SUNDAY, MAY 16, 2010
Art
‘BEARING WITNESS’
A startling survey of a couple’s complex worldview
by Blake Gopnik
A pregnant woman yells at her
son before he’s even born. Street kids stand in succession on a corner for an hour at a time, static as the rest of the world rushes by.
At their best, New York artists
Bradley McCallum and Jacque- line Tarry turn out works with a tremendous and stirring direct- ness. The couple — joined in art and life — are getting their first mid-career survey, titled “Bear- ing Witness,” at the Contempo- rary Museum in Baltimore and at six other downtown art ven- ues. The idea for the retrospec- tive came from a curatorial seminar at the Maryland In- stitute College of Art, whose 20 or so students took on most of the exhibition’s demands. The survey’s best moment comes in the Contemporary Mu- seum, in that 2004 video of the angry mom-to-be. Titled “Otis,” after the unborn child at its cen- ter, the three-minute video shows the model-gorgeous Tar- ry, a black woman in white yoga pants and white halter, running her hands over the bare flesh of her huge belly. And then, at in- tervals, she launches into a stan- dard set of maternal repri- mands: “Look at what you did!,” “What did I say?,” “You will lis- ten to me because I am your mother.” Those are the angry cli- ches all parents fall into, but some of Tarry’s other exclama- tions, just as standard, are signs of parental dysfunction: “You’re so stupid. Why are you so [exple- tive] stupid?,” “You want to cry? I’ll give you something to cry about.” To hear a mother say such things to a fetus is harrowing. You realize that our culture’s stereotypes of contempt are right there in the wings, waiting to come down on any child’s head. On the other hand, the tender moments of caressing in this video, coupled with the sheer elegance and beauty of its
More than anything, “Otis” is the elegantly simple distillation of a real-world situation. It’s got complexities, but they are left for viewers to work through, as in a cryptic scene by Rembrandt or Manet. That’s what makes “Otis” more successful than some oth- er works by McCallum and Tar- ry. Rather than complex, those other works sometimes read as ornate — two closely related concepts that tend to yield al- most opposite effects. A 2006 video called “Cut,” be- ing projected at the Contempo- rary Museum, still tends toward the simple-but-complex: The two artists crew-cut each other’s hair — but slowly, painfully, with a straight razor. The most recent piece in the
survey, also presented at the Contemporary, is an ornate 41
⁄2 -minute, three-screen video
called “Evenly Yoked,” shot in the perfectly preserved Victori- an interiors of the Engineers Club in Baltimore. There are scenes of McCallum (who is white) and Tarry facing each other across a double-sided makeup mirror: He puts on blackface, and she goes white as they practice trading races. Oth- er disconnected scenes show her dressed as a slave girl, or a 19th- century gentlewoman or 1990s bride. McCallum appears and interacts with her as a Confeder- ate soldier, as a 19th-century dandy or as a contemporary groom. Production values are impres-
PHOTOS COURTESY OF BRADLEY MCCALLUM AND JACQUELINE TARRY
‘OTIS’: The video shows Tarry interacting with her unborn child.
mother, make you think that maybe you’re watching a kind of exorcism of parental rage, or an inoculation against it. Get those angry thoughts and feelings out
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of the way before little Otis (or Kate or Jamal or Blake) is even born, and maybe they won’t de- scend on him when he actually does wrong.
sive, and some of the subject matter seems worth tending to. Overall, however, the piece has a fractured surrealism that makes it feel like the video version of your bedmate waking up to tell you a dream. Ornate: Curlicues to revel in and marvel at. Complex: Unex- pected depths to sink into. In this survey, viewers can decide for themselves which side each piece falls on. Baltimore’s Phoe- nix Shot Tower, built in 1828 to manufacture ammunition, hosts
RETROSPECTIVE: Among the works in which McCallum and Tarry photograph themselves are “Endurance: Billy,” above, and two “Untitled” photos, below.
have enlarged into oil paintings. The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of black history has an installa- tion themed around Billie Holi- day. Maryland Art Place is dis- playing eight pieces, including a three-screen video projection of samples of news footage — Mar- tin Luther King Jr.’s funeral, Klan rallies, floods — shown in the 1960s on a TV station in Georgia. The Walters Art Mu- seum, filled with its share of classic images of Mary and the infant Christ, now also hosts seven photos of unwed mothers and their babies, inkjet-printed onto silk panels six feet tall by almost five wide. Up the hill at the Maryland In- stitute College of Art itself, its components of the McCallum and Tarry project get under way only on May 25, after gradua- tion. They will include that street-kid project called “Civic Endurance,” which Washingto- nians got to admire back in 2003 when it was exhibited at Conner Contemporary Art. It docu- ments a 25-hour performance in which 26 disheveled young peo- ple took turns standing for about an hour each on the same street corner in Seattle. In the finished time-lapse video, which rushes by in under two hours, we see day give way to night while all the busy people in a modern city barely register as foggy ghosts. And in the midst of them, as a fixed fact, stands that succession of homeless youths. Back in 2003, my colleague
Michael O’Sullivan described the piece as “richly disturbing art.” McCallum and Tarry have only rarely equaled it since.
gopnikb@washpost.com
Bearing Witness
a 1996 piece credited to McCal- lum alone, for which he melted down guns and turned them into manhole covers. The nearby Carroll Mansion presents 104 mug shots of 1950s civil rights protesters, which the artists
Works by Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry run through July 31 at seven Baltimore venues, including the exhibition’s headquarters at the Contemporary Museum. Call 410-783-5720 or visit
www.contemporary.org.
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