Proper in the midst of the exhibition “Giants: Artwork from the Dean Assortment of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys,” which opens Saturday on the Brooklyn Museum, is Kehinde Wiley’s 25-foot-long 2008 portray “Femme Piquée par un Serpent.” Exhibiting a Black man in snappy however informal gown reclined in a distinctively twisted place, with a background of Wiley’s signature flowers, it borrows each title and pose from an 1847 marble sculpture by Auguste Clésinger. What you consider it actually will depend on what you’re asking for.
In case you view the portray as a Venti-size iteration of Wiley’s ongoing challenge, his decades-long assault on the paucity of Black faces in Western museums and artwork historical past, it’s one-note however arduous to argue with. Brightly coloured and thoughtfully composed, it’s visually interesting, and even in the present day, when it’s now not so unusual to see Black figures on museum partitions, catching sight of 1 this huge nonetheless elicits a thrill.
Then again, thought-about strictly as a portray, “Femme Piquée par un Serpent” (“Lady Bitten by a Serpent”) doesn’t provide that a lot. There are not any particulars that you simply’d miss in a jpeg copy, no seen proof of human palms at play, no sensual pleasure to be discovered within the floor, nothing shocking, mysterious or engrossing. It’s merely the adept illustration of an concept.
After all, you would additionally ask for each — for a transparent conceptual work about portray (and the historic exclusion of Black topics and artists) that can be a good portray. In case you do, you’re seemingly to reply to “Femme Piquée par un Serpent” with ambivalence and frustration.
I used to be excited about this — about inventive endeavors that succeed and fail on the similar time — as I walked by way of “Giants,” the newest superstar tie-in exhibition on the Brooklyn Museum. (“Spike Lee: Inventive Sources” closes on Sunday; a present of pictures by Paul McCartney opens in Might.) “Giants” attracts on the intensive artwork assortment of the married musical superstars Keys and Beatz (Kasseem Dean), bringing collectively 98 works — many outsized and of current classic — by 37 artists. Most of them are American, however additionally they come from a number of nations in Europe and half a dozen in Africa, they usually vary in era from Ernie Barnes, who died at 70 in 2009, to Qualeasha Wood, born in 1996.
Stylistically, nonetheless, it might be arduous to think about a extra narrowly targeted present. That just about all of the faces are Black, or that wherever there’s a political subtext, it includes a difficulty of particular concern to Black People, is nice. However that the work can be practically all figurative, that a lot of it’s of an analogous measurement, made with comparable colours, composed in the identical manner and hung in the identical manner, will not be so nice. So many superficial resemblances have a flattening impact. It turns into arduous to understand the nuance, or individuality, of a chunk that at the beginning blush appears like only a greener or redder model of the piece to its left.
In case you can tune out this flattening impact, you’ll discover fairly a couple of wonderful artworks from the gathering. (The present is within the museum’s particular exhibition house on the bottom ground, which implies additionally, you will need to pay $25 per grownup to get in.) They embody vibrant work that the South African artist, Esther Mahlangu, makes with conventional Ndebele home patterns; Arthur Jafa’s overwhelming, 7,000-pound truck-tire sculpture “Large Wheel I”; a wealthy, room-size polyptych by Meleko Mokgosi; and 14 charming, oval and spherical landscapes of Jamaica by Barkley L. Hendricks.
There’s an entire wall of black and white pictures by Gordon Parks, together with each well-known photographs of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Langston Hughes and delicate pictures of much less well-known faces, and a going through wall of Jamel Shabazz’s extra candid colour pictures of well-dressed Brooklynites and early hip-hop pioneers. Deana Lawson’s oversize staged pictures of home interiors, hung collectively on yet one more wall, are as unnerving and highly effective as ever. These all would have been more practical hung across the exhibit as an alternative of crammed collectively in commercial-looking shows, however the pictures themselves hardly ever miss.
A soundsuit by Nick Cave is reliably pleasant, as is Jordan Casteel’s portrait of the clothes designer Fallou Wadje promoting T-shirts in Harlem, and Hank Willis Thomas contributes an incisive 2017 textile piece known as “You Shouldn’t Be the Prisoner of Your Personal Concepts (LeWitt).” An eight-foot sq. of inexperienced and white stripes with an X within the center, it’s fabricated from decommissioned jail uniforms.
Earlier than you get to any of this, nonetheless, you need to cross by way of a sort of shrine to the collectors.
There’s a larger-than-life {photograph} of Keys and Beatz in formal put on, posing with a BMX bike. And several other precise bikes from Beatz’s assortment. And his turntables. And the piano Keys utilized in her 2014 video “We Are Right here.” And portraits of the couple by Wiley, Derrick Adams and Shabazz, who shot them re-enacting a somber 1970 Gordon Parks picture of the Black Panther chief Eldridge Cleaver together with his spouse, Kathleen, in Algeria. When you do get to the artwork, you’ll discover it interspersed with little lounge areas surrounded by Bang & Olufsen audio system, the couple’s most well-liked model, enjoying a particular playlist compiled by Beatz, as if the couple had invited you to one among their homes to see what was on their partitions.
The present’s first textual content asserts that Beatz and Keys have “stood as giants in our cultural panorama for many years”; it doesn’t point out that Beatz was on the museum’s board till late final 12 months, when he resigned to keep away from the looks of a battle of curiosity, nor had it been introduced at press time which items, if any, the couple plan to donate to the museum.
What you say about all this relies, once more, in your expectations. Is the purpose of the entire present to display what number of gifted Black artists there are on this planet? Or to fortify a few of the youthful and lesser recognized of them? These are vital targets and it might be arduous to say that “Giants” didn’t fulfill them. You can even think about that the over-the-top hype of Keys and Beatz — who’re influential artists in their very own proper — is supposed to function an analogous sort of demonstration. Or is the purpose merely to maintain the museum’s lights on by getting guests within the door? Given the present local weather, I couldn’t argue with that, both.
Nonetheless, you may’t assist however surprise if the identical level couldn’t have been made in a much less aesthetically claustrophobic manner, a manner that distributed with hagiography and left extra room for the subtlety, the depth and the sheer complexity attainable in visible artwork. In spite of everything, isn’t that what museums ought to be sharing with new audiences within the first place?
Giants: Artwork from the Dean Assortment of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys
Feb. 10 by way of July 7, the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Japanese Parkway, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.
