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Review: ‘Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic’ at the Brooklyn Museum 10 March 2015 Chloe Wyma
Tame of Thrones: Kehinde Wiley Plays it Safe at the Brooklyn Museum
A detail of Kehinde Wiley's "Femme piquée par un serpent," 2008.
(Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York/© Kehinde Wiley)
Since the mid-aughts, Kehinde Wiley has achieved Napoleonic fame for his monumental
paintings depicting young men of color in contemporary streetwear in poses derived from
European courtly portraiture. By unseating the saints and noblemen of Rubens,
Fragonard, and Velazquez and replacing them with handsome, anonymous young men
cast from the streets of Brooklyn, Dakkar, and Beijing, Wiley — curator Eugenie Tsai writes
in her introductory catalog essay for the artist’s mid-career survey at the Brooklyn
Museum — “subverts canonical art history” by making visible its erasure of black bodies.
Nevertheless, the exhibition, titled “A New Republic,” feels more safe than subversive. The
agglomeration of Wiley’s neo-baroque portraits of young black dandies posing against
botanical filigrees doesn’t disturb our way of seeing the world so much as feed our
contemporary taste for promiscuous juxtaposition and nobrow pastiche.
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Review: ‘Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic’ at the Brooklyn Museum 10 March 2015 Chloe Wyma
Despite some nice surprises — six full-length portraits in stained glass, a series of bronze
busts, a lovely group of intimately scaled altarpieces inspired by the 15th-century
Netherlandish painter Hans Memling — “A New Republic” is dominated by Wiley’s tested
and approved format of beefy, large-scale portraiture citing the grand history of European
oil painting. “Equestrian Portrait of the Count Duke Olivares,” 2005, for instance, is
adapted from Velasquez’s 1634 portrait of Gaspar de Guzmán, a prominent Spanish
courtier and politician during the reign of Philip IV. A black man in his 20s, wearing a red
hoodie and wielding a golden lance, assumes the count’s position atop a rearing white
stallion. The sliver of Arcadian landscape in the immediate foreground gives way to one of
Wiley’s conventional faux-brocade backdrops, this one ornamented with golden tendrils
against a royal blue ground. Another crowd-pleaser is the delectably kitschy, almost
Koonsian portrait of Michael Jackson, commissioned by the late King of Pop in 2008.
Pictured in full armor, Jackson rides a beribboned show pony, attended by an entourage
of naked cherubim hovering overhead.
At their best, Wiley’s portraits, such as the billboard-sized “Femme Pique par un Serpent,”
transcend shellacked hauteur and exude homoerotic male beauty. In that particular work,
inspired by Auguste Clesinger’s 1847 sculpture of a writhing female nude in death throes
from a snakebite, Wiley simultaneously queers and racializes the sublimated perversity of
19th-century academic statuary, replacing the pallid marble female nude with a reclining
black man in low-slug jeans and a green hoodie. Here, the black male body, still an object
of anxiety and presumed criminality in American culture, lies on a divan, gazing at the
viewer like a coy odalisque. Compared to this steamy display of inverted exoticism and
epicene genderfuckery, Wiley’s recent, stately paintings of black women, modeling
couture gowns designed by Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci, feel perfunctory and over-branded,
less a series of portraits of individuals than a product of luxury cross-promotion.
“A New Republic” is an emphatically visual, generous show that will likely appeal to a
broad range of museumgoers beyond your typical (mostly white) Chelsea-crawling art
crowd; and this is indisputably a good thing. Nevertheless, for work that deals with race
and the politics of representation, Wiley’s feels rather anodyne. For the most part, his
celebratory, affirmative paintings of people of color don’t challenge or implicate the white
viewer, nor do they cast a critical eye on contemporary race politics. The object of Wiley’s
BlouinArtInfo
Review: ‘Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic’ at the Brooklyn Museum 10 March 2015 Chloe Wyma
critique — the lilywhite demographics of early modern European portraiture — is too
distant, too historical, to have much of a purchase on current conversations about race in
America.
Wiley’s signature mashup of European heraldry and hip-hop swagger, art historian
Connie H. Choi writes in her catalog essay, employs “a multiplicity of cultural signifiers to
challenge the status quo.” On the contrary, what’s striking about Wiley’s work isn’t how it
places itself in opposition to some nebulous “status quo,” but how it participates in
mainstream popular culture, mapping neatly onto a politically ambivalent rhetoric of
black royalism that functions as an aspirational symbol for empowerment but belies the
everyday experiences of the vast majority of African Americans living in a society still
structured by racial injustice. From Beyoncé’s coronation as “Queen Bey” to Kanye West
and Jay Z’s noblesse-obsessed collaborative album “Watch the Throne,” metaphors of
nobility in mainstream hip-hop function as an expedient shorthand for the luxuriant
exceptionalism and conspicuous wealth once reserved for European aristocracy (Lorde’s
woozy 2013 hit “Royals” has been widely read as a critique of consumerist fantasy in Top-
40 hip-hop, albeit from the patronizing perspective of a white teenager from New
Zealand). To be clear, it’s the exhibition literature, not the artist, that’s attempting to frame
Wiley’s painting as an oppositional cultural practice. Wiley’s work isn’t activist art, nor
does it pretend to be: “As an artist and a student of history,” he told New York magazine,
“you have to be at once critical and complicit… It’s about pointing to empire and control
and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it’s not necessarily
taking a position. Oftentimes it’s actually embodying it.”
Wiley’s gesture of inserting black subjects into the canon of Western painting is less a
radical appropriation of European pictorial conventions than a progressive but ultimately
soft postmodern mash-up of art historical quotations. Moreover, beyond the works’
schticky conceptual formula, there’s something subtlety condescending — or at least
viscerally irritating — about the fact that, in so much of his work (with the notable
exception of his globe-trotting “World Stage” series), the heroism of Wiley’s subjects
remains contingent upon analogies to a princely European past. In fact, perhaps the best
work in “A New Republic” dispenses with art historical trappings altogether: 2006’s
“Mugshot Study,” a modest, relatively unassuming portrait of an anonymous young black
BlouinArtInfo
Review: ‘Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic’ at the Brooklyn Museum 10 March 2015 Chloe Wyma
man pictured in a wanted poster the artist came across in Harlem. Eschewing the pompier
bombast of much of the work on view, the painting cogently addresses the criminal justice
system’s vilification and trivialization of black lives, “repatriating” his image, as the
cultural critic Touré put it in the show’s catalog, from “the plantation of criminal
expectations.” This pared-down work might not have the commercial appeal of Wiley’s
blockbuster paintings, but it may be a generative place for an established artist to begin
anew.