MASTRY at MCA: Kerry James Marshall's Survey Show Takes the Cake

There is no argument the Museum of Contemporary Art has seen a few rough years. Following the desperate cash cow that was DAVID BOWIE IS, and the deflated UNBOUND: CONTEMPORARY ART AFTER FRIDA KAHLO, the closing of Kerry James Marshall’s MASTRY was a thirst-quenching moment for Chicago.

The survey of Marshall’s work included nearly 80 large-scale paintings installed in 15 separate rooms with shoulder-to-shoulder visitors, quieted by the simple grandness of the show and installation. The topic is realism, assimilation, blackness, invisibility, and exclusion. The paintings were huge. Marshall is a master painter. The formal aspects of the painting are just as powerful as their charges.

The first few paintings on view are older in respect to the show, all portraits of characters born out of racist archetype deeply rooted in the history of the civil rights movement and directly linked to current racial issues. Marshall is speaking specifically to invisibility here, as the characters are literally represented as invisible, dark skin on a dark background. In Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum, painted in 1981, the vacuum is the subject of the painting, and the portrait noted in the title is nearly indistinguishable from a black rectangle on the wall, with only a few not-so-subtle portrait features rendered plainly like graphic symbols. The vacuum is unplugged. The painting is stark, and creates a direct association with the black figure in the portrait and the domestic object. The portrait is small and rendered in a thin black picture frame, further silencing and making-small the figure.

Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum, 1981, Acrylic on Canvas, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Museum purchase

In the next room, the paintings are slightly more fantastical, larger and utilize collage overtly, with scratchy paint and loaded symbols. Represented are Adam and Eve, rendered in ivory black, directly in opposition to the historical representation of the figures in painting, which has always been an un-strikingly colonialist white. There is a painting of a magician with symbols of bad luck at his feet. There is a painting of a big black woman, her body parts labeled, like a diagram of how a black woman figure can exist in a painting at all. This painting is pointing a finger at the lack of acknowledgement for anything non-white in the academic painting sphere, and how consistent this has been throughout the history of painting.

Marshall invited museum patrons to rifle through his personal image archive. 

To be clear, these paintings are not about painting, or critiquing painting politics, exclusively. This show is not just about race. Marshall is very much still painting young love, magic, death, ego, taste, scenes of daily life and personal struggle. This is what makes MASTRY so dynamic. It reaches a wide audience without sacrificing the topic of identity. These paintings are not made for a white audience. However, they allow white viewers to engage them, empathize with them, all the while never allowing the viewer to forget their position in respect to the painting and the painting’s subject.

SOB, SOB, 2003 Acrylic on fiberglass Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Museum purchase through the Lusita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment

The diversity of topics and emotions in MASTRY is expansive, to say the least. There are comics, sweet romantic paintings, traditional academic paintings, woodcuts, collage and a deeply sorrowful black painting, titled Black Painting from 2003. Marshall isn’t just nodding to the black paintings of Reinhardt or Rauschenberg, Malevich or Motherwell. Marshall is mourning the loss of Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton and Black Panther party member Mark Clark, who were murdered by the Chicago Police and Cook County Sheriff's Office. The murders were not followed by police indictments. The 1969 tragedy has a direct relationship with recent events of police brutality and murder of black Americans.  

Ultimately, it is the best show MCA has curated in a very long time. MASTRY, masterful.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980 Egg tempera on paper, Steven and Deborah Lebowitz

Sticky Lips and Stranger Touches: Danny Volk is Funnier than You

Danny Volk is not shy. Volk opened his lecture at Illinois State’s University Galleries with a sincere confession. Admitting that usually he opens lectures by fake-falling or tripping on the way to the podium to elicit some sympathy from his listeners, this lecture started with no compassionate foundation. Volk is recognized for Made-Up w/ Danny Volk, a YouTube channel wherein Volk interviews artists while being ‘made-up’ by the artist.

Danny Volk is no stranger of the stage.

Volk wears a few hats. The work ranges from managing a boy band in Toronto, STILL BOYS, to writing greek plays.

There is an interest of touch in Volks work, physical, discomforting and intimate touch. Volk is interested in the uncomfortable closeness that happens when you’re spit on accidentally in conversation, or able to feel the heat of an exhale from a stranger behind you in a movie theater. It is important to note that interaction with strangers is a cohesive strain in the work Volk spoke to, partially due to an understood consent between two strangers in a public arena. A few years ago, Volk tested this in a discreetly performative role as a seasonal sales associate at the Gap. In this role, Volk assisted customers in finding the products they were looking for while engaging them in a manner appropriate with his role. He used these interactions as a way to test, play and process the boundaries of privacy people were willing to define. There was touching, as I have come to understand is critical with this performance. After all, people don’t really like to be touched by strangers, do they? Volk would graze a neck with his knuckle, or tug a belt loop when adjusting pants. It is a functional, or maybe accidental-seeming touch, like a mother jamming her finger into the waistband of her child’s jeans to gauge how loose or tight a garment was.

There is an inherent need for play in Volk’s work. This is no doubt informed by his education in theater, as he puts it, “My myth,” or his launching point as a visual and performance artist. There is a play between spectator and performer, both live and online. While Made-Up is more passive in its engagement with viewers, Volk has a second identity on YouTube as himself, the artist, with three documented performances and very little views compared to Made-Up. Mr. Ed, one of the videos, references the 1960’s TV-famous talking horse pictured below.

In Volk’s video Mr. Ed, Volk mouths the words to Miley Cyrus's hit Wrecking Ball, all the while enduring the same human-inflicted torture the four-legged TV star suffered. I am trying to be vague, as there is another layer to the video which adds a transformational magic and sincerity that is accessible only through viewing.

Volk is very considerate and generous. He is keen to humor, and brings work into a polish that is posh and lofted, fantastical and, while tasty, can also be totally, grossly off-putting. Watch Mr. Ed here.

Vulnerable Stitches:

a formal analysis of Claire Ashley and CAWT, TAUT, HOT .... NOT

Claire Ashley has two first names. She also has much to say in the field of occupying space. The Scottish sculptor creates a science fiction not unlike early 1960’s handcrafted sets of faraway worlds imagined on Star Trek. These sculptures are more figurative than landscape, though, created with painted canvas ‘skin’ and hand-stitched seams, which swell from air-inflation. The hyper-brite paint sprayed on the surface of the canvas neglects a painterly tradition in place for a characteristic of lightness, emphasizing the physical tension in the bloated, fabric forms.

Ashley is generous in her installation decisions at the University Galleries, where these chubby giants lay dormant. While the gallery bones are not forcefully disguised, it is easy to believe a transportation has occurred. This is primarily due to the size of the figures, which is significantly larger than possibly any human has ever been in the history of the world.  The size of the figures is integral to the power of the installation. While giant, they feel vulnerable, soft, friendly and playful. The figures are non-threatening. They have no gender. All the figures have features which could be rorschached into butt-cracks or boobs or the chubby fold of an armpit. Ashley allows them to breath. Navigating the show, one can feel slight movements or sounds of inflation, like the silent grandmother of a chaotic bounce house fan. Skin, stitches and bulging amalgamate into a visible, continuous tension, a guttural swelling.

As you enter the installation of Cawt, Taut, Hot …. Not, you are greeted by a chubby, shorter figure on the right, an entrance into a dark, spooky black-light cave of super neon on the left, and straight ahead, a Twombly-esque grid of silvery-painted foam board tiled over the wall concealing the gallery office. There is a hole cut out of this painting to accommodate the office window, which allows the office occupants a chance to peek at gallery visitors without the burden of direct engagement. I suppose this luxury goes both ways, since the gallery visitors are made aware of the peeking as they are viewing the untitled painting that covers the wall and frames the peeking window. Visible in the window alongside the office attendant is one Claire Ashley sculpture made of concrete and fishnet pantyhose, and one stylish, massive Mac desktop computer. This painting has other functions too, as the background of a set of small plaster sculptural figures. There is a definite change in authority between the larger and smaller figures.

These sculptures are not alive, they are dense, and serve as mockettes or maybe the playthings of the larger figures. Some are organized on a shelf display protruding out of the coverall painting, others stuck to the painting above the shelf like climbing handholds.

The untitled painting is the flattest piece of the show, created with eight or so factory-dimension foamboards tiled together. The overall motif is ambient in regard to the painting and colors laid over the skins of the figures; lots of sprayed, cloudy neon faded to silvery pinks and yellow, with very few areas of saturation. Everything seems to be applied accidentally, with small, inky blueprints of future figures. The only deliberate thing about this painting is its installation, the hole cut out for the window, and the drawing elements. The combination of accident and intention is disjointing, but the palette offers the painting admission into the show. The wallpaper-effect also prompts viewers to look past this piece in search of more solid forms. It is my understanding that, at one point, these foamboard panels were on the ground under the inflated figures during conception. Thinking about this figures as human, I feel an overwhelming embarrassment for them when viewing this piece. As if they weren’t vulnerable enough with the potential risk of being deflated ever present; now the afterbirth-soaked floor of their conception home has been pinned to the wall for all the world to see. It is highly personal, and demands respect and empathy from all guests of the gallery.