As seen in three exhibitions, Cole's work reflects an abiding interest
in African and diaspora culture, and an astute eye for the latent symbolic value of everyday materials.
On its face, the art of Willie Cole seems to recuperate the primitivism that informed so many landmarks of early modern painting and sculpture. Not unlike seminal examples from Picasso or Matisse, Cole's works often emulate the distinctive appearances of certain African tribal artifacts.
But Cole is an African-American making art in a post-colonial era, and his creative responses to non-Western esthetic traditions are less acts of superficial poaching and more products of informed hybridization. Since the late 1980s, Cole's art has combined an abiding interest in African and black culture with an astute eye for the latent symbolic value of common, everyday materials. The results of this fusion were recently surveyed by three shows, including "Anxious Objects: Willie Cole's Favorite Brands," a midcareer retrospective that opened at the Montclair [N.J.] Art Museum in March.
Curated by Patterson Sims, this traveling exhibition presents 32 works in various mediums that chronicle Cole's artistic development over the past two decades.
A lifelong resident of New Jersey, Cole moved to Newark as a child and maintained a studio there until 1997. He traces his interest in African culture back to the late 1960s, when racial tensions flared in Newark and many members of the city's black community were actively exploring their African roots. Cole specifically recalls high-school classes that emphasized African sculpture and dance, and the creative example of renowned poet and community organizer Amiri Baraka. Later, while commuting to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan for his bachelor's degree, Cole continued to study the tribal cultures of West Africa.
By 1981, Cole was renting a large loft in the lronbound district of Newark. Dominated by abandoned factories and warehouses, this blighted neighborhood offered affordable studios to artists, and an abundance of urban discards. Trolling the local streets, Cole found car parts, factory cast-offs and other debris that became components in his emerging practice of assemblage.
Nineteen eighty-eight was a pivotal year for Cole. His work rapidly matured during a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem and, as he has succinctly explained, ''The iron took over."
Growing up, Cole had been the resident fix-it man for his family and was frequently asked to repair broken irons. But he first recognized their artistic potential in 1988, when he found a metal rest plate for an iron on a Newark street. This chance encounter led to Neo-Senufo (1988), a small, wall-mounted sculpture featured in the Montclair survey. In Cole's initial transformation of an iron-related object, the rest plate reads as an animal head while two attached heating coils and a rusted car brace suggest horns and fangs, respectively. The Senufo people of the Ivory Coast, to whom the title refers, made a ritual mask that Cole vaguely echoes and updates with recycled industrial forms.
The majority of works in this retrospective incorporate irons in some fashion, thus confirming their status as Cole's signature medium. But Sims's thoughtful selection avoids redundancy and mainly underscores Cole's ability to mine numerous metaphors from a single object.
In 1989, he began using irons as art-making tools, burning impressions of their spade-shaped soles into canvas, paper and eventually plywood. This technique was employed to striking effect in 1992, when Cole produced a series of Domestic Shields, covering 12 discarded ironing boards with canvas before scorching their surfaces. Each board is darkly imprinted with a different symmetrical design, and is further distinguished by the unique patterns of steam holes in competing manufacturers' products. When first shown at the Brooke Alexander Gallery in 1992, 11 of the ironing boards were folded up and leaned against a wall, creating a collective image of various tribal shields poised for battle. Only three of the Domestic Shields appear in Montclair, and they are hung on the wall, to slightly diminished effect. Nonetheless, one can still appreciate their impressive symbolic economy, as Cole uses the branded boards to trace a shared history of subjugation and defiance from the capture of slaves on African shores to the more recent experiences of stateside black "domestics."
The versatility of this scorching technique is also demonstrated by the remarkable Sunflower, one of two large sunburst compositions that Cole burned into canvases in 1994. Arranged in concentric circles, the repeating marks of various irons closely resemble petals while the countless steam holes suggest the densely packed seeds of a ripe sunflower. On one level a decorative painting, Sunflower can also be read as an emblem of the African diaspora. Different degrees of burning are clearly evident in this canvas, creating a wide range of brown and black tones that echo the varieties of African and African-American skin coloration. By divining a single, glorious whole from a spectrum of individual impressions, Sunflower celebrates racial diversity and collective enterprise.
Over the years, Cole has amassed an enormous collection of new and used irons, many of which he assembles into freestanding figurative sculptures. The Montclair survey includes Water Window Female Iron Figure (1998), a sturdy, formidable woman whose feet, legs, torso, breasts, head and elaborate crown are made from the shiny metal cases of 23 irons.
Old-fashioned, cloth-covered electrical cords wrap her neck and waist like tribal jewelry. Home Hero (2003), by contrast, uses 13 black plastic iron handles to create a compact, seated figure that vaguely resembles a muscular gorilla. Both sculptures are loosely modeled after African carvings of ritual significance and command a comparable respect for the long history of black women who have labored over laundry. Cole's own image appears in three different works in Montclair. Though each employs distinct materials and printing technologies, they all superimpose steam-iron impressions over photographs of the a1iist's face or naked body. While alternately provoking thoughts of slave branding and ritual scarification, these fairly recent self-portraits (all made since 1998) may also allude to Cole's overdetermined identity within the contemporary art world, his selfimposed branding as the "iron artist."
In fact, the Montclair survey does a fine job of fleshing out the rest of Cole's oeuvre, demon strating his deft manipulations of other materials since the 1980s, including plastic hairdry ers, gasoline pump nozzles, bicycle parts and lawn jockeys. But works made from the latter two components were shown to better advantage in "Afterburn," a recent exhibition that focused on Cole's production between 1997 and 2004. Organized by Susan Moldenhauer, chief curator of the University of Wyoming Art Museum, this smaller show has traveled the country since September 2004 and closes this month.
The 15 works in "Afterburn" include several related to irons. But the show's particular strength is a concentrated display of five tji wara-type sculptures mounted on pedestals, a series that Cole began making in 2001. A mythical man-animal hybrid who taught agricultural skills to the Bamana people of Mali, tji wara is honored at planting time, when ritual dancers wear wooden headdresses carved into stylized antelopes. Cole fashions similar animals from bicycle parts, reconfiguring metal frames as torsos and legs, seats as pointed heads, handlebars and wheel braces as antlers, and fenders and tire segments as curving manes. As with many of Cole's assemblages, the components of the tji wara-type sculptures are noticeably recycled; paint has flaked away, rust has set in. The fragmentary appearance of the works can conjure the image of a locked but abandoned bicycle, its best parts scavenged by greedy passersby. By constructing a Bamana agricultural deity from scraps of modern consumer culture, Cole transcends mere imitation and links the rural and the urban, African grasslands and American industrial wastelands, perhaps suggesting that both are fertile grounds for creativity. As Nancy Princenthal observes in her catalogue essay for "Afterburn," the tji wara-type sculptures were famously preceded by the bull's head Picasso constructed from a bicycle seat and handlebars in 1943. She and other critics have also invoked Man Ray's Gadeau (1921), the famous tack-studded flatiron, when discussing Cole's trademark iron motif. Indeed, much of Cole's work is inconceivable without the example of Duchamp, whose Readymades dramatically expanded the material options of subsequent artists. Such comparisons do little to diminish Cole's work, but rather throw the specificity of his own found objects into higher relief. If Duchamp posed his Readymades as conceptual challenges, interrogating the nature of creativity by nominating as art ostensibly neutral manufactured goods, then Cole and other artists of his generation have since asserted that no found object is an empty vessel. Through his deliberate choices and clever manipulations, Cole reminds us that everyday things are freighted with social significance. An installation that establishes a dialogue with canonical art lies at the heart of "Afterburn." Titled get to the other side (2001), this floor-consuming work creates a 16-by-16- foot chessboard from 64 tiles of galvanized steel that alternate between polished silver and rusted brown. Cole replaces conventional chess pieces with 32 cast concrete lawn jockeys, each standing about three feet tall, disposed across the board as if in mid-game. While the pawns are painted with traditional black faces and red jockeys' uniforms, the other pieces are distinguished by Africanized costumes. The knights, for example, are slathered in additional concrete imbedded with nails, mimicking the spiky appearance of Nkisi fetishes from the Republic of Congo. The kings and queens wear colorful skirts made of neckties, copper jewelry and feathered headdresses. Cole has linked these embellished figures to Elegba, a Yoruba deity associated with games, the colors red and black, and passage between the terrestrial and spiritual realms.
Their calculated movements across a chessboard also invoke the lawn jockey's obscure history as a secret marker along Underground Railroad routes. But it's equally worth noting that this game takes place on a surface that approximates one of Carl Andre's floor sculptures. With a trademark of Minimalism seemingly underfoot, Cole's figures refuse marginalization as yard ornaments and ethnographic displays and proudly negotiate the exclusive domain of "high art."
Most recently, Cole has returned to working with shoes, a medium he explored in the 1990s. Favoring women's high heels for their sculptural complexity, Cole typically buys shoes in bulk from thrift stores and assembles them into emblematic forms. Among his earlier works, the Montclair survey featured Made in the Philippines (1993), a rainbow-hued throne built from hundreds of shoes that wryly refers to the purchasing power of Imelda Marcos. Smaller but more complex is Rosa Parks (1994), a wall-mounted mask that cobbles together black, red and white pumps to suggest the Civil Rights heroine's skin, lips and a rather ferocious set of teeth. Cole's newest shoe sculptures were displayed in "Sole to Soul," his January 2006 show at Alexander and Bonin, where a few small freestanding works wittily exaggerated the fetishistic allure of high heels. In Dirty Little Soles (2005-06), for example, a contorted mass of blue and yellow pumps resembles two figures in an athletic, coital embrace. But the most striking works on view were four large wall-mounted assemblages that repeat the sunburst design of Sunflower. Each is constructed from hundreds of women's shoes that Cole nails to hidden wood supports in tight, concentric circles. Since most of the toes point inward, the visible insoles and rounded heels suggest the unfolding petals of enormous dahlias. This floral impression is strongest in Pretty in Pink (2005-06), where a central cluster of vivid red and fuchsia shoes
gradually fades to the pale blush tones of the outer rings. Though it would seem Cole perpetuates the cliched equation of flowers and female beauty, these giant blossoms are only gorgeous from a distance. A closer inspection reveals a decidedly low-end selection of Hush Puppies, Life Strides and Naturalizers that are invariably stretched out, worn down and scuffed up. Not unlike the implicit feminism of many of Cole's iron works, these recent sculptures broadly underscore the laborious performance that is femininity. One might argue that Cole's recent recycling of down-market shoes also references black America through the overlapping realities of class stratification. But it seems more noteworthy that these new sculptures resist interpretations that are narrowly circumscribed by issues of racial identity. As we take stock of Cole's achievement at midcareer, and his numerous evocations of African-American life and history, perhaps we should also acknowledge, and question, the expectation that artists of color address such themes. Indeed, Cole has described a far more general interest in "energy transference," a desire to transform objects that have been previously handled, and thus channel something of their past lives into our present.4 As we confront the many unwelcome consequences of our increasingly disposable culture, we can at least be heartened that Cole will have plenty of material to work with in the future.
