Raw Attraction

2001
Not on view
Booker frequently uses preexisting, cast-off materials in her work, most distinctively the discarded rubber tires she salvages from city streets, auto-repair shops, and dumps. Raw Attraction highlights her ability to transform commonplace industrial materials into quasi-organic, bizarre, or threatening forms through intensive processes of cutting, sewing, shredding, and bending. This mound of sliced and gathered tire pieces takes on the look of feathers or scales covering an ambiguous hulking creature. Nestled in this mass are rows of curved rubber pieces that resemble a vulva, from which a sharp piece of steel protrudes. This jarring detail suggests the historical and literary conceit of the vagina dentata, or emasculating woman, a recurring motif of early twentieth-century Surrealism.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Raw Attraction
  • Artist: Chakaia Booker (American, born Newark, New Jersey, 1953)
  • Date: 2001
  • Medium: Rubber tire, steel, and wood
  • Dimensions: 42 × 32 × 40 in. (106.7 × 81.3 × 101.6 cm)
    Weight: 263 lb. (119.3 kg)
  • Classification: Sculpture
  • Credit Line: Hortense and William A. Mohr Sculpture Purchase Fund, 2001
  • Object Number: 2001.413
  • Rights and Reproduction: © Chakaia Booker
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

Audio

Cover Image for 2089. Chakaia Booker, Raw Attraction

2089. Chakaia Booker, Raw Attraction

Gallery 925

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KELLY BAUM: I think the first thing to know about Raw Attraction is that it's made of castoff materials that the artist collects from a variety of sites in her local environment.

NARRATOR: Chakaia Booker works with a number of different materials—in this case it is the rubber from used tires. She cut, shredded, and reassembled them into a form that might recall a predatory bird, or some other kind of animal. Curator Kelly Baum.

KELLY BAUM: I think you can read the materials in a variety of ways. On the one hand they might appear soft, even, organic, alive, slightly inviting. But on the other hand, they convey, through their allusions to spines and needles, a sense of threat and possible danger.

NARRATOR: While some call attention to the black color of the tires as perhaps symbolic of Booker’s racial identity, the artist has described other connections.

KELLY BAUM: Booker herself is more interested in the symbolic resonance of rubber, which she associates with travel, transit, and movement. And many art historians have connected her use of the tire to New Jersey; to the place where she was born and raised. New Jersey is a state in which areas of great natural beauty exist alongside endless miles of highways and desolate scenes of post-industrial destruction.

NARRATOR: The color black also recalls Louise Nevelson’s found object sculptures—like Mrs. N’s Palace, on display nearby—and Booker has identified her as an important influence.

Raw Attraction also bears an interesting relationship to Abstract Expressionist paintings.

KELLY BAUM: It does not involve the application of paint to a canvas with a brush, so it's not conventionally gestural or expressive. But it does explode, and it does blossom in ways that convey a sense of dynamism and energy, that you can compare to a work like Jackson Pollock’s.

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