Renee Cox

Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Through November 10

Renee Cox is an artist known for her photographs of nude black women, mostly herself. Last year, she came to mainstream attention when New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called her depiction of the Last Supper, in which she poses naked as Jesus, “disgusting” and threatened to withhold public funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which had exhibited the picture. Critics of the artist, who was born in Jamaica but raised in New York, have called her narcissistic but her supporters argue that she is subverting stereotypes by presenting black and female figures as models of beauty, resilience, and spirituality.

In American Family Cox portrays herself as a highly sexual being who is also the daughter of middle-class parents, the wife of a white investment banker in Manhattan, and the mother of two. In addition to family snapshots and archival pictures of Cox’s parents and the artist as a young girl, there are new images; many of these are printed large-scale while others are smaller in size and, combined with the older photographs, used to form diptychs and triptychs.

Cox, who has a very toned body and tough persona, appears in a black leather corset, a lace garter belt, thigh-high patent leather boots, or stiletto heels. Sometimes she wears nothing at all. There is a dominatrix fantasy, a Nan Goldin-like masturbation series, parodies of Manet’s Olympia and Dejeuner sur l’herbe, and references to her Catholic upbringing, in which a picture of a sweet, young Cox is bracketed by the grown-up version flaunting her bad, fetishistic sexual self.

For all the sex and sexuality there is very little that is sexy here. It’s hard not to see Cox as an exhibitionist. Even in the family snaps, which in many cases are genuinely affecting, Cox poses provocatively, as if she knew they would be exhibition fodder one day. Her calculation deprives her work of much-needed nuance. Still, there are flashes of humor, as in her photograph of her white in-laws wearing kente cloth wraps. Cox is a gutsy woman and if she learns to take herself less seriously more often, her work could get more interesting.




Rebecca Sonkin