ASAP/Journal v. 9 no. 2 (May 2024): 235-268.
abstract: This article examines the 1993 exhibition The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, conceived by conceptual artist Charles Gaines. Displaying artworks by eleven Black artists alongside criticism about their work, the exhibition aimed to reveal the limitations of the discourse of marginality and the structures of stereotype employed by mainstream criticism. The artworks—by Renée Green, David Hammons, Benjamin Patterson, Adrian Piper, Sandra Rowe, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Pat Ward Williams, Fred Wilson, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—were all produced between the years 1988 and 1992 and ranged from photography to installation. In reading The Theater of Refusal in the context of his systems-driven artwork and his theoretical attunement, I position Gaines as a key interlocutor in a heated moment of cultural tension often subsumed by the notoriety of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, whose antagonistic reception by the art world was an outcome of the very systems—public discourse, the art world, sites of display, language—that the exhibition represented.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/947145
For more on the topic, find the original exhibition catalog in your library, and the 2024 expanded re-issue, whose contributors include Kemi Adeyemi, Hilton Als, Rhea Anastas, Maurice Berger, Charles Gaines, Malik Gaines, Thelma Golden, Jamillah James, Steffani Jemison, Thomas Lax, Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, Catherine Lord, Ben Patterson, Will Rawls, Cameron Rowland, Sandra Rowe, Gary Simmons, Cauleen Smith, Pat Ward Williams.
