By Glenn Adamson | Art in America | Agosto 4, 2020 | Fuente externa
"A veces lloro mucho, siento que me vuelvo loco". Así habla Chiron, el personaje central de la película de 2016 de Barry Jenkins, Moonlight. La línea me llegó mientras miraba imágenes de los nuevos tejidos de Diedrick Brackens, que, como la película, ofrecen una exploración de la experiencia negra queer que es desgarradora y estimulante. Estos trabajos recientes debían mostrarse en la Galería Jack Shainman de Nueva York, en una exposición individual llamada "benditos son los mosquitos". Ahora está en espera indefinida, las obras de arte encerradas en un almacén de Los Ángeles. Lo cual es una lástima, porque al igual que ciertas otras exposiciones que actualmente languidecen a puerta cerrada, la retrospectiva Gerhard Richter de Met Breuer, por ejemplo, el espectáculo de Brackens es exactamente el tipo que todos necesitamos ver en este momento. Pensado como una exploración de una pandemia, ha llegado a parecer emblemático de otra.
Cuando entrevisté a Brackens a través de Zoom en abril, dijo que originalmente pensó en los trabajos para el espectáculo Shainman como una exploración del impacto a largo plazo de la crisis del SIDA en la comunidad negra. Las obras se centran en figuras representadas en siluetas negras o rosas fuertes, algunas marcadas con puntos, que podrían representar gérmenes, insectos, píldoras, heridas, sarcomas o incluso lágrimas. (Se inspiró para el motivo de Sonponnoi, la fotografía de 1987 del artista nigeriano-británico Rotimi Fani-Kayode, que muestra a un hombre negro sentado recortado en el cuello y las rodillas, con la piel pintada con lunares y un trío de velas encendidas en la entrepierna. ) Las figuras se colocan en entornos simples pero evocadores, sentadas ante una cerca o flotando con la cabeza echada hacia atrás cerca de un árbol, en posturas que sugieren un significado oculto: "todos lidiamos con la mortalidad a través del ritual", observa Brackens, "incluso el menor espiritual de nosotros ". La mayoría de sus personajes podrían leerse como sustitutos del propio artista, tienen una estructura delgada, pero también son espacios en blanco, sobre los cuales los espectadores pueden proyectar sus propias narrativas.
En un extraño giro del destino, estas obras llegaron al mundo casi al mismo tiempo que COVID-19, una enfermedad que, como el SIDA, afecta desproporcionadamente a los estadounidenses negros, sobre todo a los hombres negros. Brackens no podría haber previsto esta crisis, por supuesto, pero le ha dado una urgencia aún mayor a su tema central: en sus palabras, "todas las formas en que el cuerpo masculino falla y también de lo que es capaz". Esta es una investigación en la línea abierta por la influyente exposición de Thelma Golden "Hombre negro: representaciones de la masculinidad en el arte contemporáneo americano", que se organizó en el Museo Whitney de Nueva York, es difícil de creer, hace veinticinco años, en 1994. Brackens tenía cinco años entonces. Él es parte de la nueva ola de artistas de color cuyo trabajo se ha encontrado con al menos algún estímulo activo, en lugar de un muro de obstrucción. Los resultados de este cambio histórico han sido asombrosos de contemplar, particularmente cuando se trata de pintura figurativa: considere la reverencia otorgada a figuras tan bien establecidas como Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley y Amy Sherald, así como a artistas de Brackens. generación, como Tschabalala Self y Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
El trabajo de Brackens ciertamente encaja en este contexto, como una expresión multivalente de identidad negra. También se basa en precedentes formales como las obras de papel cortado de Kara Walker, los grabados de la artista cubana Belkis Ayón y las elocuentes esculturas de cerámica de Simone Leigh, que emplean siluetas o formas altamente estilizadas. Hay algunas cosas que distinguen a Brackens, aunque, primero y más obviamente, su medio elegido. Si bien sus obras son ciertamente pictóricas, en realidad no están pintadas, sino que se construyen lentamente, trama a trama, en el telar. Primero gravitó a la disciplina como estudiante universitario en la Universidad del Norte de Texas. "Entré en la sala de tejido y vi las máquinas y los gabinetes de hilo codificados por colores", recuerda, "y pensé: no tengo idea de qué es esto, pero es increíble". Estaba enganchado de inmediato. Le encantaba la lenta acción analógica de las máquinas, la sensación de que estaba viajando a través del tiempo, sus manos y cuerpo haciendo eco de los movimientos de los tejedores del pasado más allá de lo que se puede contar.
Brackens luego obtuvo un título de MFA en la Facultad de Artes de California, estudiando con el artista textil Josh Faught, cuyas obras ofrecen una exploración sincera y sincera de la identidad queer. Entre otras cosas, el período de estudio de Brackens con Faught lo animó simplemente a relajar su proceso. "Afuera en el mundo", dice, "la gente siempre voltea el tejido para mirar hacia atrás", evaluándolo principalmente sobre la base de una técnica rigurosa. Ahora se inclinó hacia la improvisación.“I cry so much sometimes, I feel like I’ma turn to drops.” That’s Chiron talking, the central character of Barry Jenkins’s 2016 film, Moonlight. The line came to me while I was looking at images of Diedrick Brackens’s new weavings, which, like the movie, offer an exploration of queer black experience that is at once heartbreaking and uplifting. These recent works were meant to be shown at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, in a solo exhibition called “blessed are the mosquitoes.” It’s now on indefinite hold, the artworks in lockdown in a Los Angeles warehouse. Which is a damn shame, because like certain other exhibitions that are currently languishing behind closed doors—the Met Breuer’s Gerhard Richter retrospective, for one—Brackens’s show is exactly the kind we all need to see right now. Intended as an exploration of one pandemic, it has come to seem emblematic of another.
DIEDRICK BRACKENS INTERWEAVES BLACK HISTORY, MYTH, AND SELF-PORTRAITURE
When I interviewed Brackens via Zoom in April, he said that he originally thought of the works for the Shainman show as an exploration of the long-term impact of the AIDS crisis on the black community. The works center on figures rendered in black or hot-pink silhouettes, some pockmarked by dots—which could represent germs, bugs, pills, wounds, sarcomas, or even teardrops. (He took inspiration for the motif from the Nigerian-British artist Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s 1987 photograph Sonponnoi, which shows a seated black man cropped at neck and knee, his skin painted with polka dots, clutching a trio of lit candles at his crotch.) The figures are placed in simple but evocative settings, seated before a fence or floating with head thrown back near a tree, in postures that suggest some occult significance: “we all grapple with mortality through ritual,” Brackens observes, “even the least spiritual of us.” Most of his characters could be read as stand-ins for the artist himself—they have his slim build—but they are also blanks, onto which viewers may project their own narratives.
In a strange twist of fate, these works arrived in the world at about the same time as COVID-19, a disease that, like AIDS, disproportionately affects black Americans—black men most of all. Brackens could not have foreseen this crisis, of course, but it has lent even greater urgency to his central theme: in his words, “all the ways the male body fails, and also what it is capable of.” This is an investigation in the vein opened up by Thelma Golden’s influential exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,” which was organized at the Whitney Museum in New York—it’s hard to believe—twenty-five years ago, in 1994. Brackens was all of five years old then. He is part of the new wave of artists of color whose work has been met with at least some active encouragement, rather than a wall of obstruction. The results of this historic shift have been awesome to behold, particularly when it comes to figurative painting: consider the reverence accorded to such well-established figures as Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, and Amy Sherald, as well as to artists of Brackens’s own generation, like Tschabalala Self and Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
Brackens’s work certainly fits within this context, as a multivalent expression of black identity. It also draws on formal precedents such as Kara Walker’s cut-paper works, the prints of the Cuban artist Belkis Ayón, and Simone Leigh’s eloquent ceramic sculptures—all of which employ silhouettes or highly stylized forms. There are a few things that set Brackens apart, though, first and most obviously, his chosen medium. While his works are certainly painterly, they are not actually painted, but rather slowly built up, weft by weft, on the loom. He first gravitated to the discipline as an undergraduate at the University of North Texas. “I walked into the weaving room and saw the machines and color-coded cabinets of yarn,” he recalls, “and thought: I have no idea what this is, but it’s amazing.” He was hooked straightaway. He loved the slow analog action of the machines, the sense that he was traveling through time, his hands and body echoing the shuttling motions of past weavers beyond counting.
Brackens then pursued an MFA degree at the California College of the Arts, studying under textile artist Josh Faught, whose works offer a candid and heartfelt exploration of queer identity. Among other things, Brackens’s period of study with Faught encouraged him simply to loosen up his process. “Out in the world,” he says, “people always flipped the weaving over to look at the back,” evaluating it primarily on the basis of rigorous technique. Now he leaned into improvisation. It helped that many of his peers at CCA were painters, who knew nothing about the materiality of textile and responded purely on the basis of imagery, palette, and composition. To this day Brackens’s embroidered lines feel like they were drawn by hand, his stray hanging threads like drips.
In the short time since Brackens graduated, in 2014, textiles have seen a tremendous upswing in ways of making and in attention paid—both to honored elders such as Anni Albers, Lenore Tawney, and Sheila Hicks, and to contemporary figures like Julia Bland, Sheila Pepe, and Faught himself. “It’s the same kind of freak-out that ceramics had a decade ago, or painting had a hundred years ago,” Brackens observes. Even amid this eruption, he has established an unusual method for his work by fusing together multiple textile idioms: figural tapestry, which is largely a European tradition; kente cloth from West Africa; and quilt making, particularly as practiced by African Americans (most famously the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama). His primary material is hand-dyed cotton, a fiber that comes freighted with history; manipulating the threads, for him, is another way to get in touch with past generations.
Brackens’s relationship to these various medium-specific trajectories has undergone a gradual shift. In his early work, he says, “the big thing was accessing African traditions. They were the pinnacle for me: a way to tie myself to something old. I thought, if I can get close to this root, something will happen.” After his first figurative works were misconstrued by some viewers, who saw them as manifesting African American stereotypes, he turned for a while to abstraction, sometimes adding stray, suggestive text fragments that seem to have wandered off a smartphone screen. He also began to look more seriously at Southern black quilting, feeling that it was perhaps a more authentic resource for him than African textiles—he’s from Texas, after all. He added to his work passages of over-stitching and other embellishments (among them buttons, silk organza, and baskets), allowing him to break out of the matrix imposed by the loom. Even as he has returned to figuration, beginning in 2017, his compositions have retained a dynamic, asymmetrical quality.
As Brackens’s technical repertoire has deepened, so too has the resonance of his work. His repeated use of bare silhouettes, along with certain recurring motifs—catfish, horses—lend his creations an aspect of private mythology. This is redolent, once again, of Southern folk art (the celebrated quilts of Harriet Powers, for example, or the drawings of Bill Traylor) but also ancient legends. Brackens says he has been thinking recently about mythic protagonists like Orpheus and Hercules: “all-purpose heroes” whose narratives rise above the level of mere storytelling, becoming foundational to the cultural imagination.
Any artist would want to achieve that, perhaps, but Brackens has set his sights on this goal with particular focus, and this has brought a newly allegorical and portentous quality to his more recent works. Continuing his extended act of self-portraiture, demigod and break and tremble (both 2019) show a lone naked man and a mythic horse on a quest: for human connection in the face of isolation, meaning in the face of potential erasure. Even before the arrival of COVID-19, Brackens’s work seemed almost unbearably relevant to what was going on in the world. Now, viewed through the overhanging veil of plague times—at a moment when all-purpose heroism is so much in demand—it has become essential.
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