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

If Chase-Riboud's Africa Rising can awaken us to racial distinction at its extreme, her entire oeuvre might open eyes to see more in primitive art than its primitiveness-and more primitiveness in today's societies than one is wont to admit. Modern man's primitiveness lurks beneath every layer of civilization, at times so obvious that one cannot see it. Everyone wears a mask, to attract or dispel, and every modern priest officiates in regalia. In 1991 in an African town, Pope John Paul II gave First Communion to a Confirmation class of black youths. First he delivered a sermon admonishing the youths to shun witchcraft. Then he cleansed his portable altar with perfumed smoke to drive away evil spirits, and gave to each youth a piece of Jesus' body to eat and a sip of Jesus' blood to drink. This happened where fifty years earlier the natives were believed to be cannibals.

This book is richly illustrated, and Chase-Riboud's thirty-year career to date is lucidly detailed by Selz and Janson, who are adept at bringing art history to bear on an individual artist's movement through time. Their essays (for that matter, this review) are not meant to subordinate art issues to social politics or turn racial identity into style--African American, Chicano, White, as when we distinguished schools, when Venetian, Florentine, Neapolitan, Netherlandish signed for regional styles as African elephants with high foreheads differ from Asian elephants whose foreheads slope. The sort of pluralism and cultural homogeneity that curators promote today has forced a stringent separation of races and genders, which on the positive side weakens the hegemony of art centers and the critical reductionism of world art to an avant-garde phalanx. It is nigh impossible nowadays to speak of art without spealting of race and gender. To Selz's and Janson's credit, they frankly address such topics while stressing q ualities of art that identify Chase-Riboud as first and foremost an artist moving with the flow of art history rather than of sociology in which art-as-art has played an auxiliary role. Global economics, which drove slavery, is now driving multinationalism, not art. Art is tagging along in its wake--or better said, harking at its heels. Significant works of art are representational of what is happening now. But beyond representing the external world they must represent art, otherwise there would be no difference between picturing and creating, between visual perception and visual conceiving, illustrator and artist, handcraft and sculpture. Not one of these distinctions has anything to do with race.

Wayne Andersen, who received his Ph.D. at Columbia University, is professor emeritus in die Department of Architecture at MIT. Among his books are Cezanne's Portrait Drawings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), Gauguin's Paradise Last (New York Viking Press, 1971), and American Sculpture in Process, 1930-1970 (New York New York Graphic Arts Society, 1975). He also currently has three books in press, including The Youth of Cezanne and Zola, Picasso's Brothel, and Freud, Leonardo, and the Slip of Fools,