by C. Montague
As I pause between the third and fourth rooms of Tavares Strachan’s The Day Tomorrow Began to examine a stack of oversized explanatory handouts the guard cheerfully volunteers the information that I’m free to take one with me. This is welcome news as its the kind of show that needs an explanatory handout. Standard didactic wall-text would be embarrassing—not only would audiences repeatedly be subject, room after room, to the spectacle of their fellow viewers spending more time looking at it than the large and superficially extravagant installations it explicates, but, considering the amount of text in the exhibition, it would repeatedly pose the uncomfortable question of when the art ended and the didacticism began.
Both undeniably get off to a running start in the first room, where all walls are covered floor-to-ceiling with pages from Strachan’s vaunted Encyclopedia of Invisibility. According to Strachan’s website this is a “large compendium of research into subject matter and topics of often overlooked and hidden histories.” That is one way to put it. Another way to put it is that its a Pinterest board of scientific, historic and especially Black-history-related topics Strachan’s interested in taking the form of appropriated pictures artlessly interspersed with likewise-appropriated text from articles on those topics that appear at the top of any cursory Google search. You might notice: Nina Simone, Malcolm X, Weakly Interacting Massive Particle—a concept related to dark-matter, Waverider—a dimension-hopping DC comics’ superhero.
What does it mean to present such readily-available information as “hidden?” Further, what does it mean to effectively re-hide it from museum-goers who generally have smart phones by displaying it in such a way that it is mostly inconvenient or impossible to read? Does it just mean Strachan is using thousands of printed pages, an entire room, and a ton of plexiglass to simply gesture toward the very common and familiar idea that potentially transformative ideas—especially those about the lives and histories of Black people—are marginalized? Is this just an amount of content that could fit on the back cover blurb of an Ishmael Reed novel rendered as a simple visual metaphor? Thus begins the first intimation in The Day Tomorrow Began of what I call the Lake Turned Puddle Effect—before us, repeatedly, an installed spectacle appears, reflecting the familiar and taking up an awful lot of space. It takes up so much space—and energy, and effort, and grant money—that it cannot possibly be as shallow as it appears. Yet you dip a toe in and…it is.
Marian Goodman Gallery sells small limited-edition “pocket-guide” versions of the Encyclopedia for 4500$ each. Look deep into this metaphor for the mind of our postmodern Afrofuturist and we find not craft, not detail, not poetry, not even novelty, but Wikipedia entries. No more, no less. Classier than a solid-gold toilet but certainly no more urgent, despite the desperate and worthy information it “contains” (reprints for profit).
After Ishmael Reed for Dummies we proceed, in the next room, to Robert Farris Thompson for Dummies. Strachan has reproduced a barbershop—painted black, with large images relating to Afro-American and historic African hairstyles on the walls. Did you know barbershops were an important meeting place in contemporary Black culture? Like in Coming to America or that other movie, Barbershop? Or that show Atlanta? Or in dozens of other popular depictions of Black Americans and the rest of the African Diaspora seen by many more people than will ever see this art show? Or in the much more inventive art of Romare Bearden or Kerry James Marshall? Well if you missed it, here is that information. Did you know that the culture of Black hair care and body art was a complex business influenced by native African cultures? If you didn’t, this room heavily implies it.
We then move on to tributes to African-American astronaut Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. who died in a test-flight accident, the most interesting of which is a dark room lit only by a neon skeleton which—unless the conceptual context moves you further—is exactly as interesting as seeing a neon skeleton in a funhouse or a rave. After that there is a room that dramatically welds traditional monument-style sculptures of heroes from Black history to similar depictions of heroes from mainstream—that is, White—history as if the Black were the reflection, in undisturbed water, of the White. South African activist Steve Biko is, for example, set base-to-base and below Winston Churchill. As with the Encyclopedia, the details (or lack thereof) give away the game—each figure in each pairing is lazily-sculpted in a way that I am sure Strachan either doesn’t notice or finds forgivable. These large objects, for all their heft and presence, are merely symbols, not anything to be examined or cared about in themselves. You have gotten as much from this paragraph as you would from actually seeing the work.
I could enumerate the rest but it would—like Strachan’s work—take up far more of your time than it needs to once you get the point. Tavares Strachan has seized an opportunity to direct museum-goers attention toward issues that have intrigued Black artists, critics and scholars for decades. Unfortunately, he has done little else.
Image: Courtesy LACMA