Noel W Anderson, Performativity, and Black Exhaustion Salzburg
From the Desk of NWA Studio Manager, Will Montgomery - October 1st, 2023
Noel W Anderson’s Black Exhaustion opened the last week of September at the Salzburger Kunstverein in Salzburg, Austria. This exhibition is the younger cousin of Anderson’s recent homonymous New York solo show at the Shirley Fiterman Center. Black Exhaustion Salzburg digs deep into concepts of gender, performativity, and perception. According to Anderson, this show is about, “...the requirement of people in general to work harder than they need in order to make it.” In this show, Anderson has altered mass-circulated images of Black icons of visual media, evoking the consequence of excellence: exhaustion.
Most works in this show are massive in scale and hung close to the floor, depicting feats of athletic heroism, enveloping their viewers in the scene and implicating them in its subtextual violence. But the lodestone of this presentation is a small diptych, innocuously centered between the life size action scenes. Two Left Blues consists of an identical cartoon image of an athlete’s left foot plucked from a Harlem Globetrotters coloring book. The foot is amputated from the body by the cropping, frozen in motion above the court. Zooming in is innocuous enough, but this instance of hyper-focus on the feet of a basketball player emphasizes the fetishization of bodies which perform how they are “supposed to”. The tiny snippet is iterated twice to imply both feet of an unseen athlete in motion, entering the frame. Anderson queers the modernist gesture of replication by using it to build additional context in this work instead of collapsing it. This ethos is evident in the inversion of the coloring book page from white to black, erasing the field in which there was once space (the blank page) for a viewer to insert their own meanings or narratives, and replacing it with one which makes coloring outside the lines impossible. The mechanical processes of transformation Anderson enacts on the image are themselves performances of modernist expectations of hyper-masculinity.
The resulting composition is reminiscent of a meme from the mid 20-teens, an image of two doc marten boots left a yard apart. The shoes carry a charge of performativity themselves, with their reputation as play workwear for non-working class hipsters. The top text reads, “I leave my shoes far apart so if a burglar comes in they think I’m big af”. The clothing predetermines and enacts our behaviors, stature, power, and gender before the body can even present itself. This sense of survival-based gender adherence permeates all forms of media, and changes our behavior even when we are alone. The small, repeated foot that makes up Two Left Blues is similarly spaced to imply a comically wide stance and draws attention to the smallest gestures and acts of gender performance that seep into every aspect of our lives, and not just those of us who are professional athletes or celebrities. In this case, the act of replication is itself a performance of taking up space as a masculine ideal, alongside the real world example of taking up space being depicted; manspreading. These impossible, almost laughable larger-than-life standards erase and exhaust the humanity of both the viewer and the subject.
The text which populated the terry cloth gym towel works in previous NWA shows were absent in this installment. Where words ain’t never gonna go leaves blank the page on which Anderson has before sought to “write his body”, a gesture inspired by the work of feminist philosopher Judith Butler. This blank work is a fulfillment/completion of Adrian Piper’s Everything # 21, in which she wrote and partially erased the phrase “Everything will be taken away” over and over again on chalkboards. In Anderson’s version, everything is already gone.
“I leave my shoes far apart so if a burglar comes in they think I’m big af”. iFunny.com, FunCorp
Noel W Anderson, Two Left Blues, dyed and distress stretched cotton tapestry, 2023
Noel W Anderson, Coming Out, and Make Me Come Out Myself II
From the Desk of NWA Studio Manager, Will Montgomery - June 2nd, 2023
Make Me Come Out Myself II opened mid-January at Zidoun-Bossuyt in Dubai, a solo exhibition marking the second installment of the Make Me Come Out Myself trilogy. This exhibition saw the promise of its title brought nearly to fulfillment; many of the jacquard works in this show, of legendary Black athletes, are coming out of themselves. Picked and worn away to the extreme, some works are completely distressed, entire faces obscured by threads yanked out of alignment with their neighbors. The title of the show refers to an expression spoken by Anderson’s father in his childhood: “Don’t make me come out myself”. Anderson’s method transforms this warning into a physical process of deconstructing the weave of the cotton tapestries with metal awls. As the images themselves are woven into the surface of the textile, when we pull their fibers apart in the studio we are symbolically enacting on them the violence of consuming Black bodies while simultaneously liberating them from the confines of frozen, two-dimensional images.
Mainstream media’s portrayal of Black masculinity has always been of great interest to Anderson. In the works in this show, Black athletes are caught in a freeze frame, and our attention as viewers is diverted from the hyper-visible subjects' physical display to the supernatural way they affect the spaces around them. Sprung from a childhood fascination with the magic of television and the athletic feats it broadcast, Make Me Come Out Myself II inverts expectations of magic and mysticism. A reflection takes center stage in one work, a shadow in another. This presentation eschews abstraction, favoring the everyday paintings found when one looks a little closer. Less obvious moments of quiet beauty create instances in which it is safe for these men to “come out” themselves, setting a higher bar for visibility and representation.
As a queer person, as much of the NWA team is, I can’t help but notice the connection to the concept of coming out of the closet. To come out in any way implies a resting state of hiding. This concept resonates in a broader sense here, emphasizing the restraint and survival strategies marginalized people must often employ. By shortening the title of the show from the original expression to just, Make Me Come Out Myself [II], Anderson signifies a latent but deep desire to “come out”, and infers that the restraints (the “Don’t”) will be overcome. Possibly, the connection hopes to open space for more nuance and grace when dissecting the sports stars depicted in this show, and their expected performances of masculinity. The expectation to perform gender the “right” way is a heavy burden, for straight and queer people alike, as evident in the struggle occurring on the surfaces of the works in this show. However, in such a visible arena with stakes so high, what is the cost of adhering to the roles prescribed to us? Basketball icons such as Dennis Rodman and Magic Johnson demonstrate the power and benefit to breaking stigmas.
While the backdrop for this exhibition is the basketball court, Anderson is waiting for the culture to meet him at more complex modes of understanding Black masculinity as well. Descending Ballz, a series of athletic towels stretched on panel and emblazoned with laser-cut basketball letters, makes a joke of its own simplicity. The panels read various iterations of “balls'' as they grow nearer and nearer to the floor, literally descending. The Ballz taunts the viewer with their reflection of our facile expectations. “It’s too easy”, I imagine Noel would say.
Dennis Rodman Marries Self, Evan Agostini/Liaison/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Noel W Anderson, Orbiting Abstraction, and Erasure’s Edge
From the Desk of NWA Studio Manager, Will Montgomery - September 21st, 2022
Noel W Anderson made his return to Louisville in late November with his solo exhibition, Erasure’s Edge, at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. The opening on November 18th marked the start of a new chapter of work in his ongoing tango with abstraction. This presentation was gritty, physical, sarcastic, and deadpan in its self-awareness and use of media as readymade. Anderson presents new and old dilemmas around race, erasure, and representation, as well as asserting himself in the legacy of modernism. With works spanning over a decade, an orbit comes into focus, growing closer and then further away from total abstraction.
This show is a glimpse of process, with Jacquard tapestries in various stages of distress. They arrive at the studio pristine, but once there we dye them, sand them, pick them, stand on them. Anderson’s dog Thelonius likes to lay on them. All these techniques will be seen again, but likely in increasing increments of combination and chaos. One must understand the parts before one sees the whole. Anderson always begins with an image, from there the choice is just how much to leave for the viewers to see. Anderson has likened this to the choice that faces Black people when representing themselves, whether to code switch and cater to a white point of view or be wholly themselves. He cycles back to representation every few years to grasp new material before trying to lose it again to chaos. The oldest works in the show, dated 2009, are jacquard tapestries coated in polyurethane and embedded with various detritus and are the most abstract by far. The image has been completely lost, as with the double-sided erased Ebony magazine pages, circa 2009. In the time elapsed since then, Anderson has returned to representation, consuming new media found in the wee hours of the morning, deep on the back pages of the internet. Print media such as family photo albums, vintage porn, and mugshots of Black men find their niche market of one at 4 AM in Harlem.
Anderson is in no rush to return completely to abstraction. He is sure of his course, and his intentional, calculated moves constitute a crawl back around the bend, getting his kicks in smaller, subtler ways. The stretched jacquard and cotton gym towel pieces deliver microdoses of the chaos native to the older works. A mugshot bleached strategically is iterated over and over again, staring unsympathetically at the banality and collapsed context of modernism. In one work, the signature rectangular patterns of Frank Stella are imposed upon the mugshot, calling to indigenous designs and the crucial art-historical meanings that are lost in a Warholian art world.
A crucial idea in Anderson’s work is the image as a found object. Jacquard is unique in that the image is woven into it, not printed onto it. There is no fabric without the image, they are inextricable from one another. This unity between subject and substrate ensures that any processes enacted on the surface are also enacted on whoever is depicted, literalizing the expense of the individual’s representation. The most laborious task in the studio is the picking of the cotton threads. This process conceptually replicates Black labor and literally pulls apart the very fibers that make up these images of Black men, in agony, in ecstasy. They are bleached, dyed, combed, and brushed. This distresses and distorts the very essence of the image, an arm of Anderson’s multifaceted approach to losing access to it. The extracted threads also mimic the static of a TV set. The Jacquard loom, with its binary punch-card system, is considered to be the grandfather to the modern computer. Thus, when we see the surface of the Jacquard as a screen, this picking action is a way of creating a glitch, a pixel being pulled out into the third dimension.
In two large-scale tapestry works, Anderson abandons the confines of the stretcher altogether in an homage to Sam Gillian, suspending the images from walls and ceilings and letting the fabric behave as itself. The images of James Brown as a preacher, as well as a Dogon sculpture, are levitated in the posture of Gillian’s abstractions. Free from the wall entirely, in the case of the large James Brown piece, these images are liberating themselves from the confines of the rectangular TV screen and taking up physical space in “real” life.
In the text-based works in the show, language itself is abstracted, letterforms and phrases being bent and twisted in on themselves. Anderson has laser-cut basketball leather into letters, which are fixed on gym towels. Anderson sees this leather as a sort of synecdoche for Black flesh. He’s come to the conclusion that the most surefire way to make his voice heard is to cut away a facsimile of his own skin, and literally spell it out. These works are startling and commanding in their self-immolating straightforwardness. They also bring to the fore the role of text in other works, which may be seen as incidental otherwise.
A diptych of woven Harlem globetrotters coloring book pages is a centerpiece of the show, with a figure saying “NOW YOU SEE IT” and “NOW YOU YOU DON’T”. A globetrotter appears in the first image, then disappears in a puff of smoke in the second, a sarcastic confrontation of the viewer’s expectations of the Black body, and the supposed magic it possesses. The Globetrotters' representation as a coloring book page speaks to the commercial success available to Black people if only they render themselves an “It” (as the figure in these works does) for society to ogle, then wish away as we please. A singular spectator chair sits upholstered in basketball leather, a place for a rowdy audience member to be seated on this stand-in for Black flesh, and witness the spectacle they paid for. Instead, a deformed Lebron Halloween mask lays discarded on the seat, solemnly making fun of America’s cultural desire for Blackness, but only in the ways which commodify it for a white audience.
This show spans a vast array of mediums, but each component joins the song in perfect rhythm. The disparate components play nicely, like Jazz, Anderson would say. This exhibition is a fascinating and transparent look at Anderson’s process and mindset, and it introduces techniques that push boundaries. The stage is set for a new spiral off into abstraction, one that would likely be much harder to grapple with without this primer on Anderson’s visual language.