They slump as only something made of clay can do. It’s like they’ve been sitting around for a long time, and in the meantime, gravity has had its way with them. Often, as with the typewriter, his chosen objects are technologically obsolete. #Woody de othello tvHe’s also made twisted-up faucets, caved-in air conditioners, a little TV with a permanently blank screen. Oration (2018) recalls one of Arneson’s best-known sculptures, a typewriter with red-tipped fingers for keys in Othello’s version, the keys are normal but a bright-red page lolls out of the machine like a tongue. Like the artists of the original movement-Robert Arneson preeminent among them-Othello gives pride of place to humdrum artifacts, finding in them a way to expose the “psychopathy” (his word) of the everyday. When I spoke to him this past April, he reeled off a roll call of local greats who’d made an impact on him, including the Bay Area figurative painters, ceramists like Viola Frey and Arthur Gonzales, as well as Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, and other practitioners of the street art–inflected Mission School style.īut Funk is the most obvious influence. He has since become enamored of California art history. (It took its name from Black jazz musicians’ slang, so Othello’s involvement in it is a knowing reappropriation.) Funk flourished in Northern California during the 1960s and ’70s, and Othello inherited the legacy after moving from his home state of Florida to Oakland (he received his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017). There’s another, more recent ceramic backdrop to Othello’s work: the Funk movement, a down-and-dirty, sad-sack counterpart to East Coast Pop. The effect is to suggest some form of erasure-a persistent theme in African American culture, from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man to Simone Leigh’s Brick House, a commanding figure with conspicuously absent eyes (installed on the High Line in Manhattan in 2019, and now on permanent view in Philadelphia, on the University of Pennsylvania campus). Facial features are conspicuous by their absence in these works, but they are “jug-eared,” clearly signifying a personage. In a few cases, the reference is more head- on, as in Blank Faced (2020) and the earlier Faceless Face Jug (2016). Often, they feature spouts and handle-like appendages. They are always part pot,with an overall squat shape. Othello’s figures refer explicitly to face-jug typology. But it seems safe to say that, like the blues, they were a way for makers to work through the reality of their surroundings: acknowledging, transforming, and transcending all at once. (Scholars have pointed to nkisi-ritual figures and containers made among Kongo peoples-as probable antecedents.) Really, we can only guess at the intentions that lie behind these powerful ceramics, and the significance they may have had in their communities. They may well represent ideas transplanted from Central Africa. These vessels, expressively embellished with eyes, noses, and toothy mouths all rendered in coiled clay, were first made in the early 1860s by enslaved Black potters in and around Edgefield, South Carolina. The blues had a correlate in ceramics long before Othello came along, in the form of African American–made face jugs. (As Crouch has also observed, “you play the blues to rid yourself of the blues.” To which we might add: and when you’re done, you play the blues again.) He’s found a way to deal with sorrow, letting it in without giving in. This music is the wellspring for so much in American culture-critic Stanley Crouch once described it, perfectly, as “the sound and the repository the nation’s sense of tragic recognition.” The way that great blues singers dismantle themselves in public, and are all the stronger for it their improvisational methodology, at once supremely skilled and hanging out there, loose their ability to work through a painful subject, rather than around it: all these traits are found Othello’s work. We can begin with the blues, surely the most important creative context for these works. They were indeed made at a heartbreaking time, but they also have a lot more going on: other aspects, equally present. The same goes for Othello’s heartbreaking sculptures.
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