Chapter 1: The Painter and the Police

English, Darby

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Chapter 1: The Painter and the Police

Darby English

To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror

“Somebody was here,” wrote Simone Weil, “and the next minute, there is nobody here at all.” Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 1939, Eng. trans. in Simone Weil: An...

Author

Darby English

PublisherYale University Press

PublisherHutchins Center for African & African American Research

Related print edition pages: pp.22-41

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00170.004

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18030

Chapter subject tags:Race relationsMarshall, Kerry James, 1955-Black lives matter movementAfrican Americans in artPortrait painting, AmericanBlack police officersRacial profiling in law enforcementPerspective (Art)

Chapter 1: The Painter and the Police

In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon?

— Simone Weil, 1940

“Somebody was here,” wrote Simone Weil, “and the next minute, there is nobody here at all.”1 Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 1939, Eng. trans. in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (New York: Grove, 1986), 162–95. Miles’s compilation features Mary McCarthy’s translation of the essay Weil first published, under the name Emile Novis, as “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,” Cahiers du Sud 230 (December 1940–January 1941). This chapter’s epigraph is from the same source, 181–82; the rest of this crucial passage reads, “The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life . . . intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity . . . actually, they continue because they have deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.” This is a spectacle that the police never weary of showing us. Again and again, we see particular officers act on suspicion alone with deadly force. Nearly as often as we see this dehumanizing injustice perpetrated, we see the responsible parties shirk accountability with the full backing of the law. We see entire communities exposed to periodic realizations of this constant threat, as if by a strategy of shock attack. And in most of the recorded cases, we see those who act in this way disappear back into the force, restored astonishingly quickly to the protections offered not merely by their concentrated power but also by the sheer scale and uniformity of their interface with us — one effect of which is to make each officer seem indistinguishable from the next. In our state of heightened countervigilance, we see between the one and the many no really meaningful difference.2 For a relevant investigation of the themes of surveillance and countersurveillance, see Simone Brown, Dark Matters: On Blackness and Surveillance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). How do I know that this one isn’t the one? I myself have taken this view of the police since the age of sixteen, and in the meantime I’ve had cause, on more occasions than I care to count, to strengthen my attachment to this way of seeing. In such a situation — let’s call it distributed vigilance — thought is one of the first things to go.

Kerry James Marshall’s 2015 depiction of a black male police officer casts these subjects very differently (fig. 5). The painting’s disposition toward its subject is admirably philosophical, being oriented, conceptually and actually, to the notion of reflection. This is certainly just as true of Marshall’s own disposition. It’s his controversial opinion that a little thought could go a long way, especially among those of us who — amid the latest waves of police violence and of ultraconservative sympathy for its perpetrators — feel specially targeted, and who therefore reflexively ascribe ill intent to the very figure of the police.

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Description: Untitled (policeman) by Marshall, Kerry James

Fig. 5 / Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), Untitled (policeman), 2015. Synthetic polymer paint on PVC panel with plexi frame, 60 × 60 in. (152.4 × 152.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art; gift of Mimi Haas in honor of Marie-Josée Kravis

Marshall has a challenging critique of the command generated early in the Black Lives Matter movement: “Stop Killing Us!” (fig. 6). He asks the protester to consider what it means, as he put it to me, “to require somebody else to make the effort and [invest] in your well-being.”3 Conversation with the author, November 2015. Indeed Marshall insists that Untitled was not a response to Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore, or any of them. His interest in the relations between black communities and local law enforcement dates to the Watts Riots of 1965, which took place where and when he was growing up, and

none of those particular incidents caused me to become more focused on it. What makes me more interested and attuned to it are the ways that, within black communities where crime operates, we accept a certain kind of status and can only imagine ourselves out of that if somebody allows us to be. I mean, we’re looking for permission to be human. The demand for more black police officers is supposed to remedy a problem that it’s not the police force’s to remedy. It’s ours.4 Ibid.

If “we can only imagine ourselves out of that if somebody allows us to be” describes a limitation Marshall ascribes to the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter, it also alludes to a project of self-respect to which Marshall long ago committed his talent for painting. Illogical as it may sound, Marshall chose to paint his way to a solution. That is, for him, Untitled answers a need for the fullest possible address of his relationship, as a maker of paintings, to the more polemical certainties and claims of the political moment. How is another matter entirely. A viewer’s want for something different, or for more, surely has more to do with the demands we place on art at times like this than with anything we can pin on the painter or his picture. Still and all, it’s important to be clear about how the painterly elaboration of a fictional black cop constitutes an action that puts pressure on the claims and approaches cited above.

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Description: New York Times Magazine cover by Unknown

Fig. 6 / New York Times Magazine cover, May 10, 2015

When working figuratively, Marshall only paints black people — figures wholly distinctive in aesthetic style. More important, they emit with equal constancy that sense of intrinsic worth — the ability to love and to remain indifferent — that some call self-respect.5 This formulation may recall the reader to Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect,” which first appeared in Vogue in August 1961 and is reprinted in Joan Didion: Collected Works (New York: Norton, 2006), 215–18. Such people run, as it were, on autonomy. That, of course, is a quality embedded in the historical temporality of modernist painting, a representational convention to whose manner and topoi Marshall holds fiercely — except for its ban on black people.6 For perceptive analyses that recognize the decisive role that visual modernism plays in Kerry James Marshall’s practice, see Kobena Mercer, “Kerry James Marshall: The Painter of Afro-Modern Life,” Afterall 24 (Summer 2010): 81–88; Okwui Enwezor, “Modernity and Its Discontents,” in Nav Haq, ed., Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff (Antwerp: Ludion, 2014), 167–77; and Helen Molesworth, “Project America: Kerry James Marshall,” frieze no. 40 (May 1998): 72–75. In this critical aspect, Marshall fancies himself a full-time restoration agent. Really black black people function for him, however, as a way not to disclose an (open) secret about modernism, but rather to make of modernism a more completely worldly cultural practice. “Worldly” here describes the attitude of a person, or a thing, that would take its place without wanting the approval of anyone or anything else. But Marshall’s figures show anonymous and fictional qualities that render them irreal by catalyzing their collapse into the pictorial settings they inhabit — settings whose labored yet clearly delineated structures, copious localized embellishments, and near-campy conventionality make it impossible ever to forget you’re looking at a painting.

So, when Marshall addresses a topical theme, as in Untitled, to field that address is to respond to the painting’s invitation into the thought-space allocated to the theme in question. This is, in part, what makes the painting and its suggestions so extraordinarily hard to take. But these difficulties are manifest, describable, and, I think, worth worrying. Untitled invites divergence from more ways of thinking/knowing about contemporary race terror than Black Lives Matter countenances. The policing practices that fuel violence are thoroughly visual; the strategies and tactics of those pursuing conventional confrontations with race terror are too. Both depend on a distance — a fantasy of absolute, maintainable distance — that both shootings and tactical counterattacks dramatically collapse. If the cycle can be narrated as acting at close range on what one knows from a distance, then one pivotal problem that Untitled (policeman) throws up is the problem of the pause, or what Weil called the “tiny interval that is reflection.”7 Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 173. How to proceed from the pause that Untitled solicits, given the uncomfortable uncertainty of both?8 I am grateful to Mark Reinhardt for an intervention that hinged on this question.

The painting as such looks without judgment at a subject whom we may find it hard not to judge. It’s not enough, though, to suggest that the picture looks neutrally at this stereotypical figure of masculine strength and security; on its own, such a putative neutrality might seem an ill guest in today’s climate. In making the work, Marshall took matters further by devising a compositional scheme that locates the viewer’s eye level at roughly four feet in relation to the officer. Upon noting this scale, a mature viewer’s first thoughts might turn to a Tamir Rice or an Aiyana Stanley-Jones, who, at the respective ages of twelve and seven, may have stood at around that height when their lives were ended.9 I thank an anonymous reader for Yale University Press for posing a question about this physical and analytic perspective: “What might a reading of a child who stands in relation to this image allow one to see? How to account for that location?” Marshall’s scale game acknowledges a differently empathetic possibility: by giving us an image of the police officer as he appears in a child’s-eye view, it may take us back to a point in our personal experience when reflexive distrust of such people was unthinkable — when we might have looked up to them, as it were, in precisely the way that Untitled asks us to do again, only now of all times.

At sixty by sixty inches, Untitled draws the viewer into extremely close company with its subject. This cocoon of nearness can grow uncomfortable fast, but a few, minimally consoling distractions lie within.10 The phrase “cocoon of nearness” is Norman Bryson’s. See Bryson, “Rhopography,” 1980, in Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion, 2008), 88. Marshall’s lavish treatment of all 360 square inches of the surface with flattened acrylic yields an image that sets up densely while lying low against the PVC support.11 Marshall adopted these unconventional supports around 2005 because, being much lighter than the plexi- and fiber-glass supports he’d used previously, they’re far easier to cart around the studio. Correspondence with the artist, January 20, 2016. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Marshall derive from this source. When Marshall makes a picture like this, he planes the surface as he goes, canceling the kind of paint buildup that would impede the eye’s free travel across and around the whole image. Traversing it accordingly, one observes a great deal of felicity in his handling of his white-hot subject; clearly there was much pleasure in the work’s making. It helps to view the picture diagrammatically, as it comprises but three distinct zones of intense, concentrated interaction among just a few colors: blues and yellows for the sky, grays and whites for the police cruiser, blacks and blues for the figure. This simplicity of plan, or more precisely its integrated stillness, ratchets up the impact of the more constantly vibratory elements of the image. Paradigmatic in this regard, for me, is the life in the shadows and the white car’s surface, its chromatic uniformity shattered by Marshall’s figuration of reflected light. It’s from a perception of these that one realizes how much more there is to the situation than surface-oriented looking can assimilate on its own, even if utterly in tune with all the incident that enlivens the car and the figure. Despite the relative straightforwardness of the painting’s visual appeal, then, deep and sustained attention will be needed to see what makes it work.

Marshall labors hard with the intricacies of his subject: a black male police officer in his professional setting, presumably his precinct, again presumably the black community that has long served as the default setting for Marshall’s figurative painting. Marshall is quick to insist that Untitled is not a portrait (despite the traditional format and pose), that its setting is not the present (despite the image’s topicality), and that the scene isn’t necessarily Chicago, despite a few suggestions that it must be (the distinctive checkerboard band and the shield on the officer’s cap, the profile of his badge, and the flag patch on his right arm are hallmarks of the Chicago Police Department). With these disavowals Marshall doesn’t renounce the picture’s realism so much as tip it into another register. He modeled the officer’s head, for instance, on a Headliner, a brand of rubberized-plastic figurine loosely depicting a sports star or other such as an oversized head stuck atop a much smaller, in fact risibly disproportionate body (figs. 7, 8). Marshall adores the keen mimesis of the Headliners’ heads, saying, “I use them for form, if I need to know how light hits a cheek if someone’s grinning or smiling.” Or staring impassively, as in the present case. Marshall turned from life and photographic models toward these toys some years ago, in pursuit of what he unironically calls “realness.” In this usage, realness does not so much deceive as diverge, having taken a turn that opens its theme (nature, ostensibly) up to reconstructive play.12 On hearing Marshall’s usage, one inevitably thinks of realness in voguing, the gay ballroom phenomenon. Possibly no connection exists between these usages, but one cannot help but wonder whether, and how, Marshall might be thinking about it. For sure there is an echo of the conviction that, through artifice — in voguing, through gay and trans people imitating women, for Marshall through copying a toy — you end up with something more fully real. I am grateful to David Frankel for inviting me to surface this speculation. The painting’s core seriousness has its origin in this interrelation between the spirit of the toy and the exercise of technically proficient painting. Here is Marshall again:

You just have more choices, more information in those little heads than [in] all those photographs you take. [It’s] realness because of the three-dimensional spaces. From any side, any angle, you can get a sense of how the shapes play across the head at that angle. I use those heads where there are details that . . . make for a more convincing image. Because I’m shaping the presence of that figure. It doesn’t have to just be satisfying but also convincing.

Indeed, Marshall also painted the police car from a toy model, a replica of a Police Interceptor, a car — a customization of the Ford Crown Victoria luxury sedan — once used by the city of Chicago but decommissioned over a decade ago. Here again, Marshall worked from the toy not due to any scarcity of full-scale Police Interceptors but because he likes the way its lurid color and plasticky polish ensnare, tint, and throw the available light.

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Description: Untitled (policeman), detail by Marshall, Kerry James

Fig. 7 / Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (policeman) (detail)

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Fig. 8 / A Headliner photographed in Kerry James Marshall’s studio, January 2016

So it turns out that the most worked intricacies of Marshall’s subject are other than we might have expected: he’s most intent about the ones that heighten the image’s unreality and stress its quality of madeness or invention. The weirdo realness of his rhetoric underpins Untitled thoroughly. In the picture, a painterly real related to specific mechanisms of artistic representation, at once rational and technical in the extreme and deeply identified with modes of play, intersects with the social-historical real. The result is an authentic and radical instability. Indeed the image lacks a great deal more to dwell on. Not unrelated to a withholding, the realness in play is that of a performance: Untitled (policeman) comprises no sociological referent but gives itself entirely over to a rendition of social facts. What appears at first as so much constructional or painterly incident, the sort of stuff we might deem marginal to the painting’s project, is in fact what it most assiduously thematizes. One could put this another way, and say that a pivotal term of Untitled’s realness is an emergent and persevering tension between what we want to see and what is actually on display (i.e., what he presents for our consideration). He’s painting his way through it.

The painting is a welter of frustrations, through which, rather than despite which, it reaches its eloquent if unverbal comment on the roiling conflict in which civilians and cops now find themselves. Assimilating the image of the police officer to a painting, Marshall figures that theme in his own terms. The prevailing logic of movement is Marshall’s — toward the police, in all their realness. The indefiniteness of space and form in Untitled is itself productive of a specific disorientation: one is rudely displaced from the distanced, objectivizing vantage point on such figures that is so de rigueur just now. While the pose and place are thick with moment, the terms of their narration are entirely unrestricted. Marshall tells us not how to think. Rather, he asks us to hold the ideas “black” and “policeman” at the same time, and, further, to hold this possibly excruciating pose.

I first came to realize this while trying to reckon with the painting’s weirder-than-weird space. Marshall fitted considerable depth into the picture by the use of one-point perspective, only then to conceal the space thus elaborated. Such a treatment brings the representation into line with real space, though not by means of illusion. Because Marshall leaves it unindicated in the finished work, this space must be felt, or remembered. In the scene, the modeling of masses, stacking of parts, and overlapping of laboriously defined objects suggest a space far more extensive than what we actually see. A succession of frictions plays out across the relationships between the car hood, the windshield, and the pursuit light; the figure, the car, and the sky; the head and the lamppost immediately to his left, which intersects with his radio aerial, almost touching his head; and the legs and the car hood. Other compositional decisions ratchet up this tightness rather than relieve it. The cruiser behind and beneath the cop presses hard against his lower legs. The slanted windshield and sloping hood only quicken this sense, which can be corroborated at the lower right, where an area of deep navy acrylic pools at the figure’s left knee, suggesting back-weighted contact between body and surface. It’s quite as though the figure we encounter were pressed up against the picture plane, sandwiched if not a bit squashed between it and the front edge of the parked car. In any event, a more extended activity in depth — an activity through bodily movement — is denied him.13 See Meyer Schapiro, “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac I,” in Romanesque Art (New York: Braziller, 1977), 178. The logic of movement in space that governs him is like but also unlike that of the spaces we inhabit, where real citizens and police-men mix and whose protocols many of us know by heart and observe with apprehension. Untitled represents an incident drawn from the real world, but again, its realness is of another kind. Marshall does not give us an imaginary as extended as our own, as so much of his art does. Drawn as close to the viewer as a painting will permit it to go, his subject sits for our close and considered appraisal.

A sequence of preparatory perspective drawings shows Marshall using a traditional technique: he draws the space outside the frame of the painted picture in order to determine how space will work inside that frame. Use of such a technique is especially important when an image is cropped as tightly as is Untitled. Perspectival orthogonals — the lines pointing to the horizon’s vanishing point, marked in drawing 1 by a red dot where the x axis intersects the y — provide the continuity needed to establish believable planes (fig. 9). Making the experiment recorded in this drawing all the more needful is the fact that the officer has to feel to us as if he’s seated on the hood of a car. The pose and the place are thick with moment.

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Description: Preparatory sketch for Untitled (policeman) by Marshall, Kerry James

Fig. 9 / Kerry James Marshall, preparatory sketch for Untitled (policeman)

The drawings show Marshall tinkering with the composition, too, toward similar ends. Originally, the x/y conjuncture is drawn as the center of what would have been a far larger scene. To make it the tight square that it became, Marshall shortened the painting. In the old first lines, we see a cartoon of the whole legs, then a stage of heavier strokes that darken and crop the knees. The second drawing states Marshall’s decision to abandon the larger format and square the final painting (fig. 10). In modifications to the arm at left, the drawings tell a similar story of spatial concentration. Marshall moves it three times in the first drawing; redraws it crossing the figure’s lap more surely in the second drawing; and, in the third and final sketch, he positions it akimbo at the side hip pocket (fig. 11). In the final painting, that hand rests on the officer’s back haunch. Needless to say, the figure’s apparent psychological comportment changes with each adjustment. Imagine how differently the painted result would appear to us were this arm splayed across the hood of the cruiser, where the first cartoon places it. In the painting, the radio on the figure’s vest tells us that this officer is right handed (that device has to be positioned opposite a policeman’s dominant hand). With this arm splayed across the hood — so far from his sidearm and his person — the officer would essentially be off-duty.

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Fig. 10 / Kerry James Marshall, preparatory sketch for Untitled (policeman)

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Fig. 11 / Kerry James Marshall, preparatory sketch for Untitled (policeman)

But I meet the painted officer’s vigilance with a cautiousness of my own. It’s the prejudicial inflection of this cautiousness that I had in mind when choosing this chapter’s epigraph: In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? I think that Untitled puts Weil’s question again, and I also understand what makes it difficult to give a considered hearing to either version. I will return to this. For now, there’s more to notice about Marshall’s picture.

By following the development reflected in the drawings, the painting denies us the relief of a condition where its parts could assemble less tightly. Nor is the contrast of ground, foreground, and background particularly sharp. The interval between foreground and background is bridged so completely by the car’s variously articulated surfaces as to become canceled before our eyes. Attention to the swift horizontal marks in the blue light bar, the shard-like diagonals at the window, and the broad verticals describing the center of the hood show this clearly. One finds here an almost frantic graphic activity, but no movements in depth as free as those one associates with other “realistic” images undergirded by the rules of perspective. These which customarily permit a somewhat more open style of composing. By the sheer salience of the car and figure — a salience given by their bulky, heavily stroked massiveness — an extremely narrow stage is created for action. Effects of three-dimensional space are produced, but Marshall stresses its limits. Perspective’s own concerted effort to create space is here contained by intensely surface-oriented brushwork, largely shadowy chroma, and lines illustrating the contradictory indications of light. Shells of drapery and costume comprising no fewer than five distinct areas of abstract brushwork envelop the figure. These drapes are enriched by pleats and undercutting, as well as by brushwork that revels almost impressionistically in light’s, and shadow’s, influences on surface color and the ways they transfigure form and shape. All this intensifies the figures’ massiveness, displacing them (i.e., the policeman and the car) from any known site or context apart from this one (i.e., the site and moment of viewing). It’s not the where or what but the how of this figure, as a subject of representation, that appears to count most. And of what is this figure a representation if not the historical black subject and the police and the systems of privilege and representation that produce their uneven relations with one another?

It will be obvious that Untitled is an image not of the notorious antagonism between these forces but of that condition of simultaneity, or common sense, whose emergence frustrates oppositional politics as few other social facts can. “For me,” Marshall says,

it was always challenging to have a figure in a painting that remains abstract. . . . an absolute presence but also a complete abstraction at the same time. [ . . . ] At a certain point you let go of the subject matter and you let the treatment take the course it needs to take. You’re . . . making a picture, and then you say, “How can I make a picture that does all the things I would like to see a picture do?”

Marshall is eloquently aware that he may not be giving us what we seek, or feel we need, from Untitled. Because he performs his cultural work figuratively and abstractly, but always with paint, it is to his art that we must look to form statements about the social facts that inform that work or are enacted by it.

Untitled (policeman) works according to a logic of pictorial representation that I see anticipated in a number of the gorgeously estranging floor-and-ruler pictures that Sylvia Plimack Mangold produced in the mid-1970s. Plimack Mangold explained in a 1978 lecture that

the works of this period were like catalogues of these different realities in painting. I used the objects to perform as they did in life. A painted ruler would measure things, the painted tiles would measure space. . . . This was diagramming how one’s perspective determines perception.14 Quoted in Susan Harris, “Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Of and By Paint,” in Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Floors and Rulers, 1967–76 (New York: Craig Starr Gallery, 2016). My emphasis.

A painting such as In Memory of My Father (1976; fig. 12) presents subjects — an expanse of linoleum upon which lies a metal ruler — that are both real and flat, as if released from but still energized by the surface-minded image that dominated postwar painting until many artists started to feel indifferent to abstraction and keen to put the world as it is back into painting. If the picture restores space, and declares illusion no longer a secret or a scourge, it engages these devices haltingly, seeking a compromise between a disciplinary adherence to the second dimension and a bodily localized identification with the third.

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Description: In Memory of My Father by Mangold, Sylvia Plimack

Fig. 12 / Sylvia Plimack Mangold (b. 1938), In Memory of My Father, 1976. Acrylic on canvas, 30 × 72 in. (76.5 × 183 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Through prior gift of Adeline Yates, 2009.52

Not just radical foreshortening but severe obliquity, the viewing of flatness from an angle, is decisive for much of this painting, which engages depth but strictly forbids runaway space. In this way, upfrontness is secured for the image and a more complete relatability, while also an unapologetic objecthood, for the painting as such. A painting such as In Memory of My Father lands at our feet as though thrust across its own plane into a more complete actuality. Plimack Mangold’s fragmentary view of a scaled fragment of floor covering, and her enlistment of same to fill the entire field of a picture, effectively repositions the locus and meaning of the painter’s presentation — not from inside art to outside art, but from an image’s core to a painting’s edge. With the painting’s representational work completed, its worldly work begins, at the far edge of the threshold it crosses in becoming an object of subjective experience (i.e., when it’s taken up by a viewer whose space it occupies). Its absolution of the ordinary only deepens the intimacy a viewer can establish with such paintings. They may even stipulate intimacy, given that they distinctly avoid movement in depth, despite depth’s having been painstakingly indicated. This is space not to move in. With everything pushed to the front, the point of maximum visual information is the one nearest us — almost but not quite as close as the floor upon which we stand.15 Something else activates this type of picture, something whose description might commence by one’s imagining the power of excerption and modification that a particular type of intense and generous attention imparts to its object. The resulting fragmentation is far from congenial to the practice of interpretation. What’s “cut off” is not subject matter but one’s view of an expanse in which one might confidently situate it. Such an art is thinking about what remains a part even in a view that one apprehends in full, as a putative whole.

After the lifting of the prohibition against painters framing space, the sociality of space as such was as axiomatic as its facticity. By this I mean the aspect of space that cannot be conceived apart from the occurrence within it of encounter and collision: space as a scene of relations partly constituted in a play of appearances within which pictures, their subjects, and viewers all play roles; space as a place where pictures, their subjects, and viewers continually establish and modify their significance for one another. Art here is no longer an aloof occupier of space, but a material contributor to the symbolic construction of space in the interplay of differently scaled relations of representation. By now we are well past quaint reveries of a painting about ways of picturing. In this more developed sense, painting had a new intensity of involvement with what is — an involvement sometimes best indicated by representational rather than abstract means. Such an art strives at once to exemplify what simply is and to attract an intense and generous paying of attention to it.

Like Plimack Mangold’s, Marshall’s notion of “realness” pertains to his pictures and their madeness, not to some quality we might say he captures in his subject matter, whatever that is. His painting works by building discernable image-types — black people, a kind of thing the mind already knows — into a space made symbolically dysfunctional not only by the ways they occupy it but by its very figural structure. The space is reduced so that its every element closes in on the surface. There we everywhere see the stroke work of the painter’s brush spreading edgeward, further pointing away from the horizon toward which perspective lines would rush. (The subject even leans away from the vanishing point, whose appearance yields no opening.) This is nowhere more evident than in the policeman form — its realness, again, exhausted by the terms on which it exists for Marshall. With the ground plane’s offsetting capacity effectively canceled, such pictures become all figure, and the wall on which they hang, the ground. In the expanded structure thus established, other representational processes, specifically viewers’ own mediated, private ones, play a role not readily subordinated to Marshall’s own.

The face, especially, is a stage for Marshall’s many reformulations — at least seven — of the three basic blacks provided by the manufacturer of his acrylics. Out of this range, Marshall is able to develop a more complex black in the faces of his subjects, and I do mean “more” in relation to the Kerry James Marshall most of us know best. With this new black, Marshall is adjusting away from the solider, less complex faces that once were his trademark (fig. 13). (For years, the faces were near-silhouettes.) Those faces look to him now like “a kind of stylized decorative mode . . . [that’s] just really flat, [whereas by] figuring out how to build some volume,” Marshall’s new black “ends up rich and complex . . . without having to sacrifice the blackness.” When he told me that the new skin allows him to “be rich within the black,” richness denoted the projections, recessions, planes, and corresponding tonal variations of a toy head in which Marshall sees vivid signs of human dimensionality. Signs. By keeping them this way, by compelling the viewer to apprehend forms before recognizing images, Marshall can control, or try to control, his pictures’ signifying function. Divorced from role, his figure is a means in a picturing process that enjoys representational primacy. The figure does not portray. Rather, it helps Marshall to tell the story of its construction.

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Description: Untitled by Marshall, Kerry James

Fig. 13 / Kerry James Marshall, Untitled, 2009. Acrylic on PVC panel, 61.1 × 72.9 × 3.9 in. (155.2 × 185.1 × 1.54 × 9.9 cm). Yale University Art Gallery; purchased with the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and a gift from Jacqueline L. Bradley, B.A. 1979; 2009.161.1

Another confounding spatial conundrum here invites consideration. Sometimes a figure is so related to its situation that we infer unseen spaces.16 See Schapiro, “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac I,” 75. Behind and above the officer, Marshall carves out a radiant space that draws us like the potent emptiness of a Whistler nocturne.17 See Leo Steinberg, “Fritz Glarner and Philip Guston at the Modern,” 1956, in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-century Art (New York and Oxford: Oxford, 1972), 280. In an extended engagement with Untitled, a certain kind of remembered vista unfolds beneath this sky and crawls into the obstructed background. In this memory-image, a particularly irreal space encloses the figure, backdrops him, surrounds him, shapes the light that dramatizes his face and the pleats and folds of his uniform, and forms the shadow between and beside his legs. I say particularly irreal because: fly into any midsized city after dark and among the first impressions you’ll take will be of its lighted municipal playing fields and larger parking lots, which clusters of posted lights set up as soft-edged volumes in the nightscape. Just before landing, you see them obliquely, and from this vantage can pick out discrete beams of post-mounted light that reach away from the dark sky above and form indefinite but distinct volumes. Seen through moisturized or smoggy air, these above-ground pools of light appear integrated — translucent, colored by the light source that forms them, not flat at all, but unified. They have no such volumentric integrity, however, when seen from within, as the present picture compels us to do.

A few features of Untitled seem detached from the background as if to suggest there were just such a space behind them. Here Marshall suggests a depth more extensive than the compressed foreground and middle ground make thinkable. Five gooseneck lampposts locate the subject squarely in a field much more spacious than this. The lampposts and parts of the cruiser recede as if in real space. The light array (or, more precisely, the plane it brightens) implies but does not render the restricted but definite platform of Gothic reliefs and paintings, nor even that of Marshall’s more typical twenty-first-century figure painting. The enclosed, para-carceral interior of the police cruiser contrasts sharply with this open air, so that it comes to feel like an allegory of our own situation. With this, one’s tight proximity to the figure becomes the more disconcerting, if also more explicable in its representational function.

The background is simply the surface upon which the figure is perched — it is not itself a representation.18 See Schapiro, “Moissac,” 177. As such it lacks not only presence but also symbolic value. It is genuinely neutral: ground, horizon, and sky in their most general aspect. This is not a particular person in a specific place, but a kind of person in meditative suspension — at once related and external to a certain readymade representational schema. He’s perched between being and image. In this we can grasp the conceptual character of the space world of this figure, who occupies one point in a wide matrix, a resting point of utter singularity in a moral landscape. The only things that retain their quiddity are the lampposts, the unmistakable honeycomb grille of the Police Interceptor, and some features of the uniform. To everything else in the picture — including the all-important figure — Marshall pays the kind of attention peculiar to a painter less concerned to imitate than to abstract. The grippingly gestural, space-defying character of the painting’s remaining passages — how everything happens right here; the single-minded surface orientation of much of the painting; the hinting at an uncanny locale — all this recommends an absolute separation of the image’s evocations from the realities of the object Marshall arranged for presentation as a picture. Its descriptive ambition and difficulties of design do not make Untitled a more or less equivocal comment on police and policing; what the picture seems to effect is the expression of a wish that its viewer might herself perform this separation, or do whatever would be needed to permit the figure to be singular in this way — that she might accede to the work’s claim and grant the officer his solitude as a body in space. The contemporary media-scape teems with stock images of the police officer. This isn’t one of those.

The stock image is cognate with Weil’s “man of force,” about whom the philosopher offered her thoughts in her classic essay on The Iliad, written in the war year of 1939. Weil’s man of force is consummately resistant to the fact that, in scenes of conflict, “the strong are never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but due to a certain blockage of thought, neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species: the weak see not the relation between themselves and the strong, and vice versa.” In fact, when Weil characterizes the man of force, she does not distinguish between weak and strong. She writes: “The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him, nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection. Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence.”19 Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 173.

Marshall, I think, figures that rare man of force who cannot but also be present to the idea of his own annihilation. At least it appears for Marshall not hard to imagine how it could be otherwise for a black male police officer living and working at this moment. These guys have to be both. This figure’s existence, anyway, is unthinkable apart from that simultaneity, which we see actualized in so many of the painting’s dimensions. Indications of light and light effects suffuse the picture, affecting our perception of all its manifest content. Mainly, these take the form of reflections that delocalize color, fracture form, and conjure significant, unspecific presences. But Marshall limits light’s pictorial function to powering the abstraction, supplying the linear, chromatic, and textural raw material needed to produce the tight-clenched and excluding surface where we find the subject confined and reduced.20 See Steinberg, “Glarner and Guston at the Modern,” 209. It’s by these less explicit engagements with the event and concept of reflection that Untitled makes of the officer a figure for the kind of thought that acknowledges the reality of affliction, that perceives the irreducibly human bond between assailant and victim. Listen again to Weil: “To acknowledge the reality of affliction means saying to oneself: ‘I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever that I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself. . . . It could happen at any moment that what I am might be abolished. . . .’ To be aware of this in the depth of one’s soul is to experience non-being.”21 Weil, “Human Personality,” 70, in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Miles, 49–78. On the reading I offer, Untitled presents assailant and victim in an indissoluble identification, such that we cannot say where one ends and the other begins.

If this complicates the logic of “Stop Killing Us,” it’s by drawing together the parties who stand off in its graphic image of opposition. The movement’s trademark demand entails a genuinely desperate looking outward that would appear to make sufferings easier to bear but that entails a force of its own, specifically in its tendency to assimilate every instance of the other to a single massed adversary.22 Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 182. This is the sense in which I intend my epigraph, again from Weil: “In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon?” Some of our most trusted responses to clear abuses of force amplify force rather than diminishing it. It’s for this reason that I find Untitled apposite to a great deal more of what’s currently at issue in our moral landscape than the offbeat case of the black male cop.

I’ve come to regard the complex bewilderments of the painting’s space as a source of value precisely because the hereness of the figure in Untitled so little reflects the definitive thereness of the police in present-day political imagining, and especially in the context of the sloganeering I referenced at the outset. I don’t know about you, but I work pretty hard to maintain this distance; I hew very closely to the view that I’m best protected and served by keeping them over there. But a period of time spent with Untitled has had a withering effect on the mindframe in which I do so. This cop is right here, crowding my view of the field, making the space hard to sort out, and yet offering so much to inspect and relish that I, at least, find it difficult to turn away.23 In this connection I am reminded of Steinberg’s justly legendary negotiation of Jasper Johns’s Target with Four Faces: “At a distance, you may see a man’s body, a head, and even a profile. But as soon as you recognize a thing as a face, it is an object no longer, but one pole in a situation of reciprocal consciousness; it has, like one’s own face, absolute hereness.” Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” 1962, in Other Criteria, 54.

The discomfiture of the situation with Marshall’s cop originates, for me, in the subject’s association with the concept and fact of force. The police are force, just as this is painting. Even in such an absolute hereness, both remain objects. The conviction that they must remain as such is, for me, the very morality that the painting puts into question. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? We all know how easy it is to weaponize moral conviction, especially in the name of self-defense.

I was recalled to Weil’s essay immediately upon realizing that Untitled isn’t the takedown that, instinctively, I had wanted it to be. Of force’s power to make an object of the soldier as well as the slave, Weil writes that

both, at the touch of force, experience its inevitable effects: they become deaf and dumb. Such is the nature of force. Its power of converting a man into a thing is a double one, and in its application double-edged. To the same degree, though in different fashions, those who use it and those who endure are turned to stone.24 Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 184. For Weil, escalated conflict is “simply the art of producing such transformations [in] the warrior’s soul.”

“However caused,” she writes, “this petrifactive quality of force, twofold always, is essential to its nature; and a soul which has entered the province of force will not escape this except by a miracle.”25 Ibid., 185.

To see in this image both conqueror and conquered (and, I think, the affects appropriate to each) is to see the work of a painter who chose a visuality from which no preformulated subject or concept, no readymade political position, can distract us. If rapture is in the act of recognition, then Marshall offers something else to pleasure in. What’s here, directly to be reflected upon and in fact comprehended, is a painting; a painting whose creation called on Marshall’s apprenticeship in the analytic observation of artificial conditions — only, now, to address a present urgency, associated with conditions that are almost blindingly real. Here, then, another aspect of “realness” emerges, as . . . something like . . . the courage to be prosaic, just when poetic concision would seem the more fitting response. (What’s prosaic for me is the picture’s avoidance of embellishment in favor of matter-of-factness — the stingy scenography, the materially but not descriptively indulgent brushwork, etc.) This is, of course, a perfectly valid, even by now conventional way to show how very much one has to say. But just now, in what’s called Black America, . . . not so much! Our chief executive artist has portrayed what may be the most topical theme of the day, but he’s put questions of pose ahead of the more ethically demanding or insistent question of stance. On its own, it’s a strong move. And it’s only made stronger by taking its place in a climate where stance is paramount, in a moment when many feel a burning need for satisfying conceptualizations and consoling narratives, especially from figures like Marshall.

But what may feel like Untitled’s paradox isn’t one. This is a painting. Its qualities as a picture, one as abstract as it is real, confound one’s sense of the subject’s role and place: his site, his double identity. Is he one of us or one of them? His symbolic or representational function remains wholly ambiguous. Eventually attention reverts to the core humanity of the viewing situation. What’s to be reflected upon and comprehended is the problem of the presence of another living being — one who exists not to signify but to be seen. Indeed, this is a problem that “effective” portraiture attempts to throw up: a moment of existence-as-such, frozen as we sometimes say, but somehow not converted into an image or a sign of some general understanding. Many modernist emendations of traditional effectiveness in portraiture have in common just such a desymbolization of the human.

The unexpected plasticity of this essentially private relation, full as it is of spatial and narrative enigmas, runs diagonally to most portrayals of the crisis of relation in which civilians and law enforcement now find ourselves. From within this solitude, these portrayals are extremely difficult to recover. One finds cause to wonder, rather than knowingly to assume, what really occurs at this conjunction. This invitation to revise received knowledge — it’s difficult. To me this difficulty feels salutary. There is always and everywhere the danger of falling back onto one of the many public options, with all their hopeless confidences. But it’s hard to do from right here.

Marshall’s articulation is certainly distinctive in the context of what feels, just now, like a prevailing taboo on dispassionate speech about police and policing. With no moralizing at all, Untitled (policeman) invites us at once to see and feel other human urgencies that can become visible when one lessens the force of one’s own thought and vision, even about an issue that directly and deeply affects and pains us. Here, Marshall restricts his fluency to the domain of visual expression. The fundamental effort, it seems, was to produce a presence. To be sure, the presence produced slows our perceptual operations to a near crawl. To sort it out, one really has to attend to what barely can be detected. One has, somehow, to register what’s irreducible about the shaping of material and spatial elements, of thought and feeling in this thing, right here. On this scene, one has to rethink in order to apprehend.26 See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), 130.

1 Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 1939, Eng. trans. in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (New York: Grove, 1986), 162–95. Miles’s compilation features Mary McCarthy’s translation of the essay Weil first published, under the name Emile Novis, as “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,” Cahiers du Sud 230 (December 1940–January 1941). This chapter’s epigraph is from the same source, 181–82; the rest of this crucial passage reads, “The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life . . . intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity . . . actually, they continue because they have deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.” »

2 For a relevant investigation of the themes of surveillance and countersurveillance, see Simone Brown, Dark Matters: On Blackness and Surveillance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). »

3 Conversation with the author, November 2015. »

4 Ibid. »

5 This formulation may recall the reader to Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect,” which first appeared in Vogue in August 1961 and is reprinted in Joan Didion: Collected Works (New York: Norton, 2006), 215–18. »

6 For perceptive analyses that recognize the decisive role that visual modernism plays in Kerry James Marshall’s practice, see Kobena Mercer, “Kerry James Marshall: The Painter of Afro-Modern Life,” Afterall 24 (Summer 2010): 81–88; Okwui Enwezor, “Modernity and Its Discontents,” in Nav Haq, ed., Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff (Antwerp: Ludion, 2014), 167–77; and Helen Molesworth, “Project America: Kerry James Marshall,” frieze no. 40 (May 1998): 72–75. »

7 Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 173. »

8 I am grateful to Mark Reinhardt for an intervention that hinged on this question. »

9 I thank an anonymous reader for Yale University Press for posing a question about this physical and analytic perspective: “What might a reading of a child who stands in relation to this image allow one to see? How to account for that location?” »

10 The phrase “cocoon of nearness” is Norman Bryson’s. See Bryson, “Rhopography,” 1980, in Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion, 2008), 88. »

11 Marshall adopted these unconventional supports around 2005 because, being much lighter than the plexi- and fiber-glass supports he’d used previously, they’re far easier to cart around the studio. Correspondence with the artist, January 20, 2016. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Marshall derive from this source. »

12 On hearing Marshall’s usage, one inevitably thinks of realness in voguing, the gay ballroom phenomenon. Possibly no connection exists between these usages, but one cannot help but wonder whether, and how, Marshall might be thinking about it. For sure there is an echo of the conviction that, through artifice — in voguing, through gay and trans people imitating women, for Marshall through copying a toy — you end up with something more fully real. I am grateful to David Frankel for inviting me to surface this speculation. »

13 See Meyer Schapiro, “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac I,” in Romanesque Art (New York: Braziller, 1977), 178. »

14 Quoted in Susan Harris, “Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Of and By Paint,” in Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Floors and Rulers, 1967–76 (New York: Craig Starr Gallery, 2016). My emphasis. »

15 Something else activates this type of picture, something whose description might commence by one’s imagining the power of excerption and modification that a particular type of intense and generous attention imparts to its object. »

16 See Schapiro, “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac I,” 75. »

17 See Leo Steinberg, “Fritz Glarner and Philip Guston at the Modern,” 1956, in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-century Art (New York and Oxford: Oxford, 1972), 280. »

18 See Schapiro, “Moissac,” 177. »

19 Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 173. »

20 See Steinberg, “Glarner and Guston at the Modern,” 209. »

21 Weil, “Human Personality,” 70, in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Miles, 49–78. »

22 Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 182. »

23 In this connection I am reminded of Steinberg’s justly legendary negotiation of Jasper Johns’s Target with Four Faces: “At a distance, you may see a man’s body, a head, and even a profile. But as soon as you recognize a thing as a face, it is an object no longer, but one pole in a situation of reciprocal consciousness; it has, like one’s own face, absolute hereness.” Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” 1962, in Other Criteria, 54. »

24 Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 184. For Weil, escalated conflict is “simply the art of producing such transformations [in] the warrior’s soul.” »

25 Ibid., 185. »

26 See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), 130. »

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