[MUSIC]
Now we're going to look a little bit more closely at
what happens when artists decide to take their stories from contemporary life--
to rip them from the headlines, if you will.
David was doing that a little bit with
the <i>Intervention of the Sabine Women</i>.
He was choosing that theme in response to contemporary events.
But the painting I want to spend a bit of time looking at in this lecture is,
again, one of my favorites. It's
Géricault's
<i>Raft of the Medusa,</i> from around 1818-1819.
This is, genuinely, an enormous painting.
If the movies existed in the
early part of the 19th century,
Géricault might have wanted to make a movie, instead.
But, instead, it's a painting that aspires to all, I think, the spectacle that will
become cinema in the late 19th and early 20th century.
We are looking at a scene that is, as I said, literally ripped from the headlines.
The Medusa was a French frigate that ran aground off
the coast of Mauritania-- what is now Mauritania-- in 1816.
And it was seen as an incredibly
scandalous French naval disaster.
Many people died.
The evacuation of
the ship was extremely disorderly.
The accident was due to the captain's error.
In the end, nearly 150 people were put onto
a make-shift raft-- there weren't enough lifeboats to go around--
and they were put on this enormous make-shift raft that almost
immediately began to sink, the minute that many people were on it.
There was scarcely no food, and scarcely no water, and what food and water
there was, much of it fell overboard. And by the time rescue comes, there are
only 15 people left alive on that raft. Some of them died of dehydration,
some of them jumped overboard in despair,
some of them were thrown overboard because
the raft was sinking,
and some of them were ultimately eaten by
the survivors, in a desperate attempt to stay alive.
And so, it is definitely a sensational
scene.
We're looking at the moment just before rescue comes.
In the very, very distance, on the horizon, you
can see a tiny ship, and that's what the
figures in the mid-ground are
gesticulating towards so frantically.
I would like you to spend a little bit of time looking
at this painting, because it places
you right in the midst of
the action.
As you stand in front of it, you are
literally in
the ocean, and there's a kind of falling of bodies towards you,
into the foreground-- the bodies of the dead
and dying, already a ghastly sort of sickly
green-yellow tinge, as if even those people
who are still alive are nearly amongst the dead.
As you go further into the painting, and start to go from the mid-ground to
the background, it's almost as if you're swept up in
the frantic effort of signaling to
help, as well,
until you reach the very apex, where an African sailor is waving his
shirt aloft, trying desperately to get the attention of the ship in the background.
It's a painting in which you see the
male nude, but that male nude has become something
kind of corrupt and decaying.
And, in fact, Géricault went to the morgue in Paris to study from
dead flesh, in order to get at precisely
the kinds of effects that he was
interested in.
And the painting became quite an obsession to him, as well.
It's a painting that doesn't literally
include references
to some of the more horrific
and sensational aspects of the survivors' experience.
But if you look in the foreground, where an
older male figure holds the body of his dead son,
that figure is posed in a way that those who were
versed in classical mythology would have recognized-- Ugolino from Dante's Inferno.
And Ugolino, in fact, resorted to
cannibalism.
So, you have that sense
in which savvy viewers would have gotten just what was
going on, even if they hadn't
read the headlines.
Painting in the 19th century, and
especially
paintings this large, were indeed spectator sport.
They were appreciated by those in the know, who had a lot
of training in art history or a great sense of art connoisseurship.
But they were also enjoyed by people from
all walks of life who
would have appreciated the great effects of realism, the--
in this case-- extremely sensational story and its topicality, as well.
When we look at this painting by the American
painter Winslow Homer, called <i>The Gulf
Stream,</i> from 1899,
it's a strange little work and it it's
much smaller
in size, but it takes on that thematic of tragedy at sea.
We see a lone African American sailor stranded on a boat--
we think, off the coast of the United States, in the Gulf.
And he's surrounded by sharks that are terrifying
and also a little bit funny in their
literalness.
There's a way in which one can't
help-- I think-- now, as a contemporary
person, when one looks at this painting, to think a little bit about the movie Jaws
and the way in which
the shark was terrifying when it came and popped out of the sea by surprise.
But if you got a chance to stare at it for
a while, it became something a little bit ludicrous and mechanical-looking.
And these sharks also have that kind of combination of a horrific
realism and something that almost verges on caricature, at the same time.
Homer would have had things like <i>The Raft of the
<i>Medusa</i> in mind, even as he's trying to make a more American scene.
And it's worth saying that this painting
was greeted with mixed reaction, as it were.
On the one hand, this sort of sensational, strange scene that wasn't literally
ripped from the headlines, but seemed as
if it had to come from somewhere.
And then, also, the kind of awkwardness
with which it hints at
the disaster that is coming from the man-
eating sharks in the water, circling the boat.
So, now, with these
two paintings in mind-- Géricault's <i>Raft of the
<i>Medusa</i> and Homer's <i>The Gulf Stream--</i> I want to
spend the rest of this lecture looking at two
works by the contemporary American painter Kerry James Marshall.
Marshall has set for himself an extremely important project:
and that is to say, to paint contemporary history painting,
but to paint it in a full recognition of
the possibilities and
gaps of history painting.
Its strengths and its weaknesses.
Its predilection for certain kinds of
stories,
and its overlooking of other kinds of stories.
The first painting that we're going to spend
some time with is his <i>Great America,</i> from 1994.
And I wanted to say from the outset that
I had the idea to look through the
Marshall works
with relationship to Géricault and and Homer because I had the great
good fortune to see a Marshall exhibition at
the National Gallery of Art in Washington recently.
And I want to just give a shout out to the National Gallery
for giving me such great things to think about and to look at.
So, <i>Great America,</i> from 1994, takes on
a really important and really almost
un-representable subject.
And that is to say, it's interested in the experience
of the Middle Passage--
the experience of enslaved people being
transported from Africa to the Americas
during the period of slavery.
And I say almost un-representable because it is really hard to
imagine how deeply scary and how deeply awful that must have been--
to be ripped from your home, taken on a
boat under very poor conditions to God-knows-where,
and have the rest of your life be taken out of your will and out of your
power to determine what it was going to be
like-- to spend the rest of your life in slavery.
And in order to represent this
subject, Marshall makes
some really interesting and some really difficult sorts of choices.
When we look at this painting, we are
not sure what historical moment we're in, actually.
Something like the present moment, but at the same time
something that seems almost dreamlike or fantasy-like.
We are looking at a group of African figures loaded onto a little
kind of carnival boat ride, moving into the distance towards a dark tunnel.
A kind of amusement park ride where some kind of uncertain and
scary-- we think, based upon the little ghosts that are poking out--
experience awaits them.
So, how can it be that something like a carnival ride could represent something
as terrible as the experience of being brought into slavery in the New World?
Well, first of all, I think it is because it sort of
says, 'I have insufficient tools to
represent the nature of this experience.'
And at the same time, 'I'm going to do it nonetheless,'
through marshaling cues of contemporary life that people can identify with.
What is it like to be poised on the edge of
a really scary amusement park ride, where
you know you're going
to be terrified but you don't know the future that awaits you?
Middle Passage wasn't like an amusement park ride,
but Marshall also tells you very clearly that
he knows that, with the word that's
inscribed
on the top center of the painting. That word,
WOW, written in white on a red kind of bloody, dripping banner
is a very ironic' WOW'.
It's the irony of the insufficiency of an
exclamation to evoke the terror of this particular experience.
Most of the meaning of this painting is
made by mobilizing competing and compounding cues drawn
from the history of art.
So, on the one hand, we have a
little bit of a nod to traditional
perspectival painting
in the way that the little boat
is
set on an orthogonal and seems to recede into the background.
And then, at the same time, the canvas is
absolutely flattened by those scroll
designs that go across
the foreground, that make you feel you're almost in
a kind of billboard or signboard sort
of space.
Some of the elements of the painting are very precisely
rendered--
the little carnival boat, the kind of
stylized waves around
the boat that mimic the curlicue
decorations on the boat.
And then others are painted in a really loose and brushy manner that calls
forth another set of painterly
language
conventions that are used to evoke
emotion.
Which is to say that Marshall, coming of
age as a painter in
the late 20th century, would have
had very much on his mind
the example of abstract expressionist painting in the mid-20th century as
a primary and highly-valued mode of representing
human emotion, and particularly of
representing kind of existential crisis.
So all that drippy, muscular, painterly painting done by folks like Jackson Pollock in
the mid-20th century was taken to be a sort of moment
when art was trying to represent feelings and emotions and states of being
that were beyond the ability of
representational painting to grasp.
And Marshall signals to us that he knows all about that,
and also signals, in a way, its
insufficiency, as
well, because rather than kind of luscious, gooey blobs
and drips and swipes of paint across the canvas,
you get these kind of flat and drippy and sort
of dried out references to abstract
expressionism, at the same time.
Right next to <i>Great America</i>, I
had the opportunity to see this work-- Marshall's <i>Gulf Stream,</i> from 2003.
And it's a tremendous juxtaposition.
Once again, it gives you a sense of the range of Marshall's command of painting,
painting languages,
and art-historical references.
You should be thinking about Homer's <i>Gulf Stream</i>, because
certainly Marshall was when he was making this work.
But this time, rather than a kind of sea-battered boat with one desiccated,
weakened African body on the ship just waiting to be shark bait,
you have this beautiful sailing vessel with the sail making this, again, lovely
orthogonal sweep across the canvas, giving
you this sense of depth.
And this time, you see a middle-class Black family out for a ride on the ocean.
The painting is large and it's organized, at the same time,
almost like a souvenir picture postcard-- that kind of decorative
frame of rope and netting that goes around the outside
edges, and even has a bit of glitter mixed in it.
The Pelican and the little piers of the dock in the foreground that give
you this kind of postcardy feel. You feel like you should be in an
idyllic scene, but the sea is sort of choppy and
ominous clouds are gathering on the horizon. And once
again, you're not sure whether these people are
enjoying themselves or are about to run into trouble.
And I think that kind of ambivalence about the security of experience
is crucial to understanding African American
experience, throughout American history and even to this day--
where, I think, you know, even for middle-class families, and one could say
that this is a sort of
representation of middle-class leisure,
there's this sense, for African American families, of being never quite
as securely invested in those rights and privileges as one's white counterparts.
And those are the real circumstances of race relations
to this day, as much as we try to contest
them and interrogate them and,
hopefully, make things better.
And Marshall gives you both sides of that.
And he gives you both sides of that
so wonderfully, on the one hand, because of his deep respect for and
understanding of history, and his
thoughtful address
to the historical experiences that he's trying to represent.
And, on the other hand, out of his deep respect or deep address to
and deep interrogation of the conventions of
history painting, which he knows so well.
And knows well enough to be able to take them apart and put them
back together in the making of new
meaning and new stories in his work.
[MUSIC]
Now we're going to look a little bit more closely at
what happens when artists decide to take their stories from contemporary life--
to rip them from the headlines, if you will.
David was doing that a little bit with
the <i>Intervention of the Sabine Women</i>.
He was choosing that theme in response to contemporary events.
But the painting I want to spend a bit of time looking at in this lecture is,
again, one of my favorites. It's
Géricault's
<i>Raft of the Medusa,</i> from around 1818-1819.
This is, genuinely, an enormous painting.
If the movies existed in the
early part of the 19th century,
Géricault might have wanted to make a movie, instead.
But, instead, it's a painting that aspires to all, I think, the spectacle that will
become cinema in the late 19th and early 20th century.
We are looking at a scene that is, as I said, literally ripped from the headlines.
The Medusa was a French frigate that ran aground off
the coast of Mauritania-- what is now Mauritania-- in 1816.
And it was seen as an incredibly
scandalous French naval disaster.
Many people died.
The evacuation of
the ship was extremely disorderly.
The accident was due to the captain's error.
In the end, nearly 150 people were put onto
a make-shift raft-- there weren't enough lifeboats to go around--
and they were put on this enormous make-shift raft that almost
immediately began to sink, the minute that many people were on it.
There was scarcely no food, and scarcely no water, and what food and water
there was, much of it fell overboard. And by the time rescue comes, there are
only 15 people left alive on that raft. Some of them died of dehydration,
some of them jumped overboard in despair,
some of them were thrown overboard because
the raft was sinking,
and some of them were ultimately eaten by
the survivors, in a desperate attempt to stay alive.
And so, it is definitely a sensational
scene.
We're looking at the moment just before rescue comes.
In the very, very distance, on the horizon, you
can see a tiny ship, and that's what the
figures in the mid-ground are
gesticulating towards so frantically.
I would like you to spend a little bit of time looking
at this painting, because it places
you right in the midst of
the action.
As you stand in front of it, you are
literally in
the ocean, and there's a kind of falling of bodies towards you,
into the foreground-- the bodies of the dead
and dying, already a ghastly sort of sickly
green-yellow tinge, as if even those people
who are still alive are nearly amongst the dead.
As you go further into the painting, and start to go from the mid-ground to
the background, it's almost as if you're swept up in
the frantic effort of signaling to
help, as well,
until you reach the very apex, where an African sailor is waving his
shirt aloft, trying desperately to get the attention of the ship in the background.
It's a painting in which you see the
male nude, but that male nude has become something
kind of corrupt and decaying.
And, in fact, Géricault went to the morgue in Paris to study from
dead flesh, in order to get at precisely
the kinds of effects that he was
interested in.
And the painting became quite an obsession to him, as well.
It's a painting that doesn't literally
include references
to some of the more horrific
and sensational aspects of the survivors' experience.
But if you look in the foreground, where an
older male figure holds the body of his dead son,
that figure is posed in a way that those who were
versed in classical mythology would have recognized-- Ugolino from Dante's Inferno.
And Ugolino, in fact, resorted to
cannibalism.
So, you have that sense
in which savvy viewers would have gotten just what was
going on, even if they hadn't
read the headlines.
Painting in the 19th century, and
especially
paintings this large, were indeed spectator sport.
They were appreciated by those in the know, who had a lot
of training in art history or a great sense of art connoisseurship.
But they were also enjoyed by people from
all walks of life who
would have appreciated the great effects of realism, the--
in this case-- extremely sensational story and its topicality, as well.
When we look at this painting by the American
painter Winslow Homer, called <i>The Gulf
Stream,</i> from 1899,
it's a strange little work and it it's
much smaller
in size, but it takes on that thematic of tragedy at sea.
We see a lone African American sailor stranded on a boat--
we think, off the coast of the United States, in the Gulf.
And he's surrounded by sharks that are terrifying
and also a little bit funny in their
literalness.
There's a way in which one can't
help-- I think-- now, as a contemporary
person, when one looks at this painting, to think a little bit about the movie Jaws
and the way in which
the shark was terrifying when it came and popped out of the sea by surprise.
But if you got a chance to stare at it for
a while, it became something a little bit ludicrous and mechanical-looking.
And these sharks also have that kind of combination of a horrific
realism and something that almost verges on caricature, at the same time.
Homer would have had things like <i>The Raft of the
<i>Medusa</i> in mind, even as he's trying to make a more American scene.
And it's worth saying that this painting
was greeted with mixed reaction, as it were.
On the one hand, this sort of sensational, strange scene that wasn't literally
ripped from the headlines, but seemed as
if it had to come from somewhere.
And then, also, the kind of awkwardness
with which it hints at
the disaster that is coming from the man-
eating sharks in the water, circling the boat.
So, now, with these
two paintings in mind-- Géricault's <i>Raft of the
<i>Medusa</i> and Homer's <i>The Gulf Stream--</i> I want to
spend the rest of this lecture looking at two
works by the contemporary American painter Kerry James Marshall.
Marshall has set for himself an extremely important project:
and that is to say, to paint contemporary history painting,
but to paint it in a full recognition of
the possibilities and
gaps of history painting.
Its strengths and its weaknesses.
Its predilection for certain kinds of
stories,
and its overlooking of other kinds of stories.
The first painting that we're going to spend
some time with is his <i>Great America,</i> from 1994.
And I wanted to say from the outset that
I had the idea to look through the
Marshall works
with relationship to Géricault and and Homer because I had the great
good fortune to see a Marshall exhibition at
the National Gallery of Art in Washington recently.
And I want to just give a shout out to the National Gallery
for giving me such great things to think about and to look at.
So, <i>Great America,</i> from 1994, takes on
a really important and really almost
un-representable subject.
And that is to say, it's interested in the experience
of the Middle Passage--
the experience of enslaved people being
transported from Africa to the Americas
during the period of slavery.
And I say almost un-representable because it is really hard to
imagine how deeply scary and how deeply awful that must have been--
to be ripped from your home, taken on a
boat under very poor conditions to God-knows-where,
and have the rest of your life be taken out of your will and out of your
power to determine what it was going to be
like-- to spend the rest of your life in slavery.
And in order to represent this
subject, Marshall makes
some really interesting and some really difficult sorts of choices.
When we look at this painting, we are
not sure what historical moment we're in, actually.
Something like the present moment, but at the same time
something that seems almost dreamlike or fantasy-like.
We are looking at a group of African figures loaded onto a little
kind of carnival boat ride, moving into the distance towards a dark tunnel.
A kind of amusement park ride where some kind of uncertain and
scary-- we think, based upon the little ghosts that are poking out--
experience awaits them.
So, how can it be that something like a carnival ride could represent something
as terrible as the experience of being brought into slavery in the New World?
Well, first of all, I think it is because it sort of
says, 'I have insufficient tools to
represent the nature of this experience.'
And at the same time, 'I'm going to do it nonetheless,'
through marshaling cues of contemporary life that people can identify with.
What is it like to be poised on the edge of
a really scary amusement park ride, where
you know you're going
to be terrified but you don't know the future that awaits you?
Middle Passage wasn't like an amusement park ride,
but Marshall also tells you very clearly that
he knows that, with the word that's
inscribed
on the top center of the painting. That word,
WOW, written in white on a red kind of bloody, dripping banner
is a very ironic' WOW'.
It's the irony of the insufficiency of an
exclamation to evoke the terror of this particular experience.
Most of the meaning of this painting is
made by mobilizing competing and compounding cues drawn
from the history of art.
So, on the one hand, we have a
little bit of a nod to traditional
perspectival painting
in the way that the little boat
is
set on an orthogonal and seems to recede into the background.
And then, at the same time, the canvas is
absolutely flattened by those scroll
designs that go across
the foreground, that make you feel you're almost in
a kind of billboard or signboard sort
of space.
Some of the elements of the painting are very precisely
rendered--
the little carnival boat, the kind of
stylized waves around
the boat that mimic the curlicue
decorations on the boat.
And then others are painted in a really loose and brushy manner that calls
forth another set of painterly
language
conventions that are used to evoke
emotion.
Which is to say that Marshall, coming of
age as a painter in
the late 20th century, would have
had very much on his mind
the example of abstract expressionist painting in the mid-20th century as
a primary and highly-valued mode of representing
human emotion, and particularly of
representing kind of existential crisis.
So all that drippy, muscular, painterly painting done by folks like Jackson Pollock in
the mid-20th century was taken to be a sort of moment
when art was trying to represent feelings and emotions and states of being
that were beyond the ability of
representational painting to grasp.
And Marshall signals to us that he knows all about that,
and also signals, in a way, its
insufficiency, as
well, because rather than kind of luscious, gooey blobs
and drips and swipes of paint across the canvas,
you get these kind of flat and drippy and sort
of dried out references to abstract
expressionism, at the same time.
Right next to <i>Great America</i>, I
had the opportunity to see this work-- Marshall's <i>Gulf Stream,</i> from 2003.
And it's a tremendous juxtaposition.
Once again, it gives you a sense of the range of Marshall's command of painting,
painting languages,
and art-historical references.
You should be thinking about Homer's <i>Gulf Stream</i>, because
certainly Marshall was when he was making this work.
But this time, rather than a kind of sea-battered boat with one desiccated,
weakened African body on the ship just waiting to be shark bait,
you have this beautiful sailing vessel with the sail making this, again, lovely
orthogonal sweep across the canvas, giving
you this sense of depth.
And this time, you see a middle-class Black family out for a ride on the ocean.
The painting is large and it's organized, at the same time,
almost like a souvenir picture postcard-- that kind of decorative
frame of rope and netting that goes around the outside
edges, and even has a bit of glitter mixed in it.
The Pelican and the little piers of the dock in the foreground that give
you this kind of postcardy feel. You feel like you should be in an
idyllic scene, but the sea is sort of choppy and
ominous clouds are gathering on the horizon. And once
again, you're not sure whether these people are
enjoying themselves or are about to run into trouble.
And I think that kind of ambivalence about the security of experience
is crucial to understanding African American
experience, throughout American history and even to this day--
where, I think, you know, even for middle-class families, and one could say
that this is a sort of
representation of middle-class leisure,
there's this sense, for African American families, of being never quite
as securely invested in those rights and privileges as one's white counterparts.
And those are the real circumstances of race relations
to this day, as much as we try to contest
them and interrogate them and,
hopefully, make things better.
And Marshall gives you both sides of that.
And he gives you both sides of that
so wonderfully, on the one hand, because of his deep respect for and
understanding of history, and his
thoughtful address
to the historical experiences that he's trying to represent.
And, on the other hand, out of his deep respect or deep address to
and deep interrogation of the conventions of
history painting, which he knows so well.
And knows well enough to be able to take them apart and put them
back together in the making of new
meaning and new stories in his work.
[MUSIC]