Through June 13.
Only Skin Deep, a touring show that originated at New York's International Center of Photography, is an enormous exhibition on issues of race and racial stereotype and how they are variously enforced or undermined by photographic images. It has enough to recommend it, but working your way through this exhibition is, in the end, like running on a treadmill, doing a lot of work to find yourself in the very same place.
There is a great deal of good work here--drawn from both documentary efforts of the last 150 years and contemporary art--that is absolutely worth your while to see (work, for example by Vic Muniz, Tina Barney, Jason Salavon, as well as a group of lynching images that should probably be required viewing for everyone). But taken all at once, Only Skin Deep's argument is exhaustively didactic, its questions convoluted but not, in the end, terribly complex.
It's not clear what Only Skin Deep wants to do. It seems to want to school us in reading art for messages about race (never mind the work's original intent), but to do so coming from a place less fusty and divisive than the identity-based theories of the '90s. It seems to want to examine the ways that certain ideas are called into question, while being clear that there is only one right answer. It seems to want to "demonstrate how racial thinking is created along binary lines," but takes pains to distance itself philosophically from the easy duality of works that are either racist or against racism. Curators Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis--both of them smart and with excellent exhibitions to their credit--have made things philosophically difficult for themselves because, really, what else is there? It's not as if there's some kind of middle ground. Even the most ambiguous work--like Niki S. Lee's self-portrait as the Asian-American girlfriend of a backwoods skinhead, like Cindy Sherman reinventing herself as a black woman--upends our assumptions in a way that recommends against stereotyping, against, that is, making assumptions at all. One ends up where one began.
To these ends, much of the contemporary art is divorced from its meaning in order to mount this muzzy argument. For example: Muniz's work tends to be about perception and the distance from the thing perceived; here his ink-splotch portrait of Frederick Douglass is given a polemical turn absent from the original series (which also contained Edgar Allan Poe, Yogi Berra, and one of Monet's haystacks). This kind of recontextualizing creates a discomfort that might not be entirely inappropriate (after all, those lynching photographs were originally souvenirs), but it does give one the feeling of being bludgeoned by a system of symbols instead of led toward any kind of organic significance.
All of this makes me wonder, as so much identity-based art does, who the audience is for this exhibition--that is, who is the best audience and who is the likely audience and what the difference is between the two. The kinds of strategies used here for discrediting racism seem to me to be common currency among enlightened urban types--Miguel CalderĂłn's ironic mimicry, Andres Serrano's chilling appropriation, even James VanDerZee's respectful (although dated) specificity. Like the near-meaningless "fight racism" bumper stickers you see on cars around Capitol Hill, Only Skin Deep takes a stand that is not the same in downtown Seattle as it would be in Tulia, Texas, or Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. But I suspect Only Skin Deep isn't traveling to either of those places.
Even smart Fred Wilson seems a little drained by this exhibition. In 1993, he was invited to critique the Seattle Art Museum's collection, by rearranging it, commenting on it, revealing biases in the museum's own presentation that were so buried no one had thought to look for them (like why Egypt was shown with Western cultures instead of African). That critique is represented in Only Skin Deep with a series of portraits of works from the museum's collection of decorative arts--images that document how different cultures looked at each other, how Europeans casually depicted Asians, how Asians casually depicted Africans, the whole cycle of offhand generalization. This is called "institutional racism," and it is no longer much of a surprise. What would have been really interesting would have been to get Wilson in to critique Only Skin Deep. No doubt he would have seen something I must have missed.
