In a sleepy, uneventful art season, there are the rumblings of an earthquake. After years of being dismissed as not even worthy of consideration, the work of black American artists has become essential to the future of American art and to understanding who we are.
This is true even though black artists continue to encounter tremendous resistance within the institutionalized art world, particularly in New York. It is true even though most people who follow, show and buy contemporary art do not have a clue how rich and complex the art of black Americans is.
The reasons for the change go to the heart of the concerns of many black artists, and they go to the heart of this international and historical moment. In a decade when artists feel free to draw from any artistic tradition, in any era, many black artists have been implicitly raising the notion of a world culture in which African, Asian and South American art have as much of a place as the art of Europe and the United States.
The recent revival of European art has offered a lesson about the kind of art that can now make a difference. There is a widespread feeling among American art professionals that for the last decade West German art has been the best in the world, largely because of its ability to face its most painful history. In the American obsession with Anselm Kiefer, whose paintings expose wounds opened up by Nazism and the Holocaust, there is an indication of an increasing awareness of the weight of our own unresolved past.
Nothing in that past is more painful and unresolved than the history of violence to blacks. Since so many black artists, like Melvin Edwards (whose ''Lynch Fragments'' are central to an exhibition of sculpture by black artists at the Bronx Museum of the Arts) and Robert Colescott (whose combative, thoughtful paintings are at the New Museum of Contemporary Art), are involved with memory and roots, it is impossible to consider their work without being aware of this history. Avoiding their art means avoiding this history. The appreciation of the art of black Americans and the health of American art may now go hand in hand.
There are many other artistic factors that have helped change the climate. They include a pluralistic environment that has not only helped create a general tolerance for diverse sources and approaches but also encouraged black artists to follow whatever course appealed to them. The sources and approaches of black artists are so diverse that there is absolutely no such thing as black art. The factors also include fascinating developments like the increasing prominence of black and white, which for a long time were not even considered colors. In the abstract paintings of John L. Moore, the pictorial drama often focuses on the way the color black negotiates its way through modernist space. The Maren Hassinger installation now at the Bronx Museum can be seen as a statement about endangered nature, but in the way her seemingly fragile but resilient black cable trees manage to grow out of the most minimal white cement blocks, there is also a personal and art-historical statement. Affirmative Action Is Not the Issue
The issue is not affirmative action. Giving black artists the recognition they deserve has nothing to do with special pleading based on a notion of democracy whereby every group is statistically represented. The work of black artists is not better or more immune from criticism than the art of other people.
What I am talking about is art with an openness that should lay to rest any assumption that if blacks were in a position of power they would support only art that served their narrowest interests. I am talking about art that, at best, has the kind of purpose, humanity and scope that needs to be seen and fought over in major cultural institutions.
Edwards, Martin Puryear, Benny Andrews and the late Romare Bearden have had shows in New York in the last couple of years. The lyrical and vigilant ''Lynch Fragments'' of Edwards, the sweet-sounding epics of Bearden, the rolling oracular rhythms of Puryear and the ecstatic, battered collages of Andrews are rooted in black experience. But the work of these artists is no more exclusively about that experience than Chekhov's stories and plays are only about Russia. Their art grows out a soil that Americans share. Their artistic fruit belongs to everyone.
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The welded steel sculptures of Melvin Edwards are informative about the kind of intelligence and imagination that black artists offer. They also suggest that black artists may be far more eloquent than whites in dealing with the history of white violence to blacks.
Edwards was born in Houston in 1937 and went to college in California. He has traveled widely in Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. He has been teaching art in universities almost nonstop since 1964 and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1970 he had an installation in the downstairs gallery of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has shown around the United States and has realized large sculpture commissions in several cities.
Yet he remains largely unknown. When Dr. Campbell mounted an Edwards show at the Studio Museum in 1978, the lack of response shocked her. ''It was like nothing, like the show didn't happen,'' she said. ''It was scary. It was chilling.'' Edwards's iconography is provocative. His public works include chains as tall as people, his arches and post and lintels suggest pre-industrial architecture, his disks the sun and moon. His ongoing series of ''rockers'' swings out of the rocking chair of his grandmother Cora. His ''Lynch Fragments'' are his most private and familiar works. They include chains, hammers, vises - objects identified with the labor of and violence to slaves. ''Mel is from the South,'' Kinshasha Conwill said, ''where lynching is a reality.''
The ''Lynch Fragments'' have gone through three phases: 1963-66, 1973 and 1978 to the present. There are now well over 100. They are small reliefs, as big as a face, never so large that they could not be held in the hand. Many have African titles. Some of the tools in them are found, some created. These dense chunks of steel are welded together, sometimes slowly, sometimes, it seems, improvisationally, into constructions that hector, rage, seduce and sing.
The sculptures reflect the interest in welded steel and abstraction during the civil rights years in which they were conceived. They also reflect the wish of many black artists to take images that debased blacks and make them defiant. The frontality and projecting horseshoes, links, nails and stakes help make the ''Lynch Fragments'' confrontational. You cannot look at these almost indestructible forms without feeling the weight of the history branded into them.
In another important reversal, it is not Western art that validates African art, which was essentially the case in the ''Primitivism'' show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, but rather the purpose and power of African art that validate the methods and formal concerns of the West. Without welded steel sculpture and modernist abstraction, the ''Lynch Fragments'' would not exist. But these sculptures function like African fetishes and masks. They are perceived as functional, as objects to protect, heal, celebrate and accuse.
These works have a great deal to do with transformation. Edwards's understanding of the language of sculpture enables him to take emblems of personal and racial history and shape them into statements of affirmation. The struggle to make sense of the rawest emotional stuff is something just about everyone can relate to. The sculptural intelligence and psychological courage establish a common ground that makes the particular subject matter unforgettable. Like so much first-rate art, the ''Lynch Fragments'' of Mel Edwards are about remembering and overcoming.
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