Rent from DeepDyve- Crusader
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Crusader, 2006; digital color video, with sound; 38 min. Filmed by Zachary Fabri.
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On a cold winter morning in early 2005, dressed in dark, insulated coveralls and an aviator hat, Nari Ward settles himself into the restricted space of the Crusader and (assisted by cameraman Zack Fabri) pulls out onto Fredrick Douglass Avenue from his studio on 141st Street and purposefully shuffles through the city traffic up to 145th Street. He makes a right and shuffles down to the Mobile gas station, where, as seems entirely appropriate, he turns in and pulls up to one of the available gas pumps. Here, with baby oil, Ward performs a brief ritual of hand washing/hand wringing: a sort of libation or tribute. He kneels in front of the Crusader and spins its hood-ornament globe several times, as though to activate its latent geopolitical powers. Then, fully charged, he returns to the little driver’s compartment from which he pushes the vehicle back to his studio. The whole journey takes about an hour.
Crusader is a radiant poetic work, a fictionally functional sculptural object that lives at the crossroads of the personal and the political, the worldly and the fantastical, the comedic and the deadly serious. Constructed out of several petroleum-based products, it is, in a certain respect, Ward’s poignant meditation on the debate about oil and energy that was catalyzed by the second Gulf War. But, as always, the imagination embodied in Ward’s found-object sculptures is animated by a sense of the theatricality of the quotidian and by an attunement to the life-giving, life-nurturing energies of the resolutely ordinary. [End Page 122]
Nari Ward (whose work also appears on the covers of this issue) is a Jamaican-born, New York–based artist whose work has been widely exhibited, including in his solo exhibitions at the Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee (1997); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001, 2000); the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2011); and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2015). He has also taken part in group exhibitions that include Documenta XI, Kassel (2003); the Whitney Biennial (2006); and Prospect 1 New Orleans (2008). In 2012, Ward was the recipient of the Rome Prize, and he has received commissions from the United Nations and the World Health Organization, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. His works are collected by several museums, including MoMA, Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and the Whitney Museum.
