Strokes of brilliance

By nate byerley Catalyst

Send comments to: catalyst@wildcat.arizona.edu

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat This flaming scooter was one of the many Vespas that were on display at Club Congress at 311 E. Congress St., Friday. The scooters were all part of a rally of clubs from Pasadena and Tucson. Scooters were "decked out" in different retro styles - from Thunderbird hood ornaments to furry cow seats.

Robert Colescott's paintings read like a Zora Neale Hurston novel, or play like an early Miles Davis piece, or instruct like a Baptist minister, all while straddling modernist painting from Picasso to pop.

Colescott's paintings were selected to represent the USA at the 47th Venice Biennale, which is to say that an artist who was once at the fringes of mainstream art is now, technically speaking, mainstream. His paintings, on display at the U of A Museum of Art through January 3, remain, however, highly socially charged, aggressive in both content and medium.

Colescott lives and works in Tucson, and upholds the title of 'professor emeritus' here at the University. I think that 'professor emeritus' basically means, "Hey, you make good work, you're famous, wouldn't you like to be on the University staff?" Not to diminish his talent and ambition; Colescott has won several grants by the National Endowment for the Arts. As well, a National Endowment grant brought these paintings to the UAMA. One has to wonder, however, why it takes a grant from the under-funded NEA to bring our professor's work back to the University in which he works as a professor. But hey, shipping this many paintings to Venice and back has got to cost a bit.

Working with eight-foot squared canvases, and larger, gives a person a lot of room. Colescott takes advantage of such space, creating cartoon-like figures that rival their viewers in size. The painting is visceral, laid heavy in spots where he wants us to know that his act of painting is important to the painting or more detailed in areas where the believability of the image itself lends to our understanding. Colescott's color is bold, often shocking, but consistently appropriate. In a number of his paintings, figures and scenes are painted in a monochromatic black and fuchsia scheme, where the importance of color bows to the benefits of contrast. It is this repetition of similar themes in a variety of permutations, like the distinctive melody in Miles Davis' song "Kind of Blue," which link these paintings together as a number of unique, yet individual experiences.

Notions of sexuality, which repeat in a variety of contexts throughout the exhibit, are often used to critique the ways in which men and women, both black and white, have been sexually defined in our culture. Figures are full bodied and meaty, painted sometimes gently, often forcefully, speaking to the brutal honesty of sex. Such sexuality is confronted along similar terms in the novel by Zora Neale Hurston, a major player in the Harlem Renaissance, entitled Their Eyes Were Watching God. In Colescott's painting, "Homage to Victor Hugo," he casts a seemingly depraved black man as the legendary Quasimodo from Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame. Quasimodo is caught cradling a saucy blonde, but whether the man is rescuing or abducting her is hard to tell. To the left of this central scene is a black woman staring straight ahead, a figure that recalls the blues singer Emma Lou Brown, from Wallace Thurman's (also another Harlem Renaissance player) novel The Blacker the Berry. In the upper left hand corner is a gargantuan white face consuming a disrobed black man, a figurative arrangement drawn directly from Goya's legendary painting "Saturn Devouring his Children." Then, in the lower left corner is a black man in a helmet and jersey, catching a football. A narrative begins to form, thereby continuing in signification, a tradition celebrated in African-American history.

Signification is, rather simply, a form of connotation. That is, the reader or the viewer is able to fit together a story from a work based on the things within the work which remind us of things outside the work. Perhaps the "Homage to Victor Hugo" is an allegorical reference to the OJ Simpson ordeal, and then again maybe not. Colescott notes, in a paragraph that accompanies the painting, "make the monster Quasimodo a black man and a dimension of rejection emerges that exceeds physical deformity." He then poses the question, "How different must one be to be a freak? Black or white, Quasimodo is a rascal, and he might marry your sister."

Regardless of whether this was the author's intent, we as viewers are called upon to use our tools of awareness in art, literature, music and pop culture to deconstruct these works. Rare these days in art exhibits, Colescott's mini artist statements affixed to each identification tag further the impact of each painting without saying too much. In reference to his painting "Hard Hats," Colescott explains the impact of modernism in terms of its social ramifications, in saying "Cubism, the multiple realities created by geometry, is itself a theory in service of a two-dimensional art form. It affords us an experience in both time and place. Why not apply these techniques to the exploration of a contemporary complaint?" But cubism is not the only movement that can be seen in Colescott's work.

The technique of signification stems from a tradition also promoted in pop art. Similar to the pop artist James Rosenquist, Colescott arranges his figures not as if they were on a stage, but rather like a collage, where figures and scenes overlap, superimposing one another and becoming important through their arrangement. This can be seen in "A Taste of Gumbo" which is framed around the side by crabs, the center of which is occupied by a less than appetizing depiction of a crudely painted white woman. From the bottom of the painting a black woman's face stares up at the scene. Again, a narrative begins to take shape; one which strikes each viewer differently based on their experience. To watch someone view these paintings borders on the comical. Their eyes dart about the scene taking in tidbits of visual and textual information, as Colescott frequently uses text bubbles to elucidate characters' thoughts in a sardonically humorous fashion. In "Choctaw Nickel," a majestic black Native American on the now 'extinct' buffalo nickel, utters the phrase "No mo' buffalo." Colescott's paintings are like the history lesson you never had, but should have.

Almost as if the UAMA gallery was made for this show, more than a dozen of Colescott's mural-sized canvases fill the room with color and energy. Even the lackluster brown linoleum is brought to life with the reflections of Colescott's work; a flooring decision which under other circumstances could seriously detract from the exhibit. But Colescott's brilliant paintings, like so many tales of racial, sexual, or cultural oppression, engage a variety of senses, and in so doing delve deep into our own experience. Simultaneously, Colescott's paintings pay tribute to the history of the oppressed, a heritage of African American literature, and numerous traditions in western and non-western art.