Freestyling - Studio Museum in Harlem

An exhibition of 28 up-and-coming Afro-American artists organized by curator Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem is post-theory, post-black and white-hot.

Perhaps (or so one devoutly hopes) artists are waiting in the wings now as they were a century ago, slowly maturing and testing the imaginative visions that will enable them to transcend the stagnant orthodoxies of their time, the endgame rhetoric of deconstructionism, the crust of late-modernist assumptions about the limits of art. An exacerbated sense of irony--necessary condom of the new fin-de-siecle--makes us doubt that the sense of virgin territory that beckoned modernism onwards will be waiting for them. But can we really be so sure? It is a curious fact of art history, perhaps only a coincidence, but perhaps not, that its entries upon fresh creative cycles after periods of exhaustion so often fall between the years '90 and '30. --Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, 1980

The idea of doing something freestyle is to innovate on a dime. It's a risk. Nothing can be faked, hidden or planned ahead of time. Falling flat is always a possibility. The point is to get something fresh to reveal itself, reward for leaping into the unknown in hopes of taking the game a little bit higher.

In Thelma Golden's case, the game is curating. "Freestyle" is her first big show in her new post as director for exhibitions and programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The exhibition filled the recently renovated museum, which is (and has been) dedicated to exploring the impact of Afro-American culture on American society at large. It comprises work from 28 emerging black American artists, gathered according to no particular theme. "Most of them are brand new to me," Golden told A.i.A. The average age of the artists is around 30. Roughly a third are female. Most live in New York, and several have attended the Whitney's Independent Study Program. A quarter are from Los Angeles. Asked whether she sees any similitude running through this group's thinking, Golden responds, "No, not really," and then goes on: "These artists are making work like one sees all around the world, but not in the negative sense of the every-city biennial mode. Popular culture isn't even a reference. It's just an overarching reality in terms of its influence in contemporary culture."

In a catchy, much-repeated phrase from the exhibition catalogue, Golden half jokingly refers to her present point of view as being "post-black"--meaning, she writes, that she recognizes racial identity as something to be simultaneously defied and kept alive; it's both a hollow social construction and a reality with an indispensable history. The artists in "Freestyle" are of a relatively new generation able to think in these terms, born mostly after the Civil Rights movement, privy also to a range of poststructural cultural discourses.

Golden's name is widely associated with the postmodern, theory-oriented critical practice that came into vogue during the early '80s. She has not been known as a straight-up connoisseur, but as someone particularly interested in politics. In addition to her consistent, outspoken art-world presence, there was the groundbreaking, controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial for which she was one of three curators. It quickly became known as "the identity Biennial" for its profusion of work dealing with race, class and gender.

Then came her notorious Whitney Museum exhibition, "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art" (1994-95), which elicited memorably vitriolic responses from neo-con critics like Hilton Kramer, who wrote in the New York Observer that shows "like `Black Male' ... [make] the Whitney Museum completely irrelevant for the artists and those among the public who continue to be more interested in artistic quality than political outreach."[1]

On the other side of the fence, "Black Male" animated feminist scholar Linda Nochlin to write in this magazine,

... the fact remains that the great Western tradition of art has always included questions of identity, of ethnicity, of national and ethnic representation, and, indeed, of outright political debate within its capacious embrace. Only very recently has Western art been distilled--or reduced--to an essence of pure form, in which any tincture of social comment is considered a taint.[2]

In any case, Golden struck a nerve and earned a reputation.

Golden abruptly left the Whitney in 1998, upon Maxwell Anderson's arrival as director. Her departure came on the heels of a certain "curatorial restructuring" that resulted in her being taken off the 2000 Biennial, which she had been slated to organize. Golden then embarked on a stint as the special-projects curator for contemporary-art collectors Peter and Eileen Norton in Los Angeles. As for whether or not Golden wants to revivify the waning spirit of deconstructionism that characterized the time when she first made her name, she is vehement: "No, no, no, no way. It's been digested now."