What I Wish to See: A Preemptive Engagement with Kerry James Marshall
or A Dark-Black Girl in Relation to What Might Be Her Reflection
Mastry, the first major retrospective of the artist Kerry James Marshall, recently opened its final stop at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Since its opening in Chicago in 2016, reproductions of Marshall’s work have enjoyed increased circulations on the image-based online publics of Tumblr and Instagram. This contemporary moment is righteously preoccupied with the matter[ing] of black lives. In light, Marshall colors a joyous commonplace blackness against the sharp white walls of art galleries and social media timelines.
Marshall himself is 1955 Alabama born black. Watts 1963 black. Settled 12 blocks from the local Panther headquarters black. Memory marred by gun and gang violence black. Yet and still, he retains a Hurstonian sense of possibility — a refusal of the all encompassing colored tragedy.
Marshall asks us to lean against that visceral recoil we sometimes get when faced with an absolute blackness. To drown out the taunts of middle school bullies who called you blue-black or burnt-oreo or some other rendition of undesirable, and to imagine that within that too-darkness there is a blues-toned laughter — a deep, textured happy enveloped in the skin if only we dare take the time to look at it.
Critics are quick, even in their most measured attempts at political correctness, to reduce blackness to a kind of horror. Wyatt Mason writes of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self” (1980):
“…a black face stares…The only features that one can discern in this carbon-black face are two cartoonishly white eyes and, rooted in dark pink gums, 18 large white teeth with a gap dead center, a top incisor mysteriously gone, a void in a face that, in its way, is itself a void…you shouldn’t be smiling. For the only other pictorial detail on that little canvas is a bright white glimpse of shirt peeking out from the general darkness…: It looks like the blade of an axe, one poised at the neck of that huge, haunting, gap-toothed smile… looks like something out of minstrelsy, a white actor in blackface. What we have before us is a portrait of a black man by a black man, but one that looks the way a black man might feel about being looked at in a white world by people who see, in the face of a black man, not a person but a shade, a shadow, a pigmentation: blackness.”
What Mason fails to grasp, or willfully ignores since Marshall says it explicitly later in his profile, is that for Marshall this (re)turn to shadow marks a turn to evolution, not a flattening to stereotype. As I witness this misrecognition, I hear the words sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock, written by Sonia Sanchez, post-humously addressed to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Black is the beginning of everything/and if we are the beginning we will be forever.”
Having yet to engage his Mastry in person means that at the time of writing all I have are willful projections based off digital engagement. I have no real sense of scale or the affect of the object(s) themselves save what I have been able to glean from the Instagram stories of the Black Art Elite.
What I set out to do, with my well-intentioned musings and plans to make it to LA in the coming months, is sit with the image as it first found me. To look closely and write of our relation. Rather than characterize this as a slow looking or surface reading I consider this a practice similar to cyberstalking a crush on Instagram. Those hours spent face-to-screen, under the guise of boredom, pulling curated depictions of the other into the lexicon of our own desires. This art-critical fabulation seeks to invite us into its own gaze. Me, a woman of perpetually failed brown-paper bag test, telling you not what’s there in the shadowy silhouettes of Marshall’s Canon, but what I wish to see.
Could This Be Love (1992), Acrylic and collage on canvas
In the foreground, a carbon-black woman holds a dress over her head positioned next to an ebony-black man with his hands in his draws. Her eyes caught in a sideways glance at the spectator, her mouth folded into the blackness of her body. The man beside her smiles, with a kind of dopey look breaking the midnight of his face; “what a woman what a woman” scrawls out the right side of his mouth as if whispered under breath. Behind them there is a bed neatly covered by a white sheet, crowned by a gold headboard.
The disembodied head of a white woman, seemingly picked from a 1950s advertisement, peers down at the scene through white paint in the left corner. The bedside table holds four lit candles whose waxy drips of whiteness suggest the passage of time. Behind their halo-esque glow stands a statuette that mirrors the woman’s posture. Arms raised above head, full-breast and hips signify a representation of the feminine or maybe “La Venus Negra,” the name that appears arched over the Vèvè of Erzulie Freda — the Haitian-African Vodou Iwa of love (kin to the Yoruba Orisha, Osun) — almost lost against the wallpaper. Whether or not its clear to us, this Vèvè is calling forth her Iwa in the name of all things held unholy yet irresistible by the Western Imperial order (think: Sable Venus, ‘Venus Hottentot’).
Underneath the Vèvè I see a votive candle. Propped against it, a sketch of a downward turned phallus. On the side of the dresser what appears to be the cover of a romance novel that is obscured by my computers zoom but leaves discernible a bare-chested black figure. Lower, the month of December appears ripped from a calendar smeared onto the canvas with a reddish-orange paint.
The cover of Alma Archer’s Your Power as a Woman: How to Develop and Use It (1957) is collaged between the legs of the male figure. On the floor to left of the woman, embellished gold house shoes and a string of pearls.
These icons are the makings of an altar, the bedroom a place of worship. The man an offering. The woman part siren/priestess/black woman bartering with the gods to settle the ancestral discord manifest between her thighs. The black goddess she calls up now and the heteronormative white scripts to which she once turned are positioned at odds. Tapping into her power as a woman required a darker magic.
I’m reckoning with what it means to look lovingly at a woman rendered in a familiar unyielding blackness. To yearn to see the curve and crevice that Marshall denies us. To own and attribute the desire I was taught to deny myself. In a way, to touch and be touched on the inside parts and called my name.
It would be to easy to say she’s silent. To get caught determining whether her glance is an invitation, a suspicion or a shame. Maybe if there was a smile or something more generous in her apportionment we’d be able to trust our gaze, to feel less invasive. But no, Marshall’s black folks are composed opaque — impenetrable to light, to easy understanding. In evoking this right to opacity the artist and subject depicted reject the probing transparencies that cloud our visual engagements with blackness. These engagements are troubled twice over by the digital reduction of Marshall’s deliberate gradations of/in blackness. Consequently my encounter with Could This Be Love is an engagement with a darkness that nears monolith, boundaries of body and backdrop bleed across each other into the universe of the painting.
“I’m playing dark history. It’s beyond black. I’m dealing with the dark things of the cosmos.” — Sun Ra
Hailed in this way I rethink my relation to mirrors, selfies and other reflective surfaces. What are the ways I’ve learned to soften the captured self? Might the obsession with good lighting, filters and angles just be a way of obscuring myself into legibility? To work in some white pigment?
Back to Could This Be Love, Overhead a stream of musical notes meanders a mildly percussive tune. Beneath it the words “YES I’VE GOT TWO — OO LOVERS AND I LOVE THEM BOTH.” Mimi Sheller reads this as a gesture to the artist’s marriage to the spirit. I want think about what this song means to the woman whose bedroom we hear it in. What If she redresses herself knowing the man will leave and another will come? What if she’s been asked to choose but cannot so abandons both in pursuit of herself? What if she is the other lover and this man too (literally) attached to hubris to see that she could never be his entirely?
What if it is the spectator, my self, that she seeks to lure into this space of worship? What might we learn together? Where might we go?
