Fred Wilson
It is possible to read Fred Wilson's recent exhibition 'Collectibles' as another comment on the circulation of commodities in late Capitalist culture. Porcelain and plastic figurines arrayed on white oversized tables, grouped together in clusters, mimic the merchandise in the nearby retail spaces of SoHo. The walls of the gallery are hung with beautifully rendered close-up photographs of other mass-produced objects, glossy and slick. Yet, unlike works by artists such as Jeff Koons or Haim Steinbach, in which the commodity is made to perform repetitions of presence in artificial series, and unlike Mike Kelly's fetishistic portrayal of The Uncanny, these objects are collected together to enact very particular narratives - their banal familiarity may be what is most unnerving about their silent presence.
'Mammy' cookie jars, 'Uncle Tom' salt and pepper shakers, 'Aunt Jemima' candy dishes, once representative of popular racist stereotypes of African-Americans, are now often seen to have thoroughly devolved into the irony of kitsch, their grotesque features considered too obviously exaggerated to merit serious critique. Besides, Carrie Mae Weems has already photographed such stereotypes in her 'American Icons' series of the late 80s, and Betye Saar's assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) certainly worked to turn such objects from docility to rebellion. By producing a polemical analysis of these objects, 'Collectibles' therefore risks being misread as a simple attack on outmoded artefacts. But, while a critique is certainly part of his project, Fred Wilson is rather more concerned with the transformation of identifications that can occur between objects and subjects through the practice of collecting.
Best known for installations such as 'Mining the Museum' at The Baltimore Historical Society and 'The Museum: Mixed Metaphors' at The Seattle Art Museum, Wilson has played a key role in refiguring the representation of race in museums. Working with permanent collections (a common artistic practice since Andy Warhol first 'raided the ice box' at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in 1970), Wilson exposes an institutional unconscious in the shape of forgotten artefacts. Following a traditional curatorial paradigm of historical periodisation, Wilson will place slave shackles alongside ornate silver goblets, or a crude whipping post in front of finely crafted wooden chairs. A confusion of overlapping categories for some curators, this work has offered to others tangible evidence of an otherwise invisible historical record of class and race oppressions. In 'Collectibles', Wilson draws upon his skills in museum installation to comment upon personal collecting practices.
Each cluster of figurines performs in an implied narrative relationship, causing the viewer to reflect on the collector who has placed them there: a white porcelain child towers over a miniature Mammy; a white woman in 19th century dress stands on the plastic apron of another Mammy figure who is flat on her back, face frozen in a ludicrous smile; an Ubangi 'plate-lip' candy dish offers an exaggerated open mouth, upon which is placed, as though on a pedestal, an educated white man in cap and gown. Here a familiar history of domination and submission is re-enacted with objects. Some viewers might be discouraged by these obvious stereotypes, ignoring the rest of the exhibition in favour of an easy retreat into the assumption that this is a predictable story.
Yet, Wilson's concerns are not only with racism, but also with the complexities of interracial identifications and cultural fantasies that support the mass-production of such commodities today. In About Face II (1995), a pair of photographs depict two apparently identical 'Mammy' cooks - one with saucer-like eyes, the other with only a residue of black paint on cheeks and forehead. Closer examination reveals that these objects are not identical, not produced from the same mould. Rather, one is copy of the other - a caricature of a caricature. Such replicas are, in fact, now a booming market, supported (ironically) by antique collectors such as Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. Wilson finds the antique versions of these objects only slightly less problematic than the proliferating abundance of cheap copies.
An ambivalent revenge against this proliferation is enacted in the downstairs gallery. Here a video monitor shows an African-American woman smashing the new red and white Mammies into tiny pieces, again and again. On another monitor, the artist silently strikes the poses of the antique artefacts he has collected: a shoe slips off the heel of a boy servant, Wilson carefully arranges his shoes in the same position; a cast-iron money box with a row of white teeth swallows pennies and rolls its eyes, Wilson does the same, maintaining a toothy grin. With increasing discomfort, the viewer is forced to come to terms with the sinister implications of even the most 'banal' objects. The effects, in this case, of a collector's identification with his collection are ominous. When, Wilson seems to be asking, is it proper, indeed necessary, for an artist to follow an iconoclastic imperative? What kind of violence to the subject, finally, is perpetuated by the act of collecting?
Although the show produces its own coherence, focusing primarily on commercial collectibles, there is one work which seems displaced. Entitled Old Salem: A Family of Strangers (1995), it consists of 20 photographic portraits of antique handmade dolls arranged like a family tree. The diverse 'authenticity' of these dolls, which reveal an array of occupations, skin tones, and methods of fabrication, contrasts sharply with the slick uniformity of the 'collectable' kitsch. Is Wilson offering an alternative to the narrowly defined identities - both black and white - that circulate in the rest of the show? Can collecting be recuperative as well as destructive? It all depends, it seems, on the collector's objective.
