Surface tensions

Race is not a riddle. It is simply an occult practice, a form of mysticism. The more I look the more elaborate illusions I can create for others to see. Skin color often serves as a fetish in the array of meaningless signs and sign systems on which practitioners of racial pseudo-sciences have based their theories. Like leeching or bleeding, it is clear that race reading does not work.

Racism is at least partially founded in narcissism and our aestheticization of things, including, of course, ourselves. Through this process we allow our own image to become an enlightened guide. We see and divine with our flesh. It's an easy sell. Skin mediates our world, mysteriously admitting data through our senses, separating inside from outside, accepted from denied, and desirable from abject. Skin is the thin wall of security between micro-organic cities and biological warfare's air space. We marvel at how a fragile porous sack holds our consciousness and then posit that it determines much more.

In these pages, artists attempt to challenge some of the liquid social conventions that currently constitute the racialized order of things. The artificial, computer-generated flesh of James Huckenpahler's Skin series invites us to imagine the creation of an ideal, clonable repository for an outdated knowledge base. This work reminds us that ours may be the last generation unable to completely alter our skin color through genetic engineering. Paul Solomon's melanin experiments continue this thought process by forcing an interrogation of assumptions based on a subject's coloration. The matter-of-fact, contradictory message juxtapositions of Vivian Selbo's A Word from Our Sponsor series bring us sharply to the point a step before we align ourselves as the intended audience of an advertisement's message. Lenore Chinn's deliberately color-coded gay images of herself in collage with that of her ancestors serve to unhinge stereotypes of Chinese femininity. And finally, the role of Super Being has been recast by Renee Cox. Her subversive RAJE shreds formulaic, comic codes of empowerment, opening the door to new theories of domination.

These works are critical talismans that counteract the magic-truth rituals of racial construction. Together, they illuminate the ways in which the convenient prejudices we choose come to dominate our perceptions of people. Ironically displayed in these pages, the heart of the matter is right on the surface.

COPYRIGHT 1998 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning