Leslie Hewitt’s solo exhibition at the Kitchen consists of photographs from three different bodies of work, and a two-channel video piece. All the works have been made since 2008. The exhibition is curated by Rashida Bumbray.
Looking at Hewitt’s photographs is a fascinating encounter with the problem of reading. They are, first of all, beautifully made. Their beauty and tranquility is an invitation to linger. This makes them very generous, without being cloying. The compositions are generally centered and symmetrical, the images in sharp focus, the light clean. They generate pleasure in the act of seeing. This quality in the depicted subjects easily transfers to the photographic objects themselves.
Untitled (Geographic Delay), 2009. Digital c-print, 30.875 x 36.875 inches
From their slowness emerges a “problem of reading”: a gulf opens between the visual clarity of the image and the complex referentiality of the objects within it. Even a superficial engagement with the work makes it obvious that the books, photographs, and common objects that Hewitt arranges in her photographs are all voices in a serious discourse. They all seem to be talking to each other, in a tone that is focused and deliberate. The “problem”, then, is how to integrate the visual “reading” and the content of the discussion taking place within the image: how much can a viewer rely on inference and implication, and still claim a full understanding of the work? How necessary is it to extract the specific literary and cultural references, re-assemble them, and gain fluency in their language? And failing our ability to achieve this, to what extent are we to be indicted for seeing these citations as oblique? [*1]
This makes me want to walk my terminology back a bit. The “problem” of reading feels more like a dilemma, and a productive one at that. Hewitt’s work is multivalent, and positions its legibility like a prism: each angle of entry breaks the view into a different spectrum. Hewitt is African-American, and much of the material that her work references is drawn from the literary and cultural record of the black experience in America. Or, at least, that’s what I gather from much of the critical reception of her work, like Huey Copeland’s text in the February 2010 Artforum. Copeland reconstructs a narrative from Hewitt’s images that, to this white male, is detailed to a degree that is far beyond my present visual ability to grasp. But looking over the checklist and press release provided by the Kitchen, one finds just a brief description of the film installation in terms of a text about 1950’s Harlem, and a single reference to W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness. So how available is the narrative intended to be?
And it is precisely in this space between the clarity of her imagery and the restraint of her intention that I locate the dilemma. The highly structured compositions, the delicate balance of their constituent parts, the very specific way the work is presented in the gallery: these things all “say” a lot about the pictorial content of the photographs. But in the absence of reading that content on its own terms, those formal qualities become the content. Or perhaps one should say that the formal qualities perform their operations on a depicted content whose meanings are withheld.
But withheld by whom? Hewitt? That doesn’t seem right. After all, there’s nothing actually private about these sources; they’re part of a public heritage; and they’re currency within a cultural community that stretches all across America. It is no secret that the contemporary fine art world is no more racially integrated than society at large, and may be even less so. The majority of Hewitt’s viewers are probably white. And yet her engagement with race as a subject takes a form drastically different than, say, Kara Walker, or Ellen Gallagher. I’ll risk oversimplification here, and suggest that both Walker and Gallagher take mass culture (read “white”) representations of black folks and give them back to the viewer as exaggerations, meant to expose the latent pathologies present in our collective racial attitudes. I think the reference to Du Bois and double consciousness is pertinent here, seen within the idea of “positioning” the images. One understanding of double consciousness, according to Du Bois, is that black folks’ self-awareness is always both as an individual and as how they’re perceived by others. Hewitt’s work enacts a reversal of this split awareness. Her source representations are African-American self-representations, given back to the viewer in a visual idiom that does not obviously elicit “blackness”. That is, one might venture the claim that Walker and Gallagher exploit the shame the adheres to overt racist depictions, where Hewitt elides it. And what is gained by this elision? A new double consciousness: one is not being shown that what he knows is wrong, but that there’s something he doesn’t know that is right.
The thinking and writing I’ve been doing on this site, especially as it regards photography, has generally been done as an analysis of the fundamental ways that artworks contain their meanings. Artists who make an issue of this balance their pictorial content within an image that calls attention to its own techniques of depiction. Hewitt is no exception to this, and were it not for the powerfully philosophical way she structures her images, I doubt I would try to write about her work. [*2] But the specific nature of her content compels me to venture into a discursive space where my footing is much less sure; I admit to real anxiety treading onto racial grounds about which I am obviously so ignorant. But the work also tells me that to be polite and gloss over the subject would be doing the most egregious sort of disservice: “hidden in plain sight” would be no accomplishment here.
I want to make one brief, somewhat analogous mention in this context. Zoe Crosher’s recent show at DCKT on the Bowery, “The Unraveling of Michelle duBois,” (that’s a funny connection!) had some of this dynamic in it. The work was self-consciously and explicitly about the material and visual nature of photography “as such”, with ideas applicable to the evolving discourse about the medium. And yet one could not, in good faith, separate the sophistication of that inquiry from the charged subject of a conflicted and imagined female identity. I think this approach is necessary to understanding and appreciating Leslie Hewitt’s work. In the end, the advanced pictorial strategies (which are fascinating to contemplate and are, on their own, generally the subject of this viewer’s interest) must be seen as a tool in pursuit of a broader and more fraught agenda. May she continue to pursue with such aplomb.
