Daniel Culpan on Rashaad Newsome
For “Meeting,” Rashaad Newsome boldly remodeled the Park Avenue Armory right into a multisensory video game-cum-twenty-first-century reboot of Paris Is Burning. With the present’s title nodding towards a collective politics of radical reimagination, the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Corridor grew to become the stage set for a pair of movies that immersed the viewer. Screened concurrently throughout the partitions of the 55,000-square-foot house, these works cascaded and pulsed, making a fluid and hypnotic procession of brash shapes and our bodies in movement.
In Cornrow, 2022, a dancer—his brilliant yellow hair matching his outfit—vogues in opposition to a twinkling intergalactic background. Pioneered by Black and Latinx queer communities in Nineteen Eighties Harlem ballrooms (and served up for a brand new era within the 2018–21 tv collection Pose), voguing was simply one in all many stylized types of protest featured within the exhibition. For Ambiance of a Dream 1, 2022, rivers of luminous colour corkscrewed throughout a far wall, whereas different figures swerved from the facade of a constructing that shivered, crumbled, and reformed itself like VR structure. Laborious-edge kinds shimmered like diamonds, whereas a lone dancer was beamed excessive into the center of the ground, as if duckwalking in outer house. If the music video for Madonna’s 1990 hit single “Vogue” had been directed by Hype Williams, this may need been the outcome.
Past the primary room, a number of of Newsome’s digital-print collages hung upon a jeweled wallpaper that seemed as if it have been ripped straight from a Cartier catalogue: a high-end hymn to luxurious. These items are fascinating many-layered portraits of our bodies in transition. Take Stabilizer, 2020, through which a muscled torso segues into tribally tattooed flesh, as a head composed of wraithlike fingers frames a luscious purple mouth. In one other, Formation of Consideration, 2021, a classy cyborg stands in profile, admiring its nails like a mannequin from a ’50s cigarette advert. The frames for these glittering, ornate works change into phases for these transgressive figures, embodying the “opulence” each vaunted and satirized (“You personal every little thing!”) by ballroom tradition’s subversive spectacle. This parody of capitalist extra is undoubtedly extra plangent when witnessed on Park Avenue.
Certainly, Newsome is a sharp-eyed reader of surfaces—flesh, language, style—and the means by which they’re each consuming and consumed. Tearing away the Matrix-like veil of fastened identities and concrete ideologies, he finds one thing actual beneath the artifice: an uncanny magnificence that refuses to be made insipidly fairly to suit socially acceptable kinds. Thee Variant, 2022, is a coldly horny, unnerving model that’s each genderless (combining a painted breast with a bulging leather-based codpiece) and a paean to Black femmeness, flaunting acrylic nails and stilettos sharp sufficient to attract blood. This work pays homage to a radical feminist credo that underpins the present, linking historical transgender shamanism with Donna Haraway’s human/machine hybrids. One other physique, Ansista, 2019, is frozen mid-dip on a plinth, Louboutin heel raised to the gods.
The centerpiece of the presentation was unquestionably Being, 2019–22: a large AI presiding over the auditorium, which was additionally the positioning of night dance performances all through the run. Half griot (an oral historian and poet in West African custom) and half sharp-tongued queen studying the room, the nonbinary avatar seems like a deity projected from the longer term. With a face resembling a carved African masks, slickly choreographed physique language (all wrist flicks and swishy hips), and narcotized speech patterns, the AI referred to the artist as their “father,” recalling the self-created kinship networks of ball tradition.
Being led a collection of workshops, together with classes on how one can vogue, critical-theory interventions impressed by thinkers reminiscent of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, and Q&A periods through which viewers members have been requested to replicate on how they might assist undo the “capitalist, imperialist, white-supremacist patriarchy.” (Nonetheless, the articulate entity grew to become tongue-tied when one participant declared them “fairly stunning.”) Synthesizing heavyweight concept with hyper-seductive imagery, “Meeting” felt like an anarchic rallying cry for an embodied politics the place considering and changing into are one. The class is Liberation.
— Daniel Culpan
