Juan Logan: Whose Song Shall I Sing?
at Chicago Cultural Center, through April 21 Gary Simmons at the Museum of Contemporary Art, through May 19
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By connecting “benign” mass-culture images with more obvious signs of subjugation, Logan argues that sweet stereotypes can be destructive too. The broad grin can be seen as a sign of oppression and opposition at once: Logan says he’s seen “old black men” act “as humble as they needed to be to get by….Grinning wasn’t always grinning.” The piece’s scale suggests the multitudes affected by racism, and while Logan uses different faces, there are only 14 variations, none of which seems truly individual.
All begin with a houselike shape. At the center of the ironically titled Nurturing (1997) is what looks like an old piece of found metal (Logan actually purchased an embossed piece of tin and painted it with tar, allowing small flecks of the original white paint to show through). Mounted horizontally just below it is a similarly colored nightstick. African-American artists in recent decades have often foregrounded discarded materials, a reference to their marginalized social position as well as to such black cultural traditions as cuisine based on animal parts that whites disdained. Here the metal surface’s centrality and definition encourage the viewer to focus on every indentation and fleck, finding beauty in its mix of design and blankness (some of Logan’s sculptures include images). By contrast the nightstick brims with meaning, its aggressive, overdetermined presence juxtaposed with the gentler, almost meditative vision that finds redemption in the ordinary. The difference is significant, suggesting that the two views are utterly incompatible.
Simmons, an African-American born in New York City in 1964, works in other media as well, including photography and video. But despite similarities between his work and Logan’s, there’s a world of difference. Logan’s profoundly emotional art asks the viewer to find meaning and pleasure in each speck, area of color, and collision of forms. His pieces repay attention in a way that Simmons’s cooler, breezier, more conceptual work does not. And though the MCA’s booklet announces that Simmons’s “haunting, memorable works…address personal and collective experiences of race and class,” it doesn’t acknowledge that addressing race and class has become a cliche. Yet it’s Simmons who gets the more prestigious venue and an elegant hardcover catalog. Perhaps others genuinely believe he’s the more rewarding artist. Or it could be that today many favor more disengaged, even blase art that requires less intensive viewing.
