Artist Iké Udé maintains a critical fascination with style, fashion, and media. In his recently published Style File (Collins Design, 2008) he pays homage to fifty-five individuals with impeccable, inimitable style. Conversely, his current show at Stux Gallery dissects the Paris Hilton media blitz via buoyantly colored collages. With almost two hundred photographs, several critical essays, and an interview with the artist, Beyond Decorum: The Photography of Iké Udé offers further insight into his work.
Performing Self-Portraits: Cover Girl
In the "Cover Girl," "Celluloid Frames," and "He" series, Udé takes pictures of himself in various fantastical guises. The glossy magazine covers of Newsweek, Cigar Aficionado, Vibe and other big publications are all emblazoned with a heavily made-up Udé who is never the same character twice. The artist also adds his own headlines: the cover of Rolling Stone proclaims, "Little Richard: Elvis Stole my Crown," and Vogue says, "The New MC on the Rap Scene is a Boy Waif."
With each cover, the associations that the viewer has with the magazine, the image Udé has chosen, and the headlines he has written work together to playfully make powerful, biting statements. Take the cover of Town & Country, with the artist wearing tribal face paint, a tweed jacket, a crisp oxford, and an ascot. The headlines read, "The Noble Savage is Dead," "What is Art? Experts Disagree" and "Ex-President Admits to Sodomy."
Performing More Identities: Celluloid Frames and He
"Celluloid Frames" are posters for imagined films, again with Udé setting up scenes and acting. The Regarded Self features two images of the artist together, as a couple: a man in dark suit and a woman in an elegant kimono-like wrap. The poster for The Rebel Genius is a close-up portrait with a drawn diagram of his brain, its sections telling who will be comped to the film. Negritude writer Aimé Césaire and Pharaoh Ramses II are let in free. Post-structuralist Jacques Derrida gets a discount. The Bell Curve receives a no admission.
For the "He" series Iké Udé strips away all scenery and places the portraits on white backdrops. He wears the same theatrical make-up in each shot: fuschia lipstick, heavy blush accentuated by a white stripe above it, thickly painted eyebrows. Both Kabuki theater and geishas come to mind. Whether the artist is in a long, austere pin-striped jacket or furry chaps, gesture and persona are especially important here.
Africa: Uli and Use of Evidence
Iké Udé's "Uli" photographs of abstract designs painted on female bodies directly reference the Ibo people's traditional practice of using uli plants to decorate young women. The black-and-white photos are strikingly formal. "Use of Evidence" feels more like a collaged archive of African imagery: a sweeping market scene, portraits of important cultural figures, and a street shot of Iké Udé as a young man in which he is the epitome of elegance.
New York International Magazine aRUDE
Included are some covers from Udé's own magazine, aRUDE, which he has been publishing since 1995. Described as "style, art, fashion, culture, scenes and beyond," the monthly takes a cutting-edge, intellectual approach to the world of fashion. The covers reflect this. On one sits a figure in a suit, his head totally obliterated by what looks to be a red dot of spray paint. Another is heavily out of focus, almost forcing the viewer into a daydream state.
Beyond Decorum: The Photography of Iké Udé was published in conjunction with a show at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art, and the book includes critical essays and a conversation between Udé and Okwui Enwezor. In Iké Udé's own essay, "Magnificent Futility," he is at his clear-headed, provocative best. He discusses slippery identities and the pointlessness of dichotomies, the importance of style, and physical contact in Africa, all of which are apparent in his photographs. Beyond Decorum is a thoughtful retrospective of Iké Udé's work, in book form.
Beyond Decorum: The Photography of Iké Udé, edited by Mark H. C. Bessire and Lauri Firstenberg. MIT Press, 2000. ISBN: 0262522802
Read more about Iké Udé at the Art Books blog.
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