"Beyond Decorum: The Photography of Ike Ude "
2001-07-28 until 2001-10-21
Sert Gallery, Harvard University Art Museums
Cambridge, MA, USA United States of America

Nigerian-born Iké Udé has been living in New York City since 1982, but first received critical attention in the mid-1990s as a result of participation in a number of highly acclaimed international exhibitions. This attention was also an acknowledgment of Udé’s impact on an active circle of New York artists during the 1980s, when his interest in style, fashion, and media led to his founding of the magazine aRude. Treating the magazine as a medium in its own right, Udé played multiple roles in its production.

Udé’s art insists that, while the arts have played a key role in the politics of visual culture and representation, media and fashion are increasingly defining visual culture. His photography is infused with critical references to fashion and the media, and he investigates fashion photography as a distinct type of performance documentation. His send-ups of stock fashion poses and sexual stereotypes undermine the tenuous balance between perception and reality that fashion features and ads work so hard to achieve.

Beyond Decorum: The Photography of Ike Udé is part of a larger project titled Beyond Decorum, in which worn shoes, coats, and pressed shirts displaying businesslike ties are posed as male and female surrogates. Borrowing a notion from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who observed that a wardrobe’s inner space is an intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody, Udé creates a charged space for a dialogue of identities. Enshrined in department store cases and mirrored by companion photographs, the clothing is intended to appeal to our consumer mentality to construct identity through outward appearance and gives new resonance to Barbara Kruger’s aphorism, I shop, therefore I am.

The exhibition has been curated by Lauri Firstenberg and was organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine.

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