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.

On my way to get a burrito before work, I was detained by the police.

I noticed the police car in the public lot behind Centre Street.  As I was walking away from my car, the cruiser followed me.  I walked down Centre Street and was about to cross over to the burrito place and the officer got out of the car.

“Hey my man,” he said.

He unsnapped the holster of his gun.

I took my hands out of my pockets.

“Yes?”  I said.

“Where you coming from?”

“Home.”

Where’s home?”

“Dedham.”

How’d you get here?”

“I drove.”

He was next to me now.  Two other police cars pulled up.  I was standing in from of the bank across the street from the burrito place.  I was going to get lunch before I taught my 1:30 class.  There were cops all around me.

I said nothing.  I looked at the officer who addressed me.  He was white, stocky, bearded.

“You weren’t over there, were you?” He pointed down Centre Street toward Hyde Square.

“No. I came from Dedham.”

“What’s your address?”

I told him.

“We had someone matching your description just try to break into a woman’s house.”

A second police officer stood next to me; white, tall, bearded.  Two police cruisers passed and would continue to circle the block for the 35 minutes I was standing across the street from the burrito place.

“You fit the description,” the officer said. “Black male, knit hat, puffy coat.  Do you have identification.”

“It’s in my wallet.  May I reach into my pocket and get my wallet?”

“Yeah.”

I handed him my license.  I told him it did not have my current address.  He walked over to a police car.  The other cop, taller, wearing sunglasses, told me that I fit the description of someone who broke into a woman’s house.  Right down to the knit cap.

Barbara Sullivan made a knit cap for me.  She knitted it in pinks and browns and blues and oranges and lime green.  No one has a hat like this. It doesn’t fit any description that anyone would have.  I looked at the second cop.  I clasped my hands in front of me to stop them from shaking.

“For the record,” I said to the second cop, “I’m not a criminal.  I’m a college professor.”  I was wearing my faculty ID around my neck, clearly visible with my photo.

“You fit the description so we just have to check it out.”  The first cop returned and handed me my license.

“We have the victim and we need her to take a look at you to see if you are the person.”

It was at this moment that I knew that I was probably going to die.  I am not being dramatic when I say this.  I was not going to get into a police car.  I was not going to present myself to some victim.  I was not going let someone tell the cops that I was not guilty when I already told them that I had nothing to do with any robbery.  I was not going to let them take me anywhere because if they did, the chance I was going to be accused of something I did not do rose exponentially.  I knew this in my heart.  I was not going anywhere with these cops and I was not going to let some white woman decide whether or not I was a criminal, especially after I told them that I was not a criminal.  This meant that I was going to resist arrest.  This meant that I was not going to let the police put their hands on me.

If you are wondering why people don’t go with the police, I hope this explains it for you.

Something weird happens when you are on the street being detained by the police.  People look at you like you are a criminal.  The police are detaining you so clearly you must have done something, otherwise they wouldn’t have you.  No one made eye contact with me.  I was hoping that someone I knew would walk down the street or come out of one of the shops or get off the 39 bus or come out of JP Licks and say to these cops, “That’s Steve Locke.  What the FUCK are you detaining him for?”

The cops decided that they would bring the victim to come view me on the street.  The asked me to wait. I said nothing.  I stood still.

“Thanks for cooperating,” the second cop said. “This is probably nothing, but it’s our job and you do fit the description.  5′ 11″, black male.  One-hundred-and-sixty pounds, but you’re a little more than that.  Knit hat.”

A little more than 160. Thanks for that, I thought.

An older white woman walked behind me and up to the second cop.  She turned and looked at me and then back at him.  “You guys sure are busy today.”

I noticed a black woman further down the block.  She was small and concerned.  She was watching what was going on.  I focused on her red coat.  I slowed my breathing.  I looked at her from time to time.

I thought: Don’t leave, sister. Please don’t leave.

The first cop said, “Where do you teach?”

“Massachusetts College of Art and Design.”  I tugged at the lanyard that had my ID.

“How long you been teaching there?”

“Thirteen years.”

We stood in silence for about 10 more minutes.

An unmarked police car pulled up.  The first cop went over to talk to the driver.  The driver kept looking at me as the cop spoke to him.  I looked directly at the driver.  He got out of the car.

“I’m Detective Cardoza.  I appreciate your cooperation.”

I said nothing.

“I’m sure these officers told you what is going on?”

“They did.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“From my home in Dedham.”

“How did you get here?”

“I drove.”

“Where is your car?”

“It’s in the lot behind Bukhara.”  I pointed up Centre Street.

“Okay,” the detective said.  “We’re going to let you go.  Do you have a car key you can show me?”

“Yes,” I said.  “I’m going to reach into my pocket and pull out my car key.”

“Okay.”

I showed him the key to my car.

The cops thanked me for my cooperation.  I nodded and turned to go.

“Sorry for screwing up your lunch break,” the second cop said.

I walked back toward my car, away from the burrito place.  I saw the woman in red.

“Thank you,” I said to her.  “Thank you for staying.”

“Are you ok?”  She said.  Her small beautiful face was lined with concern.

“Not really.  I’m really shook up.  And I have to get to work.”

“I knew something was wrong.  I was watching the whole thing.  The way they are treating us now, you have to watch them. ”

“I’m so grateful you were there.  I kept thinking to myself, ‘Don’t leave, sister.’  May I give you a hug?”

“Yes,” she said. She held me as I shook.  “Are you sure you are ok?”

“No I’m not.  I’m going to have a good cry in my car.  I have to go teach.”

“You’re at MassArt. My friend is at MassArt.”

“What’s your name?”  She told me.  I realized we were Facebook friends.  I told her this.

“I’ll check in with you on Facebook,” she said.

I put my head down and walked to my car.

My colleague was in our shared office and she was able to calm me down.  I had about 45 minutes until my class began and I had to teach.  I forgot the lesson I had planned.  I forget the schedule.  I couldn’t think about how to do my job.  I thought about the fact my word counted for nothing, they didn’t believe that I wasn’t a criminal.  They had to find out.  My word was not enough for them. My ID was not enough for them.  My handmade one-of-a-kind knit hat was an object of suspicion.  My Ralph Lauren quilted blazer was only a “puffy coat.”  That white woman could just walk up to a cop and talk about me like I was an object for regard.  I wanted to go back and spit in their faces.  The cops were probably deeply satisfied with how they handled the interaction, how they didn’t escalate the situation, how they were respectful and polite.

I imagined sitting in the back of a police car while a white woman decides if I am a criminal or not.  If I looked guilty being detained by the cops imagine how vile I become sitting in a cruiser?  I knew I could not let that happen to me.  I knew if that were to happen, I would be dead.

Nothing I am, nothing I do, nothing I have means anything because I fit the description.

I had to confess to my students that I was a bit out of it today and I asked them to bear with me.  I had to teach.

After class I was supposed to go to the openings for First Friday. I went home.

There is a black-owned business in my neighborhood. Over the past year, I would safely say that I frequent this place a few times a week.  I would never assume that I am friends with the owner, but we are more than cordial. We’ve talked about his kids, my goals in life, politics.  We’ve exchanged more than a few laughs and we have had moments of agonized connection when discussing the current political moment.

This man has several employees, including at least one from Mexico.

So the owner, his employee, and I were talking about the end of my sabbatical, my return to teaching, and a funny thing that happened with a student. Two other people, a man and a woman, also were in the establishment and could over hear us. As I was turning away the man overhearing us spoke up.

“See these young people are so entitled now.  This is one of the reasons I like Trump.”

I turned and simply looked at him. I could see the owner and the employee from the corner of my eye. I felt the air thicken in the room.

“Yeah,” said the woman. “I love what he says and I love that it pisses people off.”

The two of them then started to talk loudly about Trump.  The cited what they called his disdain for “political correctness” and his lack of concern for others opinions.  They liked how he said what needed to be said. They had the almost drunken belligerence of someone taking up too much room at a party-a party they had managed to crash.

These two people, both white, felt very comfortable coming into a black-owned business, one with a multi-ethnic staff and clients, and professing their pleasure with the statements and conduct of a man who professes some of the most vile and hateful rhetoric in American life.  They filled the place with their thick and stupid laughter. They looked at us, the owner, the employee, and myself, as if we too dumb to get the joke.

When people talk about the indignities of every day racism, this is what they mean.  What kind of person walks into someone’s place of business and insults them to their face?  The kind that knows that there will be no consequences.

The owner said, “this is a politics free zone.” And the two white people had a final laugh. The man said, “I just knew I’d get a rise out of you.”  The woman turned to the Mexican employee, who resumed working with her.

I looked at the owner. I thought about his kids.  I thought about how he told me how hard he worked to build his business and what it meant to him and his wife. I thought about how he had clients who felt completely entitled to come into his work place and insult him and his employees just because they thought it would be fun. I thought about his employee who now had to work with a woman who told a group of people that she believes Trump when he says that Mexicans are criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. I remembered with a mouth full of hot blood that I was in someone’s hard earned business, and in an immigrant’s place of employment.

I said to white man, “I want to continue liking you, so I’m going to forget this happened.”  He laughed and I smiled the “go fuck yourself smile” I learned from my mother.

Later, I went over to the owner.

“I’m so sorry that happened.”

“Thanks, Steve.”

“What the actual fuck?”

“I know, I know. And there’s a man from Mexico right in front of them, too.”

“I was about to tell them both about themselves.  I was about to say something and then I saw your face.  I don’t want to go off on these white people and fuck up your money, man.”

“I appreciate that. This is my livelihood. And the fact is, today isn’t even the worst of it.  You’d be amazed.”

I shook his hand.  And left.

A few days later, the woman was there and the Mexican employee was working with her.  He was kind and encouraging, present and supportive.  As I passed them, she said hello to me.  I stopped and looked at her.  In my mind’s eye, I could see her face, drunk and stupid with laughter.

I said nothing.

Bull in the Ring, 2008
Performance video – banned drill, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Produced by Brad L Cooper
WITH the players of LCFL semi-pro football
Photo by Marshall Astor

Steve Locke: The first works I had seen of yours were the Invisible Man series and I’ve seen a few of the fighting performances. They are quite brutal (I’m thinking especially of Bull in the Ring.) The sheer athleticism of those performances meshes uncomfortably with the raw physical fact of them. In watching your work, I am always amazed at the effect it has on the spectators. I have seen you turn a room of well-heeled art world types into a mass of people screaming for blood despite themselves. The work, sited as it is in (sometimes literal) arenas of masculine performance permits a certain level of spectatorial pleasure in watching the violence meted out at you, or rather at your “El C” persona. It was fascinating to see people forced to deal with how much they wanted to see you hurt, especially in the performance where the act of failure or loss is involved. The work goes on a journey of display and bravado to times of bone crushing defeat and impotence. Unlike Matthew Barney, whose masculine performances seem theatrical (and thus, unreal) to me, and unlike Bob Flanagan, whose masochism seemed rooted in exercising some control over his body, your work seems to inhabit and utilize masculinity as a site of investigation of personal and public limits and social desires. Sports are one of the few social spaces with a prevalence of black and brown male bodies. These are examined and exchanged, and are cheered for their for power and discarded when they are no longer able to perform. Which brings me to my question:

How does your work affirm and critique the social desire for the evaluation, elevation, and destruction of the black/brown male body?

Shaun Leonardo:  Most interviewers do not have the balls, so to speak, to ask me such a poignant question, so I promise to give you an equally real answer.

A journalist once attempted to compare my work to that of Matthew Barney’s. At which point I felt I could not submit to her line of questioning. “Fundamentally, my work cannot be compared to Mathew Barney’s.” “Why not?” she asked. “Because I am not white…”

That is to say that I acknowledge that the exhibition of my body, in sport or otherwise, plays within a system and cycle of (mis)representation that has and continues to use, ridicule, and distort the image of the black body. My body, or at least the perception of my body, is not always my own.

It is not a coincidence that I’ve chosen the spectacle of fighting as one of my primary vehicles of expression – the sweat of the dark-skinned, male body cloaked under the suggestion of “athleticism;” this body beaten and battered under the suggestion of “aggression;” and the animal behavior of this body (I’ve wrestled in a cage haven’t I?) under the suggestion of “intensity.”

El C vs…., 2008
Photo by Gabriel Fowler

As you stated so well, I take on the uncomfortable reality that within the span of 10 min., 1 hr, 3hrs…. I can provide people a hero, only to experience them wish for that hero to be torn down. We are ingrained with the desire to see the black athlete achieve champion-hood, but are equally thrilled to see that same person self-destruct. What we do not honestly accept is that we all have a role in creating that narrative – he can’t win, win… keep this spic/nigga boy running. Sometimes, a portion of the audience wishes for the hero to be upheld or reborn, because, I suspect, many of us are exhausted of witnessing (societally-induced) failure.

I am most successful when I am able to have the audience note their own place within the performance – the how and why they’ve handed themselves over to such a spectacle. We all know how to participate, whether consciously or not, in the metaphorical and literal arena of violence. This is precisely why it is so necessary for me to disrupt the performance at its very end – to remove the mask and reveal my humanity. It is only then that I may reclaim my identity, and also only then when I may, in utmost hope, reach my objective of having the viewer observe him/herself.

The ‘evaluation’ aspect of your question excites me most but in an indirect sense. It is no accident that following much of my performance work, members of the audience (if he/she does not have the intention of trying to sleep with me) have a difficult time approaching me. Is it that they are embarrassed of what they have subjected themselves to or the manner in which they behaved? Or maybe, immediately following a performance, the veil is not yet pulled from their eyes—I continue to be a mirror to their desires and prejudices and, in that, they are too frightened to confront themselves.

Shaun Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received awards from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; The New York Studio School; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Art Matters; New York Foundation for the Arts; McColl Center for Visual Art; Franklin Furnace; and The Jerome Foundation. His work has been presented internationally with recent solo exhibitions in New York City. He was included in Radical Presence NY: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Studio Museum in Harlem.  In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 28 February 2014, he will perform One-on-Ones with two members of the Harvard Crimson Football Team.  Images and videos of his work can be found online at elcleonardo.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.”

Ori Gersht: History Repeating is a big show, both in terms of the amount of works presented, the space occupies, and the themes it addresses.  It’s always really exciting when a museum decides to give over a lot of space to a living artist.  You have the opportunity at these times to see what they have done, knowing that they aren’t finished making work.  I say to my students that they are fortunate to live in these times, mostly because they can go to museums and see contemporary art.  In the past, it was the job of galleries to show contemporary work.  “Museums are for dead people,” David Smith said.

Gersht’s work is full of death, from the Vanitas quotations to the “falling tree film” (The Forest) and everything between.  He uses the camera to frame death, decay, destruction, and loss actually or metaphorically. The actual suffers in this show.  The photos of the “masculine” cedars next to the “feminine” olive tree is cloying and reads as essentialist and reductive.  Seeing things blow up in slow motion to reveal their transcendence is right out of the Futurist Manifesto. Unlike Bill Viola‘s (somewhat overwrought) project of slowing things down to see particular details, Gersht manipulations simply reiterate the sense of loss that is inherent in the still life vanitas paintings he quotes.  (It’s kind of tough to get interested in a video of exploding flowers when there is an actual Martin Johnson Heade painting on the wall.) The photographs in their dimensions take on the scale of history painting and Gersht’s digital manipulations mimic those of Church and other painters who re-presented the sublime landscape a lot more sublime than it actually was.  Like Jeff Wall, Gersht is not shy about his connection to painting.

What makes his work compelling is the sites he chooses to represent (or re-present).  In the White Noise series, the blurred view out of a train window becomes an act of reconstruction and remembrance;  particularly since the train’s journey is from Krakow to Auschwitz.  Gersht makes a photo that could not be made. The text and titling become a major part of the work.  Language is key in connection the images to their meaning.

Where the exhibition reaches a level of exhilaration is in the films.  There are two brilliant and overwhelmingly beautiful films (Evaders and Will You Dance For Me) that moved me deeply while boggling my mind with their visual and technical achievements. From animated snow to the recreation of the 19th century landscape Gersht shows that he is adept at reconstructing art as historical investigation.  While the stories of each of the films is vitally important to they way one views them, I often found myself forgetting about the wall text “explanations.”  Gersht’s framing and presentation of the body in Dance  makes you feel complete jubilation in every movement, a feeling exacerbated by the knowledge that every movement is an act of survival and defiance.  Evaders is a perfect metaphor for the artist, journeying alone, against all odds, armed only with one’s work and a death defying determination to reach the light.

The smaller films never reach this level of transformative power (and nor should they) but Neither Black Nor White comes close. The single channel film of the an Arab village in Israel goes from impossible darkness to obliterating light.  The wall text references the blast of an explosion which I think is the easiest metaphor.  Gersht’s film mimics the elimination of information from the screen pixel by pixel, the active lights of the village disappear, consumed in an insatiable whiteness.  It is a powerful and chilling film.  While the exhibition makes no mention of the reasons for antipathy between Arabs and Israelis in Gersht’s homeland, this film spells out the situation in a clear and compelling manner.

William Cordova at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts by Steve Locke.

artcore journal is an edited online contemporary art journal published biannually. The journal seeks to establish a broad range of responses to contemporary art and curatorial practice from varied spatial perspectives. artcore journal presents a broad range of informed written texts, art works and curatorial initiatives. Each issue welcomes creative and critical responses to a theme as a way of establishing an intertextual network postulating on ideas concerning space in contemporary art discourse.