NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten FaithBy Lyra Kilston, Quinn Latimer
Published: July 1, 2008
June 27 – Sept. 21 In the past few years, a kind of new-age spirituality — by turns visionary, utopian, and preciously credulous — has seemed to engage certain sectors of the contemporary artworld, with references to artists like the Swiss healer Emma Kunz proliferating among the artistic set. The Menil’s new spiritually minded exhibition departs from the trendy naïveté (and staunch apoliticism) of such work by turning a historical eye on the way in which ritual and faith — less mono-theistic than animistic and panthe-istic — have been practiced in the Americas by shamans, griots, and oral historians, and how those traditions have steadily infiltrated the practices of artists from the region. "Hoodoo" — which in 19th-century America referred to Haitian folk traditions from the Vodun religion, which itself derived from Nigeria’s Yoruba people — was updated in the 1970s by poet Ishmael Reed to "NeoHooDoo," to encapsulate the vernacular aesthetic of works that embraced early ritualistic practices. Thirty-five artists, including Marepe, Jimmie Durham, David Hammons, José Bedia, Rebecca Belmore, and James Lee Byars, as well as younger artists including Tania Bruguera, William Cordova, Dario Robleto, and Michael Joo, are featured, with an emphasis on both the sculptural and the blurring of the high-art/folk-art divide. An accompanying publication features contributions by poets, cultural critics, and art historians like Franklin Sirmans, Jen Budney, Arthur C. Danto, Greg Tate, Quincy Troupe, and Robert Farris Thompson, all of whom explore the mining of folkloric spirituality for artistic ends alternately political and cathartic. "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith" originally appeared in the July/August 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' July/August 2008 Table of Contents.
|
advertisements
|
Save to Del.icio.us
Digg this