Studio Call: Charles H. Nelson Jr. Keeping it Real

STUDIO CALL Charles H. Nelson Jr. Keeping it REAL CHIKA OKEKE Untitled: Weegee, 2000, acrylic on canvas, 8' x 8' Journal of Contemporary African Art 1 0 4 -Nka I n a st udio complex in At lant a's West End, I Charles H. Nelson, Jr. maint ains a st udio I side by side that of his long-time friend Kojo Griffin. The ample space is filled with huge canvases whose sure brushwork and powerful draft smanship leave no one in doubt of their intention to claim the cont est ed turf of high painting, but they are made not (at least primarily) for the gallery hall. Inst ead, t hese are photo st udio-t ype backdrops for popular happenings enacted so far in the streets of Atlanta and New York. You might want to call them popular paint ings. Yet they are scenic backgrounds for ordinary people to perform their fant asies, their disapproval , and identities. Nelson encourages passersby to pose for two Polaroid phot os one for the sitter and the other for the artist - in front of the backdrops. And because some of the paint ings are after Courbet and Michelangelo, the museum meet s the neighborhood photo st udio in Nelson's subversive happenings. The pictures have such titles as Keep It Real, Y'all Niggas Ain't Ready, Real Niggas Don't Die, which strike a familiar note, an echo of the vernacular of cont emporary African American Rap and DJ culture. Nelson acknowledges the influence of the painter-draftsman, John Biggers and the document ary photographer, Weegee. Bot h, for him, were interested in quest ions about what constitutes the real. Biggers's work reveals itself in time and is enriched with iconographies and symbolisms t aken from African cult ures the artist encount ered during his travels in the continent. As such his canvases yield forth further meanings, their constitutive forms emerge to their fullest, with time. So what you see is not always what you see. On the other hand, Nelson is drawn to what he describes as Weegee's ability to t ranscend the document ary genre while representing difficult reality, as well as to his visual poetry, his dramatic and punchy composit ional devices. And it is the dual attention to formal and conceptual part iculars , in fact the possibility of blurring the boundary between the two, that is operative in Nelson's Keep It Real, a re-enact ment of Courbet 's St one Cut t ers. Here Realism as a formal genre meet s with the Real, a prevalent but difficult-to-define t opos of cont emporary black DJ poetry and philosophy. Still, whet her Nelson references Courbet, and indeed Duchamp, or Manzoni in his inquiry into what constitutes reality as well as the poetics of representation of t his reality, his interest in the meaning of the Real in cont emporary African America bothers on social criticism of a complex kind. Are "st onecut t ers" today keeping it real by remaining in the lowly est at es, as wret ched sufferers in RNDD: Call and Response, 1999, polaroid photo the late capitalist economy? The radicality of Nelson's work becomes quite apparent in the Real Niggas Don't Die (RNDD) series. Two canvases show the murder scene - painted from media phot ographs - of rap music's biggest act s, Tupac Shakur and Biggy Smalls. Another shows that memorable balcony scene where Mart in Luther King Jr. was felled. A fourth shows the much more nondescript , and somewhat Chiricoesque, scene of Malcolm X's assassi nation . On all four pictures, the banner-font text reads, "Real Niggas Don't Die." For sure, it is not difficult to associat e the Shakur and Smalls t ragedies, and radical gangst er rap, with the stepping-razor, RNDD idea, that is with nigga culture. Which is perhaps why in the happenings st aged by the Nelson, the bullet-riddled car cordoned off by yellow crime scene t apes in the paint ings, became powerful backgrounds for ordinary folks to act out their nigga consciousness. But it is also enough reason to warrant the police to close...