Theaster Gates, a mid-career black artist from Chicago, is having his first major retrospective at the New Museum. Mostly a sculptor, he spends a good deal of time scavenging and rescuing materials from the South Side of Chicago, where he lives. The items might include crosses and panels taken from an abandoned church, or gatherings of fur in a heap, or stoneware vessels whose forms suggest a broad merger of cultures. Both Gates and Nick Cave, a gay black artist also living in Chicago and working primarily in sculpture, who is now on show at the Guggenheim Museum, come from a legacy established by David Hammons. The latter developed a powerful and challenging African-American esthetic, close in spirit to Italy’s Arte Povera movement, in which usually urban materials, often cast off, became the vehicle of a poetry based on city life and the poverty experienced by people of color. Hammons began working half a century ago, so there is now an established history of working with found objects in the work of African-American artists. Gates, whose mother was religious and who was brought up in the church, regularly makes use of castoff elements taken from defunct religious spaces . At the same time, he subscribes to the Japanese esthetic of wabi, in which transience and stark beauty results from his inspired use of objects whose earlier function have left them with an aura of both functional elegance, despite their fragmented and rough appearance.
Working in the way all three men have done is to have established an esthetic in opposition to the deliberate beauty of earlier Western art history. They all find in their associations with the debris of their culture a window enabling them to work with imaginative freedom. This liberty is not only a consequence of the mind, but also a result from the artists’ firm decision to represent their material lives without apology, using the broken and the forgotten objects found in their neighborhoods as a demonstration of persistence. Now that this manner of working has a tradition, it is possible to construct a reading of their accomplishments in both an esthetic and social or political sense. Artistically, Gates is the most spiritually oriented of the three men; in much of his work, one finds a longing for harmony and peace (he is known as a gifted tenor). Politically, Gates, unlike artists whose literalism can weaken their social message, makes use of metaphor, transforming discarded objects into environments of lyric beauty, The items, regularly taken from the street or empty homes or decaying churches, convey what black life used to be like–before the severe poverty harming their culture severely damaged the environment in which they lived in.
More than anything, Gates is a sculptor, like Hammons and Cave. Of course, there is a long tradition of sculpture in the African and African-American tradition. Usually, the objects constructed by Gates come from objects discovered on the streets, which he then improves upon. One of the floors in the museum was devoted entirely to works vessels that felt both used and new–as if Gates was determined to find contemporaneity in the past and from different artistic traditions. His works can be already extant objects he changes to his satisfaction. Thus, Gates uses the given as a platform for his visionary esthetic; he addresses not only the form of the piece, but also its internal life. Most of his audience senses both functional use and a near pious devotion in his art; moreover, the work can be seen as stemming from both a personal bias and a larger cultural tradition. Thus, the preservation of rubble and debris takes on a metaphysical weight. The lost object is not only an esthetic assertion, it is set against the gentrification of neighborhoods that once housed the poor. His art’s existence, battered and scarred, examples Gates’s wish to transform indigence into a statement of formal beauty.
According to press notes, the title of the show, “Young Lords and Their Traces,” refers to the radical thinkers that influence his home city. Gates has also undergone considerable loss in the last few years: curator Okwui Enwezor, the cultural critic bell hooks, and his father have passed away. One can’t say exactly that Gates’s art is only an act of mourning; there is too much energy in the works for the viewer to characterize it as a set of rituals meant to offset loss. Yet a sadness prevails in much of the work, which may come from moribund religious institutions that once thrived in his neighborhood, or the calamitous poetry of fragments picked up in impoverished environs, changed by the artist. The general oeuvre produced by Gates is one influenced by the historical imagination, in the form of relics that maintain their ties to the past, even as they are put to artistic use. Gates never lets go of his contact with black American culture, no matter whether the objects are old and new. So the installations and individual objects transform items dominated by history into an Arte Povera reaching out to African-American life in Chicago. The tragic poverty that accompanies so many black urban communities in America thus becomes a source of engaged creativity.
Gates is trying to do something about the damages his community has sustained. In South Chicago, he is reworking lost buildings into meeting places exploring black culture. His work re-invigorates older objects, such as an organ from a lost church, into statements defying their historical and social vulnerability. As a result, the artist rescues the black American past from its oblivion as he generates an esthetic that neatly ties memory to present considerations–esthetic, social, political. In a way, then, the work concerns memory and the passage of time, as well as the encumbrances of severe poverty. Arte Povera, the majr Italian 20th-century movement that drew inspiration from a rejection of materialism, is reprised in Gates’s work as an assertion of spiritual persistence in the face of opposition and indifference. The work suggests a question: How does an artist resurrect a battered culture, traumatized by indigence and racism? The rescue of items and materials closely associated with black culture comes to be more than a mere act of retrieval; it also serves as a platform for a new outlook, in which new forms rise from streets whose neglect can suggest despair. But Gates is hardly looking for despair as his theme.
The artist’s striking sculpture A Heavenly Peace (2022), bordering on an installation, consists of a Hammond B3 organ (last produced in 1975) with seven large speakers hung above it, some ten or twelve feet high on the wall. Inevitably, the title speaks of the artist’s religious upbringing, likely the result of his devout mother’s influence. When I visited the New Museum, no one was playing the organ, but the wires attaching the speakers to the instrument indicate that it can still be used. This work is an artifact of memory, infused with a spiritua presence. Memory works in two way in Gates’s art–as an indication of personal remembrance and as an assertion of determination in the face of prejudicial opposition. The effect of the environment, its seven speakers attached above on the wall and clearly showing the wires connecting them to the organ, engenders a powerful statement on art, religion, and social environment. Religious feeling was, for some African-Americans (more than a few), one of a very few means available to endure the disregard of majority American culture. At the same time, it enabled those who were inclined to devotion a window of opportunity, in which the need for transcendence might be justified in light of music and hymnal song.
Cross in Sections (2022) consists of four L-shaped pieces of wood taken from a Chicago church now no longer active. There are straight lines or grooves in the wood, so that the piece closely resembles in form, if not in material or color, the linear paintings done by Frank Stella early in his career. Yet we cannot forget the title of Gates’s low relief, its identification with the most potent symbol in Christianity, nor can we evade our recognition of its form. Gates is particularly interesting as a contemporary artist because of his willingness to incorporate devotional feeling–as noted, a mainstay of psychic strength for the black American community. Not always, but often his references appear to come from his own experience within the church. Yet, as Cross in Sections proves, he combines transparent religious suggestion with a modernist vision, based on recent art history. Gates mixes his references extremely well, letting his audience muse on the relations between devotional feeling and contemporary art–surely a trope not regularly visited in image-making today!
Gates also draws from traditional African sculpture, emphasizing his broad-based atemporal approach to art. In 2021, he created two wood-fired ceramic works, called Nanah and Papaw, 31 and 21 inches tall, respectively. Both works are supported by a thin rod rising from a flat pedestal. Nanah is a treatment of a full-bodied, high-breasted woman who has small, rounded mounds, one assumes of hair, on her head. Her body also has long arms and a full set of legs. Papaw is more basic, being a figure whose face includes a broad, prominent nose, a very short neck and no torso, and a pair of thick, curving legs. The pieces assume an identity so close to traditional African sculpture, it is hard to say whether Gates collected them or made them himself. But the point is larger than than: it concerns not so much the origins of the sculptures’ facture, in which their origins maintain a living conversation with the African-American imagination. As a result, it makes little difference how the works originated; what matters is Gates’s intention. He faces an important question: How does one bridge a contemporary culture to an ancient one, when it is severely divided by time and geography? Gates can be described as a scholar of black history, whose visuals spring from going the past and move into the present. They represent a related but distant culture far away from his origins. The privation endured by the black community throughout in America is not going away in the immediate future. As a result, Gates is determined to make use of local, often fragmented objects suggestive of indigence to create a visionary world.
Very recently, in the last two or three years, museums and galleries in New York have made a determined effort to transform the indifference of Americans to African-American art into a highly engaged reading of the culture. It is evident that black artists have long felt the indifference or even hostility of the dominant American culture; before he was discovered, the late Thornton Dial, an outstanding artist from Alabama, used to bury his work, seeing them as essentially personal expressions. But Dial, who was born in 1928, could easily have done so as an attempt to escape the scrutiny of the southern white community within which he existed. The point is that the black artists of the 20th century in America were under great pressure not to hide their creativity–a creativity created by difficulty and neglect. Yet people like Thornton Dial and Nellie May Rowe, another important black untutored artist, looked beyond the confines of racialized constraints. Their to partially Christian, partially impoverished communication (likely deliberate) allowed them to comment on the hardship they endured.. Gates, a later member of this tradition, and a professor of art at the University of Chicago (one of America’s best universities), does have more social support. But the rules of the game have not changed much; Gates’s appropriation of discarded materials, a long-distance connection to earlier movements emphasizing “poor” materials,, emphasizes not only the beauty of the rejected fragment, it also makes clear the extent to which urban black communities in America live under duress.
Because Gates wants to present the complex problems of his local life in Chicago’s South Side, the social implications of his materials and work cannot be seen reduced purely formal terms. But, at the same time, in his art, which can reference a major contemporary figure such as Frank Stella, we see him independently sizing up the modernist tradition. The aged wood and objects, as well as the African implication of his works, made use by Gates places him in the role of a socially oriented assemblage artist–another technique that derives from recent times. The used of worn or aged elements in his art invests his work with a melancholy that probably more political than personal in nature–although intimation of Gates’s life are never far away. But Gates is too good an artist simply to damn the unfairness of the situation, which indeed exists,; instead, he brilliantly transforms the items of black people’s unspoken hindrances into statements of clear spirituality. Since the times of the Romantics, we prefer the fragment to the whole. But such a preference is not a purely formal bent in Gates’s hands. Instead, it becomes a salvage operation, in which meaningful elements of his cultural life, such as the elements retrieved from religious buildings, are captured not merely for the illustration of a visual statement. Rather, they are meant to as stand-ins for the long, troubled decline of American cities, especially those sections inhabited by the poor.
So the imagination serves as a vehicle transforming the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of the poor into sites of moral significance. Economic survival is aided by esthetic assertion. Gates looks to an ethic economy of transformation, in which the artifacts of those in need, the materials of their lost churches, the buttons dating to the 1970s of the radical Young Lords Party, and even bell’s Bell (without date), a small metal bell given to Gates by the late bell hooks, the black writer, become items restoring the past. Such a restoration is intended to pave the way to the future, in which the elements and structure of black American culture become the building blocks of a new outlook, in which poverty is transformed into a vehicle for pride. For Gates, then, social justice cannot be separated from art; it is integral to the imagination.
In Gates’s hands, the language of need and suffering is translated into an idiom of historical assertion and contemporary achievement, making Gates an alchemist of remarkable social importance. Today, as I have noted, we are given to a visual language created by fragments and retrievl–the part means more than the whole. This has been a contemporary formaltradition, but in Gates’s art it becomes a political statement. Unlike Cave, who includes the clenched fist in a number of his sculptures, the political implications of Gates’s imagination proceeds in a more indirect fashion. His values are found in the salvaged materials themselves. Indeed, once we know where they have come from, their origins stand as a statement of pride, indicating the visual wealth of a neighborhood lacking money.
The many vessels seen on a single floor and made in 2022 all come from the series Gates calls “Black Vessels for the Traces of the Young Lords and Their Spirits.” Made of high-fired, glazed stoneware and set on an ash plinth, the sculptures, ranging from 24 to 48 inches, look both like the remembrances of an ancient culture and contemporary works that might well have a functional use. All the vessels are given the same dark gray color; they are beautiful, simply produced objects that stand as they are, regardless of the historical context we place them in (influences come from the West, from Asia, from Africa). Vessel #14 has a broad, round base that narrows into a daily wide column., with a flat plane sitting on its top. Vessel #16 has a bulbous base with a thick cross rising from a short neck. And Vessel #3 has a decidedly jar-like form; from the top of this shape, a ladder-like structure with two rungs moves freely into the air. The works, variations on a theme, attract their audience via a pronounced economy of shape; their unembellished curves can be seen as modern and ancient in the same moment. Gates well understands the tacit connection between the very old and the very new, often a recognized element in new sculplture. Thus, in this show, the museum functions as much as a reliquary as it does a space for contemporary art.
The artist has also included the late University of Chicago Slavist Robert James Douglas Bird’s personal library. Its entire contents spanned a 20-foot-length set of shelves in the museum. Bird, an internationally recognized scholar on Russian film and literature, also took a strong interest in art, sometimes curating shows. By placing the intellectual underpinnings of a major academic physically in an open space, Bird is quite literally making public the personal intellectual support of an important scholar. Interestingly, the fact of the volumes, which remain on the shelves and cannot be opened, take on a visual meaning that is equal to their written content. It is as if Gates wanted Bird’s achievement, accomplished through writing, to stand as an actual object–a monument to the distinction of his knowledge.
Gates works this way a lot; he allows the thing itself to address metaphorical concerns through its physical nature. This can require information about his pieces to be available to the museum audience. We have to know, at least to some extent, the background of the work and its materials to make sense of the point Gates is making. This might be considered a criticism of the artist’s process, but the oblique nature of contemporary art is now found all over the world, often demanding an intellectual explanation. The real problem is whether Gates, and indeed all artists, can create artworks that remain accessible to a public larger, and less specialized, than the art milieu usually isolated in its appreciation. We remember, on viewing Bird’s library, that he worked at a university internationally famous for its scholarship; although Bird’s knowledge may not necessarily transfer to a wider context, despite the fact that it is remarkable, its use of humble materials connects it with a wider audience that we might assume.
In the title, the phrase “Young Lords” refers to the thinkers who challenged the social structure of America and who influenced Gates himself. But it looks like the modernism the artist refers to is primarily visual in nature–as I have said, the pieces are almost always indirect in their suggestion of a social stance. The tall (73 inch) 2019 work called Circle Form with Pier consists of a concrete pier in a pyramidal shape that narrows as it rises; a rod extends upward for a couple of feet, supporting a bent steel semicircle with small cubes on either end. This piece exists as a classic example of late modernism and undermines our notion that Gates finds inspiration in the conceits of his neighborhood alone. Gates, like all artists today, addresses so wide a set of circumstances, his visual impulse becomes both highly specific, in regard to his life, and highly eclectic, in regard to his learning. Indeed, a good part of the subtle complexities found in the vessels Gates has made is owed to the mixture of influences, worldwide in nature, evident forming the works.
When artists borrow a form or influence from another culture, they are demonstrating that, in a world dominated by the Internet, in which images of objects from different places can be gotten in a matter of moments, work can effectively bring together kinds of information from any time and any place. It looks like what structures these various influences, which are evident in a single work, is both skill and political incisiveness. Gates effortlessly merges cultures, relying on the strength of his craft, as well as his knowledge of forms and materials, to create work highly specific to Chicago’s South Side–but also to art created in distant places millenia ago. This is a time when adopting images has become a major visual strategy; it allows the artist to range over territories previoualy unknown, so that his or her work becomes a site for juxtaposition and change.
The artist found A Maimed Martin (2012), the last work to be discussed, in a defunct public school in Chicago. It consists of a photograph of the black political leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis. The image, brutally crumpled or “maimed” at its top, so that King’s head is very hard to see because of the folds, was discovered inside a glass case, now serving as a frame. Although this politicized readymade dates back a decade, it is an appropriate image to end with. King remains the beloved leader of black America, as well as having a strong influence on white American culture. Gates likely sees King as highly valid to his endeavor, in the sense that, during his short life, he merged Christian feeling with a powerful sense of social justice. Since his murder a little more than fifty years ago, King has become a symbol of change driven by spirituality. In much the same way, Gates is determined to bring about change, by merging a devotional imagination with a focused eye for the consequences of extended prejudice. Work like his leads us to the awareness that specificity of place is an inevitable influence driving his imagination, just as a broad view allows him to incorporate his visuals into a statement that refers to art movements all over the world. In the long run, thw mergwe of visual expression across time and place will gain in influence as we move more and more toward a shared heritage, diven by the Internet. Gates understands this very well, and his art, clearly rooted in black experience, also reaches across great distances. He has become not only an artist for the present, but also one for the future.
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