Fred Wilson's artful rearrangements are intended to expose unstated institutional biases in museums' presentations.
History, it is said, is written by the victors: He who controls the present also controls the past. So it is reasonable to ask what stake art museums, which are repositories of the past, have in upholding and justifying the existing structures of power.
FOR THE RECORD - In a review of Fred Wilson's show at UMBC in Sunday's paper, I misidentified Nefertiti as the consort of King Solomon (ruled 967-926 B.C.). Solomon's consort was the Queen of Sheba. Nefertiti was the wife of the pharaoh Akhenaton, who ruled from 1379-1362 B.C.
These are the kinds of questions raised by the art of Fred Wilson, who is the subject of a fascinating and provocative mid-career retrospective at the Fine Arts Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Wilson is an African-American artist whose medium is neither paint nor sculpture, but rather the museum itself, which he artfully rearranges to reveal the presence of absences: the voices of the defeated and oppressed people who have been swept out of historical memory by the conquerors' power.
Since museums are among the most powerful institutions that shape our perception of the past, Wilson's strategy employs the museum's own curatorial practices of labeling and display against it.
He invents, for example, imaginary exhibits and presents them as if they were real, complete with soothing colors on the walls, rare objects in glass cases and labels that mimic the authoritative tone of historical scholarship. Or he juxtaposes objects that are familiar to museum-goers with others that previously were kept hidden in locked storage vaults. All his work has a confrontational quality; his "palette" of curatorial imitations runs from parody to ridicule to righteous indignation.
The point of Wilson's radical deconstructions is to reveal the unstated institutional biases and prejudices that animate the museum's supposedly objective narrative of the past.
Wilson shows that this narrative is anything but objective, and that its prejudices and biases overwhelmingly favor the powerful: the rich over the poor; men over women; white, western European civilization over the cultures of the world's non-white peoples.
Pairings that jolt
Wilson's art is a form of guerrilla theater aimed at rewriting the museum's biased version of history by reconstituting the human presences that have had to be suppressed in order to make the prevailing political order seem grand and glorious and civilized.
So, for example, his installation "Cabinet Making," created for the 1992 show Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society in collaboration with the Contemporary Museum, juxtaposes a quartet of elegant antique chairs from the society's collection with the rough-hewn, full-size whipping post that was used by Baltimore police until the 1950s.
Wilson's piece implicitly asks why we value the chairs but not the brutal instrument of punishment, why "high" art furniture is worthy of display but not an implement of the repressive social order in which such displays take place.
Similarly, in "Metalwork, 1723-1880" Wilson brought together highly polished urns, goblets and decanters crafted by Maryland silversmiths and displayed them next to a pair of rusty slave shackles. Another exhibit displayed an antique baby carriage whose downy pillow supported a Ku Klux Klan hood from Baltimore County.
Such unexpected combinations are shocking precisely because they force the viewer to come to terms with the unpleasant aspects of the past that museums usually allow to pass unremarked upon (by doing so, Wilson suggests, they concede their complicity in the crimes committed in the name of "civilization").
This is heady stuff, and the UMBC show brings together excerpts from a half-dozen or so installations Wilson has created for museums over the past decade that challenge the reassuring (but seldom completely benign) assumptions on which exhibitions are based.
Shades of Nefertiti
One piece, for example, presents a series of five plaster casts of a famous ancient Egyptian statue of Nefertiti, the legendary queen who is said to have had a passionate love affair with King Solomon.
In Wilson's installation, the five statues are colored in various shades of gray from white to black, thus raising the formidable question of race in regard to the ancient Egyptians and the long-standing museological convention of representing them as white Europeans rather than as Africans.
Nefertiti's case is particularly rich in associations because she was by legend a favorite love of Israel's King Solomon and the mother of a son to whom the black Jews of Ethiopia still trace their ancestry.
Nefertiti is also interesting because her statue reveals her to have been extraordinarily beautiful, yet the canons of beauty in Western art traditionally have excluded black women. Museums generally don't discuss race in their presentations of Egyptian culture, but that omission also abets an unstated, racist assumption that people of color could not have created a great civilization.
