KINDERHOOK, N.Y. — Feedback is what you get when a system’s output is looped through its input, as when Jimi Hendrix, closing out the Woodstock music festival in 1969, used an electric guitar with an overdriven amplifier to turn a performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” into a dizzying tone poem of anguish and destruction.
Though the gesture was received at the time as a protest — of the Vietnam War, of racial inequality, of everything wrong with America — Hendrix, himself a U.S. Army vet, was cagey about his intentions. It would probably be truer to borrow some contemporary art jargon and call what he did to the national anthem “complicating” it. Of course protest was a part of it. But it was the tension between his protest and the song’s usual bombast, which he also captured, that really summed up his historical moment and made the rendition iconic.
If we’re going to make museums genuinely representative — and, more broadly, make progress as a divided and unequal society — we’re going to have to learn to complicate the exhibits and how we talk about them, in the same way.
It’s something Helen Molesworth, the former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, pulls off brilliantly in “Feedback,” a 21-artist knockout of a show she organized for The School, Jack Shainman Gallery’s upstate outpost. Most of the work deals in some way with race, sex, or color, though not all of it. But Molesworth organizes the pieces less by content than by visual rhythm and contrast, creating deeply evocative undertones that subtly connect the works and highlight their nuances while making sure nothing is reduced to any pat political message.
In her introduction to the show, Molesworth mentions the American history she never learned in school. She means the history of violence against African Americans and Native Americans in particular, and Black and Native American history in general. What we do learn, though, are lessons about race and social class that we can spend a lifetime shaking off.
Around the corner Locke opens the conversation by putting the shape of a slave auction block at the center of concentric-square color studies à la Josef Albers, in a series of small acrylics he calls his “Homage to the Auction Block.” Thinking about “color” without reference to race is a luxury not everyone gets in our society. But you don’t have to throw out Albers or his “Homage to the Square” to say so. We can keep it all — and in fact, Modernism will only look sharper if, like Locke, we’re honest about its shadow.
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Read full review at nytimes.com.
