COLLECTION OF JORDAN D. SCHNITZER
Hank Willis Thomas’ “At the Twilight’s Last Gleaming?” is part of the “LOVERULES” exhibition at The Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick.
Are print advertisements art? Those who create them sometimes think so, and there have been times in recent history when it seems like the public agrees.
The present isn’t one of those times, though. Users of the Internet have demonstrated that no matter how nicely crafted a commercial advert might be, most people will choose to skip or block it.
Nevertheless, there remain many artists who are fluent in the language of advertising. Hank Willis Thomas is one of them. Although his work bears the influence of mid-20th century photography, African sculpture, battlefield memorials, Warholian Pop Art and utilitarian design, his main source of inspiration is the commercial ad. The fonts he chooses, the lighting he adopts, the balance and clarity of communication, the seamless and immediate transfer of information to the viewer through icons … all of it is strongly reminiscent of Madison Avenue.
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Hank Willis Thomas’ “Scarred Chest.”
Thus your susceptibility to the pleasures of “Hank Willis Thomas: LOVERULES — From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation” — a bold, broad retrospective at The Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick —will depend, a lot, on how tired of commercials you are.
How might you feel, for instance, about an Absolut ad in which the familiar shape of the vodka bottle is made from the spilled blood of an African American man downed on the concrete? If that sounds provocative or ironic — a smart statement about the link between alcohol and violence in minority communities — you will probably enjoy this exhibition. If it sounds obvious or exploitative, you might think twice. And if you’ve had enough of logos and wordmarks for a lifetime, this 90-piece show is not for you.
It is not hard to understand why the aesthetics of advertising appeal to Thomas. Effective commercials don’t mess around. They are designed to slap you hard.
Those at a protest mean to do the same sort of thing to you. The sight of Nike logos raised like welts on the bare skin of African American bodies links corporatism with slavery and discrimination and professional sports with gladiatorial fights to the death. In “Scarred Chest,” a tripwire of a photograph, nine swooshes on a bare torso catch the light. They do exactly what they are meant to do: evoke the sting of the lash and the proprietary aims of the branding manager.
Thomas has shot the picture exactly as a commercial director would. The resolution is sharp, the contrast is extreme, illumination is intense, and the sexual power of the subject’s physique is undisguised. The artist dares us to find this athletic body desirable, even as it is covered with marks of trauma.
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Hank Willis Thomas’ “I Am Your Man.”
Other companies and organizations get the Thomas treatment too. His “Afro-American Express” series consists of three blown-up credit cards mimicking the liveries of Chase Bank, AmEx and Discover. Instead of the anodyne symbols of capitalism we have come to expect on these plastic artifacts we carry, we get images from the Middle Passage, conquistadors on galleons, and the back of a beaten African man. (The Chase card has been issued to the infamous slave owner William Lynch; he has been, Thomas slyly tells us in corporate font, a member since 1712.) Here, the artist turns the bland confidence of corporate design back on its makers, underscoring the relationship between international finance and slavery and asking how deeply we have accepted the flat and emotionless tone of an exploitative economic system.
In another piece, a basketball player in silhouette goes for a basket while another, right on his tail, chases him with a naked gun. We are reminded, fiercely, of the NBA logo, and told, in red letters across the bottom of the print, of the perils that Black men face. The world is a desperate game, and some of our opponent’s shots have a high percentage of going in.
All of this satire bites hard. It is reasonable to ask, though, who is eating whom. Thomas’ seizure of the master’s tools can be as exhilarating as a jailbreak. Yet each of those logos and wordmarks was also made by a smart designer. The ad executives who created the campaigns that Thomas is raiding chose symbols that speak, sometimes crudely, to the unconscious. From there, they have been drilled into our eyes, page by page and spot by spot.
The afterimages don’t let go easily. A Nike swoosh repurposed is still a Nike swoosh. Having pinched it, fearlessly, from the lair of its maker, Thomas is cursed to have to use it.
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Hank Willis Thomas’ “Love Over Rules.”
Thus much of the art in “LOVERULES,” curated by Shamim M. Momin of The Bronx Museum, has both the urgency of sales and the shallowness of the pitch. They make their points hard, and successfully, and with the authority of a slam dunk, but once they do, they don’t have much more to give us. The most dispensable of these pieces seem to have been made for the average museumgoer, who, we are told by the gallerists who measure such things, rarely spends more than 15 seconds in front of an artwork.
The lenticular prints in the show are simple wordmarks in black and white capitals that change as a visitor walks by. Stand on one side of a piece and it will say “POWERFUL”; move a few steps, and it says “POWERLESS.” As a statement about the mutability of fortune and the importance of perspective, it works. It is also glib in the way that commercials are and, in the way that commercials always do, it promises that change can be friction-free.
Even some of the strong pieces in the show are, upon reflection, too pat.
“At the Twilight’s Last Gleaming?” is superficially gorgeous: a framed arrangement of American flags and sub-flags, each folded into a square, and then folded again on a diagonal as a handkerchief might be. The Pride standard makes a showing, as does a MAGA campaign banner, the familiar Confederate battle flag, “Don’t Tread on Me,” both “Black Lives Matter” and its “Back the Blue” counterpart. All of these have been crisply creased and fitted together with a jewel appraiser’s eye for zigzag facets and bright shade. It is a mosaic in textile, an adventure in accidental diagonals, and a very impressive work of fiber art.
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Hank Willis Thomas’ “Kama Mama, Kama Binti (Like Mother, Like Daughter).”
Yet as winsome as it is, and as much as it promises, it reflects no particular American reality. Yes, the nation is fragmented, but hardly as evenly or as fairly as “Gleaming” suggests it is. The flags in the piece do not fly for equivalent factions participating in a national discussion.
Despite the artist’s radical intentions, “Gleaming” leaves the viewer with an impression of harmoniousness: a multicultural, multi-vocal fantasy of the United States as a colorful jumble that might yet be unfolded and sorted out. That is America as Madison Avenue might like it to be, broken into discrete and identifiable segments, side by side and nicely balanced, with all pointy ends easy to trace and meeting at mappable intersections. It is not the nation we live in.
More despairing, and more insightful, is “20,923,” another dramatic fabric piece. A long blue drape festooned with thousands of white stars — a swath of a great unraveled American flag — cascades down from the wall and bunches and folds up on the floor. It feels like a static waterfall, and an unanswered splash that begs for remediation but is beautiful in its own right. Thomas tells us that each of the stars represents a victim of gun violence.
The specifics are helpful but not entirely necessary: “20,923” is so mournful in its effect that it can’t help but seem like a memorial for something grave. Tellingly, this terrific sculpture is one of the pieces in “LOVERULES” with no association with any particular brand campaign or advertising tradition (unless you count Old Glory as a kind of national logo).
Thomas is a Brooklyn artist, but he was born in Plainfield. With the Zimmerli’s blessing, he has picked 16 contributors for a Garden State Arts Annual show that rides sidesaddle to his own exhibition and spills out to other galleries on the museum’s first floor. To his credit, Thomas keeps his group show varied, youthful and energetic, favoring artists who share his interest in popular entertainment, social justice, mass-market transmissions from televisions and magazines, and ridiculously bright colors.
Ana Benaroya’s “A Thousand Kisses Deep.”
Ana Benaroya, a New York artist who teaches in Jersey City, lights up the downstairs galleries with a massive painting of two blue-skinned women with magma-orange hair, lips and nipples. This hallucination feels like the result of watching Saturday morning cartoons on a widescreen monitor after several bowls of Lucky Charms.
Newark-based Chelsea Odufu’s “Spirit of Gold” — a photographic image of a shirtless, muscular dark-skinned man with a rifle and a gold-tasseled face covering — looks similarly super-heroic.
The connection between Odufu’s image and the confrontational body shots in “LOVERULES” is hard to miss. Thomas is drawn to artists who present their work forcefully, and who are interested in subverting stereotypes and exploring the relationship between heritage and identity. Kimisha Turner of Turnersville, for instance, slides in a slice of watermelon made of resin, ancestral ashes, and hair; another sculpture of hers, titled “Pieces of Me,” includes a skull. The themes of fragmentation and reassembly reoccur often: Caren King Choi’s emotional family portraits made of thousands of eggshell-fragment paper shards, Aaron Boucher’s checkerboard weaves of paper strips, Lavett Ballard’s Afrofuturistic collages of photos and foil.
Inevitably, though, he returns to work that resembles advertising. “Vehicle: The Chosen Ones,” an immersive digital video and painting series by East Orange’s Storm Cuff, is an amalgam of glamorous fashion shoot, choreographed music video, and commercial for the sort of beat-up auto body shop common to the fringes of Garden State cities. It is witty, sexy, loose, and a little goofy, and seems like a pretty good bet to sell you something.
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Hank Willis Thomas’ “But She Has Other Important Uses as Well.”
But as any TV viewer or Internet user can tell you, a pinch of promotion is always preferable to a block of commercials. “Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915-2015,” a show within the “LOVERULES” show, is a landslide of magazine images, blown up, framed and arrayed salon-style across the gallery’s wide south wall. Thomas has eliminated the brand names, the product and the publishing context, and left us with nothing but a shot (one per year) of a woman as a prop, disappearing inside a watermelon, crossing paths with an alligator, prone and nearly bare-breasted beneath the splayed legs of a man, kneeling inside a martini glass, and submitting to other humiliations.
As a work of critical social science, it is comprehensive, impressive, and as upsetting as it needs to be to get its point across. It is also an indictment of advertising — and a message to artists not to burn their fingers on that flame, no matter how alluring it might be.
The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick will present “Hank Willis Thomas: LOVERULES — From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation” and “Hank Willis Thomas Selects: NJ Arts Annual” through Dec. 20. Visit zimmerli.rutgers.edu/art/exhibitions.
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