Looking at Sculpture Darkly: The Sculpture of Barbara Chase-Riboud. - Review - book review

Chase-Riboud likes to quote Claude Levi-Strauss saying, "Arc is the only proof that anything has ever happened in the past." African tribal art in museums is an art proving what happened in the past, but only when it was made, not when it was plundered. Graves and tombs also prove that things happened in the past. Black art today is happening in the present; our attitude toward Black art of the past is also of today. We cannot go back. Art cannot be the art it was, anymore than can the dead rise again. Africa Arising, the title of Chase-Riboud's recently dedicated memorial to thousands of slaves buried anonymously in Manhattan's African Burial Ground, can only raise consciousness in the living. Because Chase-Riboud, an American, works principally in France and Italy, she is not to my mind an African American artist. Disagree and I will say, "Of what use is that designation anyway, being a sociological rather than an artistic distinction?" As the venerable Classicist Otto Brendel said some years ago, "Greek s culptors worked in Macedonia. Was their sculpture Greek or Macedonian?" El Greco was Greek. Were his paintings Greek or Spanish? Picasso was Spanish. Was his art French? Willem De Kooning came from Holland. Arshile Gorky from Armenia. The pedantic tendency to affix styles to single ethnic populations implies that new styles must then come from new races of people--an assumption that is not acceptable. There hasn't been a new race for ten thousand years, maybe longer.

Chase-Riboud says that when visiting Egypt, she realized there was such a thing as non-European art: "It was a revelation. I suddenly saw how insular the Western world was vis-a-vis the non-white, non-Christian world. The sheer magnificence of it. The elegance and perfection, the timelessness, the depth. That trip was historic for me. Though I didn't know it at the time, my own conversion was part of the historical transformation of the blacks that began in the '60s." This sort of revelation has overcome many artists to whom race did not figure: Frank Stella owes more to Byzantine geometrical design than to Abstract Expressionism. Lita Albuquerque in Los Angeles, although born in Tunisia, drew inspiration from ancient Egyptian art. There is more raffia and hemp rope in German-born but Americanized Eva Hesse's constructions than in any African American art that I have seen. Such examples are legion. The tug of war between those who would globalize art and those who hold to the virtues of racial identity--cont ested alongside motivation to decenter, degender, deheroize, and ultimately homogenize the world's population and its various histories--will run its course as all ideologies do, leaving behind another chapter in social history.

Selz's vast knowledge of art history serves Chase-Riboud well, for her travels have been extensive--Europe to China, the Middle East to Zanzibar. Janson concludes his fine essay on Chase-Riboud's drawings, saying: "Her work stands apart as a result of her interest in other cultures and civilizations. In fact, it looks alien in every context: American or European, black or white, male or female, for it partakes of all yet belongs solely to none. She has adopted this cosmopolitan manner not to disavow gender, race or nationality, but rather to transcend the limitations they impose."