Roscoe Hall: Unfinished Business Somewhere Else
By Brett Levine

Grow up at a certain time in America and you got a steady diet of gang-related fiction: S. E. Hinton’s That Was Then, This is Now, Rumble Fish, and The Outsiders; Nicky Cruz’s Run Baby Run; The Cross and the Switchblade. Movies like Grease, with its rival “gangs” busting moves at the dance like it was a shag and frug battle. Curtis Sliwa and New York’s Guardian Angels, protecting New York nightlife. And The Warriors, boppers. Can you dig it?

Fast-forward to today, and in a culture that’s predominantly gripped by fear we’ve got gangs again. But this time it’s the malevolent specter of MS-13. Somehow we’ve traded in M patches and gang colors for tattoos and basketball jerseys, transferred our anxieties from Hunter S. Thompson’s Hells Angels to a nightly barrage of fear mongering t.v. clips and news dispatches. Relevance breeds reticence, and in this case the most insidious part is its transference.

It’s against these backgrounds that Roscoe Hall’s Thank You emerges. Described as a tentative first exploration of how “monsters are made from misunderstood lives,” Hall’s imagery – flowers – forces us to pause and consider how such seemingly innocent imagery can stand as metaphors to map the origins of Los Angeles gang history. Yet Hall tackles these nuances head-on, sharing that the flowers “embody moments of fragile beauty pressed into brutal contexts.”

There’s the nod to cultural multiplicity and complexity in Hall’s Thank You!!!!, a reimagination of George Bonga. Black and Ojibwe, in many ways Bonga stands as an archetype for our collective preconceptions and misunderstandings. Fluent in English, French, and Ojibwe, Bonga moved seamlessly – if not easily – between his many cultures. A single image – seated, formal, three-quarters – serves as Bonga’s photographic legacy. With the addition of a bouquet, Hall propels Bonga from a subject to a protagonist, from someone being seen to someone connecting directly with the present day. He’s a present-day suitor, seeking cultural restitution for our collective past transgressions.

If Thank You!!! is an invitation, Se Acabó – It’s Over – is a conclusion. A burial. A brushing over, a covering over, an end. While the work is packed with meaning, in many ways the work is excruciatingly delicate. White lilies? Beauty and harmony. White gladiolas? Remembrance. If the title is “a final collapse,” the work itself is a brief pause, a moment before tipping over into nothing.

Checked In, Never Out sets the beauty of a flowering bouquet of whites and pinks against Hall’s explorations of something unfathomable that was created here. Imagine mapping that distinction. It’s one we make over and over again, in phrases like “I couldn’t imagine” and “I can’t believe”, as if in some way the very notion of our shared “here” automatically precludes difficult and dangerous things. Of course that’s the key differentiator, the phrase that allows a “here” and “there” or an “us” and “them”, whereas in reality we’re all either Billy Ray Valentine or Louis Winthorpe, and regardless we’re all getting fucked by Mortimer and Randolph Duke. In many ways this realization sits at the center of Thank You. It’s that realization that, think what we may, we’re all one step, one stop, one moment away from being and becoming those people and things we fear most.

Of course, we yearn for hope, which on the surface Hall seems to give in How About Me and You. Yet while we’re searching for potential and possibility in the blossoms and bouquet, he’s sharing stories of discipline, hardness, practice as resistance. There’s a rainbow of color bursting forth from a white ground, packed tight in what looks like a terracotta vase, but in the end the vase is just earth and flowers are moments. And while Hall’s been hearing “what can I make/and what can I hope/it’s getting to the point/where I just can’t cope”, he’s been painting “when I venture
into the courtyard/followed by 52 brothers/bruised, battered and scarred/but hard.” He uses the agency and urgency of pre-Thatcherite Britain to reveal the possibilities living within late ‘80s Public Enemy.

Then, there’s Arrows. Yep, that’s a subtle interpretation of devil horns. And yep, this reads like an overture, a foreword, a preface. An introduction. It’s as if through these flowers Hall’s causing us to give pause to that awkward, uncanny, abject moment where we’re both enticed and repulsed, simultaneously. That’s the real connection here. There’s Hall’s insistent soundtrack that pulses through the brushstrokes, a combo of Nia Archives – an artist, not a chronicle – Husker Dü, The Carpets, “various live records,” and Solange. Add in a list of materials that’s revelatory in its simplicity: a drinks menu basically (that barrio-rare one-gallon Evian, PBRs, Pepino Limón Gatorades), the chronic, acrylic, pastels, charcoal, yam and turmeric pigments, torn sweaters, burlap denim, paper towels, peanut ink- it’s like he’s reminding us to focus on the creativity of necessity and the complexity of the everyday.

And that’s what brings us back to the beginning, to the reminder that in every moment there’s the dangerous potential for transference, for redefining the past, for remaking history. Hall halts this process through the seemingly innocuous presentation of five bouquets, he’s showing horns and logos, throwing signs, taking us to Pico-Union (today home to the El Salvador Community Corridor) and Westlake and Rampart, on a tour of Central LA, asking questions about what it means to be from somewhere and again to simply be somewhere. Really he’s just inviting us to grab some flowers from a street vendor, to sling some arrows, and to ask ourselves about them and he and you and me. And what’s left to say about that? Thank you.