In contrast to poet and playwright Amiri Baraka’s tongue-in-cheek, ceremonial appeal in his 1966 poem “SOS” (“Calling all black people Calling all black people, man woman child Wherever you are…”), Nina Chanel Abney puts not just some, but all of us on notice. Cutout, hard-edged pictorial elements transmit short, concise messages, tightly packed within the canvas’s rectangular domain and placed cheek-to-jowl alongside a succession of parallel communications, phrasings, and glyph-like codes. An expansive but unmodulated palette, on the order of Goethe’s color wheel equitably distributed across recognizable shapes and uniform fields, disallows the luxury of a driver’s-test-styled-grasp of regulatory signs and warnings. Yes, there’s a profile of a head there and, in other places, articulated and akimbo patterns suggesting human anatomy, but neither do these physical features nor their ocular stares really tell us anything that carries an assumed storyline’s descriptive arch and its moral resolution. Abney’s notice is a brash and amplified shout-out about the limitations of language, the constraints of pigment and painting, and the borderlines of comprehension, especially in this moment of limitless visibility by way of the Internet. When juxtaposed with Abney’s painted universe, the ancient Tower of Babel doesn’t even approach the linguistic boundaries, heteroglossia, and aural interferences of human discourse we experience in the twenty-first-century.
“Preface,” in Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, ed. Marshall N. Price (Durham: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2017).
