Objects and Identities: An Interview with Fred Wilson

• Published in: ASAP journal 2017, Vol.2 (1), p.3-28
• Main Authors: Wilson, Fred, Sprecher, Jered, Elias, Amy J
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Art exhibits; Art galleries & museums; Artists; Awards & honors; Careers; Contemporary literature; Conversation; Cultural identity; Drama; English literature; Natural history; Race; Slavery; Society; Violence
• ISSN: 2381-4705; 2381-4721; 2381-4721
• DOI: 10.1353/asa.2017.0001

Wilson is widely recognized for this kind of work within cultural institutions such as the Maryland Historical Society (the site of his 1993 Mining the Museum exhibition), the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College (the site of his 2006 exhibition So Much Trouble in the World–Believe It or Not!), and the Institute of Jamaica Gallery (the site of his 2007 installation An Account of a Voyage to the Island Jamaica with the Un-Natural History of That Place).5 In Mining the Museum, for example, an installation titled “Cabinet Making 1820-1910” displayed a tableau consisting of an actual wooden whipping post (last used in 1838 and long consigned to storage in the Historical Society) ringed by a mix of beautiful, well crafted Victorian armchairs. [...]often simultaneously, Wilson has pursued a broad spectrum of original artistic projects beyond the museological that range through paintings on cotton canvas, metal etchings, video installations, and sculpture. Since the early 2000s, for instance, Wilson has worked with glassmakers to produce the animate liquid forms of Drip, Drop, Plop (2001)—a series of enigmatic, shiny, black bulb-and-teardrop forms, some with cartoon-like eyes—as well as public arts projects. At the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, Wilson’s Speak of Me As I Am referenced Shakespeare’s Othello in the work’s title but also through a video of the play, screened backwards, and in a specially designed black chandelier from the Murano glass studio meant to embody the presence of Othello as an overdetermined, raced, character. [...]Othello becomes an index of the contradictory historical presence and erasure of “Moors” in Venice as well as the current status of Africans in Italian cities. [...]Othello, as a figure of both masculine power and racial disenfranchisement, was drawn into a conversation about the modes of racial and ethnic representation that operate in post-millennial global culture, for Wilson’s mixed-media installation also included a “department store” window display that featured dark-skinned mannequins sporting fashions from Venetian Renaissance paintings; a live Senegalese vendor from Venice who, stationed just outside the Pavilion, displaying faux designer bags as if for sale to passing spectators; decorative Moorish statues skillfully reengineered to carry objects—as would slave labor—or to emit light; and the assemblage Safe House II, a large, black, spherical earthenware sculpture mimicking a Venetian storage vessel and freestanding