“RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture"

The above is a more than fascinating show at the National Portrait Gallery here in Washington, DC, and not at all what I expected. I went because I love graffiti art, the hip hop rhythm and, you got to hand it to them, many of these hip hop dudes are downright gorgeous. Admit it! My personal favorite is Snoop Dogg.

Oh! The main reason was, of course, the paintings of the amazing Kehinde Wiley. They were the center piece of the exhibition, really, even though they were a bit tucked away in two opposite rooms left and right of the corridor, both of them painted an intense Yves Klein blue. Together with that color, Wiley’s works seemed almost psychedelic. He paints hip hop artists and other great looking black guys against traditional decorative backgrounds and/or in the manner of the old British, Dutch and French masters, who, all of them, painted white, male and, indeed looooooong dead people. Hip hop is different, albeit not that much with regard to living females. Sorry.

Mostly, Wiley's portraits are large, very large or huge. He has a pristine hand of painting – from a distance the portraits look like giant photos. Wiley’s method of painting and of organizing his paintings is intended to confer a degree of royalty and gravitas to his subjects – he channels Ingres when he depicts KT as Napoleon on his throne, and John Singer Sargent when he paints LL Cool the way (more or less) Sargent painted John D. Rockefeller Sr in 1917. However, his subjects don’t really need it – they are SO present, so THERE, they virtually leap out of their ornate golden frames. The background of LL Cool’s portrait seems to pulsate, as the eye is forced to hip-hop (so to speak) madly between the red of its background and the green of the Rohrschach-like shapes he painted on it and thus are forced to concentrate on LL Cool – you just can’t avoid it.

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five channel a 17^th century Dutch merchant guild painter and almost seem 3-D, with elbows protruding into one’s face and items the GFFF carry sticking underneath as well as above a painted border and even outside the painted area to the point that one tends to look for them again protruding outside the actual frame. My absolute favorite was the Triple Portrait of Charles I, which is copied above. The way Wiley plays with his colors – reflecting the aqua of the farthest away color he uses in the background onto the highlights in his faces – it makes for an unexpected and dizzying sensation of depth.

The show consists of four distinct elements in addition to the Kehinde Wiley paintings: colorful graffiti panels by Tim Conlon (aka CON) and Dave Hupp (aka AREK) of the national graffiti crews Burning America (BA) and Never Show Faces (NSF), photos of hip hop artists in action by David Scheinbaum, an installation entitled “No Thief to Blame” by Shinique Smith which is a creative response to a poem by Nikki Giovanni, and finally video art by Jefferson Pinder.

CON and AREK’s panels represented all the joy I used to feel when I used the New York City subway to go to work in the mid-1980s, which was the only joy on that otherwise miserable ride. I thoroughly regret the trains are clean these days. One of these panels actually, but almost invisibly, spells out: "Recognize!" So there, now you know.

I was somehow less passionate about David Steinbaum’s black and white photos which seemed incongruous in their colorlessness and subtlety, both with regard to their subjects and within the context of the exhibition. This is not to say that they are not good - they are soft, subtle and ephemeral – some of them are even gorgeous. They just seemed to be a whisper next to the exuberant beat of the other parts of the exhibition.

Shinique Smith’s installation beautifully complemented Giovanni’s poem “It’s not a just situation – Though we just can’t keep crying about it (For the hip hop nation that brings us such exciting art)” – it was written on the wall as well as read by a voice, presumably Giovanni’s, over a loudspeaker. Smith’s visually artistic response was creating a heap of disparate objects – shoes, a T-shirt with the face of a hip hop artist printed on it, bling objects, magazine photos, flowers, CD’s, lengths of caution tape - with symbols and tendrils extending from it that were painted directly onto the gallery wall, together forming a gloriously beautiful and strangely elegant “graffiti sculpture” hanging from one corner of the gallery, a hip, sexy daughter of Frank Stella, totally her own self.

I thought I did not much care for video art but sat mesmerized through all three sequences of Jefferson Pinder’s work. They are, for one, exquisitely beautiful and visually poetic. Also, they have an immediate effect of making you see something that is not really there – you see a one simple narrative but your brain registers something else, an entirely different and frenetic “meta video”, as it were. In “Car Wash Meditations”, a man in a car, depicted twice, mirror-wise as if driving in opposite directions, is followed by the camera while he waits for his car to go through a carwash. Somehow, the wall in the background, the spray of the water and the car shampoo, the appearance of huge brushes and later drying machines, everything in stark contrast and highly saturated primary color, suggest primal physical presences and brutal aggression. The man in the car continues undeterred, he has no choice, but his mirror image double makes that he comes across as torn into different directions. The effect is a “J’accuse” of the history of racial discrimination and violence against African-Americans in this country. A banal run through a carwash somehow in my mind became a horrifying act of violence and at the end I feared the driver, dark against the side window behind him, came to the end of his life spitting out white bodily fluid - in reality it was nothing else than light caught in the drips of sudsy water running off his car.

One question, only. Why, in the end, was my impression one of pristine cleanliness and clarity, as if hip hop had been censored by the Disney Company? After all, hip hop is not generally an art form appropriate for tea parties and ladies-who-lunch, judging by the words of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five:

“Joy-riding with my Caddy,cold chillin', gettin' loose  -  When I saw this flygirl who needed a boost  -  So I dipped into her bumpers with skill and with class  -  She screamed."Harder,won't you give me just a little more gas"  -  Doin' my best so she wouldn't feel inferior  -  She said "I like your nice plush vinyl exterior"  -  She was holdin' on tighter than a figure-four leg lock  -  This is what she said the first time she saw the jock  -  (Who Johnny Carson, your Caddy's so large)  -  (But you can park your Cadillac in my greasy garage).”

Yo, baby.