Renee Cox: The Big Picture

Olympia's Boyz, 2 0 0 0 , archival d i g i t a l C - p r i n t m o u n t e d o n a l u m i n u m C o u r t e s y R o b e r t M i l l e r Gallery, N e w York RENEE COX i w B I G PI CTURE Shelly Eversley 7 2 • N k a J o u r n a l o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A f r i c a n A r t W hat comes after post-modernism? Renee Cox. If modernism signals an awareness, and then an unconscious distancing of time, and post-modernism reflects fragmented , multiple identities, then a post, post-modernism would represent a reconciliation with insistent distinctions among time, space, and identity. Depth could appear on the most superficial surfaces. Cox's photography calls to mind an ideal, one that has not yet been acknowledged in real life, but in the mind's eye, in the moment after post-modernism, it sees. Take for example, Cox's Olympia's Boyz (C-Print, 2001). In the image, which stands more than eleven square feet, a nude Cox reclines on a chaise lounge while her two sons stand behind her. All three subjects look into the camera lens and, unequivocally, into the viewer's gaze. The image of a life-sized black woman in the nude posed as Muse invokes the viewer's cravings for sex and power, while the boys, only partially black, heighten the effect. The boys appear at once as nubile guards who protect the sexually charged woman and, at the same time, they seem innocent witnesses to the viewer 's gaze. That the photograph's presentation of color, density and desire (both pornographic and regal) suggest also that the people in the picture might actually move, might actually stand up and walk off the wall, removes any uncertainty that the staged scene could also be real. The reconciliation that takes place in Olympia's Boyz is the ideal that happens after post-modernism. Unreality seems reconciled with the real, and oppositions such as Madonna/whore and Black/White no longer seem fixed or exclusive . It suggests something entirely new since the awareness of boundary crossings is not only palpable, but also confident and even comfortable. Perhaps it is the confidence, not the black female photographer 's allusion to Manet's Olympia, that disturbs so many critics' unwillingness to see. The New York Times, among others, has referred to Cox's work as opportunistic, self-aggrandizing exhibitionism ,1 yet in another view it could be called, positively, entitlement. The difference between entitlement and exhibitionism is that one presumes the right to sit at the head of the table, and the other suggests insecurity, a kind of stealing the spotlight. Since there is no theft in Olympia's Boyz (no one owns the image of a reclining nude), Cox's rendering of her family in her series American Family, 2001, is, in some ways, a declaration of privilege. The theory of American ideals, such as rights and families, usually stand in contradistinction: equality in theory is not always equality in practice. In the history of seeing and claiming to understand the significance of Black images, the theory supports what Claudia Tate has called "racial protocol,"^ the insistence of realism 's correspondence to class disparity, racial hierarchy and stereotype. Concerning the practice of the image, dreadlocks that caress a firm, supple and precisely manicured Black female body stand outside the bounds of such theories and traditions. Similarly, half-white boys in head-wraps, carrying intricately carved wooden spears, do not evoke any idealCousins at Pussy Pond, 2 0 0 1 , archival d i g i t a l C-print m o u n t e d o n a l u m i n u m C o u r t e s y R o b e r t Miller Gallery, N e w Y o r k ized vision of Blackness. But the practice remains. The...