Harold Ove: I’ve got to try a little harder, it could be a great review – Desire, Desperation and the Disco Divas | art

MMmm…mmmm. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm. Mmm. Sometimes sexy and sometimes sleepy, sometimes like a child making airplane noises or doing an impression of a door creaking or perhaps a whale, the sound of Harold Offe’s humming and muttering fills the hall of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Mmm, it goes, mmm, mmm. He talks and mumbles and extracts a whole world of emotion from this disembodied foreground. The title of Offeh’s show, including Mmm, is a quote from a song on Portishead’s 1994 album Dummy. “I gotta try a little harder / It could be beautiful,” says the lyric, which is also printed in large, opaque letters on the gallery walls, behind Ove’s video screens, photographs and other graphic interventions. The show comes alive and bustles with songs, dances, skits, routines, public moments and special performances in the bathroom and in the bathroom.

For more than two decades, Ove has been a moving target. This is the Ghanaian-born Oveh as Haroldinho, in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, walking with a samba step and wearing typical blue Brazilian work clothes, his adopted name emblazoned across his back. He dances in the streets and on the beach, swaying and smiling, arousing the mild curiosity of passersby. In Rio, people often assumed he was Brazilian. There he was again, now in the streets and shopping centers of Walsall and Oxford and Liverpool and Chester, in Stockholm and Banff, in the shadow of the Canadian Rockies, wearing a Victorian magnifying glass in front of his face, distorting and magnifying his features. Considering the suspicious looks he receives on the British streets, you worry for his safety.

Sometimes a smile will see you through. A close-up of Ove’s face, with a rictus-like smile filling the screen. He listens, over and over, to Nat King Cole and the 1954 version of “Smile” by Charlie Chaplin and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. Produced in 2001, when Uwe was still a student, “Smile” is the first work here. He continued to imitate the exaggerated facial expressions and close-up reaction shots of black actress Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, the enslaved housemaid in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind. Experiencing racism and discrimination throughout her life as a blues singer and the first black woman to win an Academy Award in 1939 (as Best Supporting Actor in the same film), McDaniel became a model for Offeh and he ran the string of her on-screen performances. Hair styled in a white scarf, eye rolling, eyebrow raising, lip puckering, and cheek puffing at the camera, Owe imitates her stereotypical racial performance.

Here he is again wearing an “I LIKE BOYS” T-shirt and pulling and snapping his fingers like a disco diva, blazing to the tune of Armando’s “100%” from Disin’ You. Now he’s strutting around in a silent imitation of singer Teddy Pendergrass, putting his hands together in an obscene gesture. This is the artist as the reclining soul singer, comfortable in his studied masculinity. Offeh continues the drag tradition of Black R&B and disco stars in Covers, adopting their standard-sleeved poses. Dressed in black, he performs Marlena Shaw’s stylized pose in Take a Bite, Millie Jackson’s Get Out and Get Some, and Amii Stewart’s Knock on Wood. He takes up positions in various parts of his house, performing Melba Moore’s “Hot and Tasty” in his crowded loft, and for a performance of “Grace Jones’s Slave to the Rhythm,” he gets naked in the bathroom, oiling himself up to attempt Jones’ anatomically impossible montage pose from her Island Life album cover, originally designed by John Paul Goode.

There is parody, vulnerability, reverence and criticism, and more than a hint of desire to play in Covers, which Ove has also re-performed in a series of theatrical pictures.

In 2020, Uwe attempted to reenact the contorted poses of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s early modernist sculptures in the Kettle’s Yard collection. If he tried harder, he would hurt himself. Ove is compelling to watch, even when he’s lying in the bath or standing on the sidewalk, the world swirling around him. I think he’s happy to objectify himself, even as he questions what it means to be queer and a black body. This vulnerability and curiosity are also present on early 2002’s Four Ways to Feel Amazing, which finds the artist listening to self-help advice. Naked in his bathroom, he looks like a lost little boy with a half-drowned toy as his only friend, and is advised to take care of himself. Standing in the street looking rude and lonely, he is told to stop comparing himself to others (while being a lonely black person among the shoppers at the mills); On the toilet with his pants down, he was told he was sitting on top of the world. In the last of these vignettes, he is alone in an empty room, staring at a digital clock as he is told to live in the moment and feel “now.” As the numbers fluctuate around the clock, there is an overwhelming feeling of futility and stopped time. She laughed out loud, the way you laugh at a dark moment in a Samuel Beckett play. Behind the obvious joy of his early work, there is an underlying pain. You feel it in Ove’s comic timing, the moments of looking into the camera, the pacing and the pauses.

Owe is performing less these days and his body is no longer the center of attention. All the graphics and increasing compositional complexity (some influenced by Afrofuturism and Brazilian Tropicalia, especially the work of Hélio Oitica) keeps the energy up even as the pace and intensity of his art slow. On the evidence presented here, Ove’s focus has recently shifted towards community projects that are, in my view, less compelling as works of art in their own right than as social research. He has worked with young people on a project for the London Underground, and on a stadium whose design was influenced by Sun Ra and George Benson. His video documentation of a workshop in Charleston in Sussex, the country retreat of the Bloomsbury Group, during an exhibition of erotic works by Duncan Grant, in which participants discuss kinky sex, love and desire, is a boring watch. Interviews with immigrants and members of the local LGTBQ+ community in a small town in Japan, where Ove resided in 2019, or archival interviews about queer life in Toronto, from the 1950s to the present, may be compelling pieces of storytelling, but Ove here plays the role of witness and documentarian, not artist. But perhaps he sees the role of the artist in terms of its usefulness in the present.

In the gallery, there is a banner hanging at the top. She says playing. This participatory social transformation in Ove’s work has its own rewards, but to make art, maybe you have to try a little harder. It can be sweet.