Barbara Kruger, Kara Walker, and Charles Atlas Dissect Modernity
The Hammer Museum has displayed the three video installations together for the first time.
Unspeakable: Atlas, Kruger, Walker: Hammer Contemporary Collection is a selection of video installations from the Hammer Contemporary Collection features major works by American artists Charles Atlas, UCLA Department of Art Professor Barbara Kruger, and Kara Walker, created in the last decade. This exhibition is organized by Connie Butler, chief curator, and Ann Philbin, director.
"LOS ANGELES — Art is humanity’s attempt to articulate life’s intangible experiences. That idea is reflected in the title of Unspeakable, a new exhibition at UCLA’s Hammer Museum. Museum director Ann Philbin and chief curator Connie Butler have created a trilogy of video installations from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, each projected in adjoining spaces. Each of the videos was made by a major artist — Kara Walker, Barbara Kruger, and Charles Atlas — within the past 10 years. In any one room, a visitor will still hear the audio of the other two, reinforcing the relationships between them.
Both the entrance and exit to Unspeakable bring visitors to the newest of the three installations, Charles Atlas’s 2017 work “The Tyranny of Consciousness,” with the other two accessed on either side of it. In the video, drag queen Lady Bunny delivers a cogent monologue on how mass apathy and corporate malfeasance frustrate progress in the US and beyond. With its broad range of ideas, the video’s central position serves as a bridge between the other two, which deal with historical racism and globalization, respectively. The five-channel installation consists of a mosaic of 44 different sunsets over water happening at once, accompanied by a separate screen bearing an 18-minute countdown to darkness. The video collage continually shape-shifts, rearranging its grid to place the drowning suns in different positions.
After the suns set, a brief moment of black fades in to a close-up of Lady Bunny for a full-length song. But this isn’t a relief from the somber mood but an ironic continuation. Despite the upbeat music and typically flamboyant drag performance, the lyrics express frustration and self-loathing:
What the fuck is wrong with me
I don’t like who it is I see
I look in the mirror
and it all becomes clearer
Slowly, I’m being forced to see
You were the one
I knew it, but I blew it, yeah
You were the one, the one for me
You were the one
I knew it, but I blew it, yeah
You were the one
You can put the blame on meThe seemingly different soliloquy and musical act are in fact the same, comparing political helplessness with interpersonal failure.
While Atlas is primarily a video artist, Kruger and Walker are better known for their work in other media. For all three of them to have video installations displayed together is unprecedented. Despite their disparate aesthetics, they work surprisingly well as a whole. The specifics of each piece may not relate to those of the others — Walker’s evocations of black pain are quite different from Kruger’s meditations on relationships — but the overall thematic effect is strong. Sitting in “…calling to me…,” one can absorb its images of slave survival while words in “The Tyranny of Consciousness” about contemporary repression of African Americans echo in from the other room. Exhibited together, the three pieces’ varying concerns become a single, and difficult, conversation about modernity."— Dan Schindel, May 6
This post is an excerpt, read the full article on the Hyperallergic website.
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