Villa Stuck celebrates hip-hop art
When asked to say something about hip-hop besides that it is “cool,” one is hard pressed to formulate a definition. For despite its apologists, and the good faith of those who are not, hip-hop is too lax and elastic, too all encompassing and vague to be a movement or a school or a new ideology, whether political, aesthetic or cultural. For that it would need a manifesto and a program, an objective and an ideal, if not simply a teleology, as did most of the artistic and literary vanguard of the 20th century in Europe and the Americas, such as Surrealism, Dadaism or Expressionism. Instead, hip-hop’s lack of a concrete platform, aesthetic or otherwise, makes it close to impossible to decide what it is, or is not. At most, one might suggest it is a trend or current, a generalized or widespread state of mind; or perhaps a collective attitude, made of poises and poses to give expression to some of the pent-up dreams of our youth. But it more readily is, one would also like to submit, a performative art form that at the same time is a style of living and dying, and one that, wherever it goes or it is taken, takes with it the imprint of its birthplace in the slums of the South Bronx in the late 1970s. But to the extent that this is correct, hip-hop is better said to be the most inspiring and inspired politico-ethnic statement of American blacks and Latinos, which from its very beginning was meant to be trans-ethnic, trans-color and trans-racial, however limited it may be deemed to concern matters of the mind. But one does not need to agree or disagree with this critical poking at hip-hop to drop by the Museum Villa Stuck, where for the first time in Europe, a well selected set of more than 60 pieces, both pictorial and sculptural, besides some installations, will be on display. Previous to the original opening of the exhibit in the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the only hip-hop-oriented museum exhibits had consisted of cultural “artifacts,” such as CDs, music videos and clothes from “da ghetto.” Two years ago Bronx Museum curator Lynda Yee, in collaboration with guest curator Franklin Sirmans, brought together 30 different artists whose work incorporates or reflects upon the phenomenon of hip-hop. The list of artists featured includes both established as well as emerging artists from the United States, Europe, Asia and South America. One of the most prominent artists featured in the exhibition is Jean-Michel Basquiat. During hip-hop’s early days, in the 1980s, Basquiat started producing raw, politically charged, graffiti-inspired paintings. He had been spraying his original brand of graffiti throughout Manhattan as early as 1976. Following his introduction to Andy Warhol by the Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, Basquiat soon entered into artistic collaboration with the Pop Art pioneer. This collaboration proved instrumental to Basquiat becoming one of the few Hispanic-African-American artists to receive worldwide attention and appreciation in the 20th century. From 1982 until his death in 1988, Basquiat inundated the art world with savage images from the city streets. The exhibition highlights his 1984 work Untitled (Defacement), a response to the fatal beating of the black graffiti writer Michael Stewart by New York City transit police. The other widely recognized name included in the show is that of Keith Haring. Most people are familiar with Haring’s work through his colorful posters covered with faceless figures dancing, we assume, to phat hip-hop beats. His jamming, twisting figures became popular icons of the 1980s. His black-and-white work DJ 84 pays homage the uptown NYC DJ who played an instrumental role in developing the spinning and scratching techniques of hip-hop DJing. Adrian Piper, Renee Green, Martin Wong, David Hammons are other well-known names among the 30-some artists featured in the exhibition. A common characteristic of many of these established artists as well as emerging artists who appear here is that while they embrace hip-hop graffiti, DJing, rap and break-dance, they seem to do it under a pathos of distance that betrays something of a bad conscience—presumably the result of endeavoring to don a cultural identity to which many of them are neither racially nor historically connected. There is a telling irony in the fact that this exhibition is being held here in Munich, its first venue in Europe. One Planet Under a Groove mostly charts the way in which “street culture” has managed to permeate and influence the supercilious world of institutional mainstream art. And Munich boasts much that is mainstream, but little that one might call street culture. But this is only a way of saying that the irony is on hip-hop itself; for what this exhibition shows is that what was once born of irreverence and rebelliousness has by now become mainstream.