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[Art reviews]

Delightful indiscretions
Iké Udé’s sharp satire; plus basket bounty at the Society of Arts and Crafts

BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

 
" Beyond Decorum:The Photography of Iké Udé "
At the Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University, through October 21.
" Contemporary Basketry:No Boundaries "
At the Society of Arts and Crafts through August 30.

Iké Udé, the young Nigerian-born artist whose gently outrageous show at Harvard’s Sert Gallery proves as delectable as fruit stolen from a curmudgeon’s back yard, likes to dress up. Eye shadow and lipstick, fur chaps and kimonos, garters and boxing gloves — all find their place in his wry send-ups of our so-called popular culture. Masculinity and femininity are Udé’s precise targets, and in photographs that draw almost exclusively on the artist’s own body and face, his method involves donning everything from a monsignor’s smock to a halter top, from an ascot to face paint. He’s out to ridicule (and far more strangely) embrace our phony, destructive, sexy, ridiculously prescribed roles.

Behold the photos, watch the video, take in the three-dimensional work, but whatever you do, don’t read the catalogue. The various essays on Udé and his opus by fast-track academics would make you believe this artist packs all the sparkle of a keynote address at the Modern Language Association. Indulge, momentarily, a sample: " Bringing together the performative mask of his multiple personae with the wit of poetic distanciation achieved by dislocating the relation of image and text . . .  " You get the picture. What it means: Udé’s an acerbic, hilarious, kick-ass soul. And he takes no prisoners: not women, not men, not blacks, not whites, not celebs, not the homeless, not victims, not victors. In his œuvre, everyone’s seductive and everyone’s a fool. And everyone just happens to be him- or herself.

" Beyond Decorum " is billed as " The Photography of Iké Udé, " but that’s not an entirely accurate description. Although a good deal of the work here involves photographic images, photography itself is almost beside the point. Udé’s interest does not lie in exploring the medium — I wouldn’t be surprised or disappointed to learn he doesn’t even develop his own prints. He belongs rather to the tradition of conceptual artists who upend commonplace artifacts (and the concepts they’re emblems of) to make them reveal an unexpected beauty or truth. The Sert show includes a number of what have to be described as monoprints, and an accompanying videotape, itself a spoof of documentary footage, shows how the prints were made. Udé paints the behinds of naked men and women and then guides his subjects in transferring this paint to a big piece of paper. A number of the prints are positioned on plastic toilet seats that occupy a nearby wall.

The " Ass Prints " (as Udé calls them, from his " Project Rear " ) occupy only a small and by no means central place in this tightly packed, carefully presented exhibit, and it’s a tribute to the overall integrity of the show that its least noteworthy elements hold up as fully engaging. The video of the printmaking — amateurish, plodding camerawork coupled with a musical score as fully orchestrated as in a Francis Ford Coppola film — suddenly turns into what you’d never expect, a moment of human tenderness, as Udé’s hand solicitously guides the shoulder of one of his models up from the paper where he’s been momentarily stuck.

The most exhilarating and multi-faceted components of " Beyond Decorum " are Udé’s reworked magazine covers and, to a lesser degree, his movie posters. The magazines themselves — Town & Country, Vogue, Cigar Aficionado, Cosmopolitan — lean side-by-side against a wall, just as they might in a rack at a bookstore or supermarket, ubiquitous and banal. In almost every respect they look like the real thing: the gimmicky headlines, the model poses, the saturated colors, even the fonts are accurate. Only the context of the gallery (and the fact that every cover depicts the same black man’s face) tells you to look more carefully. On the cover of the Nigerian issue of Vogue, Udé appears shirtless with his arm around a topless black woman. Their bodies are almost identical in size and build and color, and their faces are similarly analogous: angular, hairless, handsome, and made up.

On the Cosmopolitan cover, Udé poses like an ingenue, with his hands angled demurely between his knees; he sports a coiffed ’fro and a sensible blouse-and-skirt ensemble. On the cover of Cigar Aficionado, the artist wears lipstick in the manner of a Warhol Monroe, a moplike wig of pitch-black fusilli curls, and enough face paint to equip the entire troupe of Donna Karan models for their next catwalk in Milan. The identical make-up job, with its penciled eyebrows and thick mascara, appears on the cover of Sports Illustrated, where Udé hunches in his boxing trunks and American-flag-motif gloves in a peek-a-boo defense, à la Floyd Patterson.

The beauty of Udé’s magazine covers lies in the way he keeps them from slipping into one-liners. They’re neither simple nor direct, and their droll power reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s " A Modest Proposal, " a classic sociological farce that methodically lays out an unassailable argument for how Ireland can improve its economy by slaughtering and eating its infants ( " a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled " ). Udé’s insight, like Swift’s, lies in his wholehearted embrace of everything inimical. A lesser artist would get scatological or slapstick or transparently angry in a remake of an Army-recruitment poster. Here, above the slogan " Be All That You Can Be, " Udé dons camouflage fatigues, strikes a perfect salute at attention, and stares blankly ahead — from behind his Madonna make-up job. The effect isn’t just funny, it’s weirdly unsettling, and not just for its irony or the way it flouts the rules. It’s unsettling for the truth it subtly points to, that military machismo itself is a form of drag.

WHAT COULD BE MORE UNLIKE " Beyond Decorum " than the contemporary-basket show that’s up until August 30 at the Society of Arts and Crafts? And yet a spirit of whimsy and inventiveness, of reworking the familiar toward unpredictable ends, makes the two oddly complementary. Udé provokes; the baskets, on the other hand, dazzle. " No Boundaries " is one of those rare shows (in our Western culture) that makes the historic tension between art and craft dissolve: each of these exquisite vessels is both art and craft, and the idea of having to choose seems preposterous. From the space-age metallic-and-metal-studded baskets of Rob Dobson to the lacy, filigree creations of Lindsay Rais (one employs a network of pistachio shells each of which is encrusted with tiny glass beads), these pieces move effortlessly between the faraway future and the faraway past, but they never stray from delightful.

Also remarkable about this exhibit is the way it’s put together: each of the six established artists — Dorothy Gill Barnes, Carol Eckert, John Garrett, Lissa Hunter, John McGuire, and John McQueen — was asked to bring along an emerging artist, with the result that harmonious correspondences enchant the space. Among the most mellifluent work is that of Jan Hopkins, whose creations not only leave the art-versus-craft dispute in the dust but also make it hard to distinguish fabric from sculpture. Also on display are powerful contributions from Charissa Brock, Hisako Sekijima, and Jo Stealey.

Issue Date: August 23-30, 2001