Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Through Jan. 8

There’s a tree growing in Brooklyn, said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. The centerpiece of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sanford Biggers midcareer retrospective is the “knockout installation” Blossom, from 2007, in which a massive tree busts through the center of a grand piano. “Violated and broken,” the unmanned piano occasionally begins playing “Strange Fruit,” the haunting 1930s tune about Southern lynchings. Throughout “Sweet Funk,” Biggers, a 41-year-old Los Angeles native, plays again and again with the tree and piano motifs. Bittersweet the Fruit (1998), which alludes to that year’s torture and murder of James Byrd, in Jasper, Texas, features a video of a black man playing a piano in the forest before the camera cuts abruptly to a shot of the man’s bare feet hovering above the keys. Biggers’s attempt to “poke old wounds” is often too heavy-handed. Nothing else in the show comes close to matching the “ambiguous intensity” of Blossom.

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Yet even Blossom is weakened by Biggers’s habit of overprogramming his work conceptually, said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. The simple addition of “Strange Fruit” undercuts the work’s allusive visual power “with the flattening literalism of a one-liner.” Still, there is evidence throughout this exhibit that Biggers possesses “remarkable talent for visual metaphor.” In Cheshire (2008), he uses a third favorite motif: a disembodied grin, fashioned in this case as a flashing, billboard-size sign. The image alludes to Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat and to minstrelsy’s false smiles, thus hinting of some dark secret meaning. At least there’s a quiet mischievousness to the image, though, which suggests that Biggers may be loosening up. “His best may be yet to come.”