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Art Preview: Artist uses newspaper as gallery for his comic
Tuesday, November 02, 1999 By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic
Like the glow that signals the arrival of the sun at daybreak, the artwork on the Magazine cover in the print version of today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette both announces the Carnegie International and is a part of it. It was done by Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall, one of 41 artists in the 53rd International, which opens at the Carnegie Museum of Art on Saturday and continues through March 26, 2000.
The cartoon, one of a series that will run in the print Post-Gazette for eight consecutive Tuesdays, is a component of Marshall's installation in the museum's Treasure Room. The Post-Gazette is the only International site outside of the Carnegie complex in Oakland.
Some may remember Marshall's paintings from a 1994 traveling exhibition at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, but the internationally exhibited artist is adept in many other mediums, including drawing and printmaking.
Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Ala., within earshot of the heated rumblings of the fledgling civil rights movement. He moved with his family to Los Angeles in the summer of 1963 and was 10 years old when Watts erupted into the 1965 riots. In 1969, when he was a young teen-ager, there was a shoot-out with police at the Black Panthers headquarters, near where he lived.
Although it would take years to distance himself enough from such events to address them effectively, he says his proximity to them helped make history an important subject in his art. Things came together when he could make a connection between the personal and other sources that were outside of his direct experience.
Carnegie International: Pittsburgh's source of artistic enlightenment for more than a century
It's easy to understand why Marshall was selected in 1997 to receive a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant. His conversation is peppered with ideas, enthusiasm and a faith in people's ability to understand -- and by implication to enter into dialogue about -- complex ideas when they are presented correctly.
Marshall's work at the Carnegie is an untitled installation in the Treasure Room that thrives on paradox, on the one hand being a highly refined conceptual piece and on the other a narrative comic strip that addresses, among other things, the under-representation of African-Americans in newspaper comics.
The panels in the Post-Gazette introduce a larger story, written and illustrated by Marshall, in which black heroes drawn from archetypal African power figures enter into a battle sparked by a drive-by shooting. The action, which takes place in the streets of a not-too-future Chicago, is a metaphor for "the conflict," Marshall says, that African-Americans have with "how to come to terms with the past greatness of African culture and how to come to terms with their present difficulties" in 20th-century America.
This is a theme Marshall worked with as early as 1992, when he was production designer for Julie Dash's beautifully evocative film, "Daughters of the Dust," which dealt with the tensions stirred when a family decides to leave the culturally traditional community on isolated islands off coastal Georgia to look for economic opportunities in the North.
Marshall says it was important that his work run in a newspaper because "having these pieces in the paper transfers a kind of authenticity to those comics that are in the museum."
Early in the year, Carnegie International curator Madeleine Grynsztejn contacted Post-Gazette Editor John G. Craig Jr. about the possibility of cooperation with one of her artists who wanted to do a comic strip on newsprint. The idea of serializing the work came out of a discussion of feasible options.
Craig said that while the idea of incorporating a work of art into a daily newspaper is "a little out of the ordinary for a certain number of people, maybe even the majority," he was willing to run the work because "the newspaper has an obligation to be stimulating.
"I don't feel at all responsible to take art to the masses, or feel that the newspaper has a social obligation to do so -- in fact, I'm opposed to that idea. But we do have a responsibility to be interesting and to have a certain amount of the unexpected," he explained.
In the PG panels, the story reveals itself through the format of a television news broadcast. The series begins, Marshall says, with a "human interest story, about the water towers in the city," but that's interrupted with live coverage of a news event.
Marshall admits that "what's there doesn't tell you a lot," and that's part of his plan. "[The panels] come in as a sort of mystery and are intended to be a curiosity of a sort.
"When they keep coming back week after week, with a little more detail each time, I would hope that they would make people wonder what is this, and that it would compel them to go to the museum."
Marshall doesn't know of any other major newspaper in the United States that's been connected to a conceptual project like his. "Certainly nothing as enigmatic as the panels you're going to run, spread out the way they are." He said that for the reader happening upon one, "It just seems like it comes out of nowhere. But, I think it's more provocative [that way] -- you've gotta wonder what it's all about. Maybe people will write letters to the editor."
Another paradox is that as puzzling as they may seem, the cartoons in the PG do add background to the overall piece, Marshall says. And, they are the most directly readable component of the work, given that the comics at the museum take on a different significance.
In fact, it is possible to miss the artwork at the Carnegie, a risk Marshall has taken to make a point about how easily things of value can be overlooked. In the Treasure Room, the comics cover the glass of the cases in the way that old newspapers are used to cover the front windows of businesses that are being renovated. Contained within the very planned, formal arrangement of the colored sheets -- which become an abstract work of their own -- are gaps that allow the visitor to do what comes naturally: peek through the covering to see the "real" work inside.
What visitors discover, the artist hopes, will inspire more questions about how we assign value and what is real -- issues that tie into Grynsztejn's overall exhibition theme.
As Marshall puts it, it's an artwork that "makes itself and takes itself apart at the same time. You present a narrative -- it becomes non-narrative. It's about seeing and not seeing, reading and not reading, valuing and not valuing. You take all of these things and it keeps reversing itself. There's an internal conflict in the way it's built, which is completely parallel to the narrative. You start with a barrier to begin with. In the barrier is the thing to be valued itself.
"It rewards the person who puts time into it with a complicated experience. The ideal audience experience would be, for me, for them to come in with all of those assumptions about newspaper comics -- a form of low-brow pop culture, a throw-away commodity -- and then recognize that some shift occurs. That they start to see other dimensions that make it resonate with other levels of meaning.
"Then they start to reconsider cultural practices and values and things like that. For example, the recognition that they've never seen a daily comic that was centered on black subject matter with a set of black characters [before, say, 'The Boondocks']."
He thinks that the work is accessible, though there's a lot to it.
"It's all on the surface, it's all in the piece. It may be layered, but if you stay with it long enough -- which is the trick -- you can get it."
Marshall will give a free lecture on his work at 1 p.m. Nov. 13 in the Carnegie Lecture Hall.
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