A Sprawling History: Tavares Strachan at the Blanton

James Russell·
AustinVisual Art
·

Tavares Strachan wants to tell the story of the whole world. He wants an encyclopedia featuring Matthew Henson, the first Black man to visit the North Pole, as well as Robert Peary, a white man who accompanied him on the journey. He wants Black photographer Gordon Parks discussed as much as white photographer Ansel Adams. He wants Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey to appear alongside Napoleon Bonaparte.

So the artist conceived the 4,000-page Encyclopedia of Invincibility, an ongoing art project included in Tavares Strachan: Between Me and You, which runs through June 1 at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin.

Conceptual art is tricky for an audience to navigate, for a curator to stage and for an artist to justify. It can easily flop if the latter two can’t wrap their heads around a museum show. Is the artist grifting the viewer by applying layers of meaning with little attention to form, material and references? Will docents understand?

Strachan’s choice of material brings his broad themes together, and Hannah Klemm, Blanton’s curator of modern and contemporary art, brings his sprawling, complex work together.

“The Encyclopedia of Invisibility does a really beautiful job of not just questioning what an art object could be, but also questioning what we consider history and the different events that happen in the world,” said Klemm. “He’s combining those questions with installation art, sculpture, prints and forms. He does this incredible job of creating this kind of nexus of projects that come out of it.”

Klemm, like Strachan, is a pro at making conceptual art accessible. The encyclopedia becomes a springboard to showcase his work, which includes a site-specific work layered with biographical references and a surprise display in the European galleries.

In the Contemporary Project Gallery surrounded by a field of dried rice is a sculpture of his grandmother built in “stacks,” much like what he declines to call totem poles. (He did not feel comfortable appropriating a practice unrelated to his Afro-Caribbean and American backgrounds.)

She carried vessels filled with food like fruit or rice on her head. “For him, the stack became this kind of symbol, both of that way of moving things around as a form of transportation,” said Klemm. “His grandmother used to say whenever she was carrying something and walking through town or moving through somewhere, it became an extension of her, an extension of her head, her thought process.”

He chose dried rice because it is a global staple and easily identifiable. As he thinks about materials for his works, he considers those that are part of a global network, such as precious metals, grass, rice and clay.

“These are things that connect people, but that also have distinctive cultural frameworks,” Klemm said. “He’s really thinking about how we can consider ourselves more connected and more similar than disconnected and dissimilar. He’s taken that to an extremely metaphoric place and thinks of the stacks as a non-linear set of influences and thought processes that go into what he does.”

As for his grandmother, each stack references someone from history: the head of Marcus Garvey, a regular figure in his work, a basketball, a kettlebell, and musical notations.

“Each object is pulled from the encyclopedia or his own influences and interests. And then it’s stacked kind of the way thinking about stacking things and moving things through space on one’s head,” she said.

Three of Strachan’s neon sculptures were already in the permanent collection to Klemm’s delight, and are on display here. The three blare “I BELONG HERE,” “YOU BELONG HERE” and “WE BELONG HERE.”

In Telluride, he built a similar neon installation: “WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER.”

Positive, right?

Klemm suggested maybe not.

“In the sense that we are all in it together, it could be for good or for bad. And that can also be very bad. Belonging doesn’t always mean a fun belonging. It can be a violent or difficult sense of belonging,” she said.

He also makes a surprise appearance in the European galleries. Three sculptures from his Black Madonna series are reconsiderations of the common symbol in Christian art known as the Pietà, in which Mary holds the dead body of her son Jesus. He’s replaced Mary, the Madonna, and Jesus’ body with Black men from history who had been violently murdered.

“If this was just a picture or a sculpture of Malcolm X and his mother, we would be having very different conversations about it with visitors in the European galleries than when he places it within the context of a Pietà,” she said.

The sprawling references to history and themes as seen in the show just how he thinks. “He’s one of those artists that likes things that come to him out of thin air where I’d have to read a hundred books and try to understand everything. Something will spark and he’ll just run with it,” she said.

—JAMES RUSSELL

James Russell

James Russell is the former Fort Worth-based web editor for the Gay and Lesbian Review and a writer contributing to D Magazine, Fort Worth Weekly and Next City.