MASUD OLUFANI – On Race, Memory and Rememberance

POETICS OF THE DISEMBODIED at MOCA GA

Masud Olufani is a gifted contemporary artist.  He is a black, tall, and large man.  His work on race is provocative on so many levels it is difficult to explain it.  As a white woman, his installation with sardine cans, photograph, and etchings, showed me how it felt to be a black man in America.

A Sentiment by Masud Olufani, 2015. Forged steel, resin, rope, pillow, paint panel sardine cans, photograph, paint.

This is a large installation and I did not want to distort it by using a wide angle lens.  When you first look at it what you notice is the sardine cans, and the photograph.  You puzzle out what the meaning is.  Then you realize, these are all drawings of black men, inside these tight, confining sardine cans.  Their essence, their lives are constrained by these tin cans.

Close up of work inside the sardine cans. Masud Olufani 2015

More of the sardine tins. Masud Olufani 2015

As I continued to look at it, I realized each man was a different man.  Each man was a different age.  Each man had different characteristics.  But they all had numbers, they were all confined into these sardine tins, they were all viewed the same:  A BLACK MAN, a singular description.

It is a stunning piece of work.  In that second when I put all the parts together, I realized how it must feel to be a black man.  To know you would not be seen as an individual, as a person but as the same black man.  It caught me so by the surprise, that he could give me that perception, that insight, that feeling, without being in my face, without being polarizing but instead being socially aware and gifted enough to create this experience.  His work has a subtly that is hard to describe, and this creates a unique paradox, subtle and yet not subtle, but not political art, which is always polarizing and hammering home a single note.

Then I moved onto the photograph in the middle.  I pondered it for a long time.  I got that the red blocks were the spaces these men might have taken but did not, they were blocked out as it were.  After thinking about the photograph, then I looked at sardine tins again and pondered on the numbers.  Prison numbers? Poverty numbers?  Unemployment numbers?

He offers no explanation of the work,  just the title.  He is confident enough in his talent, that his work either engages you or it does not.  He does not try to explain it to you.  A thing I also do.

As an artist, once you create the work and you and the work have had your way with each other, then you let it go.  I never explain my work.  He does not explain his work.  I like that about him.  He gives you, the viewer, the right to experience his work, on your own, in your own experience, in your own context.  I have no idea if what I got out of this installation was what he intended, but I got so much out of, that that point is moot.  Once the artist creates a work, then the work and viewer have their own moment, independent of the creator.  The work and the viewer speak to each other and create their own dialogue and their own experience.  This is the real essence of at and this man is gifted at it.

MOCA GA has a whole room of his latest work.  Each piece is thought provoking, spiritual in a way that can’t quite be described and so very interesting.  I have gone back now three times to see his work.

The only text he allowed is the following:

“Poetics of the Disembodied is a mixed media sculptural installation of several new works that seek to investigate the imprint of ancestral memory through the mediums of visual form, language, and performance.  The title refers to a quality of spirit that exists beyond the frame of the corporeal where time and timelessness intersect.  Drawing on personal and collective narrative (real and imagined, past and present) as source material, the work attempts to suture what was to what is and what can be.  The abutment of disparate materials – readymade and fabricated – invested with memory and meaning refers to the transgenerational registry of the lived experience on the individual and the collective while the subtle allusions to the Sacred point towards the soul’s aspiration for transcendence.  The thematic element of race, class, social stratification, and isolation serve as points of departure where the limited resources of the body give way to the limitless resources of the spirit.”

Over the next few months, I will revisit Masud’s work in this show.  Each piece needs its own blog.

MOCA GA supports Masud Olufani which is a gift to us all.  He is one of this year’s recipients of the &15,000 stipend to create new work.