May 14, 2018: Bad Exhibition

I have some thoughts about the Rammellzee exhibition at Red Bull Arts that—because they're not necessarily coherent and because there are people better equipped to make this argument—are best "published" on my "blog." I'll start by saying that Rammellzee was a fascinating cultural figure who played a genuinely important role in one of the most fertile and influential, if sometimes over-fetishized, scenes in contemporary art and music history. His places in graffiti culture and the afrofuturist lineage are worth studying, if more from sociological perspectives than art-historical ones—and, well, "Beat Bop" is one of the greatest songs of an era densely packed with great songs. But the Red Bull exhibition is bad. Very bad. There are a few reasons why:

First, while Rammellzee was, again, inarguably cool and crucial, much of his visual art doesn't hold up in a gallery setting; indeed, only his encaustic works of the mid-to-late '80s—and maybe some of his costumes—maintain interest as objects apart from their original street- or performance-based contexts. That is, his earlier, graffiti-influenced prints and paintings, and his later assemblages, are mostly pretty boring on their own aesthetic or discursive terms. A retrospective of his works grows tiresome pretty quickly, and in the exhibition at Red Bull there isn't enough engaging archival material to spice up the viewing experience.

Much of the archival material that is there is presented in a fairly inert way; even approaching the Basquiat-designed cover of the "Beat Bop" single feels anticlimactic, as the record is clustered with other materials, dark and under glass, in a room that has an ugly cooler full of Red Bull cans for visitors in the corner (there's one at the opening of the exhibition, too).

Which is to say, the exhibition at Red Bull is presented very poorly. Basically everything in the space betrays a sense of exhibition production inexperience and the misallocation of funds. Among other things, the lighting is very bad: most artworks are in the dark, and there are glares and shadows that make several objects genuinely hard to see. The wall texts are also shrouded in darkness; besides being hard to read on a practical level, they're sycophantic, using a lot of words to say very little, really just to paraphrase Rammellzee himself it seems. (Further, the wall texts are printed on yellow plastic signs that you can see through, to the black tape that holds them up; two days after the exhibition opened, the letters were also starting to peel off.)

A couple other things off the top of my head: the cube monitors sit on pedestals that are too high and the edges of which extend too far beyond the bottom surfaces of the monitors. There are iPads that show photos and play audio interviews, which you can listen to through handheld phones; besides not including very instructive materials, most of them didn't work (i.e., were basically frozen) when I visited the exhibition.

Then there's the downstairs area, which my girlfriend Cassie astutely described as looking like the waiting area to a Disneyworld ride. Full of Rammellzee's costumes, cast in blacklight, the bottom floor of the exhibition does look like a cheap theme park (maybe a suburban laser tag arena, too); the costumes themselves are in many cases compelling in and of themselves, with richly detailed and referential surfaces that toss up the wearer's gender, history, purpose, etc. But presented as they are they lose their complexity and become muddy, cheap, ineffectual. Also, just, downstairs, a couple of the storage and service room doors were cracked open, one of the lights was out...

All of this is to say, Red Bull has a lot of money, and they throw it around, often at good artists. Their music program has become a little tacky, I think, but it still does result in the creation and performance of some genuinely good, forward-thinking music. Ultimately, though, especially at Red Bull Arts, it feels like PR, and it feels pretty gross. I may sound snobby, but if you're going to work with great artists, give them great exhibitions; if you're a huge energy drink-producing corporation (whose owner is a right-wing idiot), though, also... maybe don't work with great artists? Give it a rest.

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