Coconuts at Art Palace
ON VIEW THROUGH AUGUST 23, 2006
Risa Puleo
My grandmother always told me to remember that I was white, though my skin told a different story. Her genetic argument is that we are Spanish and she is convinced that our family is represented in Velasquez’ Las Meninas. Born during the depression and coming of age pre-Civil Rights and the Chicano Movement, hers is a position taken out of self-preservation. She hates the word “Chicano.” She has defined her, and by proxy my, ethnicity so narrowly that the type of beans that we eat—pinto, not black, which are Cuban—is an important distinction.
During the nineties, the height of identity politics, I found myself in college and the middle of exhausting conversations about why I preferred the term “Hispanic” to “Mexican-American,” “Chicano,” or “Latino”. All these terms were boxes to check off on scholarship applications and had no real meaning to my life, or didn’t until I moved to New York and understood for the first time that I was not “white” enough to be white and not “Hispanic” enough to be Hispanic.
I know very well what it means to be a “coconut,” a term thrown out as an insult— brown on the outside and white on the inside—that has come to be embraced by others of my generation with similar experiences. Arturo Palacios, the curator of Art Palace’s newest exhibition Coconuts, is also a coconut. I know this because he is my friend and we make fun of each other for being coconuts. I recount these, perhaps self-indulgent, anecdotes here to point to how very complicated, often irrational and conflicting, designations like “coconut,” “Hispanic” and “white” are. Whiteness does not have to do with skin color and being Hispanic is all about the type of beans you eat.
Coconuts does not attempt to address any of these complexities. Rather, it is a presentation of work by four Hispanic artists, Sam de la Rosa, Michelle Gonzalez-Valdez (aka Bunnyphonic), Rell Ohlson and Josh Rios, who, in keeping with the state of coconutness, don’t make work about being Hispanic. Alright, so why bring up the artist’s ethnicity at all? Especially when there are other currents that holds these four artists together. They all share a wry, dark humor manifested in an aesthetic language that has come to be associated with youth culture. But does this have to do with them being coconuts? The same could be said of work coming out of Williamsburg. It is more likely related to belonging to a certain generation (all of the artists included were born between 1973 and 1981) and the curator’s desire to make a cohesive show. Despite the exhibition’s claim to be “post-identity,” Coconuts is a still a show about identity, just one not that is typically defined as such. Call it an “adolescent impulse” or hipster subculture, this identity is one that has been commercially-marketed, both in mass and art markets, and coded as white.
Rell Ohlson’s drawings, set against a hot pink painted wall that echoes the artist’s palette, present a nexus of pop-color, pattern and shape that builds relationships between graphic renderings of animals, people, landscape and anthropomorphized creatures. One such drawing, North America, reads as a flowchart of cause and effect. A rainbow leads into a scene where a buffalo collapses into the earth causing an underground diamond mine and a spawn of turd-shaped creatures that, in turn, feed a raccoon who lives in a landscape of uprooted trees. Whether an environmental statement is part of the artist’s intention, Olhson’s drawings speaks through form and process over content.
Skulls, Ninja Turtles, lidless eyes, Bart Simpson, Nike swoops, Bob Dylan and Israel are some of the repeated motifs in Sam de la Rosa’s text, collage and drawn work. To access these smaller-scaled pieces, one must circumvent de la Rosa’s plywood construction: a make-shift room that features more drawings inside—more skulls, Ninja Turtles and depiction of a group of pilgrims who stand over a dead Native American—lit by a black light. There is an urgency in de la Rosa’s work, from markers set atop the box encourage views to join de la Rosa and tag it with their own statements and sentiments to calls for Yoko Ono to murder Tom Hanks and Palacios to start recycling.
One could argue that, given the artists’ ethnicity, the political interest in de la Rosa’s and Ohlson’s work is one stemming from activism in Chicano Art that has come to bloom in a new generation. But both artists’ works lacks the distinctly Chicano vocabulary found in the work of contemporary artists working in this vein like Cesar Martinez, Vincent Valdez or Alex Rubio. Their concerns speak broadly to American society, culture and politics rather than to a specifically Chicano culture (though as the term coconuts demonstrates, this culture is not a monolith). One could also argue that the urgency felt in both artists’ works is a symptom of our generation. But, so is apathy, urgency’s slothful stepsister. Youth culture, then, can also not be regard as monolithic.
The most successful work in the show comes from Josh Rios, who in addition to contributing the most conceptually solid installation, presents the most complications to show’s premise. A pair of taloned hands reach down from a cloud painted on the corner of Art Palace’s walls to release lightening bolts at a tableau of hand-sized figures molded from black clay engaged in a variety of sexual acts. Above these figures, Rios presents a set of drawings titled This Would Be Hilarious If It Weren’t For All the Dead Bodies (Border Fence Sex Patrol) that depict parts of a ramshackled fence surrounded by used condoms and broken beer bottles. Taken out of the context of this installation and a set of drawings—five that depict a fur-covered and horned demon who opens moral doors through statements like “you now have permission to have premarital sex”— in the gallery’s next room, Rios’ fences could point to immigration along the US-Mexico border, or any border for that matter. This assumption is easily made. But alongside the rest of his work, the fence becomes a border of personal ethics that implicates the viewer; its destruction, a passage to guilt-free pleasure.
We could also assume that Michelle Gonzalez-Valdez, who dons a piñata’s head and an accordion for her performances as Bunnyphonic, does so in homage to her culture. But more so, her performance on the opening night revealed a preoccupation with childhood. As such, it is fitting that the accoutrements of her performance are specific to the place where she grew up— San Antonio. Perennially trapped inside the piñata (in the Art Palace performance Valdez forewent her standard rabbit regalia to instead assume a chicken’s), Valdez’s alter-ego played a melancholic waltz that waned into dissonance like a music box that has wound down.
Based on the criteria established, Coconuts is a success: it presents work by Hispanic artists that did not necessarily have to have been made by Hispanic artists. But the issues at stake in this exhibition are too complex for me to feel satisfied with this assessment. Why Coconuts if identity is not going to be addressed as such in the show? (And really, who am I to ponder problematic names having named my space The Donkey Show, a symptom of my own affinities with third-wave feminism). To title the show Coconuts puts the artists on display before their work, as was the case with all shows that “figured difference” in the eighties and nineties. In fact, Coconuts uses the same curatorial methodology that most of these shows used: minority artist who address identity, it just inserts a “don’t” into the mix.
These days, we often hear terms like post-ethnic, post-identity, post-multicultural, post-black and post-feminist. I think coconut could be added to this list too. These terms assume that we have addressed issues of identity and can now move on. But even if this were true, which I don’t believe that it is, why would we want to? To my mind, what separates a multicultural moment form a “post” moment is that now, minority groups have the choice to either address identity or not comment on it. This choice is reflected in the name Coconuts and the show. To cite a friend who has had trouble adjusting to Texas because she finds that issues of identity are not discussed here, “Race [or insert identity category here ] is a really interesting thing! Why don’t we talk about it?” Perhaps, it’s about finding new and relevant ways of doing so. Like examining white masculinity in the Matthew Barney’s Cremaster series or the liminal space between being white and being Hispanic that is a coconut. What we may find is that we are more diverse than the terms of diversity can hope to encompass.
Risa Puleo is a assistant editor for …might be good and she coordinates testsite , …mbg’s sister project.
