AR: Kerry James Marshall at MOCA Los Angeles

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Originally Posted: July 3rd, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Kerry James Marshall at MOCA Los Angeles

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Marshall absorbs narrative painting's more modern languages, e.g.: illustration, comics, advertising. Using commercial clarity to sharpen images to iconic while not relinquishing the subtly, slipperiness or open-endedness that the commercial trades for bluntness. Midnight black of KJM's figures slides between transparent ghosts, starkly visible, and shared tone blurring its figures, aptly analogizing the (America's) paradoxical black body: Invisible Man, vivid targets, everyone fitting the description, everywhere and invisible. It would be stupid to call it not painterly, but it lacks the masturbatory juice that the painterly usually entails, far too fastidious, serious even, for that, trading the painterly for the power of an image well constructed, Marshall's wild inventiveness in making paintings that want to be so clearly seen.

Mickalene Thomas at MOCA Los Angeles

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God bless CAD for hosting these walls, may they be forever archived. For all the artworld's (investigation/mining/appropriation) of (cultural/power/identity) (structures/preconceptions/notions) it sure loves a good authoritatively blank wall text filled with the hammering jargon of publicitized madlibs. Not so much to speak, but to have spoken. A form so omnipresent and invasive finding themselves returning as so many "reviews" and critic's picks padding the glossed backs of magazine pages. Description itself is political and yet nothing is claimed in the ostensibly neuter language of institutional rhetoric, a handwave to its caricaturesqueing and compartmentalization. No word why artists, good ones, put up with this. "But its target audience is for a possibly under-informed public!" claim those who have little respect for the average viewer's intelligence, as if onslaughts of words could stand for a statement. And you see its reactionary verse in PR from Berlin the world over, concrete poetry and watery-Whitman releases of their press concretizing the institutional voice prizing words accumulated, like nonsense is the only form we have.


Artists too: Peter Wächtler, Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga and Reena Spaulings Fine Art