Light Years

John Haber
in New York City

Stacy Lynn Waddell and Tariku Shiferaw

Going Dark: At the Edge of Visibility

Light takes time to reach us. It is the precondition of vision. It is the precondition of art. Could that be why painting need not stop you in your tracks to slow you down?

Oil paint lets you feel that slowdown in your gut, as light penetrates its layers. Any paint lets you feel the time it takes for an image to take on meaning—or refuse to serve any purposes but its own. Fancy generalizations aside, it governs how light reaches out from blackness for Stacy Lynn Waddell and Tariku Shiferaw. For the first, it is the silvery emergence of landscape, for the second the silvery resistance to white American eyes. Is blackness, then, invisible? Maybe literally so, and maybe so for African Americans everywhere who ask to become fully visible to white eyes.

The twenty-eight artists in "Going Dark" demand to be seen—not as targets for the police, but as individuals with human needs. They demand to be seen as artists, too, shaping what it means to be an individual. Much the same demand underlies the electrifying opening of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as well, and several here take its title for theirs. Still, the show's title continues, this is "The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility," and every one of them contributes to the darkness. Just how they seek invisibility is more than half the point. That alone keeps the show compelling the full length of the ramp at the Guggenheim.

Not all its voices are black. Farah Al Qasimi, say, is from Abu Dhabi, but for her, too, It's Not Easy Being Seen. The curators, Ashley James with Faith Hunter, do not make plain just when race informs their choices. They seek only black invisibility—as sought, imposed, a form of inquiry, or a matter of perception. Each has its own tier of the ramp, although the art keeps pointing to all four. Still, this could be the perfect survey of currents in African American art. It leaves out most fashionable figure painting and myth making, but such is the price of going dark.

Silver and black

Light does takes time—real time, and nothing is faster. Consider that when you read accounts of space aliens traversing untold light years merely to leave a momentary flash in the sky. And yet it does come quickly to Stacy Lynn Waddell, reflecting back from her work as well. It reflects out from real or imagined portraits, landscapes, and flowers. You might think that nothing can stop or divert its path, no more than one can stop time. As a bonus, though, she steps back in time to older art and African American histories.

Waddell takes that phrase about taking time for her show's title and renders it in cursive in neon, actual if not natural light. It looks all the more impressive in a photograph on the gallery's Web site, where the necessary exposure time allows a cloud of light to form around its letters. The rest of the show leaves it implicit and loses something in reproduction, like most decent art. She works in gold and silver leaf, along with other metals, on canvas. Silvery threads contribute delicate tracery in low relief. One could almost hold the loose bundles of flowers in one's hands, only that might kill them or kill the light.

The tracery also makes the flowers seem like living, growing things. If their titles speak instead of birds, one might as well accept their strangeness. Landscapes are flatter, like paintings, and the metal fills earth, trees, and sky with ghostly colors. Waddell is all but drawing with light. It is hard not to wonder at how she does it. Landscape can seem alive, too, and it can be no coincidence that a river may wind right through the center. Still, these are genre paintings, in a fine, familiar tradition.

Forget UFOs who never stop to ask, "take me to your leader." This is not space travel but time travel. Waddell is fond, she says, of nineteenth-century American art, and she seems more interested in the practice of landscape than the sublime of the Hudson River School. Hilly compositions evoke, if anything, painters who never quite made the grade, despite deep red circles in a yellow sky. Many are circular paintings, or tondos, another bow to tradition. A close-up of flowers has more than enough ancestors, too, like Georgia O'Keeffe in oil or Ruth Asawa in watercolor.

Her favorite, though, is Winslow Homer, and she mentions his scene of the Bahamas after a storm. I have trouble seeing it in her work, but she does subordinate light and drawing to the mundane work of cleaning up after a disaster. The Met recently featured Homer's The Gulf Stream, a black man alone in a small boat, heroic or doomed, and two more works focus on a black man. He, too, evokes tradition, but a very different one—and I do not overlook the irony of so much light in a show about blackness. He bends his knees and raises his arm in a Caribbean dance. Like the neon, he also returns her art to the present.

He is standing on ceramic floor tile, and he could be dancing in the bathroom. The work's perspective makes the floor dip sharply down, as another painted surface, and brings the viewer up close. Its awkwardness serves as a useful alternative to the claims of her landscapes. I am half embarrassed to admire them. Still, the light reaches us, and it does not take light years. It shows in the fragile, silvery flowers.

Beware of darkness

What do you see in the night? Is it a barrier that not even the eye can penetrate? For Tariku Shiferaw, it is a place of wonder past barriers that others may choose to create. His paintings take you there, but then the night reasserts itself, leaving you to ask what remains. He has left his mark, in a show called "Marking Oneself in Dark Places," but its shimmering colors, too, may be only an accident, and the darkness itself the horrors of slavery. Still, he can call the dark places his own.

For Robert Frost, the dark places were "lovely, dark, and deep," but he could not rest long in their comforts. He had, as every schoolchild knows, those "promises to keep." For Shiferaw, the promises are owed to white people and (deep breath) "exclusionary Eurocentric systems of epistemic erasure." In less scholarly terms, they keep a black out of painting and power. They erase not just who Shiferaw is, but what he knows. He cannot overlook that black is the color of a censor's mark—or of a blackboard after erasure.

A room to the side, just past the gallery's entrance, situates those marks. Shiferaw covers its walls with visions of the night sky, broken by flashes of color and points of light. One mural lies behind a chain-link fence, the kind that encloses private property, including urban spaces that you really thought were public. Keep out. He also covers the entire floor with what look like wood crates. They could have served for shipping property, too, perhaps with African American labor—and one black artist, RaMell Ross, has shipped himself to the Deep South.

They look way too run-down for that now. They are, though, the artist's "cultural space-making." They are ceramic, like fine sculpture or ordinary household wares, and they also make quite a racket. The sounds from within, the gallery explains, are those of the African diaspora, just as for María Magdalena Campos-Pons in Brooklyn. I cannot swear to that, but the combination of painting, sculpture, a found object, sound art, and installation is impressive. They introduce many more works in the main room, where blackness returns with a vengeance.

These are work in series as Mata Semay, "night skies" in Amharic, the language of Ethiopia. (Individual titles are Amharic as well.) They, too, are close to black, but without stars in the night sky. They are also, if anything, still more colorful. These are large paintings, in the gestural tradition of Modernism in America, and black paintings that become colorful in response to time and the eye go back to Ad Reinhardt. Shiferaw, though, is not a formalist, and there is not a square to be seen apart from the crates.

Red may descend in jagged streaks like lightening, or blue and yellow may spread across the sky. Other paintings incorporate iridescent film. Are their colors only the chance products of industrial materials and gallery lights? Shiferaw does not distinguish the two media—or distinguish his marks from erasure. Take what you wish from critical theory, or take them as (another deep breath) pure painting. They can still take you deep into the night.

Demanding the visible

To be sure, black Americans are seen more than enough, as stereotypes and objects of fear. Blackness itself can become visible, as a barrier or as an invitation to find comfort in the dark. Waddell and Shiferaw take that as their subject in the galleries, and so do the artists in "Going Dark." Invisible Man for Kerry James Marshall reduces to white teeth and white eyes—somewhere between a stage villain and a minstrel show. Faith Ringgold leans for hers on the flat, mute colors of African masks. The Invisible Man series for Ming Smith leaves its actors out on the streets, metal gates down for the night and covered with graffiti.

Still, Marshall is never less than amused, and Ringgold's faces acquire warmth and individuality as both men and women. Smith's photos build a larger portrait of Harlem, from children at play to adults finding sacred ground, but still at risk and alone. Sandra Mujinga's Spectral Keepers are at once larger than life and forever hidden. Nine feet tall, they tower over the viewer in loose green pants and green hoods. They might almost be emitting a green light from within. And they are not the show's last hoodies.

Kevin Beasley dips his sweats in resin as sculpture, while photos by John Edmonds lend his accents of sharp color, and David Hammons takes an entire bay for a single hood. With her hoods, prints by Carrie Mae Weems, are just Repeating the Obvious. Hiding behind clothes may take other forms as well, in Camouflage Waves for Mujinga and camouflage colors for Joiri Minaya. Doris Salcedo needs only needles and thread, while Rebecca Belmore needs only hair. Belmore's shrouded figure kneels, in prayer or despair. It has straight black hair, not dreadlocks, but then the hair is synthetic.

Of course, the easiest way to hide behind a photograph or video is in the processing. A blue light hides Chris Ofili, leaving only swirls like loose curtains. Glenn Ligon prints each of his fifty self-portraits in a different off-kilter color. Yet Smith blurs her central figures with nothing more than her command of lighting, while prints by Stephanie Syjuco take on the rhythms of her shutter release. Sondra Perry speeds things up instead. A dancer's uncanny blur contrasts with the stasis of an unfinished Sheetrock wall.

At the same time, they gain in presence. That, after all, is the show's central demand. There is no escaping faces emerging from the darkness in close-up from Lorna Simpson, Ellen Gallagher, and Titus Kaphar. There is no escaping, too, the materials—Kaphar's asphalt paper, Tiona Nekkia McClodden's leather (as in kinky sex), WangShui's oil on aluminum, or Tomashi Jackson's marble dust on PVC, even when their images fade to black. Photos may also show only backs, paired with the sitter's front for Lyle Ashton Harris. Your phone and the FBI may not ditch face recognition anytime soon, but these backs are personal and real.

Charles White enters as a kind of father figure, although his hard-edged portraits in a sea of swirls look decidedly old-fashioned. History itself takes a back seat, apart from dark landscapes by Dawoud Bey, including the site of John Brown's tannery. One bit of history, though, could sum up the vital paradox of the show's demands. The 1995 Million Man March cried out for dignity, even as an individual had to surrender to a million. Ligon depicts it in a diptych that leaves the other half black, and Hank Willis Thomas calls for One Million Second Chances in images of the nation's flag and Capitol with all else fading into white. When Sable Elyse Smith counts the days and nights for prisoners, she could be counting out America for all.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Stacy Lynn Waddell ran at Candice Madey through October 28, 2023, Tariku Shiferaw at Galerie Lelong through October 21. "Going Dark" ran at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through April 7, 2024.