The Most Well Connected Poorman in America: HOLLAND COTTER:Beyond Multiculturalism, Freedom?

Beyond Multiculturalism, Freedom?

By HOLLAND COTTER The New York Times

Sunday July 29 09:05 AM EDT

MULTICULTURALISM, more than an attitude but less than a theory, was a propelling force behind American art of the last two decades. It will define the 1990's in the history books as surely as Pop defined the 1960's. But it came with problems as well as benefits; some of those problems have grown acute. In the 2000's, the time has come to move on to new ground. Multiculturalist thinking changed the art world's demographics and expanded its frame of reference far beyond Western horizons.

It exposed the social and ethical mechanics of art and its institutions and called traditional aesthetic values into question. Most important, it reversed old patterns of exclusion and brought voices into the mainstream that had rarely, if ever, been there before. But limitations became apparent. The ideal of diversity of mixing things up, spreading the wealth, creating a new Us never quite happened. By binding art to racial, ethnic and sexual identity, multiculturalism carved out discrete areas of high visibility but kept those areas self-contained. Minority artists were introduced to the art world power center, only to find themselves, with few exceptions, viewing it from culturally specific ghettos. The deal was, you could get inside the gates, but your movements were restricted.

Since the middle of the 1990's, dissatisfaction with this situation has been widespread, especially as the very concept of race has been forcefully called into question. Black may have been beautiful in the 1960's, and powerful in the 1970's, but it has also become increasingly viewed by cultural historians as a social construct, one fixed in place only by racism itself. This view, or a version of it, recently found expression, somewhat surprisingly, in a high-profile and ethnically defined institution, the Studio Museum in Harlem. Its lively exhibition, "Freestyle," closed on June 26 and opens in California at the Santa Monica Museum of Art on Sept. 9. The 28 young artists included were all African-American, as was the show's curator, Thelma Golden.

Yet Ms. Golden described the exhibition as a showcase of "postblack art" by a new generation of artists who approach racial identity with questions as well as convictions, as one among many pieces of personal data, as something to be experimented with, or even left alone. In fact, some of the work in the show dealt with race and politics forthrightly and insistently. But with the "postblack" label, Ms. Golden may have located a paradigm shift in contemporary art. She didn't engineer the shift, and she is by no means the first to detect it. But she gave it a name, which is what often snaps an amorphous, floating- around-out-there idea into focus and ends up bringing about change. A label can, of course, also reduce an idea to little more than a smart-sounding buzzword with a short shelf life.

But the implications of postblackness or to use a term proposed by the historian David A. Hollinger postethnicity, are too far-reaching and problematic to be taken lightly. Skin color is one of the defining facts of American life. If you don't feel compelled to think about it much, chances are you are white. If you think about it often, and often urgently, you probably fit another demographic description: African-American, Asian-American, Latino, American Indian, or a blend of any of these.

Contemporary American art has felt the need to think about race and ethnicity intently in the past few decades. Some of the reasons for this are broad. Staggering changes in the country's population a huge growth in Asian and Spanish-speaking residents, an expansion of a black middle class, whites now a minority in many major cities have complicated the texture of American culture right across the board. BUT art, which occupies a fairly small and hermetic place on that board, had other, specific incentives for dealing with race.

Among them was a severely depressed art market in the late 1970's and again in the late 1980's, which had an unsettling and decentering effect on the field. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, doors once closely guarded were left ajar. In came street- based graffiti, self-taught and so-called outsider art, identity-oriented work of all types, as well as art from non-Western cultures. The complexion of the art world was subtly but forever changed. At the same time, a generation of teachers, writers, historians and museum personnel educated in the 60's and 70's had come of age. Their social and racial profile was broad.

And now they were on the scene institutionally with sharply honed questions about what made art tick, to whom it belonged and what it could and should do. They brought to their inquiry a clear perspective on the effects of racism, a casual, covert, liberal racism that extends from university art departments to the commercial gallery system. Around all of these developments multiculturalism cohered, attracting both positive and negative reactions. For its proponents, it offered a utopian vision of an art world in which color and class barriers were finally dismantled. Once they were gone, the idea was, artists from many points on the spectrum would coexist, learn from one another and at least have a shot at a career and its rewards. Dissenters projected a different vision.

They saw a proliferation of careers based on ethno-racial identity rather than artistic accomplishment; a relativism of aesthetic values in the interest of leveling the field; and a loss in the credibility, thanks to the subversive machinations of social art history, of treasured, power-bestowing concepts like "quality" and critical authority. As it happened, neither the best hopes nor worst fears were realized. Instead, a middling solution was struck, one that seemed to serve everybody's purposes but had intrinsic liabilities. Instead of a periphery-to- center integration, group affiliations were drawn deeper along racial and ethnic lines. Black shows, Latino shows, Asian-American shows proliferated.

A theory-based way of talking about art, race and culture was brought in from academia and served for a while as an empowering common language, but it soon became diluted through overuse and misuse. A tremendous amount was, in fact, accomplished. Mainstream American art gained a new content as cultural histories were recovered, examined, interpreted. Original hybrid styles were developed, notably in multimedia installations that blended Conceptual Art strategies with non-Western images and forms. Stars with an international currency were born. At the same time, old problems ended up being perpetuated.

Culturally specific shows offered more artists more opportunities to exhibit, find an audience and develop a commercial base. But they also reinforced certain narrow and distorting views of ethnic identity that "diversity" should have dispelled. Asian-American shows, for example, tended to sweep together artists of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent, furthering the fictitious, homogenized Asia of Orientalist myth. Exhibitions of Latino art united artists of different cultures under a few constantly repeated themes politics, spirituality as if those were the only terms in which their work could be understood.

Even when these exhibitions were produced by minority curators and ethnically defined institutions, the prevailing narrow reading of multiculturalism the marketable version often dictated the results. Association by ethnic identity caused other problems as well. Artists routinely assembled under the banner of race are very likely to be making art about race, either because it was their chosen theme to begin with or because such shows represent the possibility of gaining exposure. And to make art about race in America where, it might be argued, slavery didn't really end until the 1960's is often to tell a sad story. At first such tellings had impact, in part because they were unfamiliar in a mainstream context. But soon enough they were stigmatized as "victim art" and consequently dismissed.

The elevation of occasional stars from the periphery gave the illusion of a larger mainstream embrace, but this was deceptive. The art world, market-driven and self-protectively conservative, operates on a token system and always has. It chooses a black, Latino or Asian artist and assiduously promotes each one. Recycled in A-list shows and handed endless prizes, these artists come to represent all the other "others" not present. It's no surprise that before long the chosen few begin to be talked about resentfully as affirmative-action cases. Such a reaction has some logic. Are some second-tier minority artists overhyped? Of course.

So are innumerable white artists; just check out back volumes of any major art magazine for proof. But the real question may boil down to a personal one: what, after all, can identity politics really be expected to mean, in any gut-level, go-for- broke sense, to an art establishment that is overwhelmingly white and middle class? For most of its members, race and class are a comfortable given, not a problem. Race and class are a problem, though, for minority artists. And multiculturalism ended up being as much a hindrance as a help. It made ethno-racial identity a source for gaining culture power, but it also turned it into a trap.

This trap has proved particularly frustrating to artists born in the 60's and 70's for whom the Black Pride and Black Power politics of an earlier day are now deep background, historical realities to be remembered, drawn on, referred to, played with, but not re-embodied and reasserted every time out. These young artists are participating in many discussions about art, social issues, popular culture, gender and they are as interested in the unfolding span of art history as in the immediacies of agitprop.

Which brings us back to the proposal of a postblack or postethnic art. Judging by recent social developments, the time for such an art seems right. The 2000 census revealed that ever-increasing numbers of people are unwilling to identify themselves by a single ethno-racial category. They are Asian-American, plus African-American, plus white, or some other multipart mix. Interracial marriage in the United States is at an all-time high, producing children who are able to choose, theoretically at least, among a range of racial affiliations. Indeed, the very notion of race as biological category seems to be part of a past century, a fact that some artists have been addressing for years.

When the conceptual artist Adrian Piper, whose background is multiracial, drew a picture titled "Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features" (1981), or in a video piece reminded her white American viewers that they all very likely have Negro blood, she was not only offering plausible genetic information, but also identifying race itself as a social creation, a matter of perception. Many younger artists are similarly chipping away at rigid notions of ethnicity, as one can see in the modestly scaled exhibition titled "Aztlan Today: The Chicano Postnation," at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through Sept. 9. Eight years ago, the museum put on a historical show of Chicano work done from 1965 to 1985, an era of intense Mexican-American civil rights activism.

The work included political posters and documentary photographs and focused on insistently positive images promoting strength-in-unity cohesion. The art in the present show dates from the 1990's and is very different in character and tone. Emerging from photo-based Conceptualism, it sometimes offers culturally rooted images that would not have been out of place in the earlier show. But it also heads off in other directions, mocking Chicano as a marketing device, pushing its original political impulses onto a broader social stage and addressing the whole notion of identity through ambiguity and indirection.

When, for example, the artist Daniel J. Martinez pairs portrait photographs of socially "at risk" Latinos and African-Americans with pictures of artificial tropical flowers, he's asking big questions about beauty, vulnerability and survival. Some of the work in "Aztlan Today" would look as much at home in Chelsea as it does in the Bronx. The same can be said of the artists in "Freestyle," whose ideas and forms are bracingly varied, from abstract painting devoid of any political content to digital work that tackles racism head on. In short, the postblack, postethnic route seems to be the way, or one way, for contemporary art to go.

It offers a path out of the identity corner but keeps identity politics as a viable content. In breadth it corresponds to the urbane, integrative model that multiculturalism initially proposed. But it is also fraught with potential difficulties of its own. Postblack can't be a one-way street. Artists can't do all the changing. The art world has to change, too. Many artists, particularly those of an older generation with firsthand experience of institutional racism, have compelling reasons to believe that such a change will not arrive any time soon.

The count of black, Latino and Asian-American artists in the mainstream is higher than it was a decade ago, but is still not high, as the average tour of Chelsea or Williamsburg, Brooklyn, will confirm. For minority artists, identity-specific exhibitions, whatever their drawbacks, remain the primary means of visibility. There are also changes of fashion to contend with. The art world, market-driven and operating on a rhythm of fluctuating trends, has entered a more than usually conservative phase, reflecting in part a multiculturalist backlash.

The 1990's saw the development of curatorial styles that complicated the idea of art as a cultural category and emphasized its social and political dimensions. Such approaches, often conceived for new audiences who are not from museum cultures, are now being dismissed as "politically correct" by establishment critics, using an epithet often associated with right- wing censure. In general, in fact, discredited ways of talking and thinking about art are back in fashion. Once again art is a "miracle," a mysterious emanation of genius, a universal experience, transcending politics. A romantic notion of beauty, in all its decadence, is heavy in the air.

All of which puts today's young artists in an awkward position. The labels postblack and postethnic sound cool. But what they actually describe is a precarious balancing act. Ideally, they imply a condition of diversity in the widest sense, with minority artists right at the center of the art world all the time, no badge of identity required where they belong, side by side with everyone else. But, like many social ideals, postethnicity could easily end up being yet another exercise in control from above, a marketing label of greatest benefit to the privileged. And how will it play out at a time when affirmative action is in retreat; when poverty is a constant; when prisons continue to be holding pens for minority men; when American culture persists in reminding minorities, in ways large and small, that they are a problem?

Under the circumstances, a wholesale rejection of identity-based art at the behest of a white-dominated art market and critical establishment would seem, to say the least, short-sighted. The answer, whatever form it takes, will ultimately come not from curators or critics, or from the classroom or the marketplace, but from the studio, that free zone where everything starts, where all options are, or should be, wide open and optimism the rule. So one can envision this is a hope, not a prediction individual artists, many of them, pushing beyond multiculturalism's territorial constraints, moving freely among identities and affiliations, deciding to be both insiders and outsiders.

This isn't just a "black" story or a "white" story; it's a "people" story, a story about freedom of choice. Everyone has a tremendous stake in the outcome. It could produce a new American art on a truly cosmopolitan model and render contingent, culture-war labels like postblack and postethnic obsolete.ÊÊ

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