I lucked out with Elaine Reichek.  She was in town for the unveiling of her facade project for the Gardner Museum.  It’s taken from the correspondence between Mrs. G. and Henry James.  David and his crew had just finished installing the piece when I met up with Elaine for a talk in the Living Room.  Elaine was the first artist to have a residency at the Gardner Museum and she produced the award winning MADAM I’M ADAM CD rom project there.  I still use the piece with my students. It gives another kind of vision to Mrs. G’s house and sort of foretells the augmented reality phase that is happening now.

Elaine is one of my favorite artists.  I first heard of her when one of my professors showed her work in class.  It was White Brushstroke 1 from the exhibition AT HOME AND IN THE WORLD.  In my education, it may have been the first time that I saw a white artist directly and confidently address their position of whiteness.  I was kind of stunned by the way she just turned all these things that were in the air at that time (appropriation, feminism, craft, text, history, erasure, race, and whiteness) on their heads with a cross stitch.  I remember going to the MFA Bookstore and looking for all the texts I could find about her.

In 2004, I was working as Dean at Skowhegan and Elaine was one of the resident faculty.  We became very close that summer and we talked a great deal not just about art, but about life, loss and the importance of community.

It was rainy when we started talking, but it cleared up.  Elaine and I talk about a lot.  We discuss her move to Harlem, gentrification, whiteness, maintaining a career, loss, love, food, galleries, and a bunch of other stuff, if you can believe it.  We went way over time, but it was worth it.  I love Elaine a great deal.  At this time in my own studio practice when things are so unstable and fraught, it was good to sit down with a friend who knows how to keep the work moving forward.

In this talk, Jen and I discuss the trajectory of her career, but we also get into teaching, learning, the role of advanced degree study and the importance creating the space for conversation.

I hope you enjoy this show.

PS: It must be said that Jen makes the best barbecue sauces I’ve ever had.  Ever.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

― David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

I went on sabbatical from teaching last year.  It is one of those things that I, a kid of working class parents, could never have imagined when I was younger.  My institution was enabling me to take time off of work to concentrate on my artistic development: to focus on my studio the way that I have been focusing on my students for the past 10 years.  This time was hard-won, precious; I was looking forward to it opening up for me.  I had a lot of ideas that had filled my sketchbooks over the years.  Also, I had bookcases of texts I could not wait to devour.  It had been so long since I had read anything for pleasure that I was so looking forward to curling up with all the tomes I had purchased that work had not allowed me to open.  Also, to be perfectly honest, I was looking forward to getting some rest. I purchased supplies and cleared out my studio for new work.  I was cleaned up my email and finished up school business.  I got to a clutter-free place. I thought about what was possible.

Then Michael Brown happened.

While news channels kept showing his body lying in the street for hours, we found out about John H. Crawford, III.

And then Ezell Ford.  And Dante Parker.  And Kajieme Powell. And more.  And many many more.  Some captured on grainy videos replayed on television and computer screens.

In the studio, I could not stop thinking about this march of death.  I painted almost every day and every day this parade of killing was on my television and radio and social media feed.  Some of the dead became Twitter hashtags.  Some did not, but they were no less dead.  Why were some people more important than others? Did people think that some victims more worthy than others of not being shot to death, or tased to death, or run over, or beaten to death by the state?

I was on sabbatical, so I had time.  Time to create turned into time to think, and I couldn’t think about anything other than death.  I didn’t read any books.  I painted.

It’s summer (July) and I’m at dinner with a friend.  We are in a bistro with televisions all over the restaurant and bar area.  The sound is turned down but the images light the entire place.   The video of Officer Daniel Pantaleo choking Eric Garner to death plays over and over and over interrupted by silent talking heads. I wonder why are they playing this man’s murder on a loop? People eat, drink, laugh, walk about.  No one seems to notice that a man is being choked to death on television.  Then I start to think that maybe they do see it and that it doesn’t bother them.  This is the first time I witness this, a black person being killed on television.  It will not be the last time.  Not by any measure.

Over my sabbatical, I saw black people shot to death on television over and over again.  News casters and pundits would issue verbal warnings that the video they were about the show might upset “sensitive viewers.”  I tried to imagine a viewer that would not be upset about seeing someone like Walter Scott shot to death (or that his killer, Officer Michael Slager, planted evidence on his corpse).  Or Tamir Rice shot to death.  I wondered why they didn’t tell the “insensitive viewers” to hook up their DVRs.  When I am in the studio, the images fill my head.  I jump when cars backfire.

People would ask me how my sabbatical was going.  They would say, “I hope you are taking advantage of this time.”  They would tell me how lucky I was.  They would ask, “What is going on in the studio?”  I wondered if they watched the news at all.  I wondered if they know about what was happening.  I wondered how they felt about these images of black people being killed.  I posted about this stuff on social media and it is ignored for the most part. Ferguson explodes.  Social media does not believe in tears.

In August of 2015, two reporters are shot to death on live television.  Alison Parker and Adam Ward are killed by Vester Lee Flanagan, II who uploaded video of the killing.  Immediately, the television station, Facebook, and social media erupted with requests for people not to view of share the video.  To maintain the dignity of the victims, people begged the public not to watch the video.  It would be a terrible thing to give the killer satisfaction by watching his murder of the reporters.  

I started to wonder why black people are allowed to be killed on television.  Why we are allowed to be transformed from subjects to objects and left to lie in streets for hours?  Why is it acceptable to show the end of a black life on television?

I start to make work about the historical impulse to turn violence against black people into part of our domestic structures.  People continue to ask me what I am doing on sabbatical.  I think of Neruda and I wish I knew Spanish.  (“Come and see the blood in the streets….”)  I decide to make a work about all the people killed by police while I was on sabbatical.  I dismiss the idea as too agitprop.  I talk to my mentors.  One of them tells me, “Make the work.  Just don’t trivialize.”  I work with a friend and learn how to make photographs.  It is harder than I imagined.  I finish this work, Family Pictures.  I show it to a few people.  I finish my sabbatical.  I’ve read few books.  I feel surrounded by ghosts.

I paint everything I think.  I don’t trivialize.  I realize a new body of paintings.  My studio is full of murderers, victims, liars, and accusers.

I return to work in September.  In December, I am hassled and detained by the police.  I write about the experience.  Many people want me to come and talk to groups to “raise awareness.”  I decline.  They seem to be unaware that I would not like to relive a traumatic experience in public. People want me to talk about #BlackLivesMatter.  The college intervenes and offers to handle calls from the press for me. I am deeply grateful because this allows me to concentrate on my job and my students.  CNN calls the college and wants to know if I will talk to Don Lemon.  I tell the school that I will talk to anyone at CNN except Don Lemon.  I get hate mail.

Lisa Tung, the Exhibitions Director asks me what work I want to put in the biennial faculty show.  I decide to make the piece I thought was agitprop.  I call Carmine, my neon fabricator.  I want him to make a sign that mimics police light that spells out what is lost.  I research police killings of unarmed civilians.  I find no central list.  I find no definitive list.  I find no government statistics.  I rely on activist sources.  I rely on The Guardian.  I make the piece.  It is installed in the faculty show.  It is a timeline.  It’s information: date, name, gender, city, state, method of killing. I title it A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans who were Killed by Police or who Died in Police Custody During my Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2014-2015. 

There are 262 names.

A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans who were Killed by Police or who Died in Police Custody During my Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design 2014-2015

People tell me that they look at the wall and measure time.  They lift up the people in their thoughts.  Someone asks me if I am influenced by Maya Lin.  I answer that we all are influenced by Maya Lin.

Someone will say their names and they will be alive a little longer.

Nat Meade, Study (Plaid Pantry)

Steve Locke: I have been following your work since we met at Skowhegan 2009 (and I’m lucky enough to have one of your works on paper). I have always felt an affinity for your work not just because of the subject, but because of the qualities of the paintings themselves. You have a way of making images that appear to be simple but upon deeper investigation reveal themselves to be complex and layered in their realization and, by extension, their possible meanings. In an era when so much of painting is directly informed by the digital and the photographic, your paintings don’t just require a slow looking, they demand it. Because of this, your work rewards the viewer not just with an image but with a sensation. I mean this in the way that someone like Bridget Riley is interested in the effect of the painting on your eyes and your body. I get a sense of air, light, energy, heat, and physicality of space from these pictures. That does not happen a lot in contemporary painting the fact that it does in your work is a testament to your practice. In the current moment, you are making paintings that reveal and foreground their process without losing their integrity or importance as pictures. Pictures that illuminate the body as a site of contemplation, disappointment, extremity, or disbelief. Which lead me to my question:

In your painting practice, how do time and light (in both a real way and in a poetic way) influence the choices you make in depicting the body, its movements, and its locations?

Nat Meade: Light is another player or character in my work. I want it to be as tangible and, in a way, as physical as the figures and forms.

Around the time that we met I set out to change my approach to painting. I no longer wanted to make paintings that were referential and dependent on an external source. Instead I wanted to invent a painted moment- performative in its small and inward way. It was important that the images were discovered through their execution. The transition was difficult and for a long time I struggled to make anything satisfying. I needed parameters to make what I was doing challenging and tangible. I came up with a set of self-imposed rules and light became the constant player, a means of focus that also allows for playful discovery. Along these lines forms and figures have been reduced to simplified shapes in a shallow space. I can (hopefully) (more or less) predict how light might rake across the things I paint. I treat everything- light, color and form as a thing-just a stupid thing.

(Photos from Nat Meade’s studio by Jean Paul Gomez)

James Ensor has been described as employing an allegorical use of light. I only know what this means intuitively. It has to do with light asserting itself as a persistent actor. I see it in his work and want it in my own. There is directional lighting in all of my paintings-overly defined beams cutting through the composition, splitting figures, casting shadows, indifferently raking over faces. Color and light are closely linked. I like to assign the light areas a color and dark areas another: make the light areas yellowish and the dark areas green. My friend and artist Michael Brennan has said that “…[t]ime and light are made manifest in [my] work as color. Color as crumpled light.” I think I understand this intuitively as well. I like to build up opaque areas of light and emphasize the literal ridges of light and shadow. It is like repeatedly saying, “Here is the light AND here is the dark.”

Light can add drama and brevity. It can also conceal and ridicule. There is something inane about the cast shadow from a nose or a pair of eyeglasses. I like to zoom in on these moments. My subjects are meant be contradictory: elevated or beatific and buffoonish or absurd. I have been painting these bearded figures at three quarters view, a wedge for a nose, sometimes with gaping mouths like a hollowed out tree. They are these male stand-ins. I have recently realized that this goes back to an Antonio Frasconi print that was in my childhood home, a minimal woodcut of a bearded Walt Whitman with a triangle nose and series of dashes for a beard. It looked just like my dad. In my head the image was both God and Father, which were probably the same thing. On some level my work deals with this kind of elevated personage and its frailty.

I feel like this doesn’t exactly answer your question. Light is the constant character. Time and setting are frozen. And the body is reduced to its dumb, tangible parts so I can play with it like a Mr. Potato Head toy.

Thanks again for asking,
Nat

Find more of Nat Meade’s work at www.natmeade.com.

A terrified Steve Locke chats with the amazing and patient Evan Garza

For those of you who missed the conversation that I had with the divine Evan Garza of FIAR at ICA/Boston about my work, the museum has created a new web cast of the lecture.  The Artist’s Voice will be a regular feature of the ICA.  See below:

THE ARTIST’S VOICE: STEVE LOCKE WITH EVAN GARZA
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Launched in September 2013, The Artist’s Voice is a free lecture series featuring some of the most important contemporary artists working today, including Amy Sillman, William Kentridge, Jim Hodges, Steve Locke and Mary Reid Kelley. This lecture series, which aligns with the ICA’s exhibition program, gives visitors direct access to these visionary artists as they discuss their work, influences and inspirations, offering a deeply meaningful engagement with the art of our time.
On September 19, 2013, artist Steve Locke sat down with Evan Garza—curator, writer, and co-founder of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR)—for an engaging conversation about objects, paintings, and the male figure in art.

Click here to go to the ICA’s site and view the full artist talk. 

A detail of Marshall’s UNTITLED. Please go to the link so you can see the entire image. It is MUCH larger than this.

I have a tremendous love for the work of Kerry James Marshall.

So I was completely thrilled when I heard that the Harvard Museums had acquired Untitled, his 12-panel woodcut and installed it at the Sackler Museum.  The first time I saw this piece was in New York at Jack Shainman.  It seemed to big for the space then. It was almost impossible to understand it as an image because the space didn’t allow for the gestalt of seeing the entire thing. It could also be my youth and my inability to understand what the work was positing, and how, in so many ways, Untitled reveals Marshall as an artist who locates his practice in the core of the Western tradition of art.

Rodin’s ETERNAL IDOL and Marshall’s UNTITLED

The Sackler has two ways to approach the work.  Those using the elevator have to walk through many of the masterpieces of the collection. (The Harvard Museums are being renovated and the Sackler is filled with some of the great works of the collections of the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger as well as objects from the Sackler.)  You essentially approach the piece after walking through the history of art.  If you come up the stairway, you leave the Sol LeWitt and walk up many stairs through the earth toned concrete atrium to the fourth floor of the museum. These two journeys, one through history and the other from the ground to the sky, affect how you approach Untitled. 

Opening the darkened door after climbing all of those stairs you see the first panel of the work, which spans the entire rear wall of the gallery. The size of it is overwhelming.  And the process of woodcut applied to this particular scale of image making shows a mastery of the technique.  The 9-color print is made up of 4 x 8 sections, the size of plywood.  Marshall uses a building material to make an image of an architectural space.  The remnants of the wood grain haunt the image with the history of it’s making.

We start in the first panel with a view from high up.  We can see the city below us and the edge of a yellow brick building.  Then the severe black lines of the frames of the work come into view; they reinforce the perspectival grid system of Alberti that Marshall uses to create the sense of deep space in the work.  As we look from left to right, we see the reframing of space.  We have entered not just a skyscraper, but someone’s home were a group of men are assembled, having coffee, eating, talking, engaged with each other.  A hallway leads to a bedroom.  The wall turns and black rectangles decorate and the surfaces.

It’s a really strange image.

First, we are outside, high in the air.  Then, as suddenly we are close enough to a window where we can see the flowers in the window box.  Do skyscrapers have window boxes?  That could prove sort of dangerous.  There is a window but we cannot see into the space, but then suddenly, we are in the space.  And the ground of the room is green and textured, more grass than carpet.  So we are outside looking in, and then the inside has element of the outside.  We were high up and now we are in the same space as this grouping of men.  Six men in two groups.  Having coffee, eating, talking.

Marshall reveals his deep interest in the history of art without making a post-modern “pastiche” of style.  He makes a stage set of perspectival relationships in the room.  The bench is the central perspectival device (it is also very similar to the George Nelson benches in the gallery.) We are with these men in their appointed, modernist space. The black squares on the wall reference Malevich.  Using the co-terminus space of baroque painting and marrying it to the severity of the perspectival grid, Marshall collapses the distance between us and these men.  He also uses the pyramidal composition of Raphael to create these monumental groupings of men, who declare and frame the space with the gestures and placements of their bodies.  They point with their limbs and their gazes.  The twist of the figure on the left shows the influence of Mannerism and its emphasis on the extreme action of the body.  The hands and plates establish the planes in the same way that Manet uses his figures in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.  In fact, the grass in the living room is a direct link to that moment, when a painting becomes a declaration of a constructed truth.

Continuing through the room (in the sixth panel) we see that one of the plates does not seem to “agree” with the planes suggested in the rest of the image, thus declaring a different kind of space.  The difference here makes other differences clearer.  Marshall uses brown in two of the figures, the coffee server, and the man with crossed arms.  There are linked on a strong diagonal in the composition which is split by the square vase on the table.  This split to me talks about a certain idea of doubling and time.

The Master of the Argonaut Panels, The Judgment of Paris, c. 1480
Tempera on panel, transferred to canvas

There is a small painting in Harvard’s collection called The Judgment of Paris.  It is a depiction of the event that causes the Trojan war.  The interesting thing for our discussion is that there are two depictions of the same group of people on opposite sides of a panel split by a flowering tree.  Common elements are repeated and illustrate the narrative; the golden apple that Paris holds on the right is held by Venus on the left.  Nature acts as a divider, and an indicator of the passage of time.  In light of this, it is possible that instead of a depiction of six people, Untitled could be one grouping of three people at two different times.

Because of its size and scale, Untitled is experienced in time, not just visually.  Like Eakins’s Swimming Hole, each figure leads you to the next in the composition and the pyramidal composition in both paintings lends a sense of monumentality.   But unlike Eakins, where your eye tracks the movement of what could be a single body in a smaller scaled painting, Marshall makes you move your body to experience the image.  Once you enter the room, what you can see from one part of the house you cannot see from another. Therefore, we experience this as two groups of men in a vast domestic space.  For all the focus on the figure grouping, there is a tremendous amount of space in this picture that is absent of activity on first examination.

The image offers a sense of domestic life, of privacy, of community, of home, of rest and restoration.  There is a safe place to gather and a safe place to rest.  In light of Marshall’s other work, most notably the heartbreakingly beautiful Souvenirs (there is a glorious one at the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy), I look at this image as a respite.  In the Souvenirs, a luminous black angel prepares a place for us; a bit of heaven, as it were.  She prepares a place to mourn. This place is absent of participants, but the angel looks out at us.  Untitled may posit the use of that space of mourning prepared in the Souvenirs. Where else but heaven could a group of black men relax and have privacy and safety to speak their minds to and for each other? It also makes me think about the two brown figures and the groups split by the vase.  Is one side the past and the other the present?  The two brown figures actually seem to face each other.  Are they “real” and the other figures memories?  Or ghosts?  These questions shift the functions and readings of the black rectangles in the image.  They are clear references to Malevich and Mondrian (vis-a-vis the verticals of the black frames and in the later panels that hint as well to Ellsworth Kelly), but they also carry the weight of absence and death.  You stand at one end of the work and look down the vast length of it to the black square at the other end.  That square pulsates and vibrates as you approach it.  The small overprinted head on the last panel is like a reflection in a dark mirror.  We are in the “upper room” physically (we just walked up that illuminated staircase to the top of the Sackler) and visually.

If I told you there is an image of six black men at the Sackler, what would you think?  What could you image?  I am guessing that one would not imagine a group of men in a pink room having coffee.  The history of blackness in art, and of black maleness in particular, has been strongly tied to narratives of violence, separation, anger, exoticism, and hypersexuality. Or they are represented as an historical occurrence, reinforcing the notion that black people are somehow outside of contemporary life.  This is not to say that there are not “positive” or “favorable” images of black people in art, but to say that when black people appear in art, they are nothing but their blackness – they are not human, they are indexes.  (You can see this in the gorgeous Ingres Odalisque with a Slave that is directly opposite Untitled in the next room.  This work uses images of blackness and exoticism to eroticize the possessions of the empire.  They are things to be looked at.  In the Marshall, we are participants in the action in the room.  It is a key difference that talks about the nature of subjectivity and the possibility of agency.)

Marshall takes on the reductive notions of blackness.  By using that color, and he is a master of the color black in the same way that Alex Katz is a master of the color pink, he expands its pictorial and poetic possibilities.  In Untitled, black is flesh, fabric, and furniture. It varies in density and texture. It is warm and cool.  It is figure and it is ground.  It is structure.  It is public and private, heavenly and earthly.  In unpacking the color formally he shows that it can be many different things visually and socially.  We can actually think about it as a color and not a label.  It is a site of possibility.  And placing black people in contemporary art affirms their presence in life as it is lived today.

There is a vast amount of space in Untitled that is devoid of the body (although images promoting the piece feature the body).  These are hallways we pass through, spaces we negotiate to get to another space – blank areas whose blankness is reinforced by formal placement of rectangles of pulsating blackness.  Places where nothing happens.  Talking Heads have a lyric that posits heaven to be “a place/where nothing/nothing ever happens.”  Another part of the lyric really captures what I feel when I look at this work: “It’s hard to imagine/that nothing at all/can be so exciting/can be so much fun.”

In addition to the treat of having the show, I’m so fortunate that the gallery is having an exhibition of photographs by Francesca Woodman. This is the first time the work has been seen in South America. It is a major event and the number of people, collectors, and artists who have come in just for a look has been electric.

Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silverprint, 13.3 x 13.3 cm. © George and Betty Woodman, courtesy George and Betty Woodman

(I’ve provided a link to the SFMOMA Woodman retrospective. Reproductions, online and printed, almost always misrepresent the size of the prints and their relationship to frames and matting. I’ve included an installation picture for a better idea of the scale.)

The show officially opens tomorrow but there has been a steady stream of people anxious for a look at the photos. Their excitement has rekindled mine. I’ve seen this work for a long time, but the installation here is quite compelling. Mendes Wood’s gallery is a white cube but the ceiling has pointed rafters that that add a sense of place to the studied “neutrality” of the white box, as if an attic loft was exposed. It looks a bit like a reclaimed chapel. They gallerists have also chosen frames that have a hint of red wood coloring for the 20+ prints in the show. This tiny pulse of color animates the pictures, which is good. There have been too many sepulchral presentations of Woodman and in my opinion. This exhibition shows a young woman changing before our eyes, in the act of finding and becoming herself.

The show is pretty chronological. There are representative images from most of the bodies of work (unfortunately, none of Woodman’s exquisite cyanotypes are here) and there are some of the canonical images. Far and away my favorites are the photos where the body of the artist is used to expose and explain space and spaces. These pictures to me have always seemed like a fever dream, palpable and hallucinogenic. And like those dreams one tries to make sense of them to no avail. I’m less interested in why Woodman does what she does and more interested in the fact that she does it. When she crawls or floats or blends or reshapes her body she posits a world without boundaries of materiality. Is she crawling into that cabinet or turning into it? Is she kneeling on the mirror of floating out of it? In a pre-Photoshop world, she makes us ask “How did she do that?” I am sure that there are sophisticated technical reasons for the way the photos look (and Woodman is a master of them), but that isn’t the real “how” of my question. And figuring out techniques is not what keeps me staring at the photos. What I am asking is, in truth, how did she become lighter than air? How did she become a shadow?

Her craft is in service to a vision that feels very contemporary. In a world where gender is fluid, boundaries are permeable, and borders are contested, it’s exciting to see a young artist exploring and exposing those limits with her own body.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN
Mendes Wood
Rua da Consolação, 3358, Jardins, Sao Paulo, Brazil
June 23 – July 21, 2012

Imaging Lazarus: The Undead in Contemporary Painting