100 Years According to “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” at the Whitney

Motley The First One Hundred Years: He Amongst You Who Is Without Sine Shall Cast the First Stone: Forgive Them Father For They Know Not What They Do  Detail: Detail, Motley - The First One Hundred Years: He Amongst You Who Is Without Sine Shall Cast the First Stone: Forgive Them Father For They Know Not What They Do, Archibald Motley, c. 1963-72

I walked in through the back. The first painting I saw in the Whitney’s retrospective exhibition “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” was The First One Hundred Years, a striking phantasmagoric diatribe about race relations in the United States, as you can see in the image and detail above. Archibald John Motley Jr.’s (1891–1981) last painting, it was completed in 1973 after nearly a decade of reworking. He did not paint again. While the rest of the exhibition makes the case implied by its title—Motley, a black artist associated with the Harlem Renaissance, as a jazz age modernist deserving of greater recognition—through a coherent body of work, this painting sticks out as something else entirely.

Archibald J. Motley Jr. (1891–1981), Blues, 1929. Oil on canvas, 36 × 42 in. (91.4 × 106.7 cm). Collection of Mara Motley, MD, and Valerie Gerrard Browne.

Archibald J. Motley Jr., Blues, 1929. Oil on canvas, 36 × 42 in. Collection of Mara Motley, MD, and Valerie Gerrard Browne.

Motley’s works are presented (if one were to begin at the beginning, unlike me) chronologically, first as a room of Classicizing portraits with clearly defined forms that create gravitas. Then, the exhibition proceeds through scenes of Bronzeville, the area of Chicago where Motley lived, worked, and played, to Mexico, which the artist began to visit in the 1960s. These genre scenes often present figurative groups in social atmospheres—nightclubs and city streets—and these people are largely black, or rather gradations of brown, unusual at the time and also seen in his portraits of family members. With arrestingly tilted spatial constructions and high-key color, the scenes are vibrant, pulsating with a bluesy rhythm. Motley often takes advantage of artificial light to strange effect, especially notable in nighttime scenes like Gettin’ Religion (pictured below).

Archibald J. Motley Jr. (1891–1981), Gettin’ Religion, 1948. Oil on canvas, 40 × 48.375 in. (101.6 × 122.9 cm). Collection of Mara Motley, MD, and Valerie Gerrard Browne.

Archibald J. Motley Jr., Gettin’ Religion, 1948. Oil on canvas, 40 × 48.375 in. Collection of Mara Motley, MD, and Valerie Gerrard Browne.

These works hint at a tendency toward surreal environments, but with The First One Hundred Years Motley is in starkly symbolic territory, jumping from colorful but largely Social Realist depictions to an order dictated by an internal compass. The full title of this painting is “The First One Hundred Years: He Amongst You Who Is Without Sin Shall Cast the First Stone; Forgive Them Father for They Know Not What They Do,” which begins to suggest the wallop the canvas carries. Portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and JFK hover in a blue twilight scene amid a house with a devil and a dove and a tall tree bearing a hanged man next to the Statue of Liberty. The red of a Confederate Flag and the devil stands out among the all-over blue tonality. A dark void with suggestions of features haunts the middle, reminiscent of an unarticulated Francis Bacon. In great contrast to the realism, conviviality, and safe distance of the other canvases, here Motley pulls no punches.

The First One Hundred Years: He Amongst You Who Is Without Sine Shall Cast the First Stone: Forgive Them Father For They Know Not What They Do, c. 1963-72

Archibald J. Motley Jr., The First One Hundred Years: He Amongst You Who Is Without Sine Shall Cast the First Stone: Forgive Them Father For They Know Not What They Do, c. 1963-72. Oil on canvas.

Rather than understanding The First One Hundred Years as a way of ending the exhibition with an exclamation point, perhaps this painting offers a more directly political lens with which to understand the rest of his oeuvre. The genre scenes and portraits are of course already political for creating visual representations of black culture and showing black bodies. But the manner in which Motley depicts black people is a little more difficult than that; Motley’s figures are stylized and general rather than representing particular individuals, but sometimes they verge on grotesque caricature with skin painted an unmodulated black and mouths oversized, garishly red. The labels at the Whitney propose that it is a form of irony on Motley’s part, at a time when irony was rarely seen in painting. The contention is that those in the know would understand that the artist was dramatizing stereotypes rather than taking them at face value. Titles such as “Mulatress with Figurine and Dutch Seascape” also suggest he pointedly engages with social constructs.

Archibald J. Motley Jr. (b. 1891–1981), Self-Portrait (Myself at Work), 1933. Oil on canvas, 57.125 × 45.25 in. (145.1 × 114.9 cm). Collection of Mara Motley, MD, and Valerie Gerrard Browne.

Archibald J. Motley Jr., Self-Portrait (Myself at Work), 1933. Oil on canvas, 57.125 × 45.25 in. Collection of Mara Motley, MD, and Valerie Gerrard Browne.

While I don’t have an alternate explanation than the Whitney’s, it is still a shock to see titles that refer to racial designations that would have seemed backwards in Motley’s own time and depictions that from any white painter would read as straightforward racism. In a review in the Wall Street JournalPeter Plagens writes that

Motley called himself a “blues aesthetician,” and the dualism implied by these two words is indicative of his whole career. Motley longed to create a visual equivalent of black music’s vigor, slang and dialect. As a black artist, he could be fearlessly ironic in portraying African-American life, but as an academically trained and Paris-modernized outsider, he couldn’t help but see his subjects through a distancing lens.

That dualism that makes some of his work difficult collapses in The First Hundred Years into pathos and conviction with no distance or irony. The 100 years of the title refers to the centenary since the abolition of slavery in 1865, and the history that Motley depicts since that event looks like a nightmare rather than progress. Perhaps most jarring, it feels relevant today.

Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” is up at the Whitney through January 17.

LoVid, Stuffed Digital Glitches, and the “Handmade Abstract” at BRIC

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Handmade Abstract” brings abstraction as an artistic concept into the physical realm in this group show at BRIC. In this exhibition, 13 artists use a range of materials from photography to sculpture to video, along with a fair amount of textile, to embrace the abstract in unexpectedly tangible ways. In contrast to the legacy of abstraction in art as transcendent or pure, the dense exhibition includes work that is intricate, colorful, and sensory. All the works evidence the hand that made them and evoke the senses.

Installation view of "Handmade Abstract" exhibition at BRIC featuring works by LoVid

Installation view of “Handmade Abstract” exhibition at BRIC featuring works by LoVid

Case in point: a wall of works by LoVid, a pair of artists (Tali Hinkis, Kyle Lapidus) who draw a parallel between digital editing and sewing. One large screen and two iPads display what seem like colorful “glitches”–the point where computer programs come apart at the seams and go buggy on you. Analog video recordings are edited into single-channel pieces that then become the basis for images used to create patterned fabric. From this fabric, LoVid creates stuffed figurines that hang like taxidermied animals from pegs on the wall, creating digital art that is awkward instead of glossy, whose shapes are uneven and bulging rather than geometric.

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Although all the artists in this exhibition are engaged with making the abstract tactile, LoVid renders the cold realm of technology more intimate, human, and fallible. While in the videos the “hand” doing the editing is necessarily unseen, these stuffed objects provide the opposite–showing the hand stitch by stitch and thus recalling time and labor. Hinkis says in an interview with curator Jenny Gerow that this DIY, handmade aesthetic feels both more human and more true to the artists’ experience of technology: “That is our narrative of media art, the era of glitch and handmade analog mess ups.”

Installation view of "Handmade Abstract" exhibition at BRIC featuring Michelle Forsyth's photographic prints with sewn tape (above) and Pedestal Components (2014) (below)

Installation view of “Handmade Abstract” exhibition at BRIC featuring Michelle Forsyth’s photographic prints with sewn tape (above) and Pedestal Components (below)

Handmade Abstract” is curated by Elizabeth Ferrer and Jenny Gerow and features the work of Katie Bell, Maria Chavez, Michelle Forsyth, Carl E. Hazlewood, LoVid, Marisa Manso, Lael Marshall, Christian Maychack, Leeza Meksin, Liz Nielsen, Courtney Puckett, Mary Schwab, and Lizzie Scott.

Check it out while it’s still up–now through Sunday, October 25 at BRIC in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Installation view of "Handmade Abstract" exhibition at BRIC featuring work by Marisa Manso (floor L) and Katie Bell's Blind Driver installation (upper R corner)

Installation view of “Handmade Abstract” exhibition at BRIC featuring Marisa Manso’s sculpture with light (center L) and Katie Bell’s Blind Driver installation (upper corner)

 

Romantic Predilections: Simon Schubert at Foley Gallery

Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

Installation view, Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

German artist Simon Schubert presents gothic interiors with minimalist means in his current exhibition “Multa Nocte” (meaning “deepest night”) at Foley Gallery. To the left, an entire gallery wall is covered with white paper, on which the artist has created interior spaces simply by folding and creasing individual sheets. To the right, the entire wall is dark, covered with graphite paper, among which the artist has placed finely rendered charcoal illustrations of house exteriors, candles, and Edgar Allen Poe.

Poe House, 2015 (L), Portrait Edgar Allan Poe, 2015 (R)

Untitled (Poe House New York), 2015 (L), Portrait Edgar Allan Poe, 2015 (R)

The subject matter is not just Poe, as in the portrait above, but the architecture associated with the American Romantic author of mysteries and detective stories. Schubert portrays historical addresses associated with Poe or those described in his writings. Houses, a single candle, entryways, candelabra, a tree, Poe himself….all embrace Romantic cliche. The medium works to the the artist’s advantage as the black-on-black creates something like the slippery image of a daguerreotype: disappearing and reappearing depending on where you stand in relation to the light source. It works because it is simply  done, leaving the excess to the imaginative subject matter: burning 19th century homes, the waning candle, the ill-fated Poe’s stare.

Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

Installation view, Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

Lacking human figures, aside from the presiding portrait of Poe, the spaces themselves become protagonists. Especially in the folded white paper works, where Schubert creates empty interiors, the artist implies a psychology of space. For example, there are several stairways, one in particular with a perspective to induce vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock also favored stairs as sites of psychological resonance). These atmospheric constructions of space manage to convey drama and loss without a human subject.

Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

Installation view, Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

In a seeming concession to the melodrama of the subject matter, a small model of a house created of dark green iridescent feathers sits in the middle of the gallery. A large seascape in charcoal anchors the back wall. If you want to indulge yourself, and you know you do, head down to the Lower East Side to view these carefully made works on paper.

On view through October 18. More about the exhibition here.