EXTRACTION
By Danielle A. Jackson - Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellow at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Detail view of Kahlil Robert Irving, Soul Sisters, 2017
Written in conjuction with the exhibition Transparency Shade
Through a set of brief reflections, this essay offers one way of approaching the exhibition Transparency Shade: Seeing through the Shadow. I investigate some works presented in the exhibition and some I’ve seen elsewhere, relying heavily on observation to foreground some threads connecting how artists are working, their processes, and their relationships to the art world and society at large. When I explore artworks, I see lineages. I refer to the past while remaining aware of the present. The words in the title—in particular “transparency” and “shade”—are effective for exposing a method of artistic production that foregrounds information, realities, or experiences that are obscured, underrepresented, or ignored. Comparative or partial darkness (a single definition of “shade”) comes to light through transmission (a property of transparency).
A potter’s work begins with earth elements. Placing a wedge of gray clay onto the wheel, he prepares the material for centering to establish the vessel’s foundation. While modifying the speed with a foot pedal, the artist opens up the centered clay by pulling vertically from both inside and outside. The potter, Kahlil Irving, molds the material into the desired shape and form. The object is then glazed, fired, and eventually removed from a hot kiln. The result is heavy, shimmering, and black, and is added to a shelf that displays hundreds of other such vessels. Irving repeats the process again and again to the point of exhaustion—an action that speaks to the performativity of labor. Each vessel shares a black luster, but their heights, rims, necks, and bellies vary. In Irving’s ongoing ten-part Undocumented series, specifically the installation I love who you are, I love who you ain’t (2016), a plethora of these are arranged atop a twenty-foot- wide, six-and-a-half-foot-high wooden latticed platform. The work accumulates over time, consisting of vessels from all of the installations of the series to date. Utilizing the multiple as a conceptual strategy in a manner that recalls Joseph Beuys or Zoë Leonard, Irving produces a kind of portrait of historical and contemporary struggles.
The ceramic multiples stand close together, each one hugging the next. Although they are individually aesthetically abstract and lyrical, as a group they are reminiscent of a crowd of bodies, perhaps demonstrators or congregations. One imagines moments from the Civil Rights era such as “Bloody Sunday” in 1965, when nearly six hundred protestors were attacked by Alabama state troopers as they attempted to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge toward the capitol in Montgomery. This gathering of political bodies was a moment of great historical significance and pride with regard to fighting injustice in the United States. And from here it is easy to extrapolate to the bodies visible at more recent protests, a thought that is especially resonant given the current political climate. The struggle for equality continues to be a crucial narrative.
The platform divides the gallery, leaving only a small area for visitors to pass by, a space not easily negotiated. Beyond being a monument to labor in its multiplicity, Irving’s installation acts as an obstructive force and thus demands a pause on the part of the visitor, and perhaps then a moment to reflect on other kinds of barriers that separate communities in everyday life.
Hank Willis Thomas’s I Am a Man (2009), often presented in two rows against a white wall, is a series of twenty black-and-white hand-painted posters inspired by Ernest Withers’s photographs of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. It can be recited as a poem:
I AM 3/5 MAN
AM I A MAN
I AM A MAN
I BE A MAN
A MAN I AM
BE A MAN
I AM YOUR MAN
A MAN M.I.A.
AIN’T I A WOMAN
I AM A WOMAN
I AM THE MAN
WHO’S THE MAN
YOU THE MAN
WHAT A MAN
I AM MAN
I AM HUMAN
I AM MANY
I AM AM I
I AM I AM
I AM AMEN
Here, the notion of the riff becomes a tool to illuminate sociopolitical histories, and the material is language. “I am 3/5 man” references the fact that at one point under the Constitution of the United States, black Americans were regarded as three-fifths human. “Ain’t I a Woman” refers to activist Sojourner Truth and the Women’s Liberation Movement. “You the man,” Thomas has noted, was a popular idiom of his youth in the 1980s. For the visual aspect of the work, he appropriates the vernacular of Civil Rights signage in an effort to critically reevaluate history, track its shifts, and question humanity, valiantly declaring toward the end of the piece, “I am man,” “I am human.”
Beyond their strong associations with the history of black Americans, Thomas and Irving share an affinity for materiality and signification. Their artistic engagements announce themselves as nuanced poetic gestures that function in part on a “record, label, playback,” model—a phrase often used to describe the work of Michael Riedel, who in an untitled series appropriates, recycles, and redevelops previously exhibited artworks and their textual accoutrements (press releases, web texts, et cetera) into new works. The resultant compositions, distorted textual arrangements overlaid with multicolored geometric shapes, are reminiscent of computer codes or corporate design. The repetitive reuse and reinvention of familiar materials year after year creates a feedback loop that consistently refers back to itself—something also characteristic of digital culture. Though not as politically charged as the aforementioned works by Irving and Thomas, Riedel’s work, in its reliance on language and recording and his invocation of the multiple to point to social realities, shares common ground with both the lyrical rhythm of I Am a Man and the visual rhythm of I love who you are, I love who you ain’t.
Zoë Buckman’s latest body of work, Let Her Rave, is a series of boxing gloves covered with meticulously sewn wedding fabrics such as satin and tulle. The gloves are clustered together, tied, and hung from the ceiling (suggestive of a chandelier) using thick metal chains. Here again, language is a point of departure to communicate narratives of gender and equality. Specifically, the work is inspired by John Keats’s 1819 poem “Ode on Melancholy.” These are the key lines:
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
Finding difficult Keats’s suggestion that women must be given permission to feel emotion, Buckman produced a work that marries hard materials, like metal coil chains, with soft materials like satin. The contrast complicates and pushes back against traditional notions of masculinity and femininity.
Associations of womanhood run through the work of another exhibiting artist, Ayana V. Jackson, whose performantive portraits, particularly her work Tignon (2016) from the series The Becoming Subject, investigate depictions of women of color from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tignon references the Louisiana “Tignon Laws,” which required women of color to cover their hair in public. In this portrait, the artist is both photographer and subject. She sits with her gaze and body facing away from us. Her hands are folded, and she wears a brown tignon around her head, its top reminiscent of a wide-brim patterned hat. In her practice, Jackson seeks to uncover truths about the experience of African and African diasporic communities, often through re-performing rituals and drawing upon the legacy of portraiture. In this instance, she points to how women of color effectively appropriated Tignon Laws, which were meant to diminish their beauty and mark them as lower-ranking citizens, and reversed their effect. The creative tignon designs that emerged during that period became a positive emblem of Louisiana beauty and style.
The historical inversions evident in this work also recall Thomas’s approach in I Am a Man. Both take an oppressive force as their starting point and end with an existential celebration, an affirmation. Such practices bring to the fore the importance of signifiers—whether linguistic or visible—in articulating sociopolitical circumstances, intersectional identities, and visions of community. They bring to light what is often obstructed by the shadows.
1. I love who you are, I love who you ain’t was presented in Kahlil Irving: Undocumented at Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri, November 10, 2016–January 7, 2017.
2. The notion of multiples carried a special significance for Joseph Beuys, as they allowed him to disseminate ideas and teachings on a large scale. He made nearly six hundred multiples between the years of 1965 and 1985 in myriad forms: graphic works, woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, and screenprints as well as found objects, photographs, records, audio cassettes, videotapes, films, books, leaflets, posters, postcards, and printed matter. Zoë Leonard’s 1961 (2002–ongoing) consists of an array of suitcases packed with memories, each representing a year in her life. Every year, she adds another suitcase to the assemblage. When displayed in a gallery, the suitcases, symbols of migration, are stacked together and represent a portrait of the artist, a child of refugees who moved from Poland to Italy and ultimately the United States.
3. Martin Berger, Freedom Now! Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
4. I Am a Man was displayed in Thomas’s second solo exhibition, Pitch Blackness, at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, February 12–March 14, 2009.
5. Brian Boucher. “United (Blackness): Q&A with Hank Willis Thomas,” Art in America, September 19, 2011
6. Haley Weiss. “The Consciousness Raising Artist,” Interview, December 15, 2016.