Renee Cox
Robert Miller
526 West 26th Street
New York 10022
September 22- November
3, 2001
By
Chris Moylan
Cox's "American
Family", recently seen at her first solo show at the Robert Miller
Gallery, a large group of family snaps fanned out on the floor of a
side room. Set against the large-scale erotic images in the other rooms,
this group of vacation shots and family momentos may appear to be a
point of departure, or the safe domestic ground for the artist's sexual
bravado. But, as with many aspects of the show, this deserves another
look. Images suggestive of patriotism, Catholic piety, and strongly
asserted black and Jamaican identity complicate, and in some instances
blunt, the irony of mock-heroic iconography in a few larger photographs,
and the casual eroticism in a few smaller ones. And, one can't help
but notice, amidst the many references to Cox's African heritage, that
her husband is white, the children posed elsewhere in African garb are
of mixed race. Over and again in this show, what appear on the surface
to be bold assertions of identity or sexual empowerment are offset or
rendered ambivalent in the graphic subtext. In a film close-up of french
kissing, for instance, length and silence wear at the satire of hardcore
pornography, the relentless thrust and counter-thrust of the two tongues
suggesting a mute and ambiguous stalemate in an oral battle of the sexes.
On a wall nearby, male legs in drag open and close slowly, the man's
sex faintly visible in the darkness between his thighs. The parody of
sexy posturing is neutralized by its visual obscurity (we can't get
the punch line because we can't make it out) and the tease by its scrambling
of gender. Cox drew Mayor Giuliani's ire with "Yo Mama's Last Supper,"
a frontal nude of the artist assuming Christ's place amidst his disciples.
Looking at her follow similar appropriation strategies in this exhibition
one finds, more often than not, that the work is appealingly unresolved.
One of the more erotic images in the show - which features yellow, red-tipped
roses fanning from a lap to just below the subject's bare breasts -
hangs opposite Cox's African reworking of Manet's "Olympia",
sans black servant. The offering of roses is thus detached from its
original context. The political and sexual audacity of the black servant
assuming the temptress role is largely, but not entirely de-contextualized
and softened in Cox's photograph, which replaces the servant with her
sons in tribal garb. In other works, the obviousness of her art-historical
appropriations renders the appropriation almost beside the point, the
artist's nakedness appearing all the more vulnerable. It is possible
that the images of Cox in fetish gear or her juxtapositions of nudes
and childhood snaps were meant to shock. The remarks of visitors to
the gallery, however, tended to be glibly or blandly objectifying ('nice
abs,' 'nice rear,' 'I'd like to know who her personal trainer is').
It could be argued that we are now in a post-erotic time, at least in
regards to visual art, since our capacity for shock has been depleted
in other contexts. If this is so then all the better for Cox. She should
exploit the change of erotic zeitgeist, however it plays out, as an
opportunity to tease out further doubts and confusions underlying her
sexual bravura.
