Too cool for school

Spelman’s One Planet mocks its own examination of the social impact of hip-hop culture

Any academic paper about “goth” or “skateboard culture” will tell you that nothing kills the vitality and originality of a subculture quicker than too much analysis.

That point is made on multiple levels in the Spelman Museum show One Planet Under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art, which both mocks the sanctification of that musical phenomenon, even as it flirts with the academic and art world impulse to put subversive phenomena under a microscope. The accompanying catalog essay by co-curator Lydia Yee offers this choice morsel of academic gobbledygook from Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: “... rap’s contestations are part of a poly-vocal black cultural discourse engaged in discursive ‘wars of position’ within and against dominant discourses.” If anything called out for the Krylon, it’s this.

For the most part, this inspiring show mocks the analytical effort to place every phenomenon under glass and surround it by velvet ropes. David Hammons’ “In the Hood,” a funny “sculpture” of a sweatshirt hood, and Douglas Ross’ “Graft,” a “rubbing” of a brick wall covered in graffiti, reference holy shrouds. They illustrate art institutions’ tendency to remove things from their original context and how the process of sanctifying carries a potential for deadening.

The show’s primary critical apparatus is the knowing grin, and humor seems the appropriate strategy here as if the participating artists and curators Franklin Sirmans and Lydia Yee recognize the killjoy effect of overly serious analysis.

And it’s not just the artists’ amused measure of hip-hop culture that comes across in One Planet, a show that originated at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The show intimates that the phenomenon itself has a serious sense of self-referential play and subversive anti-establishment wit going on, too. Nowhere is that playfulness better conveyed than in a Keith Haring graffiti-style image displayed next to the kind of trashy movie poster papered on subway walls. Amateur graffiti critics have written their own crude ripostes to the lame movie poster, but in a touch of delicious outside-the-margins critique, they have also offered a putdown of the accompanying Keith Haring poster. It’s meta-graffiti: graffiti commenting upon graffiti art drawn from graffiti.

One Planet is a show hip and heavy on art stars, both old school and new, offering locals a chance to eyeball some of race-oriented art’s major players, including Adrian Piper, Mel Chin, Chris Ofili and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Piper offers another version of how definitively we ruin something when we break it down into minute particles in her wickedly clever, cringe-inducing 1983 video “Funk Lessons.” In the piece, the absurdly earnest artist instructs a room full of mostly white, limb-flailing dancers on how to bring in da funk.

Nikki S. Lee’s post-Piper cultural impersonations, “The Hip-Hop Project,” are also laugh-out-loud funny. Lee has built an equally sly career on infiltrating subcultures of strippers or white trash or yuppies and photographing herself in the process of impersonation. In this project, the artist has donned dark makeup, lip-liner, gold jewelry and an air of “whatyalookin’ at,” envisioning herself as a hip-hop queen — a cultural drag that clearly creates larger ripples than some of her other projects.

White teen boy culture has often sampled this exotic in-the-hood Other, and One Planet is a show that acknowledges how often and in what complex ways hip-hop has appealed to a variety of people in a variety of forms as in Japanese graffiti artist Hisashi Tenmyouya’s amusing clash of East and West.

Several works suggest that, like nearly every phenomenon in a capitalist society, hip-hop is something that — a la Nikki S. Lee — anyone can buy or put on. One Planet suggests a culture in the process of doing just that — of taking the elements of an inspired, reactionary subculture and recrafting it into something you can buy, from high art graffiti-gone-uptown Basquiats to the Keith Haring merchandise on sale at the Pop Shop.

Kori Newkirk’s brilliant collection of Fluxus-inspired objects make that same point with a surplus of humor and inspiration. Looking like the gimcrack objects you’d find in gumball machines or a box of Cracker Jacks, these flashy watches crafted from imitation sparkle and “gold” necklaces made from spray-painted macaroni mock the notion that you can buy just about any impersonation in this imitation-crazed culture.

With their glass cover and backdrop of red velvet, the artworks suggest another reading that’s just as interesting. Since so much of what we know of culture is “written by the conquerers,” the work calls into question how hip-hop will come to be represented.

Will hip-hop be authentically conveyed, or will it be a subculture co-opted and misinterpreted by the culture at large? That’s the implication in Yee and Sirmans’ catalog essay, which suggests that culture has already rendered the MC/rapper as the most significant (read: marketable) element of a diverse scene. In a culture where it is often the guns and the conspicuous consumption of gold teeth and watches that seep into the popular consciousness, One Planet leaves one with the distinct impression that hip-hop is an idea still in formation, with the potential to be appropriated, co-opted, or to retain some of its original spirit.

felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com