by   Reginald C. Woolery        Insofar as "Black Male," organized by the Whitney Museum's associate curator Thelma Golden, raises unsettling questions regarding the convergence of race, gender, sexuality, media representation and the stakes of that deployment in contemporary culture, it is truly an important and urgent project. Showcasing over 30 visual artists and more than 60 film and video makers, this ambitious exhibition brings together works and practices which speak to the subjection of the black male body, both in new art practice and the popular imagination. It is also a significant expansion of "Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710-1940," organized by the late Guy C. McElroy at the Corcoran Museum of Art in 1990.     "Black Male," which has garnered for the Museum one of its largest public relations and audience tallies in years; had seen, in its final days, lines circling around the block. The exhibition, under Director David Ross, seeks a complex synergy between diverse publics, artistic practices and current social debates usually carried out in academic settings. "Black Male" assembles an impressive array of work which appropriates and inverts controversial notions of race and gender defined as "black masculinity." It is a strange intervention which cleverly repositions, if not privileges, contemporary feminist and queer practices within the psyche of the narrowly defined yet widely visible black male.     Is the assumed (white?) hetero-normative logic of spectatorial reception which underpins the show's project of subversion, defamiliarization and misrecognition also its end point? Of the 20-30 persons I spoke with in exit interviews on the last day of "Black Male," the central "negative" criticisms from African-Americans (presumably heterosexual) concerned the flagrant nudity, exposed genitalia and depictions of homosexuality. It seemed that this group of straight blacks felt the show was at least in part "for them," and that someone had failed in their response to what was acknowledged as an important question. To them, righteous folks needed to see images of transcendence, love and family; not the further spectacle of black bodies on display.

From the beginning, the ambivalent positioning of the show's title as "(R)epresentations" of black masculinity as opposed to the conspicuous "(C)onstructions" stance taken by the film/video programs, clearly facilitated uncontrolled responses from a range of participants, particularly among African-Americans, many of whom seemed to confront depictions they would rather have avoided. Can we speculate that this ethnic group's reluctance was but a series of performative denials and misrecognitions? If we follow Judith Butler's reasoning that radical art today is visually subversive, confrontational and disruptive of any identification with traditional binary types, then we would have to answer yes. We need not take up an "accounting" of shifted attitudes or read The New York Times  Arts & Leisure section for confirmation of these disruptions.     Yet, if we consider Jacqueline Rose's thinking, noting the perniciousness of the right wing's efforts to deride marginalized groups and their institutions, then maybe the times have moved beyond a mere deconstruction or oppositional dialectics. "Getting" "Black Male" could converge, not solely around an ability to identify a unitary field of stereotypes, commodifications and contortions, but also on a multivocal critique of the why and for whom. Is it enough for curators today to use art objects as a vehicle when the force of their presentation relies so heavily on outside readings? How might we address, probe deeper or resolve the now "disturbed" cultural political questions without playing into conservative agendas which pathologize the work of artists and curators of color in galleries and museums as essentially non-aesthetic debates? Nor fall into a heterosexist critique which seems to only arise when those laying down the law are women and queers?