November 12, 2004

For New Art, Just Take the 7 Train

So did more than a few things inside and outside the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, another trip in another direction. Where the Queens Museum brings you to a bucolic parkland setting, the Jamaica Center plunges you into the middle of a major shopping strip that is, among other things, a headquarters for hip-hop finery.

"Jamaica Flux: Workspaces and Windows," the show I'd come for, takes full advantage of this location, and is, in fact, embedded in it. Studies for all the projects are on view at the Jamaica Center, but most of the work is installed throughout the neighborhood. (The gallery has a map, which you'll need.) A local branch of North Fork Bank, for example, yields sculptures by Kambui Olujimi and Roberto Visani on themes of wealth and illusions.

A smart street poster by Hank Willis Thomas connects corporate marketing and slavery in the image of a young African-American man with a Nike logo branded on his head. Another poster, by Olu Oguibe, adapts slick, macho-intensive advertising riffs to push libraries and reading.

The collective called Center for Urban Pedagogy picks up on Mr. Oguibe's guardedly utopian thread by planting models for urban architecture among footwear displays in Sneaker Mart Plus, while Larry Krone taps the promotional potential of "abject art" at a clothing store called Cookies, where he has hung three cross-gendered parochial school uniforms sewn with the words "This Is Me."

One of the best matches of art to context is Liselot van der Heijden's "America." Its main component is a video of President Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, in which, the artist says in a statement, the words "poverty," "Palestine" and "environment" were not mentioned, but "America'' was used 61 times. Accordingly, she has edited the speech to consist entirely of that one word, and installed the video in a shop called Nubian Heritage, among tapes of speeches by Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Overall, the exhibition - organized by Christopher Ho, Omar Lopez-Chahoud, Melvin Marshall, Edwin Ramoran, Sara Reisman and Heng-Gil Han, director of the Jamaica Center - raises prickly questions about the intersection of art and commerce, art and gentrification and art used as advertising, and it is presented in this case by a grass-roots institution trying hard to raise its profile in a Manhattan-centric art world.

Yet by taking art out of the gallery and into the world, this show and others like it forge a link between art and life that is, however compromised and tentative, crucial. Such a merger confuses ideas of what's art and what isn't, as well as what "quality" and "value" mean. And at a time when all kinds of categories, from "art" to "American," are being closely policed, I say the more confusion the better.