"...When I come to look at my own work in the museum,
I come essentially to analyze it, to check and see if it
still works or holds up the way I thought it held up when
I finished it. So I come in to take a critical and analytical
view of my own work."
"...What I set out to do was to develop a figure or
a form that would represent that condition of invisibility,
where you had an incredible presence, but there was a way
in which you could sometimes be seen and not seen at the
same time."
"Each one of those figures is based on somebody, some
particular somebody. Not a person that I want anybody to
know, but what I do want you to know is that there is some
difference between all of these representations, even as
they seem to be simplified and reduced to what appears to
be a stereotype."
How do you feel about this painting
from 1995 - "Many Mansions" - and about it being part of the
Chicago Art Institute's permanent collection? Are you satisfied
with it as a work after all the other works you've produced
between then and now?
MARSALL:
Well, how I feel about the painting
and how I feel about it being a part of the Chicago Art Institute's
collection are two separate issues for me. Being in the Art
Institute's collection is actually a great honor for me. It
was something that I actually strove for ever since I decided
I wanted to be an artist. One of the reasons I became an artist
was because I was impressed with some things by other painters
that I had seen, or other artists that I had seen. And so
part of my ambition had always been to be included in the
museum collection alongside all these other artists that I
admired, and to be a part of the Art Institute's collection
which has so many things that I really love, things that I
come to see all the time.
But how I feel about the painting is another thing. I mean,
it's a painting that I like a lot. But when I come to look
at my own work in the museum, I come essentially to analyze
it, to check and see if it still works or holds up the way
I thought it held up when I finished it. So I come in to take
a critical and analytical view of my own work. I mean, when
you look at a painting like "Many Mansions," which I finished
back in 1995, and I consider where I am now here in 2000,
I'm so much further ahead of where I was then. Obviously,
when I look back on it, I have to take into account that it
was at a moment when I was at a certain stage in my development,
when I was interested in issues that I may have fully explored
by now. But as a painting, I'm satisfied that it still seems
as fresh to me now as it did when I completed it five years
ago.
ART:21:
Seeing it for the first time,
there's something about the the painting that seems very familiar.
MARSHALL:
Well, certainly the painting
is built around what you could call a very classically Renaissance,
architectural,
or geometric structure. The most obvious thing you can see
is this pyramidal, triangulated structure that the figures
are fitted into. So that's one thing. If you look at the painting,
you can really map out the grid on which all of those things
hang, and then you look at the way the movement is created
through these angles that cut across it. One of the reasons
I used that structure was because when I started out, the
artists and works that I really admired - like Géricault's
"The Wrath of the Medusa," I think I mentioned that earlier
- that whole genre
of history
painting, that grand narrative
style of painting, was something that I really wanted to position
my work in relation to. And so in order to achieve a similar
kind of authority that those paintings had, to fit them into
a tradition of grandeur that those paintings represented,
I had to adopt the similar structural format to develop my
painting. And so that's what I did.
The subject matter seems in some ways less dramatic than the
kinds of subjects represented in traditional history painting.
But that's also a part of what the painting is about. It's
about those figures being represented that way: the relationship
between this representation
of figures and the absence of those kinds of representations
in that historical tradition of grand narrative history painting.
ART:21:
Why do you use such a flat black
color when painting your figures?
MARSHALL:
The initial development of that
unequivocally black, emphatically black, figure was so that
I would use them as figures that function rhetorically in
the painting. That kind of extreme is a rhetorical device
that you go to when you want to emphasize or highlight a certain
point. And one of the things that I had been thinking about
when I started to develop that figure was the way in which
the folk and folklore of blackness always seemed to carry
a derogatory connotation. So you saw a lot of very negative
stereotypical
representations of black people, especially in the 19th and
18th century images, and then even moving into the 20th century.
A part of what I was thinking to do with my image was to reclaim
the images of blackness as an emblem of power, instead of
an image of derision.
It also dovetailed with some things I was reading at the time.
One of the books I was reading when I started to develop that
image was Ralph Ellison's book "Invisible Man," in which he
describes the condition of invisibility as it related to black
people in America. The condition of invisibility that Ralph
Ellison describes is not a kind of transparency, but it's
a psychological invisibility. It's where the presence of black
people was often not wanted and denied in the American mindset.
And so what I set out to do was to develop a figure or a form
that would represent that condition of invisibility, where
you had an incredible presence, but there was a way in which
you could sometimes be seen and not seen at the same time.
And what I started with was an image that was a black figure
against a black ground, where there was only the slightest
variation between the value of the figure and the value of
the brown of the ground that it was painted against.
The only way you could make a distinction really was that
the temperature changed in the quality of the blacks. So I'd
paint a warm black figure against a cool black background.
And that temperature change created enough of a perceptual
difference that you can identify the figure at some angles,
but at other angles it would completely disappear. And so
it started out with the first painting I did way back in 1980,
a painting called "The Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow
of His Former Self." It was the first time I had used this
really highly stylized,
simplified kind of representation of a black figure, but using
that figure in concert with all of these compositional
and stylistic devices that I had learned from studying Renaissance
painting. And it was actually the first painting I had ever
done where I felt like I was completely conscious of and in
control of all of the aspects of the painting I was assembling
to make the representation. I understood the effect of all
of the devices I was using on the overall concept
of the painting. And so that painting was one that established
the black figure as a mode of operating for me. It was highly
stylized and incredibly flat then.
But over time as my thinking about this became more complex,
the representation needed a change and become more complex
itself. So it needed to start to be more than simply a one-dimensional
or a two-dimensional kind of image, and started revealing
a lot more subtlety and detail. And that's where I arrived
when I did a painting like "Many Mansions" where the figures
still are unequivocally black, because they're simply painted
with black paint. But there are highlights in the film that
give you some variation and that reveals something of the
individual identities of all of the figures represented there.
You can't say that simply because they're painted with black
paint that they all look alike. And so a part of this was
to challenge certain stereotypical assumptions or representations
of black people - that they can be represented by being called
black as a monolithic group, although I can't say that I believe
for a minute that anybody really thought that, even though
it's a convenient way of categorizing a population, singling
them out for political and social discrimination. It's very
convenient to think about people in blocks and in groups.
So a part of what I was doing with this was to challenge some
of that too by giving you what you think is a very simplified
reduction initially, but upon closer inspection you have to
come to terms with the fact that there are incredible differences
embedded inside this apparently simplified and stylized representation.
Each one of those figures is based on somebody, some particular
somebody. Not a person that I want anybody to know, but what
I do want you to know is that there is some difference between
all of these representations, even as they seem to be simplified
and reduced to what appears to be a stereotype.
