Abstract activist

Art in America, Feb, 1998 by Guy Brett

For the past 17 months the Serpentine Gallery, idyllically set in London's Hyde Park, has been closed for renovation. (It reopens to the public Feb. 28.) While the building work was going on in the background, the neat hedged garden in front of the gallery was preserved as an outdoor site for a series of temporary commissions. Naturally, whatever was placed there would be perceived in relation to the half-demolished building, the coming and going of cement-mixers, the cacophony of hammering and so on, and the organizers hoped for a series of artists' propositions which would make something of this reality. The first commission, in October 1996, was given to Rasheed Araeen.

Using an obvious means to hand -- scaffolding -- Araeen produced a beautiful near-cubic structure of monumental scale. Standing some 33 feet high and 39 feet square, it attracted attention from a distance in the milky autumn sun as a fight, almost evanescent mass, becoming, as you approached it and walked through the passageways left between the poles, a dazzling mesh of crisscrossing lines. Color was random and delicate: the gray steel poles and the haphazard pink guide markings left by the builders from previous assemblies. There was a visible relationship between the scaffolding of Araeen's installation and the scaffolds surrounding the Serpentine Gallery itself. While one was artistic and the other functional, both structures used the same materials, the same expert techniques of construction. (Araeen acknowledged the scaffolders who built the work by posting their names and photographs on a documentation board in a nearby site hut).

At first glance, Araeen's cube seemed an almost faultless demonstration of the Minimalist esthetic of eschewing emotion symbolism and rhetoric and insisting on the reality of the thing itself, its actual place and time. Yet something prevented one from taking this work simply as a self-sufficient object. Hints of a broader meaning were given by the intriguing title, To Whom It May Concern. These hints were, considerably amplified if you knew something about the artist (as most people in the London art world do). In Britain, besides being recognized for his work as an artist, Araeen is known as a tireless campaigner for the visibility of artists who have been marginalized by the institutional system; especially black and Third World practitioners. He is the author of many articles on the implications of Britain's emergence as a multiracial society. Internationally, he is widely known, too, as the founder and first editor of the influential journal Third Text, a scholarly quarterly set up in 1987 to give what it defined as "third world perspectives on contemporary art and culture." Many people would expect from him, therefore, a "political" art work in the instrumental sense-political couched in familiar terms of "black struggle," "neo-colonialism" and so forth.

Instead, they were faced with the lattice cube. Its title, a phrase commonly used in letters of inference, is addressed to anyone who may come across it, and to anyone who may feel that the work's content concerns them. In contrast to Araeen's political activities, which have been largely addressed to the white establishment and say, in no uncertain terms, "This concerns you," both the audience and the message were left open. Open enough, in fact, for it to be seen that, if Araeen was not addressing people on an overt political level, he was not addressing them as esthetes either. While his block of scaffolding may have evoked classic Minimalism, it also could be viewed as a reminder of Minimalism's true roots, Araeen believes that Minimalism has forsaken its initial concern with presenting a "phenomenological quality, a perception of the exterior world" to become a "precious, formal, gallery art."(1) By using scaffolding on a building site, he seemed to revive Minimalism's original real-world connections while at the same time deflecting any positivist reading by means of his title.

In fact, such ironic and contradictory strategies in Araeen's work go back a long way. When describing its evolution over the past almost 40 years one is torn between words that evoke a struggle or dilemma, and the opposite: words that suggest a knowing synthesis or fusion. Perhaps both apply. Equally strong in his work have been a current of political criticism, of clearly aimed polemic in matters of social urgency, and an almost dimension, an enjoyment of the elusiveness and mobility of form, open to ambivalence and imaginative projection. At times one has seemed to dominate, at times the other. Perhaps his refusal to finally separate these aspects is indicative of Araeen's conviction that political content does not he in iconography, in the image per se, but operates as something broader: relationships, arrangements, configurations. Conversely, in Araeen's view, ostensibly "esthetic" or "abstract" forms are not without social implications. Threading a personal path between rigid definitions, Araeen's work offers a complex meditation on the relationship between politics and esthetics.