The Artist As Social Critic: Lorna Simpson's Polaroid Art Asks The Viewer To Ponder

Art review

"Lorna Simpson: For the Sake of the Viewer," Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, through Feb. 6. Museum hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday evenings until 9 p.m. Closed Monday. $3.50 adults; $2 students and seniors; children, UW students, faculty and staff free. 543-2280.

Much new art today scolds and chastises viewers for past wrongs and inadvertent attitudes toward minority groups, trying to make us more aware and sensitive to the broad-based racial, sexual and cultural diversity of our society. At 33, Lorna Simpson is the queen of the artists as social critics.

What is surprising is how innocent and bland her art at first appears in contrast to much that has been written about it. Even more surprising is her forthright desire to communicate with everyone.

With huge framed Polaroid photographs of unidentified African-American men and women (she uses friends as models but never shows their faces), accompanied by sign-shop plastic captions, much of Simpson's art seems meant to be read and pondered, like comic strips or Sunday school lessons. Subjects such as rape, racial stereotypes, immigrants' accents, body language, job discrimination and reproductive rights are all treated in individual series of black-and-white and color photographs. These are loaded topics, but Lorna Simpson's presentation is both elegant and oblique.

When one chooses to make culturally specific art, it's hard to claim a more universal audience. But Simpson stressed in an interview that her issues do not only affect blacks. That may be, but "Twenty Questions" and "Screens" specifically address prejudice against minority children and young adults looking for employment.

A pro-choice piece like "Prefer, Refuse, Decide" places clear labeled circles over dressed women's abdomens and does make a broader point, as does "Self Possessions," which inscribes "nine-tenths of the law" on the plastic sheet placed over a photograph of a woman.

Viewers will want to solemnly approach each set of photographs, carefully read the captions, and consider the relation between image and text. Still there? This art experience is not pure unadulterated pleasure but, instead, becomes similar to enduring a mildly hortatory lecture.

Among the largest sets, "Guarded Conditions" repeats the phrases "sex attacks/skin attacks" 11 times beneath six triple-panel photographs of a standing African-American woman with her back to us. We get the point, I guess.

Commanding the central gallery's prominent wall, "Gestures and Reenactments" poses young black men in various ways to point up, Simpson explains, how "their body gestures are often misinterpreted as threatening."

"Lorna Simpson: For the Sake of the Viewer" seems curiously mistitled. It is a hard pill to swallow. Really appreciating it involves sharing certain assumptions about "culturally conditioned representations of gender and race," the victimhood of black men and women, and, in Simpson's view, the shame and guilt due the majority white culture for perpetrating such attitudes.

There is little visual splendor or material appeal here but lots to inspire talk - and argument - over an espresso later. That's what much contemporary art aspires to these days: provocative discussions. In that sense, Lorna Simpson has not disappointed anyone.