Travis Somerville and Keris Salmon at Jack Fischer Gallery
In a similar fashion to that of German artists grappling with the Holocaust, caucasian American artists, perhaps in particular those who come, as Travis Somerville does, from the South, have a substantial burden of grief and shame to bear. Setting aside, for the moment, issues of geography and ethnicity, anyone paying attention to the political climate in our country in recent days—or to be frank at least the past four horrific years of the Trump White House—has to feel outraged and in despair. As I write this, we have thankfully voted that destructive presence out of office, and it looks like he at last has faced the reality of his loss. (Well, that hope for a glimmer of sanity has since been crushed-bjm)
Visiting Jack Fischer Gallery to see “One-Two Punch” before the election, it was a particularly fraught moment: so much was at stake. Given all the attempts to restrict voting in numerous nefarious ways, interfering with the US Postal Service perhaps the most insidious, the piece that had the greatest initial impact was not one of the artists massive and powerful wall-mounted works, but 1965 (2020), a sculptural installation. A wooden box, resting on a pedestal, was lit with a crackling video projection of dancing flames. A recording of LBJ’s 1965 speech approving the voting rights act sent chills down the spine as the wooden object came into focus as a vintage ballot box, particularly in light of the fact that several ballot boxes had actually recently been the target of firebombing.
Once one absorbs that sobering and dramatic content, the rest of the gallery comes into focus as filled with Somerville’s gargantuan and challenging paintings, as well as some moody and mysterious photographs which we will come to a bit later…
Somerville has taken every offensive triggering image in the racist playbook and painted it, beautifully, one might add, in oil on the rugged surface of recycled truck and army tarps. These rough images are juxtaposed with iconic American symbols like the flag and the Liberty Bell, and layered with some genteel lacy wallpaper. One work, Year of Our Lord 2020, features scrawled text stating Jeff Davis was not a president, punctuated by a Confederate flag. An image of a figure, toppled to the ground, may evoke images of statues of very unpopular Confederate Generals being pulled down in recent protests. We may recognize the dark blue suit and oversized red tie of the hooded figure holding the bible—upside-down.
The figure which has been knocked down is, in fact, a boxer, an image that recurs in several of the paintings. In one, The Mat (2020), a powerful torso and arms float in space, a klansman’s hood replacing its head, its hand clad in boxing gloves, one red bearing the initials “GOP.” The same figure appears in Poster Boy, only here we see his angry, mask-like face, shorn of an empty hood dangling adjacent. My initial take on this imagery was that the figure perhaps represented anger against racism and political injustice, but further thought on this has yielded a more probable conclusion that the pugilist, with tan skin of a hue that does not initially ascribe race, is perhaps the “Great White Hope” of the early 20th century boxer Jim Jefferson, who came out of retirement in 1910 an ill-fated attempt to beat Jack Johnson, the African-American heavyweight champion. This figure as well is a stand-in for Trump, whose white-supremacist leanings are well-documented, with famous incidents such as his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville. And, with the initials RNC and GOP prominent in The Mat and Poster Boy, it doesn’t take much of a leap to assume that Somerville finds the Republican party as well to be complicit in the rise of racism and white nationalist violence in our country.
Sadly, as I have been working on this story, a new and tragic chapter has been written, with the storming of our nation’s Capitol last week by an angry mob of violent, deluded, Trump supporters, egged on by their amoral and lying leader. These ugly and appalling images, including rioters smashing Capitol windows, invading the sanctity of the most secure and private areas of our nation’s houses of government, carrying off the lectern of the speaker of the house, and even beating a police officer with of all things an American flag. When will this insanity stop? As I write, a second impeachment process has begun for this disgraceful excuse for a president. Some Republicans have, in the wake of their own lives being threatened by his mob, turned against the president, but others remain, if not loyal, unwilling to do anything to upset the status quo and in particular their Trump-supporting constituents.
It is hard to fathom the situation, but it certainly is reflected quite clearly in Somerville’s work, which seethes with rage and indignation at this twisted mutation of patriotism. Back to the hooded figures. Anyone paying attention to contemporary art has likely heard of the huge controversy over recent postponement of the major retrospective Philip Guston Now organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and scheduled to run at the Tate Modern, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All pulled out of the commitment, citing concerns in particular over how Guston’s challenging imagery—also containing hooded figures suggesting klansmen—would be viewed in the light of increased sensitivity to racial injustice. It is particularly ironic that those who support freedom of expression would censor the voice of Guston, one of the more influential painters of the 20th century and one whose leftist political leanings are quite clear. As a youngster growing up in Los Angeles, Guston was profoundly affected by the KKK’s persecution of the Jewish community. Images of this violence are foundational to his later use of the imagery. These later hooded figures are, admittedly, more nuanced in nature, alluding perhaps to how we ourselves often contain elements of that which we most despise.
With heavily-loaded symbols, and there are a boatload of them here, one may feel the urge to tread lightly. Taken out of context, one might find them highly offensive, frightening, dangerous. But the ugliness is not created by the artist, rather he is reflecting the ugliness he sees before him in our fractured society. The references to Guston are likely meant to include a commentary on the thorny issue of censorship in the museum community. We even have some quotes from Guston in Somerville’s palette, with it’s bubble-gum pinks and candy-apple reds, while Gutted (2020) offers a klansman image lifted almost in entirety from Guston’s The Studio (1969).
“One-Two Punch”…so one blow is the racism and injustice perpetuated by elected officials, the other is the knockout punch of death and havoc wrecked by the COVID-19 virus. A jaunty ball with coronavirus spikes is tossed in the air above images of a skull and a patient on oxygen. Honestly it’s hard to imagine a more challenging time to be alive, at least from where we currently sit. With new administration just days away, we are holding our collective breaths for a return to sanity. Somerville’s unflinching work clearly struck a nerve.
Along with Somerville’s work, Jack Fischer presented The Architecture of Slavery, a haunting series of cyanotypes by Keris Salmon, an African-American artist. Salmon was appalled when her caucasian husband shared that “he had something to tell her about his ancestors.” They were, in fact, slave owners, and her work is derived from photographic negatives exposed at the estate where they had lived. Processing the real and intimate details of a world where ownership of human beings was commonplace is heartbreaking and sobering. A folio of works, To Have and To Hold, accompanied her exhibition.
What happened to the “Great White Hope”? Jim Jefferson lost the contest, and faded into obscurity. We may hope that the 45th president soon does the same.
Barbara Morris
One-Two Punch closed in December at Jack Fischer Gallery