POSTMODERN DREAMS
The Kerry James Marshall retrospective at the Met Breuer, Mastry, attracted the most energetic and eclectic museum crowd I’ve ever seen. Marshall is African American, and publicity surrounding the show was pointedly political. An explanatory wall text notes that his work “synthesizes a wide range of pictorial traditions to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society and reassert the place of the black figure within the canon of Western painting.“ Marshall’s richly-colored, mural-sized canvases are strongly graphic, with characters often rendered in profile, and fields in flat, bold colors. They have the kinetic energy of posters, quilts and graffiti. Some capture everyday scenes from black American life: a beauty salon, a barber shop, two lovers in bed. Others capture moments from black history: the failure to seize a rogue slave ship, the colonization of South Africa by the Dutch.
Despite political interpretations, the paintings are most remarkable for their skillful postmodern storytelling, employing fractured imagery to upend conventional narratives. Scenes are constructed within a conventional perspectival background, and their integrity is questioned by a web of seemingly random graphic marks
laid right on top of them: letters, numbers, banners, logos, and puddles and streaks of paint. The complex, layered
image-making recalls the work of David Salle, and
the sensual handling recalls the work of Eric Fischl. But Marshall’s work is more ambitious formally and more troubling emotionally than that of either of his contemporaries.
In the most powerful paintings, the dissonant overlapping and accumulation of images exposes the distance between American life and the American dream. A series of paintings completed in the 1980′s (including Better Homes and Better Gardens, above) shows black men, women and children emerging from handsome apartment blocks, playing on tidy suburban yards, sunning themselves at the beach, and resting inside homes. They’re surrounded by all the acoutrements of good bourgeois living: flags and banners, sprawling green lawns, flowering trees, gently winding streets, sunny skies. But the stray texts, strokes and smears floating on the surface above them expose the scene as a fiction, and the canvas as an unreliable, illusory surface. The very structure of the paintings suggests that, for black Americans, undisturbed good living might remain a fiction.
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