Project America

According to the survey undertaken by Komar and Melamid in their recent 'America's Most Wanted' project, the painting the average American would most like to see would consist of a landscape with an expansive blue sky, inhabited by a group of figures at leisure, all painted in vibrant shades. Perversely enough, this could be a schematic description of the work of Kerry James Marshall, whose colourful landscapes are populated by jet black figures at leisure in the all too familiar housing projects that punctuate the African-American neighbourhoods of America's large cities. Whereas the resultant painting made by Komar and Melamid was a rather stylised, kitsch image, Marshall's work is a lush jumble of painterly styles and allusions that greatly complicates the Soviet émigrés' vision of America.

Before 'America's Most Wanted' another, stronger version of American painting was set forth in influential articles such as Clement Greenberg's 'American Type Painting' (1955) and Michael Fried's 'Three American Painters' (1965). Both critics contended that the strengths and virtues of Abstract Expressionism emerged from a particularly American sensibility (albeit one informed by dissident and exiled Europeans, along with some Mexican muralists), akin to the poetry of the nation's laureate Walt Whitman and the 'buckeye' painting of American Sunday painters. Hung unframed like tapestries, Marshall's large canvases, often in the 8 x 12 feet range, would surely have dismayed Greenberg and Fried, saturated as they are with narrative content, the inclusion of text, and human figures. Nonetheless, the paintings from his 'Garden Series' share many of these critics' concerns. They are emphatically flat (both the figures and the swathes of deep space), and drips, dots, and strokes of paint create a kind of all-over pattern effect when the paintings are seen from afar. They are, as Greenberg and Fried demanded, quite self-consciously aware of their status as paintings; indeed they play out, with a kind of school-yard glee, one of painting's central problems: the struggle between illusionary space and flatness.

Better Homes Better Gardens (1994) is in part anchored by the tension between the way in which the flat black figures occupy a three-dimensional space whose surface is covered with scumbles and drips of paint that forever bring the eye to the front of the canvas. Likewise in Watts 1963 (1995) a pictorial tension is created when the tilt of the flat green space of Nickerson Gardens runs aground at the base of the international-style Modernist architecture in the painting's background, simultaneously providing no steady footing for the children in the foreground, all three of whom stare searchingly out at the viewer. Perhaps Greenberg best describes the effect of these paintings when he writes 'the flattening surfaces of their canvases compelled them to move along the picture plane laterally and seek in its sheer physical size the space necessary for the telling of their kind of pictorial story'. Obviously, Greenberg is referring to canvases made by the men of Abstract Expressionism, and not, say, the flattened outdoor spaces of Jacob Lawrence, similarly populated by flat black figures who often moved laterally across the picture plane.

But Marshall appears equally at home in both métiers; and in his hands abstraction ceases to be of interest as such, while figuration is hardly retrograde. Rather, to approach the problem by way of an analogy, if the institutional critique of the 80s and 90s (from Hans Haacke to Fred Wilson) can be seen as a complication of the presumed neutrality of the viewer of Minimalist sculpture, so too can Marshall's work be seen as complicating the project of Modernist painting, a project that found its apotheosis not in any actual paintings, but in the writings of Greenberg and Fried. And herein lies the rub, for Marshall seems to be borrowing (at will) from a variety of artistic modes of production and address, as opposed to merely rejecting out of hand the Modernist doctrine set forth by two of its major rhetoricians. Yet his brand of painterly pastiche comes less from a watered-down version of Postmodernism and more from the collage sensibility of Romare Bearden and Robert Rauschenberg. Marshall's paintings also appear unworried by recent critical dismissals of the Modernist project, which have often manifested themselves in alternately mournful or celebratory reports of the end of painting.

This is not, however, to say that Marshall's work is anti-intellectual or anti-critical. On the contrary, Marshall's paintings are a complex affair (in part due to their deceptively 'simple' or 'folk art' appearance): they disregard wholesale rejections of the various Modernist projects in favour of a more complicated version of Modernism. Their intricacy is compounded by their status as history paintings whose concerns are contemporary history and the history of painting; and the version of both stories they offer is nuanced, intertwined, and particularly generous. This is all to say that in Marshall's work, Modernism is not only the painting championed by Greenberg and Fried, but the reciprocity of such painting with other cultural forms, such as architecture, popular music, and the work of artists like Lawrence and Bearden - a reciprocity continually denied by Modernist critics' insistence on the purity of media.

The most obvious connection made by Marshall is that between the ambitions of Modernist painting and architecture in post-war America. The projects and gardens that serve as the settings for Marshall's paintings are subjected to a trenchant rhetorical analysis. All the connotations of 'project' are conjured up, from the scientific and social experiment to the philosophical and aesthetic. Equally, 'garden' runs the associative gamut from Adam and Eve, through Renaissance delights and English country pastimes, up to its use as a common surname for inner-city housing projects. The social experiment in affordable, equitable urban housing degenerated under the continual pressures of capitalist greed and systemic racism, and resulted in one of the most obviously failed moments of Modernist ambition. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of painting in Modernism led to an end-game strategy that seemed to exhaust the medium's ability to say anything much at all. In these paintings, Marshall draws a morphological similarity between the two 'projects' - the rigid geometrical look of international-style architecture summons the flat planes of much late Modernist painting. Yet Marshall drapes decorative swirls and layers over both, slyly mocking the anti-decorative paranoia of figures such as Le Corbusier and Greenberg.

The utopian desires of post-war painting and architecture are continually flagged by the streamers of text that float through the canvases, often held aloft by Disneyesque bluebirds. Truisms of American life, snippets of the commercial world's promise of continuous goodness and plenty, phrases such as 'better homes, better gardens', 'our town', and 'there's more of everything' turn ironic in the context of housing projects where plenty has been made structurally inaccessible. That irony is a defining characteristic of Modernist literature should not surprise us, given Marshall's pillaging of the field. And true to form, his irony is (slightly) Modernist in feel, for it is an irony born of having believed or having wanted to believe in the thing now treated ironically, as opposed to the cool irony of contemporary experience that is the belief system or the experience in and of itself.

In different hands this gambit might have turned cynical or maudlin. Such pitfalls are avoided - but how? It's due, I think, to Marshall's lush meditation upon how the projects of Modernism - of painting and architecture - are intertwined. The paintings are about how these projects managed to develop, despite the purported intentions of their makers or the proclamations of their supporters, resolutely embedded in one another, in complex and difficult ways. The ability to articulate the how of this embeddedness is problematic and elusive. After all, what cause-and-effect links can we make between the development of project-style housing and the meteoric rise (and equally abrupt decline?) of 'American Type Painting'? Marshall's paintings suggest that perhaps the connective tissue is bound up in the way such histories created spaces and genres that are continually shot through with the stuff of everyday life, filled as they are with people just living their lives, and usually, despite all the odds, enjoying themselves. In Our Town (1995) two children careen through the landscape, a boy on a bicycle, a girl in hot pursuit. In Better Homes Better Gardens a young couple's stroll evokes the lyrics of Me'shell NdegéOcello: 'Step, step into the projects where I found love.'

Music is always implicit in Marshall's work; the gorgeous brightness of the colours, the layered styles and the disjointed space all have a particularly aural effect. And it is invariably popular music: the extreme blackness of the figures evokes Curtis Mayfield's 'We people who are darker than blue'; the flat blazing sun that rises in the background of many of the paintings recalls Sly and the Family Stone's 'Hot Fun in the Summertime'. In Pastime (1997) the musical undertow is made explicit, as a father and son sit in a park together, listening to music, while the background is ironically populated with African-American figures enjoying the stereotypical upper middle-class white pastimes of golf and water-skiing. The father listens to Smokey Robinson sing 'Just My Imagination', while the son's radio dispenses lyrics by Snoop Doggy Dogg: 'Got my mind on my money and my money on my mind'. Looking at Marshall's work, one often finds oneself with snippets of music in one's head, the catchy lyrics that circulate in our minds as we move through time and space. But more importantly, perhaps, is the way in which we are identified generationally by the music that ends up revolving in our heads. So that, once again, Marshall has refrained from a monolithic notion, this time of African-American identity, and displayed instead the polyphony that is structural to all social and cultural formations.

Dave Hickey has recently written that popular music is the dominant art form of the American 20th century, so much so, he maintains, that Abstract Expressionism is unthinkable without Be-Bop, and Warhol inconceivable without rock-and-roll. 1 This seems true of Marshall's mix, for amid the problems of painting and the disastrous results of international-style architecture there remains the continuity of everyday life, which moves along at its own geological pace, a continuity for which the soundtrack is popular music. Part of what these paintings are about, then, are the ways in which different forms such as music, art, and architecture are experienced as coterminous and inextricable from one another. They are also about the utter and complete inextricability of African-American history from American history, indeed African-American experience from the American experience (whatever that is, as nebulous and expansive as such a category would have to be). If, for Marshall, Modernism is disallowed its traditional 'purity' of media, so too American experience - be it New York School painting, Modernist urban planning, or popular music - is shown to be about the inextricability of black and white experience. While the powers that be continue to maintain the differences (be they aesthetic or social) in order to protect the privileges garnered by such acts of exclusion, Marshall's ironic text banners continually gesture toward the promise of equality and the reality of shared experience. And while these ideas may now seem to be a failed utopian vision, his paintings suggest that such a premise should not be abandoned, that the histories of American type painting, and all of the things that run through and around such a venture, may still be open for revision.