Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall

Koplin Del Rio

Through October 24, 2008

(Disclamer: This essay is not to be confused with my forthcoming ArtReview piece on Marshall's work)

Kerry James Marshall’s vignettes at Koplin Del Rio Gallery simply show African-Americans in contemporary dress in scenes of romance at play – games of hide and seek, dashes across meadows, hand holding in the grass, cuddling up to spectacular views. Specifically, the activities and scenery belong to the world of 18th century Rococo, but suggestively, the paintings also contain thatched huts specking the distant landscape. The paintings are exercises in restraint, there’s nothing loud or upsetting, and not even Marshall’s apparent act of defacement of the work does much to change the sober nature of the surface. Instead of slashing dark colors or taking out a spray can, he slathers on a batter of pink paint as if a city clean-up crew politely covering over graffiti. The pleasing images fade into an abstract wash of veils or erasures. These Edens never existed, were lost, or remain a nostalgic wish.

Historically, the most often repeated description of the Rococo style is that it is all surface. Rococo might be called the fashion magazine and high end boutique of the 18th century, a set of shimmering planes of delicate lace and light. The luxuriousness of its pigments matches the decadence of its subject matter. Rococo seems me (and I am hardly a scholar of the genre) to have represented an untouchable ideal in the same way airbrushed photographs and televisions offer it today. Yesterday’s coy indiscretions around a country swing in the meadow become the glossy sexual encounters of Soap Operas.

Marshall’s paintings have the surface of Rococo but use history to counter the glitz and the faux. Like some of Marshall’s previous work, his new paintings simply offer an alternative story line. In 1994, the work Many Mansions gave us three sharply dressed men tending a garden amongst public housing with welcome signs and flowers, a stark contrast to the Cabrini Green Projects in Marshall’s adopted city of Chicago. Now, Vignette 13, 2008 gives us more fantasies which are immediately tested by our realities. We know the dismal events of what actually happened to Africans during the 18th century, and we will not find Africans or African Americans up to any Rococo schnanigans in the Frick or in the French galleries of the Met. Even Marshall’s construction of his painting supports suggests that this is no act of mere pleasure Marshall is taking on – the paintings are on wood panel instead of canvas and left bare instead of framed in gold.

There are many ways to approach these works. They could be read, for instance, as references to Africa as the possible location for the Garden of Eden, and thus the fantasy is that African Americans have returned to the Garden to dwell in its glory. Another reading is that African Americans have literally entered into the 18th century world of the French, that it is France we see and the huts were allowed to be built there, African Americans stand in the place of an aristocracy they never enjoyed. Finally, what are we to make of Vignette 14, 2008, which curiously references Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, 1948,one of the creepiest paintings around but undeniably an American icon? Is it America that we are seeing instead of France and Africa? With just a simple coterie of symbols and suggestions, Marshall floods with possibilities, several versions of Eden.

With each possibility come quiet warnings, and the pink paint heightens the sense that these visions don’t have a chance, that they are day dreams in a world too tired for dreaming. In terms of a return to the African Garden of Eden, I recalled the story about a group of African Americans who returned to Ghana in the hopes of making a life there, tossing their U.S. Passport into the ocean only to return to the same beach week later, looking for their documents. In thinking of the African Americans in French Rococo, we think of the Middle Passage, the violent separation of families, and the horrors of slavery – the events happening while Aristocrats had conquests in gazebos and hothouses. And of the possibility that this fantasy landscape could be the U.S.? Well, it throws into sharp relief the reality of things, the ongoing turmoil of the inner city, the struggles that Africa Americans still have to overcome.

Marshall’s work doesn’t thrust any of these possibilities into our purview. Instead, the ghosts of alternative histories awaken the real histories inside us. This seems to be a fundamentally different take on the Rococo than what is usually seen in the contemporary artworld. In ArtForum last month, Meredith Martin defined the dominate features of Rococo through Contemporary Art’s interpretation of it -- Jeff Koons’ embracing of “its democratic nature,” Cindy Sherman’s noticing its “malleability of identity,” Elizabeth Peytons’ nostalgia and meditations on “interiority,” Karen Kilimnik’s use of its theatricality and artifice as alternative models for pleasure, Yinka Sonibare’s “amplification of power and commodity fetishism,” and artists like Jorge Pardo and Rudolf Stingel’s use of Rococo design elements in their work.

I’m not saying that any of these artists are doing something particularly counterproductive, but I will say that there is a certain amount of magic to what Marshall has done – he’s turned a style of art known for surface, spectacle, and wanton decadence into an exercise in quiet reflection, incredible depth, steel-eyed intelligence, and imagination. No small feat.