In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall

In the Tower: National Gallery of Art Kerry James Marshall June 28 – December 7, 2013 Kerry James Marshall was born in James Meyer (JM): Let’s begin with Great Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955. He America [cover], the work that precipitated our show. How did it come about? moved with his family to Los Ange- Kerry James Marshall (KJM): Among a lot les in 1963, where he was educated of friends and acquaintances of mine there at the Otis Art Institute; he cur- has been this idea of a transitional moment rently lives in Chicago. One of the in the experience of Africans being brought to the New World. The moment of the Middle most accomplished painters of his Passage [the transportation of enslaved generation, Marshall has exhibited people between Africa and the New World] widely in both the United States was traumatic. There’s this idea that many of and abroad and is the recipient of the attitudes and personality developments in black folks in the diaspora are a consequence a MacArthur Fellowship, among of this unresolved trauma. There have been other honors. His work explores the attempts by black artists to try and figure out experiences of African Americans how to represent that in some kind of way. and the narratives of American his- None of those images were ever really satis- factory. I’d always wanted to do a work that tory that have often excluded black addressed the Middle Passage, but because people. Drawing upon the artist’s I don’t have any way of comprehending what prodigious knowledge of art his- that experience must have been like, I can tory and African diasporic culture, only look at some of the aftereffects — how that might have filtered down to generations his paintings combine figurative who still have knowledge, but no direct experi- and abstract styles and multiple ence, of it. allusions. In Marshall’s art, the past JM: It’s often said that the Holocaust evades is never truly past. History exerts a depiction. The Middle Passage is also described in this way. Many of your prede- constant, often unconscious, pres- cessors, such as Romare Bearden and Aaron sure on the living. Douglas, have tried to depict it. How are you doing something different? In 2011, the artist’s painting Great KJM: We’re not dealing with a genuine his- toric memory but with information we’ve America (1994) was acquired by come to know through indirect sources. As the National Gallery of Art. The African Americans we’re trying to come to present exhibition — the latest of terms with a zero point in an evolving history. the In the Tower series focusing We can only locate our point of origin at a “no place” in the middle of a vast sea; it represents on art since midcentury — affords nothingness. We’re trying to figure out a way a context for understanding this to construct a point of origin from that “no painting and its powerful imagery, place.” And the reason why we are compelled and includes several of Marshall’s to do it is because a story has been told. It’s a story to which we feel related. The philoso- preparatory drawings as well as pher Cornel West has said, “There are things some of his most arresting paint- that one cannot not know.”1 For a lot of African ings. Marshall sat down with James Americans, not knowing something about Meyer, associate curator of modern their origins is one of those things. You have to fill in a lot of the gaps. art, to discuss the exhibition. Where other artists may have tried to focus on the trauma, I felt like you had to displace it and attach it to some things in a more indirect way that don’t appear to be traumatic. Which is how I arrived at the use of the amusement Cover: Great America, 1994 park haunted tunnel ride in Great America. It was the only way I could comprehend what evolve through the other drawings where the the idea of the Middle Passage was and the notion of the Middle Passage as a haunted closest I could get to something that suggests theme park ride started to emerge. The figures that kind of fright and anticipation. in a lot of the drawings don’t immediately sug- JM: There are hints of trauma in Great Amer- gest figures in distress. ica. The ghosts, the head bobbing in the water, JM: In some of them you depict water polo the word WOW painted in white on top of a players outside of a Tunnel of Love [fig. 2]. splatter of red paint . Two kinds of leisure activity . KJM: There can only be hints. In order to get KJM: Which don’t go together. That’s the way to Great America I had to imagine the Middle I’m trying to figure out how to come to an Passage in the most traumatic terms that I image that embodies all of the dimensions of could — the reality that 25, sometimes 30 per- the Middle Passage. cent of the people didn’t make it to the other JM: You set up troubling exchanges between side. Even setting it up that way doesn’t begin history and the present. Your works are history with the most extreme manifestation of the paintings but not merely history paintings. trauma: the brutality of being dragged onto KJM: They aren’t costume dramas that locate a ship, being locked in a hold, being chained the events in the past. What you’re trying down with little space to move. The only thing to do is figure out a way to embed all of that that seemed to make the most sense when I historical knowledge into a work that remains started out was to begin with the sketch from compelling in this moment and hopefully for below the boat showing figures floating down generations to come. It has to exist in a bubble to the bottom [fig. 1]. And then it started to that’s outside of any particular time. None of Fig. 1: Sketch for Great America: Under Water, c. 1994 Fig. 2: Study for Great America, c. 1994 (right) the things in the picture are specific to a par- KJM: I’m going in a completely opposite ticular time or place. direction. I would use “amalgamation” more JM: Great America presents several tech- than “pastiche” as a way of thinking about the niques in a single picture. In this painting work. It’s an accumulation and use of styles alone you have figurative images of people, to create a unity — a unified field where every- abstract expressionist brushwork, Renaissance thing is linked to the overall narrative in one one-point perspective, symbols — the red way or another. I’m not trying to divest images cross, circles of stars — and even different sur- of meaning. I’m not simply deploying them faces due to your use of collage. How would for their own sake. I try and channel the way you describe your technique? It seems deeply a viewer is able to think through the relation- connected to the idea of subject matter you ships between these component parts and to just described. look at the differences between them. KJM: There are two ways to think about it. I’m juggling all of these different modes of There is the classic postmodernist mode operating. You’re trying to hold together a of thinking about this mélange of styles multiplicity of parts that under every other as “pastiche.” circumstance seems to want to fly apart. This JM: Pastiche was described during the 1980s is the way I thought about it: You have a car as a combination of different kinds of images driving down a winding mountain road, the and symbols that projected a lack of meaning. way we see them in movies. Every time it gets The signs didn’t add up. That kind of work to one of those curves the tires skid toward the was current when you were coming up as edge. And then the car gets to a hairpin turn. an artist.2 It goes up on two wheels and is just about to Fig. 3: Baptist, 1992 go off, and then you freeze the frame right deities — Yemaya, Oshun, Ogun, Elegba . there. But you keep the sound of the wheels Voyager in particular is about becoming spinning and the engine roaring. The person something different. The diagrams [such as who is in the car gets out and walks away. the elaborate crosses next to the kneeling pas- That’s the metaphor I use for what I’m trying senger] are Haitian veves.4 Each one of them to do with all of these different elements in represents the different manifestations of a picture. those Yoruban gods and deities. JM: You spoke about the Middle Passage as JM: New World translations of African ideas. a “nowhere.” It’s also a passage, a transition KJM: Eshu/Elegba is the god of crossroads, from one place to another and from one state of transitions. Yemaya is the goddess of the of being to another. In Baptist, you depict ocean. The picture embodies those concepts the Middle Passage as a map of the Atlantic of transformation, of birth and rebirth. The Ocean with two hemispheres visible. A body invention of the African American, or the treads water [fig. 3]. InVoyager , you paint a Haitian or Jamaican, is a consequence of the dory with two passengers. The boat is called transatlantic slave trade.

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