"in the orbit of funk and hip hop" @ Brooklyn Museum of Art

...thought some people might be interested....from todays new york times....

In the Orbit of Funk and Hip-Hop

By ROBERTA SMITH

hen the interplay between rap music, hip-hop culture and contemporary art gets the exhibition it deserves, it will probably be a show that picks up where the Bronx Museum of the Arts' "One Planet Under a Groove: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art" leaves off.

"One Planet" takes its title from a late 70's Funkadelic song, "One Nation Under a Groove," and includes more than 50 works by 30 contemporary artists, nearly half of whom live in California, Texas, Japan or Europe. Organized by Lydia Yee, the museum's curator, and Franklin Sirmans, an independent critic and curator, the show concentrates on art, as befits its setting. Thus it automatically comes much closer to doing its subject justice than "Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage," a show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2000, which was largely devoid of art and swamped with ephemera, memorabilia and clothing.

It also concentrates almost exclusively on work that refers directly to hip-hop or black urban culture, encompassing painting, sculpture, photography, video and a great deal of Conceptual-based art. The show's starting point, both chronologically and emotionally, is Adrian Piper's 1983 videotape "Funk." It shows the artist teaching a mostly white audience how to dance the Funk, and it exudes an aura of bygone innocence. One of the show's most recent works is Nikki S. Lee's far more calculating "Hip-Hop Project," a series of photographs in which the artist poses (with real rap stars) as a seasoned B-Girl.

Galerie Alain le Gailard, Paris/Bronx Museum of the Arts

"Toxic" by Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Video: Roberta Smith on Bronx Museum Show

Join a Discussion on Artists and Exhibitions

P.P.O.W./Bronx Museum of the Arts

A large detail from "Sharp Paints a Picture" by Martin Wong.

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Presiding above it all, and unfortunately only intermittently accessible to the public, is Renée Green's "Import/Export Funk Office," an archivelike display of books, newspapers, photographs and listening stations that document the role of black music and black power in recent American history. For those who found it difficult to assimilate this work in the midst of the 1993 Whitney Biennial — and I include myself — this is a chance to see it again.

Everything in "One Planet" makes thematic sense, although sometimes that's all the sense that is made. The simple Surrealist wordplay of Mel Chin's "Night Rap," a microphone-tipped police stick, and David Hammons's "In the Hood," which consists of a sweatshirt hood, minus its sweatshirt, tacked to the wall. Mr. Hammons's appropriation of the work of Christo, who might be called a wrap artist, is much stronger; one of the artist's hair, wire and chicken-bone assemblages, noted in Mr. Sirmans's catalog essay, would have been even more to the point.

The exhibition revolves around two issues: sampling — or appropriation — as a aesthetic strategy, and marginalized identity as an artistic subject. Neither is very new. Nearly all black music and much of its best-known derivative, rock 'n' roll, has reflected the identities and often the disenfranchisement of the people who created it. Musical sampling has been around for centuries; the visual arts' use of found or pre- existing images or materials has been a part of modern art since Cubist collage.

It is not by chance that appropriation became the dominant artistic technique in the 1980's, at the same time that hip-hop became a global phenomenon.

Some would argue, Ms. Yee and Mr. Sirmans included, that sampling and identity came together in a new, liberating way in rap music, with a social urgency and anger and an aesthetic éclat that have had a profound impact on popular culture and contributed importantly to the often vital blurring of high and low. Their show captures some of its metastasizing energy.

Sidestepping graffiti art as a subject worthy of its own exhibition, "One Planet" includes healthy amounts of graffiti-inspired art, and at its best reflects a world in which music, language, image and dance continually change places.

Visually the exhibition is bracketed by Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Toxic," a 1984 painting of a scarecrow-like figure surrounded by the chatter of words, and Chris Ofili's "Afrodizzia (second version)," with its hallucinatory patterns of colored dots punctuated by tiny cut-out faces of black hip-hop artists and celebrities. Other works whose visual magnetism approaches that of the best hip-hop are Erik Parker's erupting hip-hop genealogies and Brett Cook-Disney's rapid-fire line drawings of rappers and break dancers, shown here on the museum's windows.

Another standout is Martin Wong's radiant and witty "Sharp Paints a Picture" from 1997-98. Completed a year before the artist's death, it shows Sharp, a first-generation graffiti artist, standing, as if in his studio, before an elegant white-on-white graffiti canvas in a city park.

Two relatively unknown young artists, who are among the show's finds, join sampling and direct references to hip-hop with quieter or more oblique results. Dario Robleto, one of several emerging Texas artists specializing in visually appealing, conceptually based work, recycles vinyl records into cast and sculptured plastic music boxes that play hip-hop music. He adds record dust to the recipe to make a minute log cabin overseen by a puffy cloud of smoke whose largest dimension seems to be its poetic title: "Sometimes the Top 40 Makes Me Feel Like an Empty Maine Coastal Cottage in the Dead of Winter."

Bea Schlingelhoff, 31, a German artist who went to art school in Los Angeles, renders hip-hop lyrics in eccentrically fanciful script on ephemeral site-specific graffiti drawings that consist of hip-hop lyrics rendered on adhesive paper. Each piece is installed in response to one of the other artworks in the exhibition; one of her pieces, for example, quotes Queen Latifah at the entrance to Susan Smith-Pinelo's video "Cake," a dubious attempt to explore hip- hop's tendency to objectify women.

Some works provide vivid glimpses that could be explored more, like the effect of hip-hop on Japanese visual culture. This point is raised by Hisashi Tenmyouya's graffiti-peppered, ultra-refined paintings on paper of emblematic Japanese subjects like samurai and sumo wrestlers.

Other works adapt familiar strategies — often with tired Neo-Geo results, despite the addition of hip-hop relevance. In this category are Maxine King Cap's embroidered hunting jackets, Nadine Robinson's modernist plinths accessorized with speakers and turntables (remember Wallace & Donahue?) and Juan Capistran's "Breaks," 25 photographs showing the artist break dancing on a Carl Andre sculpture.

Ms. Yee and Mr. Sirmans try not to make hip-hop completely heroic, acknowledging its commercial reach and the frequent misogyny, materialism and machismo of its lyrics and lifestyle. In the show, these tendencies are gently lampooned in Luis Giuspert's lavishly customized go-cart and Kori Newkirk's remakes of hip-hop jewelry in foil and plastic. At the same time, the show's narrowness can make hip-hop seem all- powerful, obscuring the ways its visual repercussions are part of a much broader pervasive cultural atmosphere.

Even though hip-hop's visual repercussions were part of a much broader, possibly unavoidable, cultural environment.

Still, "One Planet" is very impressive. With minimal resources, and maximum diversity, it has roughed out much of the scope of its subject. It's easy to imagine filling it in with more, and better, works or giving it a broader artistic backdrop. But for now it is the Little Exhibition That Could, and a benefit to both the art audiences of today and the curators of the future.

``One Planet Under a Groove: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art'' will remain at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse, at 165th Street, Morrisania, (718)861-6000, through March 3. It will travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (July 14-Oct. 13) and to the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta (spring 2003).