Archive Project 11: Edgar Arceneaux

Franklin Sirmans' Essay | Vincent Johnson Interview Images from the Exhibition | Edgar Arceneaux Home Page Archive - Fall 2001 Home

Franklin Sirmans' Essay

A one and a two… on the ones and twos. Simple concepts leading to complex ideas, surely a primary basis for humans understanding humans. One, me or you, the biblical individual associated with Creation, and the act of creation. Solitude interrupted by the 2, representing duality or opposition, the source of creation with manifestations in life and death, truth and falsehood, matter and mind, the complementary, the divisive, antagonistic dialogue.

The seemingly binary opposition of linguistic referents points to the source of Edgar Arceneaux’s interest in the forms in which concepts are materialized. Ever conscious of the distance that so often separates concepts, philosophical and streetwise, Arceneaux’s work directs us to modes of personal representation and visual presentation in a way that is inevitable, at times questionable, and always innovative. Deriving from the art historical apparatus of conceptualism with its long tradition of combining text with image, and rap’s unperturbed insistence on elevating the word, the word, the word, Arceneaux’s art ably navigates a space where high meets low and pop culture is forcibly slowed for intellectual consumption. His hook, in part, is that while he is making work that formally carries on the tradition of minimal and conceptual art, his execution of figurative drawings made of graphite on vellum carries the work into countless other realms. In effect, he is carrying on and highlighting the conceptualist process of creation as more than a perfunctory affair, yet also complementing, mixing, and reworking. Contrary to the current need for speed, a Kunderaesque slowness is required here.

Though by no means a requirement, if you remember who said bumskiddlybumskiddlybum, then you probably will take an initial liking to Spock, Tupac, Tuvac, an early Arceneaux drawing. That is also to say that Arceneaux’s work evades attempts to designate conventional, closed meanings by directing the viewer to make sense out of his images and language. Endgame conclusions are dead in the water, floating like his seemingly random images. Although, through the careful view, enough is internally understood to grasp the picture. You’re in dialogue.

Arceneaux’s recombinant structures, for instance Temporary Assemblage, Movement B—new drawings and objects from his studio, including tubes of unused paper, rulers, flat boards, and long boxes filled with all the drawings he has made and still possesses—act as signifiers for the intellectually pregnant space in between the work. We are confronted with a plethora of subjective associations that follow the confrontation with Arceneaux’s work, and in that space filled with intertwining narratives, perhaps the pleasure of looking begins. His work questions the way in which we receive knowledge while drawing attention to the way concepts are disseminated and congealed into accepted patterns. Is a tube a tube or a work of art? Arceneaux’s work thrives on this kind of blurring of boundaries. From this point of view, he easily inserts the figures of Pharoahe Monch (Internal Affairs, Pharoahe Monch) and Thelonious Monk (Brilliant Corners, Thelonious Monk), while invoking Dante Alighieri with selected texts displayed as drawings (Translation/Transcription, Movements A and B).

The recent installation titled The Trivium consists of Arceneaux’s trademark graphite-on-vellum drawings and objects from the artist’s studio and daily environment informing the process of creation that is so central to this exhibition. While language is the subject of the work, it is also the means to diverse discourses ranging from universal humanism to pop art, investigating media to a focus on subjective meaning within the context of existence. Though Arceneaux’s work often appears reductive, operating as it does in a minimal palette of hues from black to white, it is the evidence of a search for rigorous thought in a world where language seems increasingly a cacophonous Tower of Babel descending readily into the too often empty rhetoric of advertising slogans. One is reminded of a host of art historical precedents, but most prescient for me are the investigations of language in the theoretical work of Wittgenstein, the signifyin’ popular folk tales of Uncle Remus, the visual art of Joseph Kosuth, the principles of randomness or chance in John Cage’s musical compositions, and the wordplay of Biggie Smalls, R.I.P. All of these precursors, like Arceneaux, who often traffics in unloaded signifiers, recognized the fact that words have meaning because they function as signs.

While The Trivium consists of three essential parts—grammar, rhetoric and logic—this is no scatter art, and it ain’t always logical, favoring the beauty of the disparate mix, the mix that makes you go huh…why…how the…? Each part of the installation integrally places these factors into single objects, though the view is subjective. Brilliant Corners, Thelonious Monk is a drawing of Monk’s famous album cover done on a photocopy of the original cover. Parts of the mechanically generated image can be read through the surface of the drawing, which is on frosted vellum, forcing views through the work to the original and back again. The original is never dead; it is enhanced by the remix, or the appropriation, depending upon your reading of the signs.

Arceneaux has been playing word games in his artwork for the last five years, largely through representational drawings and nomenclature. The Trivium opens the door to another realm of experience for the young artist to investigate the possibilities of his concerns. The implications of his work are the creation of a reciprocal process of exchange in the face of dynamic images and language in a sign-driven silence. “Be Silent. Who Keeps silent inside/Touches the roots of speech,” as said Rilke.

Franklin Sirmans is a New York-based writer, critic, and curator. A former U.S. editor of Flash Art International Magazine, Milan and adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts, he writes regularly for Time Out New York and One World. The editor of Basquiat (Tony Shafrazi Gallery/D.A.P., 1999) and Transforming the Crown: African, Asian, and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996 (Caribbean Cultural Center, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Studio Museum in Harlem; University of Chicago Press, 1997), Sirmans has written for several publications including The New York Times, Art in America, Art News, Art Nexus, Tema Celeste, and NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art.

He is currently at work on the exhibition “One Planet Under A Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art,” with co-curator Lydia Yee at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.