Living on Borderlines

John Haber
in New York City

Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Teresita Fernández

Austin Martin White and Kathia St. Hilaire

Esteban Cabeza de Baca would love to celebrate his ancestry, but not if it means pinning him down. Just to list his influences is to provide a cartoon tour of contemporary art, and his bright colors do not always escape a descent into cartoons.

They stake out, though, a sophisticated place between hope and despair and between traditions. Does he stake out a place between Latin American art and Chelsea as well? Be careful when it comes to crossing borderlines. While Cabeza de Baca paints desert skies, a tropical storm is heading north with Teresita Fernández. Austin Martin White and Kathia St. Hilaire wrap colonialism and torture in rubber, with grounds for hope as the tires roll away. So what if I see their heart of darkness through western eyes?

Desert warmth

Growing up in a border town south of San Diego, Esteban Cabeza de Baca was already living on borderlines. He can claim Native American but also Mexican descent, and the latter for him is complicated, too. He inherits his last name not from a person of color but from a conquistador, a European invader—one who, he cannot help boasting, became a spiritual healer. He titles the show "Nepantla," a Nahuatl word for what a Postmodernist might call transitional spaces, but borrowed from Gloria Anzaldua, a Chicana scholar new to me. Art itself situates him between cultures. As for Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, to be a painter is to enter more than one tradition, even within Native American art, like Mary Sully in Modernism's New York or Natalie Ball as both indigenous and black.

One work asks in its title, in Spanish, to kiss the earth, but then another in English reminds him that nature never forgives. In the first, two figures face one another lovingly enough, but at an unbridgeable distance, and the figure at left might be melting away. Nature in the second is evidently female, with the breast plate of a warrior, but she surrounds herself with ceramic vessels. Not a lot of romance is going on here, but nature, however unforgiving, seems at home with native craft and high culture. Come to think of it, a melting figure in a landscape owes plenty to Surrealism in Europe, like the melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory. But then Salvador Dalí, like a conquistador, was Spanish.

Decorative or abstract patterns loop across the largest landscape for a tour of another kind, a psychedelic trip. More totems offer themselves as Conocimientos, or knowledge. Flowers lie at the base of Mesa Glorieta, a table in glory, for a more arcane knowledge, while phases of the sun or moon arc across the sky. If that were not enough, the artist's statement throws in references to Christianity, Buddhism, and Jewish folklore. All this is getting awfully glib, but relevant all the same. It points beyond ethnic pride to the very question of identity.

Cabeza de Baca is suitably fashionable, when artists are expected to celebrate diversity and themselves. In a time of feel-good art, one can almost forget that those subjects of celebration can be at odds. Artists, though, remember. Just last year, El Museo del Barrio featured Taller Boricua, a print workshop. It members of were not just Puerto Rican or New Yorkers, but Nuyorican. Just to mess you up further, I took "living on borderlines" from the title of an essay by Jacques Derrida that helped launch deconstruction in America.

Latin American art here is about more than Latin America and colonialism. It is also about more than celebration—or what Amalia Mesa-Bains calls Domesticanx. Children gather outdoors for a family meal, with a welcoming realism. Too close to a greeting card? As if in reply, a figure in black face takes easy strides ahead as I Believe in Mr. Grieves. As the Pixies sang about Mr. Grieves, "Hope everything is alright."

Vessels picks up the theme of native cultures, while transforming their shape into something more dangerous. The outlines of a person rise against flame-like mountain peaks, in wood brown and ecstatic white. They could just as well be the outlines of a scaffold or a casket. The same shape stands as a sculpture at the center of the gallery, where it could be the site of a lynching. And someone's initials do appear to hang down in place of a noose, although whose I cannot say. The fiery skies of a desert landscape may provide just a little too much warmth.

Shelter from the storm

Long past thoughts of summer, yet another tropical storm was heading your way, the thirty-first in a long season. Eta hit land before dawn on a November Thursday, bringing 40 mile per hour winds to Florida and that numb sensation that comes when the weather service has to fall back on the Greek alphabet for names. That same day, as it happens, a different storm was headed for Chelsea. Baked into ceramic tiles, it was not leaving anywhere soon at that, thanks to Teresita Fernández. For her, it is an entire Caribbean Cosmos. It is also a friendly presence in a show of natural and unnatural disasters, "Maelstrom."

Hurricane Sandy may have devastated New York eight years before, but it sounds downright friendly by comparison—unless, no doubt, you had a flooded gallery or a house literally built on sand. The tiles may be small and irregular, but the painting, and it functions very much like a painting, stands eight feet high and twice again as long. Is violence implicit in the epic abstraction of Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock? Is it the whole point of Mexican murals on the theme of revolution? Devastation here lies all around. Works on paper in the rest of the front room take on the same browns not from staining but burning.

The storm has its fallout in the next room, where a blackened palm tree hangs from the ceiling, just off the floor. Is it rising with the winds or falling? From the wrapped bulb where roots should be, the artist might have caught it in an act of landscaping. The same ambiguity comes in assemblage on adjacent walls, as Rising (Lynched Land). A storm might have uprooted their charred parts and shattered the mirrored glass behind them, but the work is out to impress. If you are white and feel anything less than responsible for the damage, she means it as your mirror, too.

Storm seasons are only getting worse, but Fernández unlike Rachel Rosheger in digital media has hardly a thought for climate change. The mural may look up to date, with the spiral patterns you know from storm threats on TV. She means them, though as a metaphor for the devastation that Europeans wrought on indigenous peoples—and on the Africans that they brought with them. Not just the land has been subject to lynchings. An artist's statement points as well to her roots in Cuba. And that raises the question of just whose storm has a place in her art.

Not all that long ago, art had to look serious while avoiding some serious questions. Bob Dylan or the Beatles wearily denied that this song or that was about a drug trip, even when the title's initials were LSD. Artists like Jasper Johns thrive on allusions to life stories while making them almost impossible to pin down. Nowadays, it often seems, artists have instead to emulate a past generation while boasting of their racial or sexual identity as Johns would not. You are supposed to feel that you have seen and read this all before. I am not sure how I feel about that rather than crossing borderlines and questioning the very nature of identity, but it has brought welcome attention to Latin American women, Cuban artists like Juan Francisco Elso, Caribbean art, and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

I have mixed feelings about Fernández, too, but it is perfectly fine to nod your head at her history lesson while living in the present. She has attended to today's weather before, with outdoor sculpture that mirrored clouds over Madison Square Park. Just downstairs, she also provides shelter from the storm. She covers the walls with thirty small paintings and blue horizontal lines that, thanks to dark horizontals within the paintings, appear to cross them. They show the clear trace of the artist's hand, while hints of color shine out from a painting's darkness. The paintings may depict still life, with its traditional warnings of mortality, or a woman's body, but their refusal to say more brings a sense of peace.

Heart of darkness

I had been rereading Joseph Conrad when I caught Austin Martin White and Kathia St. Hilaire, and I felt the shock of recognition in their work. Had Conrad helped me understand them for who they are, or had I betrayed them with yet another white perspective on the Third World? The question may matter more than its answer, for an author with tale after tale of empathy, honor, and betrayal. Conrad's Lord Jim can forgive himself only by retreating to the heart of a Southeast Asian island where no one knows his past—and then only by leading its people in their revolution. And then, conned by Europeans with their own agenda, he feels his failure as a betrayal and dies at the hand of a native friend who takes him at his word. Then, too, there is Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, with enlightened values as a cover for unspoken cruelties.

The question may matter more to the art as well. White has his Lord Jim in Captain James Cook, the British explorer killed by the Hawaiian people. Cook had tried to kidnap their king in exchange for a tool to repair his ship, because he placed his mission of mapping the earth above all else. White's European stands tall with an impressive ship in the distance, after a 1785 etching of Cook's last battle. He paints a lifeboat, too, perhaps another echo of Romanticism—Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault in 1819. For me, though, it might have been that defining moment at the start of the novel when Jim, against his better instincts, joins a derelict crew in abandoning ship.

White also paints men joined in violence with the dead at their feet. Is it an uprising or the crushing of one? He paints a towering Asian, a god, or a goddess blessing a grinning black man at its feet. The central figure holds a head in its other hand, as an assertion of power or a higher vision. I thought of the native heads that Kurtz places on poles outside his fortress, all but one facing in. As he adds in a handwritten postscript to his own "objective" report, exterminate the brutes.

St. Hilaire is more upbeat on the surface but just as inscrutable. She takes inspiration from an African flag that led Haiti in its revolution. (Like Renée Stout, she must hear echoes of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora today.) She could be weaving a flag herself, in paintings composed of four-sided pieces. She takes inspiration, too, like Frank Walter from Caribbean art and Latin American women. Their faces dominate, some in the scarves of what I take to be Islam, but a man with hands above his head may await punishment as well.

She does not make it easy to decipher much else in her clotted surfaces, printed on anything from fabric to metal. More prints serve as drumheads set throughout the gallery for an unscheduled performance or an unstated ritual, while others look like trash bags on the floor, with a mop ready to clean them up. Some are on rubber, which she associates with tires used to strangle prisoners. White uses rubber, too, but as a binder for pigment, and he associates rubber with colonialism. It has its virtues, though. He uses it to outline his subjects against a darker background, with the texture of paint squeezed fresh from the tube.

Are they too optimistic or too pessimistic? White paints a man with a raw wound on his back, and his central colors are a flaming yellow and red. The head in the idol's hands could be on fire. He finds another parallel in space shots from private entrepreneurs, just when police violence brought so many others back to earth. For him, it is Captain Cook all over again, only lost in space. But then artists, too, can be children of the Enlightenment, even as it casts its shadow over their work.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Esteban Cabeza de Baca ran at Garth Greenan through March 13, 2021, Teresita Fernández at Lehmann Maupin through January 23, and Austin Martin White and Kathia St. Hilaire at Derek Eller through March 20.