Destroying History, Unearthing Truth.

The Seattle Art Museum follows a predictable pattern: its major shows of the year are trumpeted to the public as life-changing!, important!, entrancing!, but in fact are, cautious, sprawling and bland.

The pattern also dictates that the SAM’s minor shows—less publicized and less costly—are vastly more unique, gutsy and worthwhile. While the crowd flocks up to the top floor for second-rate Matisse and portraits of George Washington, the hidden gems of the museum wait around corners and in back atriums for the slower and more curious visitor. The current show in the Jacob Lawrence/Gwendolyn Knight room is exactly such a treasure, and the most audacious thing in the entire museum.

Titus Kaphar, a contemporary black American painter, questions what is presented and what is omitted from historical art with tenacity and skill. Repainting 18th and 19th century portraits in minute detail, Kaphar then dramatically alters their content to challenge inherent assumptions: he cuts figures out of the canvas whole cloth, slices portions of them to ribbons, burns, sews or dips portions in tar, or flips the entire piece backwards. The result is a piece that the audience may have been familiar with initially, but now asks provocative questions about how history is painted and portrayed, who has a voice within our historical record and who is kept silent.

In 2009’s “Push Yuh Own Damn Boat,” Kaphar recreates a well-known Thomas Eakins painting of two men on a boat. The black man—in the back with the oar—pushes, while the white man hunts game in the reeds. By cutting the upper half of the oarsman out of the canvas and changing the orientation of his body just slightly, Kaphar dissipates his servile body language completely. Suddenly, the oarsman is an active character, rather than a silent non-entity. Whether his movement is to step off the boat, or to clock the huntsman with his oar is left up to the viewer to decide.

2008’s “Conclusive” stands in the middle of the gallery alone and upright. A towering recreation of a 17th-century painting by Simon Vouet in jewelline colors, “Conclusive” depicts a martyr/soldier in slumped exhaustedly on his spear. Or, it would, if Kaphar hadn’t sliced the soldier clean out of the canvas and laid him on the floor below his own empty silhouette. To Kaphar, this martyr/soldier was reminiscent of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he wanted to “lay this tired soldier to rest.” Splayed out on the white pedestal below the frame, the tortured figure does look as if he has finally found the respite and repose denied to him.

One of the simplest and most striking compositions is a double portrait series, which puts the issue of pride, race and identity at the fore. A repainted portrait of a pasty-white European noble hangs on the left, a young black servant child staring up at him with starry-eyed admiration from the corner. On the right is the portrait of a black French soldier who fought in the the American Revolution (and became a leader in the Haitian revolution). By simply cutting the child out of the first portrait—where he stands as a symbol for white superiority and the supposed admiration of colonized nations for their masters—and placing him at the side of the Haitian general, Kaphar fixes the imbalance. Where is the admiration of the white nations for their black servants, slaves and soldiers? is what this conversation seems to ask. What and where is the place for an empowered, fully adult black male in the late 1700s, one who is not a child, not a subordinate and not a soldier?

Run through the special American Art show that sprawls exhaustively through half the third floor of the SAM, and instead take your time with the demanding questions raised by Titus Kaphar. That longwinded exhibit will still be up there when this one has slipped away as quietly as it arrived, and your art experience will be the blander for missing it.

SAM Second floor. April 3–September 6, 2009

Ghosts in the Open

In a certain corridor in the Henry Art Gallery waits a surprise. Walking down the echoing, empty hall the wall suddenly drops away to your right, revealing a long room far below you. Gathered in rows down the room are kneeled and bent silvery figures, rank by rank, facing the opposite wall. The convocation is motionless, and as you make your way down the long stairs toward the room, you have the unnerving sensation that they will wait as long as necessary for you to reach them.

But when you enter that room—the figures now reaching to your waist as you walk amongst them—you encounter the real surprise: these figures are faceless, featureless, hollow and void. They are the forms of women who are bent in prayer, supplication or fear, and they are simply empty shells of tinfoil arranged in rows.

When I saw Kader Attia’s Ghost room in his 2008 exhibition at the Henry, the sudden sight of all these motionless figures below me was both exhilirating and frightening. By wrapping female models in tinfoil and arranging them in long ranks beneath the viewer, Attia’s huddled mass evokes intense emotions.

My first reaction was of dread: that this would be a political statement about some horrible event of persecution, or relating to an historical happening of repression or genocide. And it certainly could be: the forms are bowed at the middle and could represent all types of body language; huddling, begging, praying, slumping, grieving, dying. Jen Graves of the Stranger was hit similarly by the dread of these massed figures: “Horror is a recurring theme. Attia has choreographed the exhibition so that the slumped foil bodies of Ghost—praying? begging?—are seen first from behind, where their backs look full and meaty. It’s not until later in the progression through the galleries that the terrible gaps on the front of them are revealed…” Ghost makes a clear statement about the anonymity of women, especially those in third-world or religiously repressive countries.

But there is a clear connection to prayer, too, since the bent backs of the figures are obviously reminiscent of Muslims bowing to Mecca. However, the reverberating emptiness of the hoods connotes something more sinister. In Regina Hackett’s review she noted that, “Growing up French-Algerian in an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris, Attia is familiar with people who disappear into devotion. “Ghost” is empty sacks of group-think…” Attia’s faceless women are also without minds and wills, and he demonstrates what religion and prayer looks like when it has become rote routine, without thought or reflection.

Ghost has been dismantled and re-made throughout the world, each time in a different space and with varying models. The current grouping at the Saatchi Gallery (where these photos are from) does not allow the viewer to see the forms from above, which I consider a shame. The voyeuristic quality of the show is diminished, not to mention the feeling that you are peering into something secret and possibly terrible. However, nothing can downplay the shock and emptiness one feels while walking amongst these figures where everyone is there, but no one is home.