2024-09-01 01:47:05
Composed mostly of thousands of discarded, often obsolete objects, including his famous low-upper women’s pumps, Willie Cole’s sculptures stretch the concept of pop collage by a mile, deploying form of tribal art and design. His graphic works “Scorch” are produced by burning steam-iron outlines on various surfaces, materializing contexts of menial labor and slavery into various two-dimensional practices. His balancing act between autonomous media expression and research and the repurposing of African artistic themes is one of the most enduring counterbalances to supremacist logic by any contemporary artist. In Cole’s words, his purpose is not to redefine or construct the context of African art so that it exists on the fringes of contemporary art, but to make African art American art.
Willie Cole, Sonnenführer, 2013; Bronze. Photo courtesy John Michael Kohler Art Center.
The artist’s famous, irreverent shoe assemblages are always in uncanny communication with the graphic subtleties of his “burnt” paper works. His exhibition, titled “Home Assembly,” occupies the Kohler family’s original house, around which the museum was built. One room flanking the exhibition showcases the artist’s “Five New Beauties.” These sombre works on paper transcend the rare objectivity of his earlier work, emphasizing an element of Cole’s oeuvre that fundamentally challenges the very nature of gallery architecture. The human-scale pointed arches, actually pressed from peeling, worn and inked ironing boards, recall the form and cultural history of slave ships. This combination transforms the central living room into a Gothic church corner with a terrible absence.
Cole blended rural and tribal designs and applied them improvisationally to develop a transnational aesthetic. The wall adjacent to the “church” space is completely covered with small rows of steam iron shapes, recalling textile patterns or the appearance of West African mud houses. It reminds viewers of the roots of ethnographic traditions that evolved into global sensibilities, and how the management of colonial economies eradicated the patterns and structures of African and Asian populations.
Willie Cole, Five New Beauties (detail), 2012; ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy John Michael Kohler Art Center.
Willie Cole, Shield XV and Shield XVI, 2021; canvas, resin and charred objects. Courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy John Michael Kohler Art Center.
In response, Cole absorbed popular Western themes and mythology. One can’t escape the spirit of Jimi Hendrix’s voodoo chile-like structures rocking male and female genitalia in “Shoonuful Female” as he infused fashion and eroticism into the artifact. Contemporary black people dive headlong into the realm of large-scale photography, revealing themselves in the extraordinary masked figures of hidden pop goddesses, championing artists’ blues and jazz influences.
Willie Cole: Installation view of Home Assembly at the John Michael Kohler Art Center, 2024.
Many sculptors who study cultural narratives often become improvisational collectors. In Cole’s case, he blended an educated eye with a deeply working-class/skilled worker vernacular, an Arcimboldo-esque obsession with a reflexive pact of reuse. The folk artists the museum aims to support often create works from discarded curiosities. Cole combines this with a desire for a variety of materials, craftsmanship and techniques (high and low). His projects somehow manage to combine a dynamic performative social document that revolutionizes formal and conceptual expectations of craftsmanship.
Willie Cole’s works are not fetishistic, although they exploit Western sexualized and monetized ideas of wildness and ornamentation. His love for the exotic is balanced by a multicultural panorama of sight and sound and a deliberate improvisation of the evolution of meticulous craftsmanship. The history of jazz and its relationship to modern art is not lost in his unique blend of autobiography and ancestral community.
Presenting contemporary cross-cultural art in Wisconsin Industrialist’s Hall 19th This century-old Italianate residence has been included and recontextualized by its affiliation with an institution dedicated to vernacular art, installation and engineering techniques, and it is striking.
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