Dear Family, Friends and Supporters of MoCADA:
We are very proud to share with you our review in the New York Times of The French Evolution: Race, Politics and the 2005 Riots! If you have not seen this incredible exhibition, please take an opportunity to do so this summer! We can't thank you enough for making this all possible and we would like to thank our major contributors for making this exhibition possible: Independence Community Foundation, Forest City Ratner Companies, New York State Council on the Arts, The NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, City Councilwoman Letitia James, City Councilman Albert Vann and our many supporters and members! Thank you and please spread the word,
Laurie A. Cumbo
Founder & Executive Director
Art Review | 'The French Evolution'
Whose Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité? Colors of France Today
By MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Published: July 13, 2007
Curated by KIMBERLI E. GANT
When violence broke out in Paris in fall 2005, it seemed in some ways like a reprise of events in this country: Watts, say, or Detroit. It also recalled the student and worker strikes of May 1968 in Paris, an endless source of fascination for contemporary artists.
"The French Evolution (Mariam')" by Alexis Peskine
But France's problems today are different from America's, or from French or American turmoil in the 1960s. One of the strengths of "The French Evolution: Race, Politics & the 2005 Riots," an exhibition of multimedia images by Alexis Peskine at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, is that the artist is a highly informed guide through the thickets of the conflict.
His own position is complicated. He was born in Paris in 1979 to an Afro-Brazilian mother and a French-Russian father who is the son of a Holocaust survivor; his background differs from most denizens of the Parisian banlieues, or suburbs, largely populated by poor people of color. His father is an architect, and Mr. Peskine has spent a good deal of time in the United States. At 17 he attended a Nike basketball camp, then earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Howard University and a master's at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2004 he was a Fulbright scholar.
Along with his French-American education and experience, his training as a graphic designer is immediately obvious. The glass door to the gallery is decorated with the icons used to designate men's and women's restrooms and with France's motto, "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité." Just inside is another door made of wood with broken windows that says "Hors Service" (or "Out of Service"). The doors simultaneously evoke Jim Crow-era segregation in the United States and suggest that France is unable to offer liberty, equality and fraternity to all of its citizens, especially those whose parents or grandparents immigrated from former French colonies.
The slick, flat-colored painting "Tintin and Your Kids" explores the early Nazi sympathies of Hergé, the Belgian creator of the comic character Tintin, as well as the racist tinge of his children's book "Tintin in the Congo." (A copy on view here, showing Tintin cavorting with Africans who bear a striking resemblance to the monkeys in the story, could be an illustration for the recent protests in Britain that led Borders stores there to move the book out of the children's section.) Mr. Peskine depicts the fair-haired Tintin as a skinhead with a swastika armband, and a tiny Congolese flag can be spotted on a pile of tires, a reference to the history of the rubber trade.
Another graphically inspired painting, "La France 'Des' Français," deploys two bits of pop iconography widely recognizable in France: the racist caricature of a Senegalese soldier on the label of the Banania chocolate drink and Astérix the Gaul, a comic-book character who looks, in Mr. Peskine's rendition, more than a bit like Yosemite Sam. Here the Banania character is a masked insurgent wielding a Molotov cocktail; Astérix is dressed as a policeman. The title of the work tweaks a right-wing French political slogan, "La France aux Français" (France for the French), into the more inclusive "France of the French."
Next is "The French Evolution (Mariam')," a portrait in profile of a young Senegalese model wearing the red Phrygian cap, an ancient symbol of liberty. The title is a play on Marianne, the official symbol of the French republic depicted in Delacroix's 1830 "Liberty Leading the People," and Mariama, a popular Senegalese name.
Mr. Peskine's graphic sensibility is also at the fore in a sculpture in which five oversize bars of pale blue soap displayed on a white-tiled pedestal are marked with the words "Sale Noir" ("Dirty Black"), "Sale Blanc" ("Dirty White"), "Sale Arabe" ("Dirty Arab"), "Sale Jaune" ("Dirty Asian") and "Sale Juif" ("Dirty Jew"). A series of photographs includes "Word?," in which rap lyrics are written in white across a young man's face, and a pair that employ watermelon and bananas to explore racial stereotypes.
Despite the French subjects and titles, Mr. Peskine's work is heavy on American ideas. He cites Jean- Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellen Gallagher and Kerry James Marshall as influences, and you also detect the graphic sensibility of Kara Walker and the appropriationist techniques of Fred Wilson, who has explored pop-culture depictions of African-Americans by displaying racist collectibles. Betye Saar did something similar with "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima," a mixed-media assemblage from 1972. Mr. Peskine's work also recalls that of David Hammons and Adrian Piper, who have used a variety of means to draw attention to racist stereotypes.
The mash-up of French and American culture is evident in a music video in which Mr. Peskine raps in English about the travails of his friends. Titled "Ripa" (slang for Paris), the video touches on the indignities experienced by young people in the banlieues, like the routine identification checks that some suspect set off the riots in the fall of 2005. (The uprisings began after two teenagers in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois were electrocuted when they hid from the police in an electrical substation.)
Context is provided by a DVD prepared for the exhibition that includes riot scenes from French and American television newscasts and discussions of the violence, immigration policy and labor laws. One young man reminds viewers that France is a country that takes protest very seriously as part of the legacy of 1789.
An interview with the French rap group La Rumeur resonates particularly with Mr. Peskine's work. One member describes France's social and political situation as a kind of apartheid in which all judgments hinge on social origin and race. Hearing American rap, like NWA and Run-DMC, he says, "was earth- shattering for us."
"For the first time people who looked like us, speaking freely," he continues. "It was like being branded with a hot iron. We still haven't gotten over it."
Mr. Peskine's work, uneven at times, is not as searing as a hot iron. But it is ambitious and reflective, and succeeds in illustrating how racism, immigration and the fallout from colonialism and slavery are not any one nation's problem. In France's difficulties, we feel echoes of our own.
"The French Evolution: Race, Politics & the 2005 Riots" continues through Sept. 9 at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, 80 Hanson Place, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, (718) 230-0492.
