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Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy

This is a massive, probably epoch-making exhibition, but which I found troubling and repelling for reasons I’ll try to explain later, in part 2 of this review. First I’ll try to give you all the information and as many images as I can so that you can make your own mind up.

Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall is, according to the curators at the Royal Academy, ‘America’s most important artist‘.

This huge exhibition of Marshall’s enormous paintings at the Royal Academy is the largest ever held outside the US and so the first chance for most of us Brits to experience his works in the UK.

Exhibition structure

The exhibition includes 70 works, primarily paintings, as well as examples of the artist’s prints, drawings and sculpture, from museums and private collections across North America and Europe.

It includes a dramatic new series of paintings made especially for the show.

The show marks Marshall’s 70th birthday (born 17 October 1955).

Marshall works in series and cycles. The exhibition brings together 11 groups of works made between 1980 and the present, displayed in 11 galleries.

For your information I’ll give the curators’ wall labels to each of the 11 rooms verbatim, distinguished from my commentary by being indented.

Gallery 1. The Academy

The works in this room feature scenes from art schools, studios and museums – places, like the Royal Academy, where artists study, create and exhibit their work. There is a deep fascination in Western art with the studio as the locus of production and the museum as the repository of wonders. Adding to this tradition, Marshall transforms it by centring Black figures as both producers and consumers.

The painters he depicts are masters of their medium and materials. The model in ‘The Academy’ strikes a pose reminiscent of the American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games. On the student painter’s table there is a preparatory sketch of the model as well as a ‘nkisi nkondi’ ‘power figure’. In ‘Untitled (Studio)’, a painter adjusts the position of her model to match the picture in progress.

Untitled by Kerry James Marshall (2009) Yale University Art Gallery © Kerry James Marshall

These works emphasise the decisions artists make in composing and completing their work: whether to paint precisely or loosely, whether to render objects flatly or with more volume, and how to arrange colours. Marshall uses various black pigments to depict skin colours, layering, or placing side by side, ivory black, Mars black and carbon black, mixing in other colours to render black fully chromatic. As he has said, ‘if you say black, you should see black’. While his blacks are complex, Marshall rarely attempts to depict the browns of real skin tones. His figures are at once individual characters and examples of an emphatic Blackness, real and rhetorical, and as such, provoke wider questions about the idea of Black figures in art.

The Academy by Kerry James Marshall (2012) Collection of Dr. Daniel S. Berger © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Gallery 2. Invisible Man

Marshall’s family moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles in 1963. In 1965 he visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a school trip. In 1968 he was selected for a summer drawing workshop at the Otis Art Institute, where he first encountered the work of Charles White and committed to becoming a full-time student there after high school. He enrolled at Otis in 1977 and received his BFA in 1978.

The 1970s was a volatile period at Otis, and within the art world in general. Conceptual artists were abandoning painting; some artists associated with the Black Arts Movement were distancing themselves from European art traditions and devoting themselves to political works aimed at uplift and protest.

Not to be deterred, Marshall continued his pursuit of an education dedicated to maximising the knowledge and skills associated with the best results in picture making. When the time was right, these could be put to effective use. That time arrived after he read Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel ‘Invisible Man’. In the novel, the protagonist feels he is invisible because he is not seen as desirable in American society. This idea inspired Marshall to begin a series of works in which Black figures are set against a dark ground, so that they become almost invisible to the viewer. The first of these was made with egg tempera, a medium strongly associated with Sienese painters like Duccio, and later revised by artists like Ben Shahn.

In this first major cycle of images, Marshall also explored histories of racial stereotypes and caricatures, choosing to render his figures in black paint. From this point on, his figures function rhetorically, raising questions about Black absence and presence both in society and in art history.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing two of the invisible man paintings – if you look closely you can see the white teeth and white eyes of the invisible man (photo by the author)

Gallery 3. The Painting of Modern Life 1

The two largest galleries are devoted to Marshall’s ambitiously composed, large-format paintings that record scenes of everyday life in Black America.

In the nineteenth century, French artists like Édouard Manet and Georges Seurat transformed the genre of history painting to render scenes of modern life on an epic scale. Made on unstretched canvases and secured to the wall with grommets, the paintings in this room date from the early to mid-1990s, when Marshall, having relocated to Chicago and settled into a studio, began to make his own paintings of everyday life: children playing, lovers dancing, families enjoying a day in the park.

‘De Style’ (1993), showing a group of Black men in a barber’s shop, was the first work of Marshall’s to be acquired by a museum, and is both an amalgamation of established art historical styles and a monument to Black style.

De Style by Kerry James Marshall (1993) Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA

A year after completing it, Marshall embarked on the works in his ‘Garden Project’ series, three of which are shown here. These look back to the American public housing projects named ‘Gardens’ whose first residents included families, like Marshall’s own, who had migrated from the South and settled in the north and west of the United States from the 1940s. Made at a time when many housing projects were suffering from a lack of resources, the images convey the hopes of the past and the resilience of residents in the 1990s.

OR:

Deeply influenced by artists such as Edouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Georges Seurat and other painters of modern life, and conscious of the absence of large-scale images of daily life in the work of many Black artists before him, Marshall depicts Black families picnicking in the park, lovers dancing, children playing in communal gardens, and friends hanging out in hair salons, for example in School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012 (Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham (AL)).

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing three of the Garden Project paintings (photo by the author)

At the centre of this room hangs the vast Knowledge and Wonder, 1995 (Legler Regional Library, Chicago Public Library, Chicago), Marshall’s largest painting to date, exhibited for the first time outside of Chicago.

Knowledge and Wonder by Kerry James Marshall (1995) City of Chicago Public Art Program and the Chicago Public Library, Legler Regional Library © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: Patrick L. Pyszka, City of Chicago

Gallery 4. Middle Passage

The five paintings in this room were made in the early 1990s and constitute Marshall’s first attempt to address the history of the Middle Passage – the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, during which many captive Africans died before reaching the slave markets in the Americas. It is a history understood in fragments, and accordingly, instead of making works functioning like costume dramas, Marshall composes paintings with disparate images, motifs and textures, incorporating symbols and diagrams derived from Yoruban religion, Voodoo and other syncretic religions that were practised across the African diaspora as acts of defiance as well as to maintain connections to Africa.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing Great America (left) and Plunge (right) (photo by the author)

Before embarking on the series, Marshall completed a group of woodblock prints called ‘African Powers’, imagining six Yoruban orishas – divine spirits or gods.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing the six African Powers woodblock prints (photo by the author)

He had also recently worked as the production designer on Julie Dash’s film ‘Daughters of the Dust’ (1991), for which he constructed sets including bottle trees and grave markers that were derived from African religious traditions. The dream-like structure of the film has an affinity with some of the paintings here.

A section bringing together imagined portraits of historically significant Black figures such as Scipio Moorhead and Harriet Tubman, question how historical portraits can be created in the absence of archives and earlier representations of individuals.

Gallery 6. Vignettes

For Marshall, every historical genre and style of painting is ripe for reinvention, and in a long-running open series he has looked back to romance pictures, challenging himself to make serious and layered paintings with apparently light-hearted subject matter. The first ‘Vignette’, dating from 2003, was a landscape in the manner of Henri Rousseau set in an American park, showing a naked couple wearing jewellery related to the Afrocentric movement. In the later ‘Vignettes’, Marshall reworked the compositions of French Rococo artists like Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

By painting romantic scenes, Marshall produces images of resistance. ‘Breeding’, not marriage, was encouraged by some slave owners as a way of increasing their wealth and workforce.

Vignette #13 by Kerry James Marshall (2008) Susan Manilow Collection © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Although the paintings are filled with flowers and lovebirds, the various scenes are marked in other ways by signs of protest, including burning tyres and political flags. Surrounded by pink brushstrokes and presented as dream scenes, the works also raise the question of whether Black couples can really relax in public spaces or if this idea remains an illusion.

Central Hall. Souvenirs

In 1998, Marshall produced a suite of paintings, photographs, sculpture, prints and video for the exhibition ‘Mementos’ at the Renaissance Society in Chicago – four paintings are reunited here for the first time since their debut. The paintings are set in the middle-class houses of Marshall’s friends and relatives. One is the house of his mother-in-law. Decorations in their living rooms included tributes to the assassinated Kennedys and Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The works concern the ways in which the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, marked by unfulfilled optimism and political upheaval, might be commemorated in the 1990s.

Of the four large horizontal-format paintings in the group, the first two, in full colour, memorialise political and activist martyrs, who are silkscreened as a frieze across the top. The other pictures, rendered in grisaille, expand the tribute to recognise the importance of cultural heroes who died between 1959 and 1970, bracketing the 1960s. As well as thinking about glittery greetings cards, Marshall wanted to transform the genre of Renaissance Annunciation paintings, where the archangel Gabriel appears in Mary’s home to tell her she will give birth to Jesus. The angels in these paintings call on us to remember. They appear somewhat exhausted by the process of assessing the unrealised dreams or real achievements of these political protagonists and cultural heroes.

Lecture Room. The Painting of Modern Life 2

In the 2010s Marshall continued to construct powerful scenes of everyday life. The settings were parks, nightclubs, homes, city streets and art galleries. He often reworked arrangements and elements from famous paintings, none more prominently than when he transformed the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ (1533) into a distorted Sleeping Beauty, disturbing the space of a salon in ‘School of Beauty, School of Culture’, a sister work to his earlier barber’s shop painting ‘De Style’.

School of Beauty, School of Culture by Kerry James Marshall (2012) Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Sean Pathasema

Some paintings here refer to specific moments from the past, such as the crowning of Gloria Smith as the second Miss Black America at the height of the ‘Black Is Beautiful’ period in 1969.

Others provoke questions about Marshall’s own time: ‘Untitled (Policeman)’ (2015) was made shortly after the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement when protesters campaigned to ‘defund the police’. Together, these paintings express a wide range of Black experiences of and attitudes towards America, from deep joy to a profound, uneasy ambivalence.

Untitled (Policeman) by Kerry James Marshall (2015) The Museum of Modern Art, New York © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

Gallery 7. Africa Revisited

Made specifically for this exhibition, the paintings here concern challenging moments in the recorded history of Africa, not often represented by artists. Five of them address the slave trade, showing people kidnapping children, rowing captives in a canoe to buyers out of scene, returning with all kinds of booty, and celebrating their successful trades. As with his previous works, several of these new paintings present confident Black people acting with agency. These figures are shown having sold slaves, driven by their greed for the consumer goods that Europeans supplied in exchange. Another painting depicts the murder of Shaka Zulu by his half-brothers in Zululand in 1828. Together, these paintings disrupt a view of the African past, providing a fuller picture of a complex history.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing three of the Africa Revisited paintings (photo by the author)

Two final paintings depict the so-called ‘white queens’ of Africa, Colette Hubert and Ruth Williams, at their weddings to Léopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, and Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana. These scenes, showing real unions but with the details reimagined by Marshall, disturb narratives about the post-colonial period on the continent.

Gallery 8. Wake / Gulf Stream

Marshall first showed these two works together in 2003 at the Venice Biennale.

‘Wake’ centres on a black ship on a pedestal that stands for a black sea. While recalling the journey made by enslaved Africans, the work also suggests the growing power of Black cultural expression. Each time it is displayed, Marshall adds more medallions, representing the proliferating achievements of African Americans. The idea of accumulation comes from the ‘nkisi nkondi’, a type of Kongo ‘power figure’ into which users drove iron nails to increase its spiritual potency.

The painting ‘Gulf Stream’ was shown in front of ‘Wake’ in Venice. In it, Marshall revisits a painting by the American artist Winslow Homer, also called ‘The Gulf Stream’ (1899/1906), which featured a shipwrecked Black sailor whose boat is surrounded by sharks. Set off the coast of America in the present day, the friends in Marshall’s yacht here appear to be enjoying their day sailing, but storm clouds are visible on the horizon, indicative of unpredictable times ahead.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing Wake (the sculpture on the floor) and Gulf Stream (the painting on the wall) (photo by the author)

‘Wake’ also encompasses ‘black light’ photographs of a slave ship, and plates commemorating the first cargo of twenty Africans brought to America, as well as one for William Tucker, the first person of African origin born in America in around 1624. Marshall represents Tucker with a photograph of himself as a teenager.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing the plate from wake commemorating William Tucker but bearing a photo of the artist as a teenager (photo by the author)

Gallery 9. Red Black Green

In the works gathered here, Marshall deploys the colours of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) or Pan-African Flag, created by Marcus Garvey in 1920, as well as the imagery and slogans of the Black Panthers from the late 1960s. But rather than straightforwardly celebrating Black Nationalism, Marshall constructs cheeky and layered works that also reference the connected histories of painting and erotica. Artists from Titian to Goya and Manet made famous canvases of reclining nudes. Marshall exchanges their female figures for a Black man who hides his genitals with a flag. Similarly, struck by the lack of Black women in American pin-up magazines, Marshall decided to make his own images.

One of his imagined models here becomes a ‘Black Star’. The painting also references the ‘Black Star Line’ – the shipping company that Marcus Garvey founded in 1919 to encourage commerce with Africa and the voluntary return of Black Americans to the continent. Gripping a star like a ship’s wheel, the woman here looks back like a model in a photoshoot. We are left to ask whether Garvey’s creations are now just useful for making stylish and sexy images, or if his political project remains relevant today.

Pros

1. Visitors The friend I went with pointed out that an unusually large number of the exhibition visitors were Black, and also young. This was noticeable because, no matter how much galleries go on about diversity and inclusivity, most of the exhibitions I go to have few if any Black visitors and are overwhelmingly populated with old white people. So this is Success if you’re trying to attract a younger, more diverse audience.

2. Black art She went on to say that if you’re a little Black girl or boy, and interested in art and go to galleries, it must be alienating or dismaying to see nothing but white faces in all the art works. You might end up feeling art is a White activity for White people. Whereas Marshall’s works clearly rectify that notion and would make you feel that art can very much be a Black interest and activity, after all.

3. Black presence The size of the paintings, their confident mix of classical examples with modern subject matter, their sweeping range over Black history from the dawn of slavery through key moments of American history, up to his numerous portrayals of everyday life in Black communities – all these triumphantly achieve his goal of restoring and emphasising a Black presence in art. So it’s a triumph.

But do you actually like any of it?

That said, she didn’t actually like any of the paintings on display. Usually we play a game of getting to the end of an exhibition, having read all the wall captions and absorbed all the information – then stroll back through the show selecting one key work from each room, and explaining why we like it more than the others.

But in this huge show neither of us saw any one work we liked in any of the rooms (with the possible exception of the six African Powers woodcuts, which I liked, up to a point). Neither of us chose any of the vast paintings because we didn’t really like any of them. We didn’t really enjoy looking at Marshall’s art. Big, colourful, striking, and in a good cause, sure, but…

So I get the point of the works, and they certainly succeed in fulfilling Marshall’s aims and agenda. But I felt alienated and outside all of them. Why? I think it’s for three reasons.

1. Blackness

It’s no use denying that the paintings’ insistence on Black Black Black was a problem for me for the simple reason that I am not Black. I don’t object or dislike the Blackness, I just don’t feel included. It feels like it’s for a different audience than me, which is fine, but explains why I didn’t feel engaged.

What puzzles me is that I really like specifically Black art. The London art gallery devoted to Black art, Autograph ABP, is one of my favourite galleries, and I go out of my way to review its shows. I absolutely loved shows there by:

Wilfred Ukpong: Niger-Delta / Future-Cosmos (March 2024)
Omar Victor Diop – Liberty / Diaspora (November 2018)

To name a couple which really stick in my mind. I really liked Mary Sibande‘s brilliant show at Somerset House and who could forget the great Basquiat exhibition at Barbican? And I’ve really liked all the Afro-Futurism things I’ve seen, for example at the Barbican’s science fiction exhibition. So it’s not Black people or Black culture or Black art which troubled me, it’s something else.

2. American cultural imperialism

A big part of my abreaction is because it’s so American. In my opinion, British culture is super-saturated with American cultural products. In my youth we were exposed to a fair amount of Hollywood movies and TV shows, but this has now gone supersize with the explosion of streaming services, Disney, Netflix, Apple TV, HBO and hundreds of others. Then there’s the entire internet itself with its inbuilt bias towards American products and the American worldview. And then there’s American smartphones and social media which most people have willingly invited into their homes to record every aspect of their lives. And now we are about to be taken over by American artificial intelligence getting to know us better than we know ourselves.

In my opinion, the super-saturation of British culture with American products, ideas, technology and discourse ought to be resisted.

Instead of which British cultural curators and gatekeepers fall over themselves to promote American art and culture and movies and TV shows at every opportunity.

And, disappointingly, the same goes for academia where what used to be called Critical Theory has been superseded by various forms of identity theories (feminist theory, queer theory, Black theory, post-colonial theory) almost all imported from America, led by American academics (I was watching a video about Judith Butler recently, queen of Queer Theory) who speak to specifically American history and circumstances.

In my opinion this has two distinct negative consequences:

a) American culture swamps and obliterates British culture

The actual social and political and cultural situation of my country, England, gets swamped and lost in products, discourse and rhetoric which is and sounds American and stems from American history and politics.

So when I see yet another image of Martin Luther King or John fucking Kennedy, I just think, Fuck off. That’s your country, your history, your politics, your problems, you deal with them. I have my own country with its own history, politics and problems to deal with thank you very much.

b) Importing American culture means importing American politics

But there is a horrible historical inevitability here as well. In terms of social and cultural trends, America has often been seen as ahead of Europe; in some sense, America has often been seen as the future. So what do all these social, political and cultural trends get us? What is the shiny hi-tech America which British cultural guardians fall over themselves to promote, with its fabulous Oscars and Taylor Swift and woke activists, heading towards?

Donald Trump. Taken together, all the efforts of American feminists, queer and Black activists have ended up, through the mad irrationality of human society, handing power to an authoritarian moron and his henchmen. Fifty years of earnest American feminism has led up to… the revocation of Roe versus Wade and the ending of the nationwide right to abortion. All the Black Lives Matter calls to defund the police have ended up with… augmented powers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forces which now roam the streets like a semi-fascist militia, kidnapping and deporting people at will.

In other words, so many of these progressive causes in America, in the unique context of American history, politics, culture and society, have not only failed but triggered a huge and horrifying backlash.

My position is simple: I think of myself as left-wing. I support a woman’s right to abortion, I support LGBTQ+ rights, I sympathise with Black activists’ opposition to police brutality, and so on.

But I greatly fear that the wholesale importation of American cultural and political models and discourse into Britain risks triggering exactly the same white, heteronormative, masculine backlash here as has happened in the States, the followers of the new martyr Charlie Kirk. Why would we want to import the hugely conflicted culture wars which have brought America to the brink of some kind of civil war, into our own society?

And in fact it’s happening already. The rise and rise of Reform at the expense of the feeble Labour Party mirrors the rise of Trump’s MAGA movement within the Republican Party at the expense of the feeble Democrats.

It may seem grotesquely unfair to associate Kerry James Marshall with the rise of Donald Trump. All I’m saying is they both come from the same toxic culture. When I saw the images of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy I not only experienced a vast weariness with American pop history, but a premonition of how this all ends up.

I don’t want Reform, I don’t want the Conservative Party to adopt the tone and policies of Trump’s MAGA, and, in my opinion, one way to resist the rise of America-style authoritarianism is to insist on the difference between America and Britain. To insist on the specific Britishness of British social and political issues. To stop kowtowing before American cultural products and importing American discourse, with all its toxic resonances, into British culture.

3. The new figurativism

But just as impactful as all the above was that I was dismayed by the style of all these paintings, namely a return to a kind of naive realism, which I found dismaying. In the RA shop was a big expensive book about The New Figurativism. According to Google AI:

The new figurativism refers to the modern resurgence of figurative art, or art depicting recognizable subjects like people, in contemporary times, driven by a desire for greater artistic representation, a reflection of 21st-century realities, and a break from abstract art’s dominance. This movement allows for the exploration of social and personal identity, particularly for traditionally marginalized groups, and features bold, expressive styles often inspired by past movements like Neo-Expressionism.

Return to Representation: It marks a shift back to depicting the human form and recognizable scenes after a long period where abstract art was dominant.

Emphasis on Representation and Identity: A major driving force is a need for greater diversity and the ability to tell authentic stories from various perspectives, including those of people of colour, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals.

Relevance to Current Reality: The genre’s ability to capture and reflect the contemporary world makes it a potent tool for addressing social issues, expressing personal experiences, and engaging with contemporary culture.

Opportunity for Authenticity: It provides a powerful platform for artists to tell their own stories and to represent their communities in a way that abstract art cannot.

So on this definition, Marshall’s work is a prime example of the New Figurativism, both in style and very much in purpose, namely ‘to tell authentic stories from various perspectives, including those of people of colour’, in his concern to ‘represent his community’ and so on. As the Royal Academy curators put it, Marshall certainly:

makes visible those people who were so noticeably absent in the works that came before him.

But to [put my concerns in a nutshell, what is happening here is that woke political concerns are justifying a return to a deeply conservative, retro, anti-modern style of figurative painting. There are a few stylistic glitches and angularities which feebly gesture to the great innovations of the modernists a hundred years ago. But overall, it feels as if most of twentieth century art never happened.

I’ve just visited the van Gogh / Anselm Kiefer exhibition which is also playing here at the Royal Academy. I was thrilled by watching van Gogh develop his visual language and evolve his deployment of oil paint on an almost week-by-week basis; and dazzled at the enormous, thrilling innovations of Kiefer’s huge canvases clotted with surface detritus, stalks and twigs.

Coming from those thrilling and mind-opening innovations to Marshall’s deeply conservative, old-style, backward-looking figurativism felt like a big, big imaginative letdown.

Conclusion

As I said back at the start, Marshall’s art perfectly achieves his stated aim of putting the Black presence front and centre of his work, which has been enthusiastically taken up by galleries and commissions across the States and, I bet, will open doors for Black kids and teenagers and aspiring artists and just sympathetic gallery goers, to realise that they can do this, too, and that they have a voice and presence in the sometimes intimidating realm of ‘Art’. In terms of cultural politics it is an enormous success.

But in terms of actual aesthetics, of the style and value of what you actually see, I feel Marshall’s art represents an enormous step backwards, to a naively realist approach which erases everything I love and value about modern art.

So that’s the fundamental reason why I really didn’t like this exhibition.

Coda: Kerry Marshall and David Hockney

To take the race element out of the equation altogether, I feel the same when I look at David Hockney’s works from last 20 years or so. In the RA shop, next to a book about New Figurativism and umpteen books about Marshall, was a pile of books and merch celebrating Hockney’s dayglo renderings of the Yorkshire Wolds.

I flicked through one particularly enormous coffee table book and was staggered at how many there are, hundreds and hundreds of huge, vivid, simplistic pictures, I wonder if he’s done over a thousand by now, rattling them off on his ipad.

And as I flicked dispiritedly on, I thought: It’s as if the last 100 years or artistic experimentation never happened. A guy with a great eye and a love of bright colours is creating a never-ending stream of entertaining, easy-on-the-eye figurative paintings of a subject he loves; in Hockney’s case, the landscape of his beloved Yorkshire, in Marshall’s case, Black people, history, art and so on – and in both cases I can see that they’re big [both artists produce very big paintings, which is another rather dismaying aspect of contemporary art], bright and confident but… I just don’t like them.

And found myself thinking that this is anodyne, easy-on-the-eye, deeply reactionary, backward-looking anti-art, an art appropriate for an age which has lost any belief in the future and looks back to multiple pasts with a kind of crippling nostalgia, in both content and style.

Untitled (Porch Deck) by Kerry James Marshall (2014) Kravis Collection © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London

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Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South @ the Royal Academy

From left to right: 1) ‘Sarah Lockett’s Roses’ (1997) by Ronald Lockett, made from cut tin, nails and enamel on wood. 2) ‘Stars of Everything’ (2004) by Thornton Dial, made from paint cans, plastic cans, spray-paint cans, clothing, wood, steel, carpet, plastic straws, rope, oil, enamel, spray paint and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood. 3) ‘Oklahoma’ by Ronald Lockett (1995) made from found sheet metal, tin, wire, paint and nails on wood. All in room one of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy

1. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation

There are two important points to grasp about this exhibition. The main one is that ‘Souls Grown Deep’ isn’t a fancy name dreamed up by the curators but the name of an organisation in America. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF) is based in Atlanta, Georgia. It:

advocates for the inclusion of Black artists from the South in the canon of American art history
fosters economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement in the communities that gave rise to these artists

Founded by Atlanta collector William S. Arnett in 2010, Souls Grown Deep derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes titled ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. The poem is one of Hughes’s signature works and is worth printing in its entirety:

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The Souls Grown Deep Foundation stewards the largest and most eminent collection of works by Black artists from the Southern United States. It originally totalled some 1,300 works by more than 160 artists, two-thirds of them women.

Part of the foundation’s remit is publicise and promote these artists beyond America. To this end it energetically partners with galleries around the world and has placed more than 500 works from the collection in 32 museums globally. So this is an example of the foundation’s global outreach program. They came to an arrangement to display a selection of their works at the prestigious Royal Academy in London.

What exactly do we mean by ‘The Deep South’?

Map of the South featured in ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy

The artists live and work in this region, from communities in South Carolina to the Mississippi Delta, in isolated rural areas like Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and in urban centres like Atlanta, Memphis and Miami, all indicated on the map.

2. Outsider art

Obviously all the artists are Black Americans, that’s explained by point 1. But just as important is the idea that these artists, growing up in communities in the Deep South, come from outside the mainstream of American art schools and galleries. Some couldn’t afford art school, some were actively excluded on the basis of their colour, others didn’t know about the possibility or care.

So, with little access to formal art education, most of the works on display here were made by artists who developed their own artistic techniques and styles by learning from neighbours, friends and family. Both the foundation and individual artists make a big point of emphasising that these artists came from within very local traditions and communities. In this respect a bunch of photos at the entrance to the show capture the context and vibe of these works in their original settings.

Clockwise from top left: Ronald Lockett standing by ‘Sarah Lockett’s Rose’; Thornton Dial pointing at the camera; Doris Moseley and Mary Margaret Pettway working on a quilt; Purvis Young standing by a canvas; Lonnie Holley giving a thumbs up; Mary T Smith in the middle of a big yard show.

Some used skills they developed when working in industry, such as Thornton Dial and Joe Minter who were metalworkers. These skills were handed down – Dial trained his sons Thornton Dial Jr and Richard Dial and nurtured the talents of his younger cousin Ronald Lockett.

The women of Gee’s Bend, a remote settlement on the Alabama River, have handed down the skills of sewing and making quilts from generation to generation. Artist Loretta Pettway Bennett, featured here, recalls learning to sew by helping her mother and grandmother make quilts.

Raw materials

Coming from outside the mainstream art tradition, many of the artists here recycle and reuse materials available locally – like clay, driftwood, roots, soil, sawdust and all manner of cast-off items, old phones, bicycles, tools, shears, wire, trash and detritus. This gives almost all the works a rough and ready, hand-made appearance. For example this stunning work by Archie Byron (one of my favourites in the show) is made entirely from sawdust and glue!

Anatomy by Archie Byron

Or take these two sculptures, assembled from bits and pieces of bicycle (on the left) and an old tool box, spanner and wire (on the right).

Three-Way Bicycle by Charlie Lucas (c. 1985) made from bicycle wheels, metal machine parts and electrical wiring and Where is My Hammer? by Joe Minter (1996) made from welded found metal

The exhibition

The exhibition brings together 64 works by 34 artists from the mid-20th century to the present. There’s various media including assemblages, sculpture, paintings and drawings, reliefs, and video.

Artists

The artists include Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Hawkins Bolden, Bessie Harvey, Charles Williams, Mary T. Smith, Purvis Young, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary Lee Bendolph, Marlene Bennett Jones, Martha Jane Pettway, Loretta Pettway, and Henry and Georgia Speller.

Room 1. Friendships and family ties

The first room is, arguably, the best and showcases work by artists connected by close familial relations and friendships. Lonnie Holley, who had been working as a gravedigger and cotton picker, began sculpting in 1979, when he carved grave markers for a young niece and nephew following their tragic deaths in a fire. Through a former girlfriend he met Thornton Dial, who had worked in farming and as a steelworker before he became an artist. Both artists worked with discarded and salvaged objects and organic materials, transforming them into impressive sculptures and assemblages rich in personal, social and political symbolism.

The most impressive pieces here are by Dial including the biggest piece in the show, the fabulous ‘Stars of Everything’ (see above). But it was the relatively small piece, ‘Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music)’ by Lonnie Holley (1986) which the curators chose for the exhibition poster. Like all the assemblages here it is made from cannibalised waste and spare parts, in this case a salvaged phonograph top, a phonograph record and an animal skull.

Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music) by Lonnie Holley (1986)

I don’t know what it’s saying, but it’s saying it very powerfully indeed, a brilliantly powerful, unnerving image.

Room 2. Personal stories, local sources

Working almost entirely without recognition from the wider art world, these southern Black artists drew inspiration from daily life and current events. The resulting works are intensely local in terms of materials, subject and audience, while also bringing out universal themes.

This room features the work of Sam Doyle, Henry Speller, Eldren M. Bailey, Georgia Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth. Lack of access to conventional art materials and tools often led artists to repurpose what
was around them. Sculptors including Bessie Harvey found artworks ready to be ‘drawn out’ from the twisted organic forms of roots and dead wood, a practice that became a distinct regional tradition.

Instinct drove visually impaired artist Hawkins Bolden as he searched the streets for items he could sense felt right for his ‘scarecrow’ sculptures, giving new life to materials that others would class as trash.

Installation view of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ @ the Royal Academy

By and large the sculptures were much more interesting and effective than the paintings. Many of the ‘primitivist’ paintings were just too basic for my taste.

Paintings from room 2.

For example, I couldn’t get on with any of the big, puke-yellow paintings by Purvis Young. Apparently, his scenes are populated by wild horses, warriors, angels, pregnant women, boats and prison bars but I still don’t like them.

Paintings by Purvis Young

By contrast with the paintings, I found almost all the sculptures wonderfully effective. In part this is, I think, because I’ve seen so much of this kind of thing before. Pablo Picasso made cubist sculptures before the First World War; Marcel Duchamps signed a urinal and put it in an art gallery in 1917; Dada artists created absurdist sculptures made mashed-up street junk in the early 1920s. Then lots of artists in the 1960s turned to making sculptures from found objects, and then the Arte Povera movement of the early 1970s, which took industrial waste products and cast-offs and made them into abstract sculptures.

My point is that recycling street junk into imaginative or surreal sculptures is hardly new but, on the contrary, feels like a venerable and well-explored strategy, which is why so many of the pieces here had such a reassuringly familiar feel to them. I really, really liked this piece by Hawkins Bolden but that’s partly because it reminded me so strongly of classic Surrealist sculpture. Could be by Picasso or Max Ernst.

Untitled by Hawkins Bolden (1989) Pot, drainpipe, cans, muffin tin, rubber hoses, nails, wood and wire

Room 3. The yard show

As most of the artists did not have access to formal art spaces, often the only place they could display their work was in their own back yards. The ‘yard show’ is a deeply rooted Southern tradition where artists would arrange their sculptures, paintings, and assemblages on their property.

One of the best known examples has been created over decades by Joe Minter (b. 1943), and is titled ‘African Village in America’, on a half acre site near Birmingham, Alabama. The show includes an impressive video featuring a panoramic scan over this huge area full of ramshackle constructions.

Room 4. The quilt-makers of Gee’s Bend

Gee’s Bend, officially known as Boykin, is a remote settlement on a hair-pin bend of the Alabama River. The Bend’s residents are descendants of the enslaved people who worked on the cotton plantation established there in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), many of the formerly enslaved people remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers, who were obliged to give part of their crop to the landowner, and many inhabitants today still bear the surnames of their ancestors’ enslavers. The community was able to remain intact due to Government loans provided during the Depression which enabled tenants to buy the land they farmed and protected them from forced evictions.

Installation view of Gee’s Bend quilts

This continuity allowed a unique tradition of quilt-making to survive and be passed down through generations of women. Most Gee’s Bend quilts are improvisational or ‘my way’ quilts. Quilt-makers start with basic forms then head off ‘their way’ with unexpected patterns, unusual colours and surprising rhythms. Not originally conceived of as formal artworks, quilts were both decorative and necessary objects, keeping families warm and making use of fabric scraps.

More Gee’s Bend quilts

I appreciate the enormous amount of time and energy which goes into creating patchwork quilts like this. I appreciate the communal nature of the work, and the deep local tradition which has bound successive generations of women quilt-makers together. But, to be blunt, I wasn’t that impressed by the quilts. Maybe it’s just not my medium or genre. I quite liked the couple which were made from corduroy, because the texture of the fabric was so tactile, and my favourite was the one made entirely from denim patches, maybe because it approached closest to being a painting in design.

Spending five minutes in the quilt room made me suspect I just don’t ‘get’ quilts and embroidery and sewn artefacts in the same way that I do paintings, sculpture and photographs. Well, my loss.

Marfa Stance and quilts for sale

‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ is a relatively small exhibition, but be warned that there’s an additional room, which is sort of part of the show but situated right at the other end of the Royal Academy building. I couldn’t find it and had to be shown the way by one of the Royal Academy receptionists. It’s through the members’ cafe, then up some stairs and in the Academicians’ Room on the first floor.

Here are displayed eight or so modern quilts from some of the Gee’s Bend quilt-makers. The difference between these ones and the works in the main exhibition is that these ones are for sale. They felt ‘better’, more elaborate and finished than the ones in the main show but, as I explained, I’m not a good judge of these kinds of thing. But be warned about the prices. The cheapest one will set you back a cool £25,000, the most expensive one, £30,000.

There’s a web page about them where you can not only read a bit more but buy one, if the fancy takes you and your bank balance can handle it.

Marfa Stance and the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend

More Royal Academy reviews

More Royal Academy reviews

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by Simon on May 29, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in America, Art, Exhibition

Tagged Alabama, Alabama River, American art, American Civil War, and Henry and Georgia Speller, Archie Byron, Arte Povera, Atlanta, Bessie Harvey, Black art, Black artists, Boykin, Charles Williams, cubist sculpture, Dada, Deep South, Eldren M. Bailey, exhibition, First World War, Gee’s Bend, Georgia, Georgia Speller, Hawkins Bolden, Henry Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Joe Minter, Joseph Gee, Langston Hughes, Lonnie Holley, Loretta Pettway, Marcel Duchamps, Marfa Stance, Marlene Bennett Jones, Martha Jane Pettway, Mary Lee Bendolph, Mary T Smith, Max Ernst, Memphis, Miami, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Outsider Art, Pablo Picasso, Painting, Picasso, Purvis Young, Ronald Lockett, Royal Academy, Sam Doyle, sculpture, Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers, Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South, South Carolina, Southern US, Surrealist sculpture, the Mississippi Delta, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, The Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Thornton Dial, USA, William S. Arnett, yard show

Posted by Simon on May 29, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/29/souls-grown-deep-like-the-rivers-black-artists-from-the-american-south-the-royal-academy/

Karl Marx on the American Civil War (1861-65)

Marx the journalist

Karl Marx fled the revolutions which rocked Europe in 1848 to the relative calm and safety of London. Although he never intended to, Marx then ended up spending the rest of his life, in fact three quarters of his entire adult life, in capitalist England.

Ironically for Marx the revolutionary, he lived here during pretty much the quietest period of 19th century English history. The uproar surrounding the Great Reform Act of 1832 was long over, and the Chartist Movement failed and fizzled out after 1848. There followed 25 years or so of growing wealth, accompanied by (admittedly piecemeal) Parliamentary legislation to try and improve the lot of the working classes toiling in the new industrial cities in their grim seven-days-a-week factories. It was the era of the triumphant bourgeoisie and the unstoppable rise of British Imperialism, in India, China and around the world.

Although Karl wanted to write great masterworks of historical and economic theory, these wouldn’t pay the rent for himself, his wife and growing family. Although he wanted to be at the head of great revolutionary organisations, the Communist League with which he’d been associated during the 1848 revolutions, splintered and fizzled into insignificance.

So Karl turned to journalism, which he had actively pursued in Germany since his student days (it was his editorship of the seditious Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne which was the reason he was kicked out of Germany in 1849).

Incongruously, Marx ended up getting a job not even with a British publication, but with the New York Daily Tribune, working as its European correspondent, from 1852 to 1862. The Tribune had wide working-class appeal in America and, at two cents, was inexpensive. It had a circulation of 50,000 copies per issue and its editorial line was progressive and anti-slavery.

So it was a this progressive New York newspaper which ended up paying the rent of the Marx household living in Soho, London for a decade. However, when civil war broke out in America in the spring of 1861, it was for the Liberal Vienna paper Die Presse that Karl wrote 37 articles about it, starting six months into the conflict, on 20 October 1861.

Karl Marx

Marx’s articles about the American Civil War

The American Civil War began with the secession of the southern slave states, starting with South Carolina, which declared independence in January 1861.

The eight seceded states went on to declare themselves a new nation, the Confederacy, with its capital at Montgomery, Alabama. On 12 April 1861 Confederate forces shelled Fort Sumter, a fort off the coast of South Carolina which was still held by units of the U.S. or Union army. It was this action which signalled the start of the American Civil War.

Of Karl’s 37 articles just two are translated and published in the Penguin selection of Karl’s Writings From Exile 1848-1863, which is a shame. I wonder if you can read the lot online.

Karl begins by lining up the London papers of the day, The Times, The Economist, The Saturday Review and summarising their positions.

Most of the British press sympathised with the southern states. They thought the war was mostly about the issue of trade tariffs. The North imposed various tariffs on imports and exports, whereas the South didn’t. Moreover, an enormous amount of southern cotton was bought by British factory owners, turned into clothes, and traded back to the South (or sold on to India).

This explains why Britain, being a free trade nation, and economically linked to the region, had strong sympathies with the South.

It was because of this economic self-interest – Karl argued – that Britain’s papers and politicians argued, ‘Why shouldn’t the South declare itself a separate nation?’ And ‘Why should the North bother, or dare, to try and invade and suppress this new nation?’

Buried, pushed aside, undiscussed in all the mainstream media articles which Marx quotes, is the issue of slavery. In the two articles published in the Penguin selection, Marx sets out to contradict and refute the British bourgeois position, and to put the issue of slavery smack bang in the middle of the argument.

Marx’s knowledge

Marx is incredibly knowledgeable. I found reading the nineteen pages which these articles make up in the Penguin edition nearly as illuminating as reading James McPherson’s 860-page history of the war. Karl demonstrates a surprisingly detailed grasp of the geography, the economic facts, the demographic changes and the political manoeuvring that led up to the war.

Karl gives his unstinting support to the North and says it must conquer the South and overthrow its iniquitous slavery system. Otherwise the South will triumph in its pre-war attempts to impose and spread slavery to all parts of America and with it, to enslave the working classes, too.

Karl says the war is about slavery pure and simple. The Founding Fathers may have been slave-owners (most famously Washington and Jefferson), but they thought slavery was an evil imported from England which they hoped would eventually die out. By contrast, apologists for the South treated slavery as a good in itself which deserved to be spread as widely as possible. According to them, slaves loved their slavery. Not only that, they wished to spread and cement slavery as a core element in American society. The South is fighting, as one apologist put it, for ‘the foundation of a great slave republic,’ (page 336).

Karl details the political build-up to the war, including:

the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which established 36º 30′ as the northernmost extent of slavery)
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 (which retracted that ruling)
the attempt to spread slavery into New Mexico
the controversial 1850 Fugitive Slave Act which forced northern officials to acquiesce in the hunting, kidnapping and return of slaves who had fled North into slavery-free states
the 1857 Dred Scott case which established that slave owners had a right to take their slaves anywhere in the country

Marx describes the revival of the slave trade in the years running up to the war which, he claims, had resulted in 15,000 new Africans being kidnapped and brought to America (making a bigger deal of it than McPherson does in his history).

And Marx repeats the outrageous but widely publicised aims of the southern states to conquer Cuba for America, and to extend their rule throughout Central America (specifically in Nicaragua where, for a year, a southern American mercenary did, indeed, manage to become president!).

All of these political events show, to Karl, the wish of the South not just to defend slavery, but to actively extend it throughout the wider region.

Why?

Marx’s economic explanation for the motives of the Confederate states

Karl gives a characteristically economic explanation for political events.

The old slave states are exhausting their soil. Maryland, Virginia, even South Carolina, have become net exporters of slaves. ‘Breed ’em and sell ’em,’ is the slavers’ policy. Therefore, the slave states need a steady supply of new markets, they need to make new territorial conquest, in order to maintain their economies.

Even in South Carolina, where slaves form four sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has remained almost stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil… South Carolina has become partly transformed into a slave-raising state by pressure of circumstances in so far as it already sells slaves to the states of the Deep South and South-West to the tune of four million dollars annually. As soon as this point is reached the acquisition of new territory becomes necessary, so that one section of the slave-holders can introduce slave labour into new fertile estates and thus create a new market for slave-raising and the sale of slaves. (page 341)

There is also politics. Each American state sends two senators to the Senate, regardless of population. Therefore, there is a naked power struggle whenever a new state is admitted to the Union as to whether its two senators will be pro or anti slavery, each new state’s nature threatening to upset the very finely tuned balance of power between slave and anti-slave states in Congress.

Who is pushing the drive to extend slavery? Karl estimates that there are only some 300,000 significant slave owners in the whole of the country. So an oligarchy of 300,000 has been trying to impose the political, legal and economic system which underpins its wealth onto the other 20 million Americans.

This ‘plantocracy’ was well aware what it was fighting for and understood that to restrict slavery to its current territories would:

reduce slaver representation in the senate i.e. undermine their political power
lead, over the long term, to the inevitable extinction of slavery
and the consequent general impoverishment of the South would lead to class warfare between the slave-owners and the poor whites who would, finally, realise how they are being exploited by the wealthy 300,000

Thus the war is nothing to do with free trade and tariffs, as the respectable London papers were trying to claim. It was about whether:

the 20 million free Americans should submit to a political and economic system imposed by an oligarchy of 300,000
the vast new territories of the Republic should be slave or free
whether the foreign policy of America should be peaceful – or get dragged into further wars with Cuba and Central America

Punchy and pithy

Karl is at his journalistic, punchy and pithy best. In the second article he makes the rhetorical point that the South – which had declared itself a new nation – isn’t a proper nation at all.

It is not a country at all, it is a battle-cry. (p.344)

In the second article he gives a detailed description of the geography and slave populations of all the ‘border’ states between south and north and describes how the slave states had made political, legal and, finally, armed attempts to infiltrate and capture these states for slavery.

Conventional opinion had it that it was the northern armies who had invaded the south, and indeed most of the fighting was done on the soil of southern or the so-called ‘border’ states. But Karl’s list of, first, the political attempts to suborn the border states, and then his detailed accounts of border incursions and raids by southern forces, makes a powerful case that the war is in fact:

a war of conquest for the extension and perpetuation of slavery. (page 350)

A glance at the map of America in 1854 shows what was being fought over. The southern slave states (dark green) already controlled significantly more land than the northern free states (pink). The issue was: should slavery be extended into the huge expanse of land to the west (light green) – nearly half of the American land mass, which was still only roughly parcelled out into territories provisionally named Kansas, New Mexico, Oregon etc, but which would, in the near future, attain the status of ‘states’ and be admitted to the union. Should they be slave – or free?

American states in 1854

Marx was wrong about lots of things but the materialist worldview which predisposed him to see all major events in terms of their economic basis and in terms of the class conflicts which capitalism inevitably give rise to, often gave him a thrillingly incisive vision which cut through the painful bombast and wordy rhetoric of the stuffy, obtuse Victorians he lived among.

Thus in Marx’s view the American Civil War was emphatically not about tariffs or free trade or the right to have a separate culture or any of the other mystifications and obfuscations which filled so many speeches and newspaper columns, no:

The present struggle between South and North is thus nothing less than a struggle between two social systems: the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer peacefully co-exist on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.

He thought the North would win and that the full emancipation of the slaves was inevitable.

Given that he was writing in November 1861, with the war only six months old and most Republicans (including President Lincoln) still reluctant to countenance slave emancipation under any circumstances, Karl in these articles was not only typically incisive and insightful, but remarkably prophetic.

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (3) by James M. McPherson (1987)

This is a long book. It takes McPherson about 280 pages before he gets to the outbreak of hostilities, just to paint in the complicated political, economic, legal and social background to the American Civil War. This build-up section is absolutely fascinating, giving insights into a number of deep and enduring aspects of American history and culture.

Cuba

I had no idea that freelance forces raised in the southern states repeatedly tried to invade and capture Cuba (this was after President Polk offered Spain $100 million for it and Spain haughtily refused). The so-called ‘Ostend Manifesto’ of 1854 declared that Cuba was as vital for American interests as any of the other American states. Invasion attempts were led by Narciso Lopez among others. Cuba was attractive because it had a slave population of some 500,000 i.e. annexing it to America would create a) another slave state, thus giving the existing slave states more political clout, b) add a big new territory in which slaves could be bought and sold i.e. where slave traders could make a profit.

And Nicaragua. In 1855 adventurer and mercenary leader William Walker managed to get himself appointed head of the Nicaraguan army, from where he usurped the presidency, ruling as President of Nicaragua for a year, 1856-57, before being defeated in battle by an alliance of other Central American states. (Walker had previously ‘conquered’ La Paz, the capital of sparsely populated Baja California, with a force of 43 men, and concocted various plans to seize territory from Mexico. McPherson’s book conveys a wonderful sense of this era of bandits, adventurers, filibusters and mercenaries.)

Plenty of southern ideologists thought that, blocked by the free states in the north, their destiny was to seize and conquer all the nations surrounding the Gulf of Mexico (Mexico, all of Central America, all the Caribbean islands), institute slavery in all of them, and corner the market in all the world’s coffee, sugar, cotton and other tropical goods, establish a new slave empire.

What an epic vision!

The various invasion attempts reinforced Latin American countries’ suspicion of America’s boundless arrogance and her thinly veiled ambitions to control the entire hemisphere, which lasts to this day.

Reviving the slave trade

Many southerners wanted to renew the slave trade, and some went as far as commissioning private ships to go buy Africans and ferry them back to America e.g. Charles Lamar, although Lamar was arrested (and released) and no sizeable trade was, in the end, established.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854

In McPherson’s opinion the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was ‘the most important single event pushing the nation towards civil war (p.121).

The territories of Kansas and Nebraska needed to be defined and organised. The process was led by Senator Stephen Douglas. He needed senate support. A key block of southerners made it clear they wouldn’t support the bill unless Douglas allowed slavery in the new states. To be precise, unless he repealed the ban on slavery north of 36° 30’ which had a been a central part of successive compromises with the slave states since 1820.

Douglas inserted such a repeal into the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the bill’s supporters then forced a meeting with President Pierce (1853-57) during which they threatened him: ‘Endorse repeal or lose the south’.

Pierce caved in, the act passed and caused a storm of protest. McPherson details the process by which the Kansas-Nebraska Act precipitated the collapse of the Whig party, whose northern and southern wings increasingly struggled to find common ground. From the ashes arose a variety of anti-slavery parties, which eventually crystallised into a new, entirely northern, Republican party.

Nativism

Immigration quadrupled after the great potato blight in Ireland of the mid-1840s. Immigration in the first five years of the 1850s was five times higher than a decade earlier. Most of the immigrants were Catholic Irish fleeing the famine or Germans fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848. They tended to be poor peasant labourers who crammed into urban tenements, driving up crime, squalor, disease and drunkenness.

Pope Pius IX (1846-78) helped stoke anti-Catholic feeling among liberals and the American Protestant establishment by making the Catholic Church a beacon for reactionary beliefs – declaring the doctrine of papal infallibility and publishing a Syllabus of Errors which forbade Catholics from praising or practicing liberalism, socialism, public education, women’s rights and so on. American Catholic archbishop Hughes published an inflammatory book declaring that Protestantism was declining and would soon be replaced by Catholicism in America.

Unsurprisingly, in reaction, spokesman arose for a movement called ‘nativism’, which promoted the Protestant virtues of sobriety and hard work. There were riots and fights in cities between nativist mobs and Catholic groups.

Nativism overlapped with a growing temperance movement, which sought to close down bars and ban hard liquor – an anticipation of the Prohibition of the 1920s.

Secret societies grew up dedicated to keeping America Protestant by organising their members to only vote for Protestant candidates. There may have been up to a million members of these societies who were told that, if anyone asked about the name or membership of their local branch, they were to say ‘I know nothing’. As a result they became known as the ‘Know-nothings’, and in the few years up to the Civil War knownothingness became a sort of political craze.

The Catholic Irish also tended to be strongly against blacks, with whom they competed for the roughest labouring jobs at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It was the Irish vote which played a key part in preventing blacks from being given equal voting rights in New York, in 1846. One journalist summarised the conflict as:

freedom, temperance and Protestantism against slavery, rum and Catholicism (p.137)

Abraham Lincoln

The trigger for civil war was the election of Abraham Lincoln as president on 6 November 1860. The less well-known of the two candidates for the Republican party, it wasn’t so much him personally, as the sweeping triumph of the essentially northern antislavery Republican party running on a platform of opposing the spread of slavery to any more U.S. states, which prompted southern slave states to finally carry out the acts of secession they’d been threatening every time there was a political clash or controversy for the previous decade or more. (For example, South Carolina had threatened to secede in 1850 over the issue of California’s statehood).

Indeed, it was South Carolina which first seceded from the United States as a result of a political convention called within days of Lincoln’s election, the official secession declared on December 20, 1860. South Carolina was quickly followed by Mississippi (January 9, 1861), Florida (January 10, 1861), Alabama (January 11, 1861), Georgia (January 19, 1861), Louisiana (January 26, 1861), Texas (February 1, 1861), Virginia (April 17, 1861), Arkansas (May 6, 1861), North Carolina (May 20, 1861), and Tennessee (seceded June 8, 1861).

The seceding states joined together to form the Confederate States of America (CSA). In April 1861 President Lincoln made a speech saying the seceded states did not form a separate country, and that he would take steps to protect Union property and assets in the so-called Confederate states.

Almost immediately a flashpoint arose at Fort Sumter built on a sandbar at the entrance to the harbour of Charleston, capital of South Carolina. Reports that the Union navy was planning to resupply the small Union garrison in the (unfinished) fort prompted the South Carolina militia to make a pre-emptive strike and bombard the Fort into surrender on April 12, 1861. These were the first shots fired in the Civil War and Lincoln had been astute in managing to ensure it was a rebel state who fired them.

A political war

It was a political war. From start to finish the aims of both sides were political – broadly speaking the survival of their respective political, economic and social systems (one based on slave labour, one not) i.e. it was not a war fought about land or conquest.

Although it quickly escalated (or degenerated) into a total war, mobilising the resources of both sides, and leading to terrible casualties, the political aspect of the struggle was always pre-eminent.

Neither side was monolithic. There were moderates in the south, there were even unionists in the upper southern states, to whom Lincoln held out the possibility of negotiation and reconciliation. Similarly, not all northerners were in favour of total war, and one plank of southern rhetoric was to reach out to northern ‘constitutionalists’ by emphasising that the southern states’ cause was a logical consequence of the American Constitution’s concern for each state’s individual autonomy. They were merely fighting for their rights under the Constitution to govern by their own laws.

Whose rights came first – the states or the Union as a whole? Who ruled – the central or the states governments? This had proved a thorny problem for the drafters of the Constitution back in the 1780s and was, at least to begin with, the core issue of the war. It’s certainly the one Abraham Lincoln focused on in his early speeches, which assert that you simply can’t have a government if large parts of the country threaten to secede every time laws are passed which they disagree with.

We must settle this question now: whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.

But the south didn’t think it was a matter of this or that law – they thought the Republicans’ stated aim of stopping slavery from spreading and, in time, forcing it to wither and die, represented an existential threat their entire economic and cultural existence. As the South’s reluctant president, Jefferson Davis, said, the Confederate states had been forced:

to take up arms to vindicate the political rights, the freedom, equality, and state sovereignty which were the heritage purchased by the blood of our revolutionary sires.

Length and complexity

This is why the first 300 pages of McPherson’s book are so important. They need to paint a really thorough picture of the confused and contradictory political scene right across American society in the decades preceding the conflict:

explaining the arguments over slavery which tore both the pre-war Whig Party and that Democrat Party apart
explaining the rise of the new antislavery Republican party; describing the importance of nativist and racist movements in the north (not only anti-Catholic and anti-Irish but also anti-negro)
describing in detail the sequence of political crises which flared up over the admission of each new state to the union, the blizzard of arguments on both sides about whether each the new state should be slave or free
and detailing the complicated compromises which just about papered over the cracks for decades until the election of Lincoln.

And you need a good grasp of the kaleidoscopic and shifting complexity of American political scene in these years to understand why Lincoln took the decisions he did; for example why he appointed to his first cabinet several of his major political rivals – even from other parties – in order to build the widest coalition.

Why he appointed a soldier from the rival Democrat party George B. McClellan as head of the army on the Potomac, and stuck with him even though he failed to press the North’s military and logistical advantage.

Similarly, why Lincoln delayed so long before declaring the Emancipation of the Slaves – namely that he had to keep onside as many as possible of the Democrat (i.e. slave-friendly) politicians in the north who had continued attending the Union Congress and Senate, and avoid offending opinion in the border states of Missouri and Kansas.

The American Civil War really is a classic example of the old saying that war is politics by other means as, throughout the conflict, both leaders, Lincoln and Davis, had to manage and negotiate unending squabbles on their own sides about the war’s goals and strategies. McPherson notes how both leaders at various points felt like quitting in exasperation – and how both sides found their war aims changing and evolving as political feeling changed, and as the value of various alliances also changed in importance.

Killers

Meanwhile, as in any war, some men discovered that they liked killing.

You need the background and build-up in order to understand why the border states between north and south (for example, Missouri and Virginia) found themselves torn apart by opposing political movements and descending into their own mini civil wars, which generated gangs of raiders and freelancers beholden to neither side, degenerating into tit-for-tat bloodbaths.

One of Quantrill’s Raiders, the best-known of the pro-Confederate partisan guerrillas (or bushwhackers) who fought in the American Civil War. Their leader was William Quantrill and they included Jesse and Frank James (pp.292 and 303)

It takes some time to explain why such a large, rich, bustling, vibrant nation managed to tear itself to pieces and descend, in many places, into violent anarchy. Battle Cry of Freedom is a very long book because it needs to be – but it never ceases to be completely absorbing and continually illuminating.

Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 @ the Photographers’ Gallery

To my embarrassment I’ve never been to the Photographer’s Gallery before. It turns out to be a tall, narrow building on a corner of Ramillies Street (number 16 to 18, to be precise) just behind Oxford Street East. It’s a bit of an Aladdin’s Cave, with exhibition spaces on the 5th, 4th and 3rd floors, as well as downstairs in the basement, next to the excellent shop full of photography books and equipment.

Since all the exhibitions are FREE, if you arrive before noon, and the ground floor has a comfy café with wifi and cakes, this is quite a cool place to meet up with friends or just take some time out.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize exhibition 2018

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation is a Frankfurt-based non-profit organisation which focuses on collecting, exhibiting and promoting contemporary photography. Deutsche Börse began to build up its collection of contemporary photography in 1999 and it now holds more than 1,700 works by over 120 international artists.

Together with The Photographers’ Gallery in London, the foundation awards the renowned Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize each year, when a long list of entrants is boiled down to a short list of four. This year they were:

Mathieu Asselin
Rafal Milach
Batia Suter
Luke Willis Thompson

The work which got them onto the short list has been on display at the Photographers’ Gallery since 23 February. On 17 May the winner was announced and it was Luke Willis Thompson, who picked up the first prize of £30,000.

So what is his work and the work of the other three photographers like? I’m glad you asked.

First the competition criteria. The prize ‘rewards a living photographer, of any nationality, for a specific body of work in an exhibition or publication format in Europe felt to have significantly contributed to the medium of photography.’ The press release states that ‘All of the projects share a deep concern with the representation of knowledge through images, where facts can be manipulated and meanings can shift.’

I was to be surprised at just how knowledge- and information-based the work of all the finalists was.

Mathieu Asselin

The room devoted to Mathieu Asselin is a ‘photographic interrogation of global biotech giant, Monsanto’. It was originally conceived and published not as a display but as a photobook, and the exhibition contains a number of documents, legal forms, invoices and testimonies, among much else that Asselin has assembled to document what he sees as the nefarious activities of this huge biotech corporation.

The book and display have the overarching title Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation and have been five years in the making. The book – and the excerpt of works here – are the result of a meticulous investigation supported by archival documentation, court files, personal letters, company memorabilia and photographs.

David Baker at his borther Terry’s grave, Edgemont Cemetery, West Anniston, Alabama, 2012 © Mathieu Asselin. Courtesy of the artist

David Baker at his brother Terry’s grave, Edgemont Cemetery, West Anniston, Alabama, 2012 © Mathieu Asselin. Courtesy of the artist

This photo shows David Baker whose brother Terry died at the age of 16 from a brain tumour and lung cancer, caused by exposure to PCB, a chemical manufactured at the nearby Monsanto Chemical works. A variety of toxic chemicals are present in the soil and water of Anniston at far higher than legal levels. In Asselin’s account Terry is just one of Monsanto’s victims.

Monsanto is known as a leading manufacturer of insecticides DDT, PCBs, Agent Orange and of genetically engineered seeds. Another photo shows one of the many farmers who Monsanto have pursued through the courts, accusing them of abusing the company’s property rights by harvesting crops contaminated by, or originally sown from, seed genetically engineered by Monsanto.

Twenty years ago I did the research for a television documentary which tried to bring out the grotesqueness of a possible future in which Monsanto and a handful of other biochem companies could develop genetically engineered food crops:

which only respond to Monsanto-produced fertilisers, insecticides and so on – so that if you buy the seed they have a monopoly of all the other products you need to buy to grow them
and in which these companies own the intellectual copyright of the resulting grain crop, which you are not allowed to resow without paying them a licensing fee. Environmental activists were trying to get this practice banned before it could take off in the EU and the documentary followed their efforts.

So I’m familiar with the issues; none of this was really new to me.

The ‘Asselin room’ includes a variety of photographs, but also just as many legal, environmental and similar types of documents, blow-ups of newspaper articles and of Monsanto promotional images, as well as examples of the company’s attempts to change their negative public image through children’s TV shows and marketing campaigns.

Installation view of the Mathieu Asselin room at the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery

I came, I saw, I read, I took it all in and it seemed a lot more like photo-journalism than a photography display, as such.

Rafal Milach – Refusal

Milach is Polish and his work explores issues and ideas around abandoned aspects of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics. He is particularly interested in the way governments and states distort and control information. To quote:

Rafal Milach’s project focuses on the applied sociotechnical systems of governmental control and the ideological manipulations of belief and consciousness. Focusing on post-Soviet countries such as Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Poland, Milach traces the mechanisms of propaganda and their visual representation in architecture, urban projects and objects.

I found the most arresting items in his room to be:

1. A brilliantly stark photo of a viewing tower in Georgia. This was commissioned for the Black Sea village of Anaklia by the then-President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, in 2012, as an ostentatious way of showing the world how new and modern Georgia would become under his pioneering administration. It was a form of architectural propaganda.

Then, when Saakashvili fled the country after a coup in 2013, the tower was abandoned half-built, leaving it unused and useless, standing in an eerie, unpeopled wasteland.

Anaklia, Georgia, 2013 by Rafal Milach © Rafal Milach. Courtesy of the artist

2. A nearby monitor is showing a ‘rap’ video in which a Belarussian woman, Xenia Degelko, is singing to an enraptured crowd. The point is that this is a government-sponsored video created by the Belarus authorities and using ‘youth culture’ tropes to promote a patriotic, pro-government message. It is, thus, an example of Milach’s overarching theme of government manipulation, and what he sees as the need for refusal of this manipulation.

Not a photograph, though, is it?

3. Another wall displays a line of print-sized images. These are photos of hand-made objects used in the chess schools based in government buildings across Azerbaijan. Each one is an optical illusion designed to help young Azerbaijanis’ spatial imagination and abstract thinking skills. Seen through the slightly paranoid lens of Milach’s project, they are included here as yet more examples of way that governments can manipulate young minds.

Installation view of the Rafal Milach room at the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery

Batia Suter – Parallel Encyclopedia #2

My teenage daughter’s bedroom wall is covered with photos of herself and her mates, posters of their favourite bands and tickets to gigs, images torn out of magazines and so on – images which speak to her, which say something, which click.

Batia Suter does the same thing. She collects books, often second-hand ones, full of images, and selects the ones which light her candle. Then she blows them up into large (two or three feet across) prints and then – this is the best bit – hangs them on the walls of galleries, thus creating, in the words of the commentary:

an encyclopaedic collection of visual taxonomies that expose the shifting and relative meanings of printed images depending on their context

Unlike the rather minimalist hangings of the previous two rooms, Suter’s work is definitely ‘immersive’ covering all four walls from floor to ceiling.

Installation view of the Batia Suter room at the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery

The way the images are unframed helps them to meld together. And neighbouring images bring out new aspects and details you hadn’t noticed in the individual works on their own. For example, it all looks very organic until you see the big pic of a vacuum cleaner and the even more incongruous close up of a printed circuit!

Her work is an exploration of how visual formats affect and manipulate meaning, depending on where and how they are placed. Apparently she has amassed a collection of over 1,000 publications to use as source material. What a simple, elegant and beautiful idea!

Luke Willis Thompson – autoportrait

As you enter the 5th floor room there’s a very loud noise of machinery which I thought must be some kind of building works going on next door. But on crossing the gallery and walking into the pitch black alcove behind it you find a really old-fashioned 35mm film projector at work. It’s this that’s making all the racket.

Film projector for Luke Willis Thompson’s work, autoportrait

And what is it projecting?

A silent black and white film showing a bust or portrait framing of a young black American woman, Diamond Reynolds.

In July 2016, Reynolds broadcast, via Facebook Live, the moments immediately after the fatal shooting of her partner Philando Castile, by a police officer during a traffic-stop in Minnesota. Reynolds’ video circulated widely online and clocked up over six million views.

In November 2016, Thompson established a conversation with Reynolds and her lawyer, and invited Reynolds to work with him on an aesthetic response to her video broadcast. Acting as a ‘sister-image’ the artwork would break with the well-known image of Reynolds, until then only known as a distraught woman caught in a moment of violence, and then distributed far and wide as a shocking news story. As the gallery guide puts it:

Shot on 35mm, black and white film and presented in the gallery as a single screen work, autoportait continues to reopen questions of the agency of Reynolds’ recording within, outside of, and beyond the conditions of predetermined racial power structures.

In other words it makes you compare and contrast her image in the self-filmed distraught moments after the shooting v and how that image was swept up in social media and then into a firestorm of angry comment about police racism in America – with this silent, calm and meditative image? Which is the real Diamond? Who owns her image, and her behaviour? How is anyone’s ‘personality’ caught and distorted by film?

I’d like to link off to the video on YouTube but it doesn’t seem to be on there. Here’s a promotional still. Diamond is recorded, successively wearing a couple of different outfits, in all of them looking screen left, downwards, silent and expressionless. Quite obviously portrayed in a soulful, introspective mode. Which is the real Diamond? Can we ever know? Are we, the viewers, participants in yet another distortion or only partial presentation of her personality? Discuss.

Still from autoportrait by Luke Willis Thompson © the artist

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018

To my surprise, this is the work which won the £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018.

There’s no doubt that it’s a sensitive and moving work in itself; that it’s a thoughtful response to the way the young woman’s image was ‘kidnapped’ by the circulation of the tragic video footage on Facebook, and that this is a careful effort by her, and Thompson as intermediary, to reclaim her image in a way controlled by her, to portray herself as more than the weeping victim of a moment of police violence.

But it’s not at all a photograph, is it, and certainly not a ‘body of photographic work’.

I wonder what established photographers make of the fact that one of the most prestigious prizes in photography was won by a film, that two of the other entries (Monsanto and Refusal) were essentially book projects which contained a lot of video, TV and text-based content as well as photos – and that the fourth entry (Batia Suter’s) didn’t include a single original photograph but was instead a collage of previously-existing images.

Also, the imperial dominance of American culture and values is a bugbear and bête noire of mine, so I was disappointed that, although the competition specifically mentions ‘Europe’ among the entrance criteria, two of the entries (Monsanto, autoportrait) are about entirely American subject matter.

The videos

Three of the entrants have a video about them on YouTube. They play consecutively, one after the other.

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Alabama

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy