In 1992, Mark Seliger shot a Rolling Stone cover of then-controversial rapper Ice-T wearing a police uniform and brandishing a nightstick. Time Warner, the parent company of Ice-T’s record label, had been made the subject of a shame campaign after an Ice-T side project called Body Count released an album featuring the song “Cop Killer.” By dressing the focal point of all this public outrage as a cop — holding a nightstick, less than a year after the country watched Rodney King get bludgeoned to a pulp by three uniformed Los Angeles policemen — Seliger caught the zeitgeist in a bottle.
Pretty great portrait. But I like Kehinde Wiley‘s painting of Ice-T, styled after Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres‘ 1806 “Portrait of Napoleon on His Imperial Throne,” almost as much. Now that Ice is 50 years old and
probably more famous for his role on “Law & Order” — as a cop! — than for his music, the regal trappings suit him.
The Wiley is one of several paintings of hip-hop gentry (LL Cool J, Grandmaster Flash) rendered in the aggrandizing style for which monied personages of centuries past paid a premium. (VH-1 picked up the tab in this case, commissioning Wiley to paint the recipients of their 2005 Hip Hop
Honors.) They’re arguably the best part of RECOGNIZE! Hip and Contemporary Portraiture, a show that manages the not-so-easy job of making the National Portrait Gallery feel, well, contemporary. It’s a little perverse that in a show that uses such an admirably loose definition of portraiture, the worksmodeled after an antiquated style are also the ones that resonate most.
To be fair, the other elements of the show are all worthy: D.C. artists Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp have tagged one hallway of the gallery with their vibrant graffiti art. David Scheinbaum‘s crisp black-and-white photos capture hip-hop artists in performance, mostly in 2002 and mostly at Albuquerque‘s Sunshine Theatre. An audio recording of activist-educator Nikki Giovanni reading her poem “It’s Not Just a Situation” shares a gallery with “No Thief to Blame,” a Shinique Smith installation the NPG commissioned to accompany Giovanni’s verses.
Jefferson Pinder‘s three short films are a kind of self-portraiture, albeit with the artist casting himself as a kind of every(black)man. In “Mule,” he drags a heavy log strapped to his body down the street, while “The Invisible Man” finds him standing in a room full of lightbulbs, gradually brightening as the screen changes from pitch black to blinding white. To frame them in musical terms, Pinders movies are like the Public Enemy albums of the 1980s, or 21st-century recordings by rappers such as Boots Riley (of The Coup) or
RhymeFest: They make their political points without compromising their artistry.
Despite that analogy, RECOGNIZE! doesn’t try to offer a comprehensive overview of hip-hop, either as a musical genre or as a cultural exponent of slang, attitude and dress. It wisely keeps itself to only seven artists, which allows it to achieve a clear perspective despite its catch-all moniker.
Still, Wiley’s work stands out among all the rest, finding oblique inspiration in the oft-cited objection to hip-hop that so much of the lyrical content is made up of simple boasts about the artist’s wealth, possessions, performing skill or sexual prowess. Through their lyrical “flow,” rappers have always done for themselves what the wealthy and powerful of eras past generations hired portrait painters to do for them ‹ assert their primacy before the world. It’s the explicitness with which Wiley’s monumental portraits make that connection that makes them feel so vital.
“Painting, by and large, has to do with a type of propaganda act, and the propaganda propagated in this work has to do with dominance,” Wiley told Brandon Fortune, a curator at the NPG, in an interview last month. “In some sense, I’m sort of interrogating the notion of the alpha-male subject of painting.” Interrogating is a good word for what RECOGNIZE! does. Vibrant on the surface and inquisitive beneath, it’s a bracing blast of fresh air.
