Kerry James Marshall: Along the Way
21 July – 22 October
www.modernartoxford.org.uk
Kerry James Marshall is a man on a mission: to
give the art historical canon a new lick of paint. Whereas many black
musicians line the hall of fame, black artists have continually had to
smuggle their agenda in through the art world’s back door. Marshall’s key
aim is the formation of a black aesthetic and a dialogue around this,
aspiring to rectify the lack of black subjects on the white walls of the
world’s hallowed art institutions. The mere existence of ‘Along the Way’,
his first UK solo show signifies another success to this end and the
selection of works included here provide a comprehensive, albeit overdue,
introduction to his practice.
As to be expected, the most striking aspect of the exhibition is the black
figure. In contrast to the varying scale or the different mediums that
Marshall employs, his delineation of it remains constant. Always positioned
in the foreground, his figures stare out from all corners of the room,
eyeballing the viewer, daring him or her to meet their gaze. It is his
treatment of their skin that is most remarkable – whether in his earlier,
more kaleidoscopic paintings, or his recent grisaille vignettes, blackness
screams out, his subjects’ facial features and bodily contours subordinated
in comparison to their slate, almost atonal silhouettes. The very notion of
being black is stripped down to its essence in an ironic head-on collision
with connotations that a dominant white culture has traditionally aligned it
with – that of a dark, unknown evil.
While Marshall’s work is certainly confrontational and is meant to be so, it
fortunately never lapses into a noble but flat and didactic one-liner, a
risk that accompanies any act of artistic resuscitation. Perhaps because
it’s hard to distinguish the tune that hangs in the air – initially a
requiem dedicated to absence and invisibility, it is then peppered with the
beat of a utopian march, one that started with the civil rights movement and
whose echo Marshall still follows now. The lacrimosa asserts itself with
works such as Souvenir II (1997) and The Lost Boys (1993), in the latter a
centrally placed figure of a boy holding a glaring pink water pistol,
funereal lilies and an effigy just below, alongside a tree of life carrying
bullets engraved with names in its leaves and a fluorescent police line
wrapped round its trunk collectively lament a stolen youth with a staccato
bang. The paintings are situated in an uncomfortable proximity to a number
of giant stamps lying abandoned on the gallery floor. Slogans of black pride
such as ‘We shall overcome’ and ‘Black power’ are read backwards and upside
down by the viewer, the associations of speed and authority that a stamp
normally possesses are here poignantly diluted to the whimper of a muted
drum.
Marshall’s eye for appropriation, his ability to coerce a multitude of
allusions to rub shoulders at such an alarming pace is certainly impressive
and one of the strengths of the works assembled is the intriguing and epic
accumulation of footnotes that they conjure. His use of renaissance imagery
has so far perhaps been the most celebrated aspect of his work, haloed boy
scouts and angelic housewives exemplifying the double entendre that cuts to
the heart of his work – on the one hand the choir of allusions elevates the
black figure to majestic proportions, while also acting as a reminder of the
gap between this grandeur and the actual reality of marginalisation. It’s
great though to see the energy with which he has turned to other sources –
the comic book superhero in Rhythm Mastr (2003–4) and the romantic ideals
and decadence of the Rococo period in his ‘Vignette’ series (2005) – their
original associations writhing within Marshall’s new context.
Do idealistic yearnings still have a place? Marshall is unsure. In Sun Ra’s
1974 film, Space is the Place, he discovers a planet populated only with
black inhabitants, a cosmic dream where ‘the vibrations are different’.
Thirty years on, Marshall has exposed man-made and dreamt utopias for what
they are – empty myths. With more than a firm nod to recent events, and also
those that go back through history, his aim is to hijack reality here and
now.
Isabel Stevens