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Kerry James Marshall and the Museum Figure 7 Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio), 2014 (Pl

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Kerry James Marshall and the Museum Figure 7 Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio), 2014 (Pl Helen Molesworth THINKING OF A MASTR PLAN Kerry James Marshall and the Museum Figure 7 Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio), 2014 (pl. 79). 28 The picture is immediately legible: We are in a studio, an interior where pictures are made. A painting leans mid-process on an easel; the adjacent table is littered with brushes and paints. A model sits patiently in front of a red backdrop while a young woman adjusts her profile. Two men occupy the background: one is nude, the other pulls a mustard-colored jacket or smock over his arm. A yellow dog in the foreground watches the scene intently. If the first glance is rewarded with the speed of this quick gestalt, then the second viewing is like entering a time warp. Comprehension slows. All the figures are black: jet black, ebony black, charcoal black, obsidian black, velvety black, inky black. Their blackness heightens the intensity of their pictorial role as figures against a ground. This effect is amplified by the painting on the easel: a female torso is roughly sketched in with the blocks of color that will ultimately serve to model her form, while her face appears with the starkness of a cameo, nearly floating above the picture plane. A male figure stands behind her, weighted, rooted to the ground like a tree. He both creates and stands in shadow, an act that renders his nudity palpable yet occluded. His position slightly behind the easel lends him an air of being in the wings of a stage, as if an actor in a play. Behind him is a stack of canvases, their stretcher bars echoing the windowpanes to his left. Standing in contrapposto, he is a model—but for whom? Given that he does not appear in the picture on the easel, his nudity forms itself as a question. His figure grows increasingly shadowlike, flattened in the shal- low space between the canvases. His identity as an actual figure in space becomes uncertain; his role as an apparition grows. His immobile flatness Figure 8 Albrecht Dürer, The Virgin and Child (The Madonna with the Iris), 1500–10. 1 Oil on lime; 58 ¾ × 46 ⁄8 in. The National Gallery, London. 29 Thinking of a Mastr Plan Figure 9 Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Las Meninas, c. 1656. Oil on canvas; 125 × 109 in. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. is exacerbated by the physicality and movement of his male counterpart behind the red drape to the right. Backlit from the windows he, too, falls in shadow. But as he adjusts the right-hand collar of his jacket, and as he pulls his arm through the left-hand sleeve, he is all sartorial movement, the angle of his head set at a jaunty forty-five degrees. His role in the scenario is unclear. Is he the artist or another model? Is he starting work or finishing it? Meanwhile, the women in front of him prepare for the painting in progress. The seated figure is the model, and the outline on the canvas acts as her shadow, her double. She is becoming an image. She is already an image. The woman who adjusts her head, the woman in green high heels, the woman with a paint-smeared dress: Is she the artist or the artist’s assis- tant? Her gaze is directed out of the frame, but its recipient is unknown. Is she looking at the artist for confirmation? Is she making an adjustment in a mirror? Is her gaze reserved for us, the viewer? Untitled (Studio) (fig. 7), a seemingly straightforward image in the real- ist tradition, starts to wobble, to pivot around its central absence: Where, or who, is the artist? The work is filled with allusions to other paintings: the flowers are pulled from Albrecht Dürer’s The Virgin and Child (The Madonna with the Iris) (fig. 8) and Edgar Degas’s portrait A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (1865). The skull on the table is part Hans Holbein, part Marvel Comics. The two buckets of brushes are a nod to Jasper Johns, while the knife does double duty summoning both Jean-Siméon Chardin and Paul Cézanne. In addition to these fragments, the overall composition and subject matter allude to Diego Velázquez’s magisterial Las Meninas (fig. 9), 30 Molesworth Figure 10 Gustave Courbet’s monumental The Artist’s Studio, a Real Allegory Summing Gustave Courbet, The Artist’s Studio, A Real Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life (fig. 10), and Thomas Eakins’s Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life, 1854–55. Oil on complex William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River canvas; 142 × 235 in. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. (1908). And because all of these historical images depict the artist at work, the absence of the artist in The Studio grows even more confounding. This central lack is made even stranger by how emphatically this painting is about painting: the pigment-stained worktable; the abstraction being transformed into figuration on the canvas; everywhere the tools of the trade—brushes, paints, professional lights, backdrops, clips from Home Depot; stretched canvases at the ready; finished works stockpiled; and the ultimate trace, left like a gift from the artist to the viewer, bits of colored paper tacked to the corner of the table. Placed ever so slightly off center, these scraps point to the heart of the matter: This is a painting about color. This is a painting about the rendering of the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional plane. This painting is a trick. This painting is an illusion. This painting is a representation. This painting knows exactly what it is doing. This painting is masterful. This painting has viewers who will be rewarded by its complexity. These pieces of colored paper indicate all of that while insisting that this painting is flat—it has edges and limits, and we, the viewers, are outside this line of demarcation. This painting, purchased by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is now part of the public trust. If we are looking at it, we are in a museum. At the beginning of the millennium, Kerry James Marshall penned the following: “I gave up on the idea of making Art a long time ago, because 31 Thinking of a Mastr Plan I wanted to know how to make paintings; but once I came to know that, reconsidering the question of what Art is returned as a critical issue.”1 This statement is an inversion of the conventional narrative about art after World War II in which the medium of painting was seen to have given way to the category of art, since it seemed that painting was unable to answer the question of what art is, much less help us describe what art does. For the past decade or so, the discipline of art history has been working steadily to consolidate this plot. Anthologies dedicated to movements, readers of collected essays, and the appearance of an authoritative new textbook, Art Since 1900, all signal a field-wide desire for explication.2 In almost all of these narratives, painting’s hierarchical and traditional place as the apogee of art was toppled. Instead, the strategies of minimalism and concept- ualism were given pride of place, positioned as the engines that lead to site-specificity, installation art, appropriation, and institutional critique. Marshall’s abandonment of Art for the sake of painting might be a way of understanding the degree to which his work has not figured prominently, if at all, in these increasingly dominant accounts of art after 1945. I’d like to suggest that the failure to account for Marshall’s oeuvre is largely bound up with the intensity with which his work has been discussed almost exclusively in terms of subject matter, particularly his sustained investigation of the black figure and its placement within conventional pictorial structures. (This is an all-too-common hermeneutic applied to subaltern artists, a vestigial prejudice that leaves the problem of form to the putatively universalist struc- 1 Kerry James Marshall, foreword in Kerry tures that attend whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality.) In focusing James Marshall, Terrie Sultan, and Arthur Jafa, nearly exclusively on subject matter, Marshall’s critics and interlocutors have Kerry James Marshall (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 9. neglected to articulate the systematicity with which Marshall has taken on the museum, particularly the Western encyclopedic museum, as one of the 2 Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: 3 Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism constitutive institutions of civil society. I would like to argue that one reason (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2011); Marshall abandoned Art in favor of painting was to focus more specifically James Sampson Meyer, Minimalism (London: on the problem-idea of the museum, by understanding fully, and deploying Phaidon, 2000); Peter Osborn, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 2002); and Helena tactically, its most hallowed object: easel painting. Indeed, I want to suggest Reckitt and Peggy Phelan, Art and Feminism that one productive, albeit counterintuitive, way to think about Marshall’s (London: Phaidon, 2001). oeuvre is to see it as participating in the logic and practice of institutional 3 I am working here with a generalized critique and, further, to see it as operating as a kind of metacommentary on understanding of the public sphere as established the ways in which institutional critique has been performed and historicized. by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Marshall’s project is multifold because he is involved simultaneously, through The public sphere is made up of those institutions that compose, either spatially or discursively, his use of the black figure, in a deep inquiry into the category of race.
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