"One Planet Under a Groove" at the Bronx Museum - New York - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Calvin Reid

Curated by Franklin Sirmans and Lydia Yee, this exhibition took on the enormous influence of the hip-hop phenomenon--sampling, rap, break dancing, graffiti--on popular media and on a generation of young artists enthralled by pop culture in all its permutations. By isolating hip-hop culture's predilection for unsanctioned borrowing, boasting, partying and acting out, the show mapped hip-hop's osmotic transformation from black urban street culture to consumer product to a new international creative syntax informed, in part, by conceptual art practices.

The curators included the scribble-covered, Xerox-collage paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat as well as Keith Haring's subway chalk drawings, both from the early 1980s, flagging a connection between the mostly white (Basquiat notwithstanding) downtown art world and the mostly black and Hispanic graffiti scene, focused on tagging subway trains and buildings with spectacular word graphics. The more contemporary works of Sanford Biggers and Juan Capistran also provided links to the hip-hop legacy, illustrating a synergy between ghetto style and art-world esthetics. Bigger's Mandala of the B-bodhisattva (2000), for instance, combines a linoleum floor for break-dancers with a wall-mounted overhead video recording of a performance held on it. Hip-hop's exuberance meets high-modernist austerity in Capistran's The Breaks (2000), a series of photographs that document the artist's break-dancing session on a museum-installed Carl Andre metal floor piece (which looks uncannily like Biggers's linoleum floor) in a faux-instructional, step-by-step break-dancing how-to.

Nadine Robinson presented an installation combining minimalist paintings and gleaming DJ turntables. Sol Sax's odd fashion-shoot photos of Africanesque sculptural figures wearing hoodies mix museum-style artifacts with funky street attire. The funniest work here, however, may have been Kori Newkirk's delightful collection of fake "ice," a selection of stereotypical, ostentatious bling-bling signifiers, including Rolex watches, huge medallions, chains, jewelry and rings favored by many hip-hop performers--but all carefully, raggedly constructed of glass, paper and tinfoil. Hip-hop's international reach is evidenced in the digital photos of Enlightenment, a group of Japanese designers who showed portraits of Japanese DJs and rappers draped in sports gear and flashing the don't-fuck-with-me scowls that are de rigueur for the hip-hop crowd. David Hammons wryly invokes the verbal wizardry of rapping in a booklike piece that presents the late rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls along with the artist Christo as a bunch of superstar "wrappers."

This was the second exhibition at the Bronx Museum to assay hip-hop (Yee also co curated the first, "Urban Mythologies," which focused on the art world's fascination with the Bronx since the 1960s). Beginning in the 1970s as a competitive, communal urban street culture, hip-hop represents the triumph of poor but ingenious black and Caribbean kids who created extraordinary performance and visual-art spectacles far away from conventional, commercial art or pop-culture venues. But it's clear that the hip-hop-influenced artists in this show have just as much in common with the usual art-historical movements (Yee's essay touches on this a bit), namely, Dada, Fluxus, Pop art and Minimalism. Yee and Sirmans set out to illuminate hip-hop's influence on young artists with a variety of backgrounds. But in the process, they also revealed that the art world has infiltrated at least part of the hip-hop nation, too.