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Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Brooklyn Museum; Opens Sep. 15 2023; Closes Jan. 14, 2024

Introduction

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons has a new exhibition going on from September 15, 2023 to January 14, 2024. This show is very much recommended.

Campos-Pons is a refugee from Cuba, where cultures and religions such as the Caribbean Santeria, as well as political dissenters such as artists were repressed. Later in their career, Campos-Pons uses her heritage and knowledge of history to bear witness, testimony, and – in the title of the exhibit – behold the problems of police brutality in the United States. This essay shall consider some ideas in Campos-Pons’ work. Generally speaking, I am going to go over psychological priming; Macbeth problems; Marxist Fetishism; post-proto-Cubism; and empty or full ideologies; and I promise I will digress as much as possible. 

Warhol, Noguchi, …and Campos-Pons?

Once or twice after seeing Warhol’s “Brillo” (1964) sculpture piece, I have done the dishes. And it’s this wonderful epiphany that I saw the art piece, and now I’m living it. Not to be outdone, at least from my point of view, I like to think Isamu Noguchi’s coffee table from Herman Miller is a similar art-in-real-life experience. The cool part is Noguchi planned on his coffee table becoming as ubiquitous as Warhol’s Brillo pads already were. I have tripped on a Noguchi table at a corporate office setting after seeing Noguchi’s works at the New York City museums, and doing so is more surreal than the weirdest Salvador Dali. Tripping on a Noguchi table feels like a weird insider’s laugh. Hey Noguchi is in the office again. 

Bringing it all back home:

About a week after going to the Campos-Pons show, I saw cloth ghosts in choreography dangling from a tree, as Halloween decorations. This is close enough to Campos-Pons ’s video of Santeria rituals to give me pause. That’s because I didn’t pay a ton of attention to the scene when I watched it. And I didn’t expect the artist to be proxy for myself. Finally, albeit non-trivial at the very least, the subject matter of ghosts having any extracurricular breach outside of the museum is woo-woo, for sure. Campos-Pons got into my head, and with humor and humility I recognize that. 

Macbeth Problems

That psychological breach – going back and forth from one’s personal mental experience to her experienced physical life – is good enough for a loose transition to Macbeth problems in art. If you will remember, the play “Macbeth” tells the story of the eponymous character, who misinterprets criticisms and kills his critics, instead of implementing feedback and synergy like the Northface fleece-vested CEOs of the present day. Macbeth does not understand the feedback – killing his critics for backtalk – and so confuses the causality of symbols. He never knows when the sign is going to leap off of the page, breach his mind, and take over. And this explanation thus sort of defends why theater workers are forbidden from saying the word Macbeth. The taboo not to say Macbeth is a fear of the curse of Macbeth, which is to confuse symbols and criticism, and risk the breach of psyche. Macbeth’s world is a nice place to look at, but you wouldn’t want to live there. 

Macbeth Problems as Goal

Macbeth Problems are a tragedy for our titular hero, however, in art – sometimes in some examples – leaping off of the page and modifying a viewer’s behavior is the point. In a more friendly expression, you might say inspiration. Campos-Pons does this in very many ways. The artist often uses diptychs and triptychs, of separately framed pieces, in polaroid photos, and elsewhere as paintings, or even sculptures. Subjects often break the boundaries of the frame, as if the cropping missed more of the story. This head-to-head nature of artist versus viewer is a lively discussion. Nevertheless, there is no referee here. The staring contest between maestra and audience is for each individual’s conscience, and theirs alone. 

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (born Matanzas, Cuba, 1959). Freedom Trap, 2013. Polaroid Polacolor Pro photograph, 24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco. (C) Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. (Photo: courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris).

Post-Proto-Cubism

In the 1920’s Picasso and his partner Braques invented Cubism, which actually was a formal system of Post-Impressionist painting. The two artists wanted to render objects from more than one perspective, all within one two-dimensional painting. Cool! Somewhere along the way, Picasso started imitating African masks in his works, throwing Cubist technical doctrine out of the window. When Campos-Pons uses African Yoruba culture and religion, and Caribbean Santeria religion, she has more authenticity than Picasso. One jokingly imagines an art-loving tourist going to Africa, and wondering how these people all bought Picasso originals. Picasso, Modigliani, and the Cubists stylistically stole what Campos-Pons is in by social and historical matter of fact. 

Subjective-Objective; Ideologies

IF,

1. Campos-Pons discusses subjectivity as feelings, individual experiences, losses, and pains;
2. AND IF, Campos-Pons considers objectivity as facts that exist beyond experience;

THEN, the artist flips back and forth between these two quite a bit, often within the same work. These ceremonies are intimate and private because yes, partly people would not understand a Santeria or Yoruba ritual. But engaging the symbols as high art, and staging them as to-be-photographed, to-be-viewed as high art objects, creates a critical distance and identifies these objects as holy, or possibly holy for the agnostics out there. 

Let’s Play Subjective-Objective

Many of Campos-Pons’s themes and ideas about the subjective-objective dialectic appear in this artist’s lament for Breonna Taylor. The piece is framed as one object, cropped as a triptych, as a way to show objectivity. However, the middle painting abstracts the hyperrealistic paintings on its flanks, and reveals instead black holes, which in many cultures is a reference to the All-Seeing Eye; the objectivity of human awareness as condition for possibility in the first place, or something like that. The painting is realistic flowers, which is objective, with an abstract painting in the middle, which is subjective, and that subjective abstraction includes the symbol for the all seeing eye, which is a cross cultural symbol of objectivity.

Color 

Campos-Pons is an absolute supervillain about color. Color for Campos-Pons is not separate from the works, and yet neither is color the dominant theme of the works. Color is not the first or only scene stealer. But as long as we are here, take a look at Campos-Pons in red, across materials in similar but not identical shades of crimson. Or take a look at the green of the flowers in “The Calling,” or the saffron orange in Campos-Pons homage to Breonna Taylor. The eyes on Campos-Pons catch these views of the sea, and their muted pastels are so very pretty. At any time, the vast material single colors can be anxiously warning terror – Campos-Pons holds wooden slave ships in one piece – or the calming serenity of an infinite blue ocean. 

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (born Matanzas, Cuba, 1959), Red Composition (detail), from the series Los Caminos (The Path), 1997. Triptych of Polaroid Pro photographs, framed: approx 37 x 29 in. (94 x 73.7 cm) approx. 37 x 87 in (94 x 221 cm) overall. Collection of Wendi Norris. (C) Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. (Photo: courtesy of the artist).

Symbolism Charged Up; Immanence

In his dialogue, “On Free Choice of the Will,” Saint Augustine said, “If you do not believe, you will not understand.” He was talking about free will, but I think there are obvious ways in which belief is necessary to interact with the world. I may not believe in Santa Klaus, but there is a pragmatic consequence when I talk to a man dressed as the holiday clown. Slavoj Zizek often remarks, as in his “Pervert’s Guide to Ideology,” there are many corporate slogans and promises that do not hold water, are merely empty husks for making money. That metaphysical or ontological emptiness does not make their pragmatic effects less real. Asking how much belief is required for any given action is not just a silly joke, but an important defensive boundary for a person against corporate greed. 

The flip side of this is immanence, that instead of an action at a distance prayer stone, maybe it’s just a construction hammer – a symbol, sure, but also something I can grab and hit a nail with during a job. Likewise, consider a symbol with its own legs, that needs neither faith nor oblation. That’s easy – that this shit is so very real that it has nothing to do with me. Are we back at the Kantian Sublime yet? 

Art Critics Draw Conclusions, Too

Hegel warns against treating knowledge as some final heavenly destination, but also warns against using knowledge merely as an instrument to get to something else. If the Kantian project sequestered appearances away from true reality; then Hegel agreed and merely added that we are always getting better, or at least a little bit more objective. In line with sentiments from the last paragraph, there is a certain sense in which if you do not believe, you will not understand the art and rituals of Campos-Pons. And again – regardless – an immanent deity would not need any prayers from anyone, or any beliefs whatsoever. Evil doers: watch your back.