The Brooklyn Rail

The global flow of goods owes much to the shipping container, whose mid-century advent made maritime business quicker, cheaper, and more efficient. It rendered dock workers increasingly redundant and increased the total amount of cargo moving globally. Currently, an estimated eleven billion tons of goods— “goods” being a catch-all that, like a closed box, elides the nuances of content and context—are transported via shipping container each year. The figure of the container, a symbol of global capitalism’s flows, violence, and erasures, looms large in Post Atlantic, a show of eleven paintings and five collages by Bay Area artist and septuagenarian Dewey Crumpler. Crumpler, an inhabitant of the port city of Oakland, has formally and thematically parsed these boxes in work across media over the past three decades; Post Atlantic zeroes in on examples from the past nine years.

Across the works on view, containers frequently poke holes in their own functionality, perhaps as a means of undercutting capitalism’s productivist mandates. Two paintings hung side by side depict containers that spill their contents—their guts—in strange, unpeopled landscapes. In Green Bananas (2017), a partially collapsed yellow box appears out of place in a barren expanse populated by errant arthropods and amphibians that move amongst scattered cargo: bunches of green bananas—the world’s most exported fruit, which is inextricably tied to colonialism, imperialism, worker exploitation, and ecological devastation—extending out to the horizon line. White Shoes, Red Field (2016) skews more eco-horrific, taking capitalism to its natural conclusion. In the work, shipping containers, marooned upon red sands, have expelled a slew of identical sneakers that form a kind of intertidal home for starfish. The red landscape has tinted the white shoes the color of meat; the sneakers’ tongues occasionally resemble human tongues, their collars contorted to look like howling mouths.

This is not Crumpler’s first brush with anthropomorphic apparel. His grey “hoodie” figures, begun in the 1990s, are inspired by empty hooded sweatshirts that appear embodied; their liminality has a cosmic quality, enabling them to travel through time and space. In the painting Crows (2023), several hoodies make an appearance, peering out from amid sagging shipping containers in a landfill teeming with evidence of our relentless consumption: Amazon boxes, Apple e-waste, tires. Prior to his involvement with the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s, Crumpler was mainly exposed to art through museums and curricula that centered Western art history, and his work often includes nods to that history. The references to fine art in Crows, including partly concealed stacks of canvases and Warholian Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, position the art object as another branded good buoyed by globalized currents, or perhaps a special kind of container for the storage, transfer, and extraction of capital (cultural and otherwise). To export art is also to export ideology, a point Crumpler hammers home with an overflowing crate of Statue of Liberty heads.

Sometimes, the artist’s containers slip their ships. In BONE (2016), whose gilded backdrop references gold-ground Renaissance paintings designed to inspire reverence, a mass of shipping containers form a geometric abstraction as they careen into the lambent water. The painting alludes to the systematic abstraction of material goods via containerization and logistics while also gesturing to the societal enshrinement of capital. The containers’ visible contents, protected under a layer of bubble wrap at the bottom of the frame, include iconographies that have been exported or appropriated to enter global flows—Bart Simpson, West African masks—as well as a drawing of a hungry Indo-Pacific lionfish, an invasive species that has colonized and decimated the Atlantic’s coral reefs. Above the entire scene floats the titular bone, with the ominousness of a necropolitical scepter. “Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against the Atlantic slave trade” write Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in their 2013 essay collection The Undercommons. “Logistics could not contain what it had relegated to the hold,” they continue, arguing that new forms of sociality emerged in response to hideous injustices.¹

The Atlantic slave trade, with its links to racial capitalism, has a powerful, spectral presence in Post Atlantic. Crumpler uses objects that initially appear innocuous to acknowledge brutal histories; one of the items crowding the landfill of Crows is C&H sugar, an allusion to the ties between sugar and enslavement in the context of the Atlantic slave trade. Tulips are a prominent motif, as in the mixed media collage The Watery New (2018), in which an African statuette with a strapped-on headset presides over a group of “broken tulips,” a “viral” flower that was the subject of ardent tulipomania among the sixteenth century Dutch. For Crumpler, these flowers, which were severed from their original context, manipulated, traded, speculated on, and used in service of empire, mirror the experiences of enslaved Africans in the transatlantic slave trade; in this case, the use of metaphor offers a means to represent trauma without reinscribing it.

While Post Atlantic enters harrowing territory, it also gestures towards hope. In Breach (2023), a war ship and a container ship collide, sending containers tumbling into the sea. There, they are churned by the water, set among breaching whales, a Duchampian urinal, and, just beneath the water’s surface, glittery figures. Did these mysterious swimmers orchestrate the crash that sent the cargo overboard? The sea—a site of so much pain in relation to the slave trade, as well as vital acts of resistance, as when Igbo people captive on a US slave ship drowned their captors and themselves rather than be enslaved—becomes a site of refusal and a place of possibility, where the world might be imagined otherwise.

1. Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2013, p. 92.