img_above: Sam Watkins Park, Tea Cake, 2019, oil on canvas.

WHERE ARE ALL THE YOUNG THUGS OF THE GALLERY?

Written by MARINA MAY
MARCH 14, 2020

An embrace of brevity. A return to satire. An embodiment of what it means to be young, be human, right now in this moment. How ridiculous? 

“In all reality I would love to be a non-narrative painter,” Watkins says. “But in all honesty, I find that to be difficult because it requires a lot of discourse to justify sometimes. For me personally, I would like the ability to be kind of silly.” 

Watkins chuckles.

“You don’t have to like me because I’m talking about race — or not talking about it. Part of being glib and being superficial and flashy and hyperbolic is that some people might think it’s dumb, and that’s fine with me. But it should still show up, and if it shows up then you’re doing your job. Making sure the whole spectrum is being portrayed and there isn’t an echo chamber of narratives, then I think you’re making progress in true equity. Where we can embrace people and it doesn’t have to be monumental, but [the work] can be fun and still be part of the culture.”

Imbued with intimacy and vulnerability of subject matter, his work is lighthearted and comical (in the most nonchalant way) while simultaneously alluding to the most critical and hurtful aspects of “identity politics,” the loaded buzzword of the past few years of discourse centered around race, gender, and sexuality.

He writes of his show “Black Wolf” at Cunst Gallery (where I initially encountered his work), that he is satirizing “race narratives within the art world” and “baiting well intentioned white liberals to read sincerity into the composition of the work.”

He continues to say, “The work itself however is a parody of black narratives that tend to oversaturate gallery conversations on racial inclusion. Inspired by traditional Korean mask making, the paintings overstylize facial expressions making their emotional content read somewhat hollow and insincere while the hypersaturated color scheme winks to the viewer that this work really is about the superficiality of image making.” 

His color palette shouldn’t make sense. The compositions are overwhelmingly surreal. Try to decipher the text and you can’t. It’s an equation that doesn’t want to add up but you’re engaged. You didn’t know what coveffe meant culturally and you still don’t know, and what does that have to do with your modem or a cactus? What does it say that we find it beautiful when it should be repulsing?

Watkins incorporates his direct, personal experiences of feeling and being othered but his work encapsulates, satirizes and rejects those classifications. They are first and foremost paintings and he is first and foremost a painter. And a damn good painter at that.

Through the combination of text and representational painting, Watkins puts his consciousness on display, but he does not provide a decipherable narrative. At play is the dichotomy of serious nonsense, which fills the work with buzzing, palpable, unresolved tension. Again, Watkins deals with the ambiguity of an identity that lies at the intersection of two cultures. This work, he says, mirrors his own experience as a biracial man, as he reflects on experiences that straddle the complexities of inclusion, exclusion, and prejudice disguised as “well intentioned sentiments” (re: conversations in his high school cafeteria). 

His paintings transcend absurdity because they are, at their core, honest in their intentional confusion, reflecting a personal noisy neurosis, that could perhaps be translated to at the general anxiety and hesitation of a generation in flux.  He’s challenging the viewer to dissect something that can’t really be dissected. Any imbued meaning on the work simply reflect’s the viewers own interpretation of how the work fits into “a larger narrative.” 

And for Watkins, the point is that it doesn’t. Or if it does, he doesn’t care.

“I want to be kind of seditious…,” Watkins continues, “I don’t want to be loved by the gallery structure or to be a gallery darling, especially as a black artist. I want people… I want white people to be okay with not liking me, or not feel that you have to, because I’m frivolous as a painter, and I want to be. As a black artist I feel that’s important to have that be represented. Not necessarily portray black art that talks about the struggle, but also be frivolous, superficial and glib.”

Take his painting “Rachet.” At first glance, I thought I was looking at some sort of ultra-vivd, cavernous space cafe from The Fifth Element. In actuality, I wasn’t too far off. Watkins is referencing a Chinese food court his visited while traveling with his wife, fellow painter Song Watkins Park.

The overall effect? “It’s visual hyperbole, like bathroom graffiti. It’s not necessarily a pun, but it’s clearly not serious. It’s comedy,” Watkins explains.

Watkins crafts a space contained by ascending, centripetal rings of color, noting the expanse of the space while collapsing it. He depicts three figures. Two (and a half, I guess?) are seated at gingham-clothed table, center of the composition. Another stands behind a counter. From his mouth, Watkins includes crudely scrawled dialogue. A simple “YUP.” He seems dumb, aloof, or over it — probably a combination of all three — with his green skin and blank eyes, staring at the other seated figures from afar. The central figure, a dual headed hybrid human, cloaked in black with red faces, expresses two emotions. One passive, mouth slightly agape, the other an obvious, crude frown. They ask “AM I?” To the right, a figure in profile, with grey skin, a blue jersey, a hat and Nikes, holds a bottle while saying “HELL NAW.” A bottle of red liquid spills across the table; nobody seems to care. 

The vacancy of expression dips into the void of the uncanny valley. Watkins says this stylization is informed by the tradition of South Korean mask making, which prioritizes both performance and the surreal.

Above the figures in the same scrawling font, — reminiscent of those Beevis and Butthead, hardcore, cut scenes — are tangled masses of text. For Watkins, text is a crucial component of his practice. He intentionally strips phrases from a coherent context or narrative. These musings are derived primarily from pop culture and many reference, as Watkins states, implied “black narratives.” He is thinking about hip hop, movies, and T.V. (including “Tony Soprano,” “Dayum,” “Don’t Trip,” “Bump Bump,” “Anxiety,” “Murder Murder,” “We are Peaceful”), alongside statements more universal colloquialisms (like “LOL”).

“A lot of the phrases stem from my desire to see black pop culture exist in a gallery format. For example, there’s references to Tommy Wright III, who was this underground 90’s hip hop artist. There’s references to silly stuff like “skrrt skirt,” and it’s juxtaposed in a very hyperbolic way.” 

To place it in the analytical framework of categorizing the two dominate types of hip hop, a single painting by Watkins oscillates between “conscious” and “ignorant.” And for Watkins, that duality, that spectrum of representation, is by and large lacking from the institutional and gallery framework.

“Most of the people in a gallery setting are pretty progressive, like if you say ‘Black Lives Matter’ people will agree, but if you say Young Thug is the Picasso of our generation, you might ruffle some feathers and now you’re stepping on tradition, and you’re stepping on a culture and an institution,” Watkins says. 

“There’s a lot of great black artists that I admire, like Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, that very eloquently do that. They paint themselves into the lexicon of history in the way that it should have always been. But I’d rather see a new chapter written all together and just accept it for what it is, without having to fit it into the larger cannon of what’s come before. And for every Kehinde Wiley, where are the Young Thugs of the gallery, ya know? I don’t see them. Where is that culture living in art?”

“That fun culture behind all of it, the superficial, the flossing and flexing, that has contributed to the spread of the culture. People love to dance, you know? People love the rags to riches mentality, anybody wearing gold. You don’t have to overthink it. It’s so beautifully distilled, in its attractiveness. From the music to the slang — it’s the brevity. Kendrick is one of my favorite artists of all time, but there’s another part of our culture that isn’t represented in the gallery structure, especially in the midwest.”

When I first met Watkins at the opening of his exhibition at Cunst Gallery, it was in front of “Rachet.” I can’t remember the conversation, and had to later apologize for that, because the majority of my attention was diverted to looking at the work. I guess you could call it “Ratchet Vision.” Due to the large scale and exuberant execution, engagement felt unavoidable. In all honesty, I was overwhelmed, comforted, and amused. The work felt like an examination of my psyche and a celebration of emotional complexity — that we don’t have to be one singular thing at any given moment. We can be all things at once, continually processing all of the nonsense swirling around us, taking bits and pieces of narratives and stringing them together to create an identity that’s both true and false. That we can attempt to reconcile the disparate factions of our identity— glib, poignant, superficial, insightful, deliberate, irreverent — as just what we are in the present. In “Rachet,” I felt less alone.

You can see more work from Sam Watkins Park at artistsamwatkins.com and on IG @srwatkins777,