File Note 09: Kerry James Marshall

It is a current phenomenon in art schools that a young artist, during the process called a ‘crit’, (the moment when a teacher, critic, or curator visits an artist in their studio to discuss his or her work in progress) will inevitably say “my work is about…” or “the ideas behind my work are…” or “I’m interested in …”. These utterances confound and (truth be told) irritate me. I don’t think art work is ‘about’ something. It is a thing. Art is not only, or even primarily, a metaphor, it is also an actuality, a thing in itself. In this vein, I often think that the most important idea behind the work is the wall. Then there is the category of ‘interest’. On the face of it, this shouldn’t be as egregious as the other two comments — after all, to be interested in things is a hallmark of intellectual and aesthetic life. It means the life force of curiosity is running through one’s veins. And yet there is something slightly ‘less than’ about it as an aesthetic formulation. Can you imagine, for instance, Kerry James Marshall saying that he is ‘interested in’ the legacy and history of the American Civil Rights Movement? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that Marshall’s paintings contribute to the very shaping of what that history is and what it might mean?

I’ve written about Marshall’s work on two occasions before this one, which, I suppose, could be construed as an indication of my ‘interest’ in his work and my commitment to him as an artist. But what really compels me about Marshall’s work is the way I think it avoids (maybe even tramples) the art school language of ‘interest’, and instead performs the more existential problematic of having a project. In Being and Nothingness Jean-Paul Sartre sets forth the notion of the project as a choice about how one lives one’s life, a mode of being that has as both its expression and its goal a future end. This futurity is only possible through a steady reflective engagement with the past. As Sartre writes: “I always have the possibility of positing my immediate past as an object,” and hence “consciousness posits its own past as an object; that is it evaluates its past and takes its bearings in relation to it.¹” 

This is why one can see a trajectory in his oeuvre from the paintings that pay homage to the integrationist fantasies of the Civil Rights Movement to the images of Black Power and quasi-romantic fantasies of ‘back to Africa’, to depictions of everyday life in African American neighbourhoods in Chicago. The paintings partake in the transformation and changing ideals of the intertwined ideas of integration and history, self-actualisation and freedom. They are not offered as a progression (from better to best or from idealistic to realistic); rather they are instances of the very mutability of the ideas that cohere to the concept and reality of blackness.

So too we can see in Marshall’s oeuvre a restlessness that manifests itself in a wide use of medium, such that a slogan such as ‘Black is Beautiful’ is transformed into an Oldenburg-like sculpture of a mammoth rubber stamp. Freedom rendered bureaucratic changes both freedom and bureaucracy. To see freedom as ever mutating and impossible is to see it as part of a self-conscious engagement with the present, which is partly what we are doing when we look at Marshall’s ‘epic’ video projection of a Chicago back yard party, ever evocative of Renoir’s The Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881), in which we simply watch normal people of colour at an utterly non-exotic social gathering. During a time when the powers that be pretend that truth is an immutable fact, when the word freedom is used in increasingly Orwellian terms, and when the perpetuation of inequality and oppression is maintained by the enforcement of economic poverty on the one hand, and war on the other, Marshall’s work stands out, exemplary to its core, generously allowing us to become part of its larger project.