Alison Saar is included in the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition “We Wanted A Revolution:
Alison Saar is included in the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition “We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85.” The show is absolutely brilliant. It brings together many of the better known African American women artists of the period—from Faith Ringgold to Lorna Simpson—with their lesser known counterparts who worked alongside them. Telling a twenty-year story about activism, identity, organization, and artistic production, the exhibition is spacious enough to hold many intersecting histories and trajectories. An especially compelling one I noticed is a general move from more figurative and explicitly identitarian work in the 1960s toward a subtler, more analytic treatment of the figure, particularly in sculpture and photography, in the 1980s. As one of the youngest artists in the show, Saar falls on the latter end of this spectrum. The black female figure is always there in her sculptures, but it stands in for many things and conveys multi-layered, critical allegories. In her more recent work, like Mammy Machine seen here (not in the show), the female body is invoked by its absence. The materials presented—tub, stand, tiles, tubes—generate a visceral response that calls to mind cleaning, medical treatment or perhaps even torture. The pendulous forms hanging from the top look and droop like a cluster of disembodied breasts. Inviting and repelling bodily engagement, Saar’s disturbing sculpture and its title make us grapple with questions of agency, realizing that bodies are produced and controlled by competing apparatuses of power—and that racialized and feminized bodies are particularly vulnerable to these structures.Alison Saar, Mammy Machine, 2012 -- source link
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