Kerry James Marshall
Eliza Williams
Camden Arts Centre London November 25 2005 to January 29 2006.
Having shown extensively across the US, rising to particular prominence at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, it is surprising that this retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre is Kerry James Marshall's first UK solo show. Marshall's work is steeped in the American vernacular, specifically that of American black civil rights, and perhaps this has led to it being slow to travel to these shores, despite the fact that the artist is strongly influenced by European painting and portraiture. This exhibition makes up for this deficit, with an extensive show of painting and sculpture stretching back to the 70s.
Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955, in the same year that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white man on a bus in nearby Montgomery (an action that kickstarted the black civil rights movement) and as a child he moved to Watts in Los Angeles, near the Black Panthers' headquarters. He has been vocal about the influence that this, alongside the work of artists such as Charles White, has had on his art, describing his work as 'a mission of a sort, which has to do with the position of African-American artists within the narrative of art history'. Some of the works here refer specifically to the civil uprising of the 60s, with one room devoted to a large untitled sculptural work from 1998 made of oversized rubber stamps commemorating black power slogans of the era, including 'Black is Beautiful', 'We Shall Overcome' and 'By Any Means Necessary'. Likewise, a series of works titled 'We Mourn Our Loss' from the mid-90s depicts iconic portraits of Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.
Nostalgia both invades, and is explored in, these works, yet Marshall's political and social commentary is not all rooted in the past. Rythm Mastr, 2003-04, painted in the style of a comic strip, depicts a stereotypical young black hero battling the nameless bureaucracies that are conspiring to tear down housing in his neighbourhood. Painted on newspaper, Rythm Mastr was originally displayed in random order on gallery windows in the US to echo the use of newspaper as a means of blocking the view into empty buildings. His series 'Lost Boys' also tackles an ongoing problem for black urban youth, eulogising the lives of young men who were cut off in their prime by drugs, jail or gangs. Unlike the lost boys of J M Barrie's Peter Pan, the damnation of eternal youth for these young men is all too real..
Other works tackle racial clichés, and the subtle associations we have with blackness. An early painting, Oh Dear Dangerfield, 1983, is a largely black canvas in which the shadow of a church-like building can be made out. The only other colour on the work is a series of delicate white flowers along the top of the painting, which prompt our connection of blackness with mourning and loss. Marshall also emphasises how western art has continuously excluded black figures and imagery throughout its history, and attempts to begin redressing the balance with a series of paintings depicting humdrum domestic scenes and a group of portraits of black American Scouts. The highly stylised nature of these works serves to accentuate their oddness, forcing the viewer to really contemplate what is being represented. And the domestic works also subtly attack other clichés attached to race, particularly ideas of the difference between black and white sexuality.
In one of his most recent paintings, Vignette, 2003, Marshall tackles the Afrocentric idea of a return to a paradise, and a harmony with nature, when free of white oppression. In Marshall's hands this notion is depicted as sentimental and romantic, with the painting showing a black Adam and Eve running blissfully through a garden, accompanied by large birds and butterflies. The work pre-empts a series of new works, also titled Vignette, which continues Marshall's exploration of the absence of black faces in the history of western art. Here he takes the frivolous, overly sugary style of the 18th-century Rococo period and mixes its imagery of romantic leads coyly pursuing their sweethearts with an urban backdrop. While beautifully rendered, the works are as uncomfortably unreal and stylised as the scenes portrayed within them. This is Marshall at his most complex, bringing together the complicated politics of blackness in both a historical and contemporary context as well as going beyond race into an exploration of the notion of representation itself and how it contributes to and shapes the way we view the world.
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