Steve McQueen Shines a Powerful Light on the Invisible

I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. – Ralph Ellison

This refrain from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) has been referenced thousands of times in Black cultural studies, deployed so often that we have risked emptying it of its meaning. The most imaginative artists, though, can give new amplitude to, and find new cadences in, the texts and ideas we think we know so well. Ellison, whose work raises eternal questions around the meaning of visibility in a racialized world, is a vital connective tissue binding together two current exhibitions by Steve McQueen at Dia Beacon and Dia Chelsea.

At Beacon, McQueen presents a single, newly commissioned, site-specific work, Bass (2024), while at Chelsea he shows three works: Exodus (1992–97), Sunshine State (2022) and Bounty (2024). McQueen is an artist of vast multiplicity and range; the two exhibitions stand for themselves, beyond the burden of overdetermining coherence. But in both, we witness an artist with an unshakeable will to interrogate the inner workings of his metier: film. As McQueen subtly evokes Ellison and his narratives of sight, he dissects and deconstructs film and its dialectics of visibility and invisibility, presence and absence.

Bass begins not in the gallery space, but with the descent into it. The installation seizes its audience members from the moment they start heading toward the subterranean room in which it is housed, readying their bodies for an art of the (be)low, the deep, the subaltern. As Dia curator Donna De Salvo notes in the accompanying leaflet, you are reminded of the basement in which Ellison’s invisible man settles at the end of the book, a ‘hole […] full of light.’

On its surface, Bass seems to have no relation to film. It is a work of abstraction. Beyond the basement’s spare architecture, there is no surface of material representation of which our eye can grab hold, no objects on which to fix our gaze. There is only space, colour and light. The ceiling is fitted with sixty colourful LED lightboxes, which constantly move across the colour spectrum at an almost undetectable pace. As these slight, slow chromatic shifts unfold, our perceptive faculties adapt to a similar tempo, one that allows for a more attentive strategy of noticing. Immersed in this array of luminous colours, you don’t so much watch a film as train yourself to see the basic element of film’s visual ontology: light.

Bass is also grounded in the sound of its titular instrument. The sonic component of the installation was produced out of McQueen’s collaboration with a bass ensemble led by Marcus Miller, which, back in January, gathered for a session in the basement that presently houses the installation. There, the bassists improvised a more than three-hour-long score that grew out of their reactions to the 40-minute light sequence. (Now, however, the two are played independently, resulting in endlessly permuting aural and visual display.)

The score is also a map, a history: the styles and types of bass it involves were culled from across the African diaspora. We hear the manifold possibilities of the instrument in jazz standards, in the throb of Detroit techno, in the sway of reggae and in the lucid tonalities of the Malian ngoni music. The music plays from three stacks of speakers, which form points of an invisible triangle on the gallery floor. Standing – or sitting or lying down – in the middle of this triangle, you are caught in the crosshairs of a rumbling dialogue. Visitors are asked to keep silent, so as to fully inhabit the intractable gravity of the sound. As its density accumulates, Ellison’s invisible man resurfaces once again: ‘Who knows,’ he asks ‘but that on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’

The totalizing vibration of the sound, paired with the auratic hold of the lights, loosens one’s grip on space and time, on presence itself. It engulfs the body with a wholeness that can be likened to the experience of a rave, albeit absent of all that frenzied heat and of the gyrating crowd. Or – as McQueen himself has suggested in the same leaflet – to the hold of a slave ship, that deep and deadly womb from which the sonic life of the Black diaspora was born.

At Chelsea, works from the earliest to most contemporary moments of McQueen’s career converge. In one gallery, we encounter his first film Exodus, a Super 8 work following two Caribbean men conspicuously carrying palm trees through London’s streets. The camera focuses on these men with such intensity and rigour that it compels the audience to simply look. For Bounty, McQueen again turns to botany and the Caribbean. The work seeks beauty amid the remnants of catastrophic history of enslavement and colonialism: it comprises several photographs of plants native to Grenada – his father’s birthplace – arranged in a single line looping across the gallery walls.

But the Chelsea exhibition pivots around the titular centrepiece, McQueen’s two-channel film Sunshine State. In the film, we hear a voiceover of McQueen relay a story his father told him just before his death, about an incident of racial terror he endured in Florida, where he picked oranges as a migrant worker. McQueen tells the story four times, but only once in full: in the subsequent retellings, he deletes words from the story, replacing them with silent pauses. The editorial gesture recalls the Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe’s methodology of ‘black redaction’, which she described in her book In the Wake (2016) as a technique of critical revision marshalled ‘toward seeing [blackness] beyond […] the logics of the administered plantation.’

The aural redaction of words unfolds alongside a visual redaction of presence. Each time McQueen recounts the story, the screens play silent clips from The Jazz Singer, a 1927 film notorious for its blackface performances. McQueen’s use of this early film nods to the politics of racial spectacle embedded in cinema's origins. The filmmaker subverts this crucial piece of his medium’s history, editing it so that as Al Jolson’s Jakie Rabinowitz applies blackface, he doesn’t merely become blackened – he becomes invisible, a body seemingly without a face.

McQueen further complicates these disarrangements of the visible by setting the two channels in a doubly inverse relationship: one screen plays the positive version of the film in reverse while the other plays the negative in normal forward progression. On the negative side, Jolson appears to be whiting himself out as he applies the blackface, until he is entirely erased, while the white characters appear chromatically black.

The film culminates in a frenetic, strobe-like finale where the screens flicker rapidly between the positive and negative representations, causing Jolson to flutter between blackness and whiteness. The crazed illogic of race and its visual schema reaches a frenzied, incomprehensible crescendo. One’s eye seems to tremble in the face of such dizzying vacillations. The filmic image as we know it tears at the seams, left to crumble into incoherence; vision itself breaks.  

‘Steve McQueen’ is on view at Dia Beacon, New York, until 25 May 2025; Dia Chelsea, New York, until Summer 2025.

_{Main image: Steve McQueen, Bass, 2024. Installation view. Courtesy: Dia Art Foundation, New York and © Steve McQueen; photography: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York}