metropolis m

Monika Szewczyk

Let’s start with this Garden Party scene. On first glance, this painting seems to do something different than your previous work because it’s an interracial mixing of people. I’m curious about that.

Kerry James Marshall

I can talk about this in terms of the overarching project in which I see myself involved in. And it accounts for why those figures are who they are in this picture. Since a good deal of what I’m working towards is enhancing the black figure’s presence in art history oriented museum collections, that picture and almost all the pictures I make have something to do with historical genres of painting, such as Impressionist painting, which is what this painting is aiming to be. This has to do with the fact that Impressionist painting is one of the most popular painting styles ever. Everybody likes Impressionist painting. They’re really pretty pictures. I couldn’t really be an Impressionist painter because I wasn’t alive when the style was being developed and codified. I only have access to its governing principles, after the fact, as an affect. Here, I’m trying to produce the effect of an Impressionist scene, but peopled by all the people who are not in any of the Impressionist paintings.

So I’m always asking the question: What does it mean to appreciate and like and enjoy something like Impressionist paintings, if you are not represented there – as a maker or as a subject? It seems to me that it conditions people of color to accept their absence as reasonable and natural. After all, who really does belong in these pictures, who represents the model of beauty, and who enjoys the pleasures that flow from generations of global dominance? If you are always outside the representation of beauty and always outside the representation of pleasure and always outside the representations of the pastoral what does that mean for you, when you come and enjoy pictures like that?

Monika Szewczyk

You’re enjoying your own exclusion…

Kerry James Marshall

This is one psychological effect of the history of art. Many people are in some way conditioned to acknowledge the greatness of other people – to enjoy a capacity that you or your people don’t seem to possess. That’s why my engagement with Art History is structured the way that it is. If the whole of Art History is structured that way – where everybody else on the planet is a marginal participant in the development of Western Art History. And the history of art as it moves through Impressionism is the history of people becoming modern. Many people of color readily acknowledge the achievements and greatness of Europeans while forfeiting the capacity to match that ability for themselves. That is why my engagement with art history is structured the way it is. Western art history casts non-Europeans as bit players in the story of a dominant force marching steadily forward; a people becoming “Modern”; often at the expense of colored people.

Monika Szewczyk

I’m not sure if these are Chinese or Japanese figures, but they put me in mind of the whole history of Japonisme and Chinoiserie being taken up by the Impressionists.

Kerry James Marshall

And the Post-Impressionists. But what you see in those things is the way in which the non-European subject is almost always an object. Those Japanese prints, just like African sculpture, are just raw material. It’s like bauxite. You go to a place, you take this raw material, and you make it into something that the people who are sitting on it don’t seem to have the capacity to make. This structural dynamic reinforces the status quo distribution of power in the world. Artworks direct attention away from fundamental power imbalances and focus it on connoisseurship. Everybody enjoys the picture. The colonizer and the colonized both appreciate it, except its meaning cannot be the same for both viewing subjects. It comes down to that capacity to take raw material and make it into something. So the Japanese, yes, they made those prints. Africans made some incredible sculptures and masks. People from every culture have an ancient aesthetic patrimony, but their best stuff is always their old stuff. They are not significant competitors in the game of modernism or in shaping the future. Europeans made themselves modern. It seems everybody else was made modern under duress. So that’s a big part of the whole project: I take Western art history as raw material – it’s a given; and then I’m trying to figure out how to make something out of it on my terms.

Monika Szewczyk

Are you doing to the Western cannon what Picasso did to the African cannon?

Kerry James Marshall

It’s not quite the same thing because what I’m doing is really not that transgressive.

Monika Szewczyk

But I think maybe what’s transgressive about it is its beauty. Beauty is very transgressive.

Kerry James Marshall

I will agree with you there.

Monika Szewczyk

Maybe beauty is more transgressive than putting a proverbial X on a Watteau.

Kerry James Marshall

To me those are silly gestures – to express your dissatisfaction or a certain anguish with a thing by trying to cancel it out.

Monika Szewczyk

When I look at these works, even though I love them, I have to ask if they are meant for me, or if they are quite specifically not meant for me and what does it mean to love them. In a similar vein, I’m interested in what you think of these works going to Europe, in the context of the show at MuHKA (though of course you’ve shown in Europe often).

Kerry James Marshall

In some ways, the work is made for that audience. Western art history is European art history. Is that a closed concept? My hope is that all the associations and assumptions that you have about how an Impressionist painting is supposed to perform are first fulfilled in just the appearance of the thing. But then this question of why you never saw any of these people in any of those paintings before, and what these absent subjects should do about it, is part of what I want to address.

Monika Szewczyk

I don’t imagine you are reconfiguring anything even though the majority of the audience will not be African American, or in the case of this picture, Chinese or Japanese – I’m sorry I can’t exactly tell the nationality.

Kerry James Marshall

There are two Chinese and three Koreans.

Monika Szewczyk

So they are real people – this is a kind of document of a real party?

Kerry James Marshall

Well, it’s a complete fabrication; although I did do a video based on this painting called The Garden Party and I invited some of the people who are in here to be in that video. But the video came after the painting. To make the painting, I just invited these people over and took their picture and then I built the picture around them. Actually there are four Korean people, the forth has her back turned to us so you don’t immediately recognize her.

THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW IS PUBLISHED IN DUTCH IN METROPOLIS M No 5-2013
BUY IT HERE

Kerry James Marshall
M HKA, Antwerp
4 oktober 2013 – 2 februari 2014

Monika Szewczyk

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