Word: lamming
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...hasn't expected to find -- as the viewer does, 69 minutes into the 112-minute film -- that Dil is a man. A gay black man, pining for a gay black British soldier, yet eerily enticing to an Irish heterosexual who now has the convulsive feeling he is on the lam from himself...
...Lam's debts to Picasso raise a certain irony. Starting around 1907, Picasso got a whole repertoire of forms from African art; Lam took some of them -- the shield masks, the displacement and distortion of limbs -- as a means of reconnecting with his own African inheritance. He was not the first "provincial" to discover in Paris a means of using his local identity; he took what he needed (not only from Picasso but also from Max Ernst and much lesser figures like Hans Bellmer, and even from Jean Cocteau's hypermannered / line drawings) to find what he was. Lam...
...things, however, seem unique in Lam's work. One is its pervasive, melancholy tone of dreamy eroticism, metamorphosed into "presences" that would seem monstrous if they weren't essentially benign -- horse-headed women, birdlike deities, masks conflated with breasts but equipped with phallic chins. The second is the persistence of religious motifs that no European artist was likely to grasp but that were of deep significance to Lam -- the symbols of Santeria ceremonies. Why do Lam's women have heads like horses? Not, fundamentally, because of Picasso and Guernica but because in Santeria ceremonies the medium is known...
...Lam was no more a tribal artist than Picasso. But his primitivism came from inside, and part of the originality of his art lies in his effort to take back his gods from the man who, with such momentous consequences for art 30 years earlier, had appropriated them...
...IMAGING: Mark Stelzner (Manager); Gerard Abrahamsen, Lois Rubenstein (Supervisors); Steven Cadicamo, Charlotte Coco, John Dragonetti, Raphael Joa, Kin Wah Lam, Carl Leidig, Linda Parker, Robert Pfleger, Mark P. Polomski, Richard Shaffer, David Spatz, Lorri Stenton, Paul White