subject: Martha Wilson The Legs Are The Last To Go [print this page] At the opening of Three Trips Around the Block, a scorching 15-year survey of work by Rico Gatson at Exit Art, people were lining
up to stick their heads through the bottom of a box hanging from the ceiling. Titled Two Heads in a Box (1994), this confrontational
video installation is the shows earliest work.
Imprisoned behind three bars inside its black interior is a movie that features Gatsons dark face illuminated by fiery red light and
adorned with a white clown nose, a painted white beard and a huge white paper bowtie. Inverting Al Jolson's racist early-20th-century
blackface performances, Gatson repeatedly intones Jolson's trademark song, Let Me Sing and I'm Happy, until he is ready to drop.
The exhibition is the first since the much-lamented death of Exit Art co-founder and director at Exit Art Jeanette Ingberman from
complications of leukemia this summer. Jeanette and Papo Colo approached me about the show almost exactly a year before her
passing. Gatson recalls, I first met them when they saw my work in 1992 at Sauce and their enthusiasm was my first real New York
art world affirmation. Im honored to have been a part of Jeanettes great passion for artists and art.
Born in 1966 in Augusta, Ga., Gatson grew up in California and graduated with an MFA from Yale in 1991. Hes been showing with the
legendary Ronald Feldman Fine Arts (which represents Leon Golub, Joseph Beuys, Hannah Wilke and Eleanor Antin, among other artists)
since 2000. His work was included in Freestyle, the influential 2001 show at the Studio Museum in Harlem that introduced the notion
of post-black art -- redefining complex notions of blackness, as curator Thelma Golden put it. (A conversation between Golden and
Gatson is scheduled for Exit Art on Nov. 3, 2011.)
Picket Cage (1999-2011), another viewer-constricting installation, is a claustrophobic enclosure created by a tall white wooden
fence. Inside is a video featuring a digitally simplified figure wearing a blood-spattered white Ku Klux Klan outfit that soon
bursts into flame. As it intensifies, the fire becomes more realistic, accompanied by an ominous crackling soundtrack. The dark skin
and eyes flashing underneath the cone hat lead one to suspect that the person burning is African-American. In fact, Gatson himself is
performing the Klansmans immolation, a tragic paradox suggesting that racist violence destroys both perpetrators and victims.
Fire has continued to be a constant motif (it was the title of Gatsons first solo show at Feldman) but its since become an
interestingly frozen, almost manufactured formal conflagration, like an artificial inferno thats impervious to change. Hot reds and
oranges are often frozen into stripes reminiscent of African textiles, geometric minimalism, and the bars of a cell, perhaps
providing a bit of protective distance from overwhelming fury.
A technique opposing differing colors and textures obliquely echoes the more overt conflicts expressed in Gatsons starkly graphic
paintings. In Nape of the Neck, Small of the Back (2006), for example, a male silhouette is constructed of darkly glowing
wallpaper-like stripes of color that completely flatten the vulnerable body the title infers. Pierced with a constellation of scars,
the figures back faces the viewer, exposing a presumed history of slave-era abus, Xu responds with the kind of self-satisfied,
opaque arrogance that only a coddled vice-president of the official Chinese Art Academy, which he is, would dare to proffer as a
backasswards defense of the ChiCom situation.
For starters Bingo blames the current reality of Chinese state-controlled culture on its own people: "They can't tell if it is up or
down." He then goes on to name his favorite artist: "myself" and the show he most recently visited, his own exhibition in Virginia!
Bingle is so circumspect, except for his own self-regard, that he refuses to name his favorite restaurant, although he offers that he
