On Afterimages: Echoes of the 1960s from the Fisher and SFMOMA Collections
Kerry James Marshall’s subject in Souvenir III (1998) brings an offering of fresh flowers to commemorate black artists and visionaries who have passed in the 1960s. She meets the viewer with her eyes and does not assume the pose of a mourner, though the piece faces directly onto Warhol’s Jackie (1963) and shares space with Tony Feher’s conceptual piece, Le Roi de Baton (1991) of which the artist says the mementos “accumulated became a reliquary, almost a memento mori for a life lived and hopefully to keep going.” Placed with Marshall’s piece, the waterfall of lightbulbs of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Ishia) (1993) nearly obscures Marshall’s remembrance and testament to the legacy of Black Power.
The mirror at the center of Marshall’s piece reflects a wall beyond the bounds of the painting where the viewer can just make out the words “We Mourn.” Marshall, who was born in 1955, remembers these types of posters memorializing JFK, MLK, and Robert Kennedy, all assassinated in the 1960s, as a common household item. Marshall obstructs the epoch’s mourning with a well-positioned clock so as not to obscure the legacy of black art and intellectualism, power and liberation, which becomes a focal point for the piece. In fact, the names remembered are not written on any wall; they rather float in the air, in an omnipresent silver.
It either makes for a sardonic juxtaposition or strange irony to place Marshall’s black subject, who holds a stance of pride and self-assurance, in a room with so much mourning. Placed in one of the show’s smaller, more dimly lit rooms, it is difficult for the viewer to encounter the piece for its full panoramic effect and without the narrative that distorts it. The placement of Souvenir III with representations of mourning overshadows the joy — Black Joy — as much as it does the painting’s liberatory effect. While the show acknowledges the demonstration and oppression of Gay Pride in its demand for civil rights, there is a muted presence of the epoch’s oppressive anti-blackness.
In “The Power of Minimal Forms” room, Anne Truitt’s Green: Five (1962) is placed with Theaster Gates’ Civil Tapestry 3 (c. 2010) probably because of the historical trajectory drawn between Truitt’s use of geometric forms and industrial materials to Gates’. Truitt is as much interested in the liberatory effect of color as Gates is in the liberatory effect of material, but the pairing, in its aestheticization of Civil Tapestry 3 as Minimalist Art, portrays an alternative narrative that obscures what Jack Whitten in the 1960s called a “black sensibility,” or using one’s work to describe black liberation and power. In her essay, “Sense and Sensibility: Reflection on Post ’60s Sculpture” (1973), Rosalind Krauss refutes the tendency of art criticism to equate meaning with history and insists on looking at an art movement for its intention and sensibilities. Krauss explains that “the same assumption operates when, in answer to a question like, ‘What does this painting by Stella mean?’ the reply comes, ‘It’s about his relationship to Johns and Newman.’”
Of his works, Gates says that he is interested in the “cultural affects and investigations of black states of being.” It must be supposed that he deliberately chose to use the fire hose with all of its “internal relationships” associated with Black Power. To stand with Gates’ Civil Tapestry 3 and its neutralized decommissioned fire hose in all of its history and politics is to step into what Robert Morris describes in his essay, “Anti-Form” (1968), as a “positive assertion,” though not as “disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders for things,” but because of its very engagement of these forms. The work’s positive assertion lies in the fact that there is no risk of a sudden, stinging, surge of water. The decommissioned fire hose can not knock the wind out of the viewer nor can it hurl anyone to the ground. It cannot break the skin. The internal relationships in Civil Tapestry 3 works to enhance its “public external quality” by bringing the viewer in through its promise of safety. It becomes, as Robert Morris describes, “part of the work’s refusal to continue aestheticizing form by dealing with it as a prescribed end.”
Civil Tapestry 3 exposes the weaponization of material used against black bodies. Gates’ work is deeply political and, as with Abstract Expressionist works, full of internal relationships, so much so that unless removed or aestheticized from its history and black sensibility, cannot be depoliticized, as can Truitt in Green: Five, who is interested in what Krauss describes as the “demolition of history.” This demolition, though, for the Minimalist Artist is meant to be a sort of ameliorative to the person subjected to an increasingly commodified and materialistic world and what Krauss describes as Minimalism’s “utopian gesture,” that “acts as a form of reparations” and is “deeply aesthetic” to a subject whose everyday experience is one of increasing isolation. Within this framework, Krauss’ assertion begs the question, what of the increasing isolation of the black subjective experience that encounters, for instance, an “objective” black and white piece? To what audience does Minimalism purport to pay reparations?
In his essay, “Notes on Abstraction,” Mark Godfrey writes how Frank Stella, had titled some of his 1959 “Black Paintings” after Nazi slogans, one of which is in the SFMOMA collection, though is not on view. Godfrey describes the “unwillingness” of modernist critics at the time “to explore what Stella’s allusions could amount to because they were reluctant to address content in abstraction beyond form.” In its “unwillingness to address content in abstraction beyond form,” the accompanying placard to the Gates piece reframes the fire hose as a weapon used on “peaceful protestors” without naming the protest. The placard invokes “social injustice,” without naming the injustice. It speaks of police brutality without exposing anti-blackness.
Hundreds of major events and movements of the decade line one of the rooms, yet nowhere to be found is the Mississippi Freedom March of 1963. No Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power in 1966. No pan-Africanism and Malcolm’s 1964 sojourn in Africa. Is the museum visitor supposed to forget Birmingham, the Black Panther Party and the suppressions of its leaders? What about Angela, Attica, Selma, Watts? Is it to be supposed that it might all have been a dream? In room after room, Black Art is isolated, and the artist’s black sensibilities are aestheticized from their works. And while a few select political conditions surrounding art movements of the 1960s are named, the show provides an alternative history of the epoch in its omission and subsequent erasure of Black Power.
Noah Purifoy, whose c. 1970 conceptual assemblage piece, Drum Song, which is not on view, but in the collection, demonstrates the “new American artist” confronting capitalist consumerism as a black artist, a move that is directly related to his personal, political, and public encounter of the Watts Rebellion of 1965. Godfrey writes,
“Purifoy saw the Watts rebellion not just as an insurrection against discrimination but also a rejection of materialism. In burning and looting, protestors laid bare the false promise that, by buying new things, black Americans could take part in a postwar society as equal American citizen-consumers. It was with this understanding of the Rebellion that Purifoy’s art practice began: he started to gather the debris of former consumables and create a new use for them in abstract assemblage sculptures.”
In this way, Purifoy saw his works as “functional” saying, “education through creativity is the only way left for a person to find himself in this materialistic world…Art of itself is of little or no value if in its relatedness it does not effect change.”
Placed in the show’s opening room, the Pop Art room, which features Warhol’s Triple Elvis (1963), is Raymound Saunders’ Beauty as Syntax (1992). Within the context of consumer culture, it becomes easy to miss the women, finely traced and outlined like constellations, who like gods, span the universe. The lightly drawn chalk against its dark background is further shadowed by the boldly colored and outlined images that depict religious icons and consumer goods, most prominently, a 7UP bottle. Its whitewashed label tells the viewer, “You like it.” In the style of Rauschenberg’s “combines,” there are several scenes in which, one, Saunders inserts the image of a black and white print of a black man’s head whose eyes are closed, giving the impression that he is dead. In the absence of Black Power, the image takes on the soda pop’s cheap consumerism.
Saunders’ work shares space with Corita Kent’s enriched bread (1965) which incorporates a quote from the French activist scholar Camus advising that “we listen attentively” and “hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations those great ideas that come into the world as gently as doves,” an uproar that may well be understood to come not only from empires and nations, but the museum itself. In “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” (1990) Rosalind Krauss relates what Tom Krens, founder of MASS MoCA explains about the role of the Museum to “select a very few artists from the vast array of Modernist aesthetic production and to collect and show these few in the depth over the full amount of space it might take to really experience the cumulative impact of a given oeuvre.” He describes this as a shift from the “encyclopedic museum, intent on telling a story” to one that would “forego history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial.”
Maren Hassinger currently sits aestheticized in a “vast array of Modernist aesthetic production” in a room called “Minimalist Landscape.” Her work Untitled Rope (1972) is arranged with a Serra piece, a set of large Buddha beads, and an intricate assemblage painted black to evoke cages. The placement betrays what Robert Morris describes as Minimalism’s ability to allow the artist to “take relationships out of the work and make them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision.” Another Minimalist Art piece in an exhibition that does not name Black Power, Hassinger’s Untitled Rope is erased from the viewer’s field of vision amidst the objects that do not share in its black sensibilities. By aestheticizing the massive ropes arranged as loosened knots to evoke images of the sea, estrangement, and passage, Hassinger’s intent to liberate is disabled.
At the 2019 Alliance of American Museum conference: Reimagining the Museum in Oaxaca, Mexico, interdisciplinary artist and curator, Fred Wilson, shared a few of the encounters he had while calling into question the way a museum collects and curates, a strategy named “Mining the Museum.” He noted how one museum had dimmed the lighting on a period piece to a level where the viewer could not see the black figures shadowed in the background. Wilson worked with the museum to help bring Black Power to light. He showed them the piece with the light dimmed and asked what they could see. Then Wilson brought it to light and asked again. Afterimages: Echoes of the 1960s from the Fisher and SFMOMA Collections left me not only questioning the placement of things but also why the late Sam Gilliam, among others, was not on display and what other “cultural currents” and “consciousness-shifting artistic movements of the 1960s that are relevant today” were left to be mined, most important is the naming of Black Power.
Gilliam, who began his drape paintings in the 1960s, sketched his pieces in watercolor. In the SFMOMA archive, there are two of his early watercolors, Green Slice (1967) and Least Rivers (1967) as well as one of his signature drape pieces, Street (1970). Once on canvas, Greg Allen in his essay “Color in America” describes how Gilliam would use “poles, clamps, and hooks to project his canvas off the wall and into the space of the viewer.” In an interview with ARTnews in 1973, Gilliam who was familiar with Barnette Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Stella, wanted to work through the techniques and materials the Color School artists had adopted from Helen Frankenthaler and Hans Hoffman to create works reflective of his own personal environment, and the “clotheslines filled with clothes with so much weight that they had to be propped up.” In the 1973 interview, Gilliam applauds the industry for naming Black Art because it “calls attention to the number of major galleries in New York and museums around the world that had not shown, were not showing, were not willing to show any art by any black artist,” as well as the industry’s tokenism.
Afterimages, in its power over the narrative, names a few art movements of the epoch to the exclusion of others. It selects political conditions surrounding these art movements and omits others. While the show takes liberties to emphasize and prominently feature the Minimalist Art movement of the epoch, whose aesthetic spans several rooms, it does not take the breadth of its exhibition to ascertain the movement’s complex politics, fault lines, nor its black sensibilities. In Minimalism, or the “new American art,” Robert Morris writes that, “placement becomes critical as it never was before in establishing the particular quality of the work.” In an effort to “select a very few artists from the vast array of Modernist aesthetic production,” Afterimages needs to seriously consider its placement of things.
Embark on a visual encounter that complements the concepts explored in “Taking Liberties” by exploring the immersive Black Power Room exhibition. This curated experience brings the essay’s themes to life through dynamic artworks, narratives, and historical references. Immerse yourself in the interplay between power, transformation, and history, bridging theoretical discourse with impactful visuals.
