while the increasing silence allows anonymous lives their say.
Did I expect a firmer and harsher commentary, as so often in the past? Did I imagine a forced march through nearly four hundred paired images, with the present always having the last word? Instead one sees the past shaping the present and the present learning to remember the past. Black was already beautiful, they say, and a man at a chess table is a lot more dapper and funnier than hustlers in Washington Square. Memories of Jim Crow are poignant now? And yet the smiles in the photo booth are their own.
Rather than simple imitations on one wall, one has themes and variations, and they are rarely side by side. Each wall forms a single large work—rising and falling, swelling and narrowing. Simpson in fact describes the smaller work as a "cloud," and one can see the abstract ink stains as clouds. They also evoke old photographic plates exposed deliberately or accidentally to light. The notion of exposure still runs through the series, as a critique of American culture in black and white. At the same time, she hopes, exposure is rediscovery.
Is she really painting?
Simpson was opening up a dialogue even before her videos with sound. Some silkscreen cityscapes of the late 1990s, with felt panels for text, soften the message in a different way. Still, they oblige one to puzzle out even the obvious. And she still does, only now that means penetrating the darkness. She even calls her latest work "Darkening," and there is more now than ever to penetrate. They open onto vast arctic seas in paint.
Is Simpson really painting? She made her name with photos paired with text, but even her videos border on conceptual art. Now a dozen big blue canvases combine silkscreen and paint, and it is hard to know where one ends and the other begins. It takes paint to make a silkscreen, and she lets it smudge and blur, for its own sake or for clouds and sea. Every so often it leaves exposed the white ground, sometimes in vertical bands that contain words. If the big blue recalls Onement by Barnett Newman, the words could be his "zips."
The sheer scale recalls the Hudson River School—and towering icebergs an earlier sublime in Northern Romanticism and nineteenth-century Danish art. Still, another kind of glamour altogether slips in. One or two superimpose a black fashion model, in purples that deepen and enrich the blue, while smaller paintings overlay faces on one another, like a Cubist Ebony. A tall stack of magazines holds the center of the gallery as Simpson's Timeline. She describes the series as taking considerable research, but that, too, might have been a guilty pleasure. If Andy Warhol had taken up the Abstract Expressionism, he might have found himself here.
Simpson would be the first to protest the association. She has worked with found photos long enough, thank you, and the felt was large, too. For several years now, she has also combined photocollage and paint, with color additions to images of woman. When she called one of those paintings Blue Wave, the wave meant a woman's hair. Now light glistens off icebergs and distant skies, with no obvious source in the dark of night. Asked if the scale of her new work signals its ambition, she prefers to think of it as a loosening and a space for her to explore—not unlike an arctic exploration after all.
Is she, then, extending her old concerns, now to blackness and the blues, or deconstructing them? Instead of acid commentary, her pillars of text amount to mere fragments of words. (I believe I could make out "children" and "thieves.") Pop Art made use of images and text, too, but filled with advertising's impersonal desires. How far that seems from Glenn Ligon in his coal-spattered power slogans or Simpson's own raw cultural history. How far it seems from these words as well.
As with so much of the revival of painting nowadays, she still leaves me wondering about its necessity. In fact, Warhol's early silkscreens did indeed respond to Abstract Expressionism, with a loose touch and the anxiety of the electric chair, as she pointedly does not. Her evolution from the irony of the "Pictures generation" could serve as a relief or a dire warning. Can Simpson still define the gaps between black and white, words and black experience? Can she still put a white male like me on the spot? I have my doubts, but I can only wonder that she creates her own space between the visual and the unseen.
Beyond the melting pot
When Alexandria Smith calls her work "Monuments to an Effigy," she speaks in the plural, even for a single moving installation. She also places art and memory at two removes from the African American experience, even for an African American artist today. Just that makes her history all the more urgent. She evokes a largely forgotten African American burial ground in what was then Olde Towne in Flushing, not far from the Queens Museum. (This is, after all, Flushing Meadow Park.) And she does so by inviting one to a ceremony on behalf of the living and the dead.
One enters past a first remove, a black wall broken by a slim window of stained glass, right next to "Mundos Alternos," a show of art and science fiction in the Americas. It suggests an opening, to the light or to the visitor, but also a fragment of something long since buried and lost. It is imitation glass at that—and mere color, like abstract painting, rather than an illustration from the Bible. Beyond that, everything is about blackness and, for the most part, literally black. Smith textures the wall with glitter, so that one feels one's presence all the more and so that the blackness shines. Objects within add local color all the same.
The Macedonia A.M.E. Church administered the burial ground until 1898 and served earlier as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Two pews hang side by side on a wall, as if swept up in the fervor of a ritual or risen from the dead. The facing wall has two legs that could belong to dancers or angels. Each curves around a shape like a burning bush or a flame. One last pairing could belong to an American church or a deeper history. African masks stand atop ionic columns.
Smith keeps doubling and redoubling, just as with her effigy and its monuments, even as a better-known African American burial ground in Lower Manhattan settles for the static and monumental. It allows objects to confront one another in the present, but also you. So does A Rooting Place, a black sculpture in the shape of pigtails, fingers, or roots. She speaks of them, too, as rising out of the ground, although they rest on a pedestal as a stand-in for an altar. So does a soundtrack as well, mixing quotes from Gwendolyn Brooks, the poet, with music by Smith and Liz Gré for cello and soprano. It has a touch of old-fashioned church music and a touch of gospel, as At Council; Found Peace.
Doubling, though, can be unnerving, as Doppelgängers or what Sigmund Freud called the uncanny. The objects here could represent ghostly counterparts or living memories. This is Civil War art updated for an ongoing civil war under Donald J. Trump. Its impressions recall absent bodies for David Hammons or the forced absence of African Americans in politics and textbook histories. Still, a doubling, like the plural "monuments," remains an openness to alternatives. Smith sees ionic columns as masculine and African masks as the property of women.
With Beyond the Melting Pot, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer in 1963, one American ideal gave way to a picture of conflict but also diversity. A melting pot might still make sense, though, so long as one imagines its viscous contents poured out one pot at a time, leaving other layers below. Flushing is now home to the Mets and Chinese Americans, just past the Latino community in Corona, and the city paved over the burial ground decades ago for a playground. The Queens Museum arose on the site of another celebration of diversity, the 1964 Worlds Fair. Spooky, no, or maybe uplifting? For an African American or a woman, it is not so easy to lay the past to rest.
Lorna Simpson ran at The Brooklyn Museum through August 21, 2011, and at Hauser & Wirth through July 26, 2019. Alexandria Smith ran at the Queens Museum through August 18. An earlier article looks more fully at Simpson in retrospective.