installation view of work by Maria Campos-Pons

The last time I was at Gallery Stokes, I told Heidi Aishman to check out Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 Part II at Spelman Museum of Fine Art because it was--and this phrase actually came out of my mouth--"an important show." Jesus. What does that even mean? It's an unfortunate phrase because it makes the show sound like something you study, not something you enjoy.


Big Gurl, (video still), Lauren Kelly, 2006

This is critical, because so much video work that got attention in the late 90s and early 2000s was the arid, anti-formalist stuff by the likes of Aida Ruilova and Shinique Smith that drove me up a wall. In contrast, Remixed curators, Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Valerie Cassel Oliver favor bold, and sometimes aggressive, immersions into the media's visuality and tactility.

Remixed rewards looking, and I was glad for that. Lorna Simpson's "Easy to Remember," which debuted at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, comprised 2 and a half minutes of a grid of humming lips of varying genders and ages. This is the best kind of video work--the sort of artifact that releases a chain of associations that unfold discursively so that the first 30 seconds give you no clue as to where your psyche will alight at the end of 150 seconds of essentially the same image. My mind went to choirs and funerals and the comforts of home and the eroticism of everyday life.


Easy to Remember, (video still), Lorna Simpson, 2002

A similar thing happened in front of Berni Searle's "A Matter of Time," (2003) in which the artist attempts to walk up a slippery slope coated with olive oil only to fail, slip down, and have to begin again--an elegant meditation on culture and the confining definitions of skin color (olive) in a South African context.

I wish I could say the same for Zoe Charlton's "Dead White Men," which is unfortunately as unidimensional as its title. It features the artist taking on the poses of iconic nudes from throughout western art history. By leaving the background as blank and white as possible, the viewer is confronted with the starkest chiaroscuro of body against ground. This serves to emphasize the darkness of the figure, its leaden position in history as well as in the imagination, but I found myself asking, "to what end?" For a work made in 2006, its strategies of appropriation and recasting felt awfully 1980s.


Dead White Men, (video still), Zoe Charlton, 2006

Appropriation and reinterpretation were common themes, however, but most often put to richer uses. Ina Archer's "1/16th of 100%!?" (1993-1996) took a kind of archaeological tour through early film history, cutting together scenes from Babes on Broadway, Whoopee, Imitation of Life (the Douglas Sirk version), Busby Berkeley musicals, Josephine Baker, and a half dozen other sources to meditate on miscegenation and the disturbingly consistent chain of images that form our shared cultural legacy of how we view race.


Imitation of Life, (film still), 1959

Tracy Moffat and Gary Hillberg similarly mine the collective archival imagination in "Lip," (1999), a compilation of Hollywood's black maids and servants enacting the "sassy," scene. You know the one: where the likes of Vivien Leigh, Lana Turner, or Barbra Streisand get told off by their uppity servants, who at the end of the day still remain servants.

As if those weren't enough references to Imitation of Life, in "American Classics" (2005) Elizabeth Axtman lip synchs to scenes from both versions of Imitation among other "tragic mulatto rants" throughout Hollywood history, adding another layer to the troubled history of racial imaginings.


American Classics, (video still), Elizabeth Axtman, 2005

I also like Axtman's small jewel of a video "Expletives Owed," (2007) that features Rita Isbell, sister of one of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims basically going ape-shit at Dahmer's trial. Each expletive is deleted and replaced with the same expletive uttered by Richard Pryor, Bernie Mac, or Eddie Murphy. The tragic and the comic become one.


Expletives Owed, (video still), Elizabeth Axtman, 2007

Other works I liked: Senga Nengudi's hypnotic video about an invisible economy undertaken by (socially) invisible people


The Threader, (video stills), Senga Nengudi, 2007

and Marguerite Harris's experimental animated short, although with less gusto than many of the other works.


Flowers & Leaves 2, (video still), Marguerite Harris

Colette Gaiter contributed an elegant conclusion of years of research into the work of Emory Douglas in the form of a CD ROM with educational overtones. And Yvette Mattern's "Zanzibar Project" (1997) had some nice passages of freighted and indecidable interactions between people encountered on the island of Zanzibar.

The current installment at Spelman is part 2 of a 2-part exhibition. The first installment ran through last fall and included work by, among others, Jessica Ann Peavy, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Tracey Rose, Carrie Mae Weems, Paula Wilson, and Lauren Woods. It also included work by 2 artists whose Atlanta debut was in a show curated by yours truly the year before: Cauleen Smith and Ogechi Chieke.


Thee Creation Theory, (installation view), Ogechi Chieke

Okay, so yes, this is an "important show." But here's what I really meant by that: Cinema Remixed is an exhibition that not only shows something, it does something; it acts back upon the world in a direct way by creating a category of art and artists--black women in film and video--for whom there was no canon and for whom no space existed in the public imagination. It's the kind of show that--like Sensation, Freestyle, and Freeze--reorganizes internal conceptual relationships within the art world. With all the recent murmurs of disaffection with curating in Atlanta, Spelman exemplifies what smart and meaningful curating looks like. Shows about monsters are all fine and dandy, but such confections only make sense in the context of a good meal.