Theaster Gates@ White Cube: The Archive as artistic medium

‘My Labor is my Protest’ is on at the White Cube, Bermondsey until  November 11th 2012

 Theaster Gates is an intriguing artist to be shown at the White Cube, as much of his work as an urban activist seem at odds with the minimalist, commercial space of Jay Jopling’s Bermondsey gallery. ‘My Labor is my Protest’ is not only a showcase of Gates’ work in London but raises questions about how artwork translates from community engagement to gallery show.

Gates’ installations engage with archives and the nature of artistic medium to explore black identity and subjectivity. As we shall see then, it is in refusing the commercial viability of his works that this American artist engages British viewers. Yet equally, it is in the gallery’s decision to stage such a show that it declares a subtle transition to a commercial role more informed by education and curation.

Collective ownership

Theaster Gates’ installations seemingly refuse commercial purchase and possession, appearing more as large ephemeral collages whose parts will be disassembled and returned to the place they belong. The books and Ebony magazines that make up most of the pieces on show belong to the archive of the Johnson publishing company. This displaced ownership gives the installation its temporality. That it cannot be bought or remain intact makes this library a snapshot of the flow of information that formulates an identity or subjectivity.

Theaster Gates’ central ‘monument’ is a large old fashioned bookcase that stands the length and breadth of one of the warehouse-like walls of the White Cube. With book ladders of different heights enticing us to look higher, exploration takes us through the many varied titles attached to black history and culture.

As a piece encapsulating some key issues of black identity, this makes some bold accessible statements. In a literal sense we are offered texts that offer ways into this history on display. Yet it also makes clear that any attempts to encapsulate an identity are doomed. The sheer numbers of books resist our attempts to grasp every detail and signal the infinity of information.

This infinitude’s difficult relationship with identity is posed in both a live workshop and its props that are left to stand in the meantime. Using past issues of ‘Ebony’ visitors can have a makeover utilising cosmetics from a cabinet entitled ‘On Black Foundations.’ Here the cosmetics and magazines stand in a limbo between artefact and everyday functioning object.

Black medium

 In the paved entrance to Bermondsey’s White Cube stands a fire engine, whose brash yellow surface has been marked with daubings of tar. Tar makes several re-appearances throughout the show. First as a series of paintings; whose tarred surfaces are mirages of texture which can only be gleaned at certain angles of light. Through the gleaming surface circular marks, textures of imprinted material and the swirling of its own fluidity can be seen. Secondly, in a video piece, we see his tar paintings enacted as a ritual to blues music he himself performs.

Beyond the immediacy of a medium which offers reflection on ‘blackness’ as a property is its subjective relationship to Gates’ family history. His father as a form of alternative protest had a tarred roofs of houses on Civil Rights era America, and here Gates re-stages it as an expression of his identity. Tar as a medium then, is not just there for its visual properties but explore the materiality of family heritage and history.

Conclusion

Julian Stallabrass in texts such as Art Incorporated and High Art Lite has already alerted us to how the commercial art space can stunt an artworks ability to engage socially. When looking at Tomoko Takahashi, Stallabrass notes that the attitude of her work changes distinctly when it moves into the commercial gallery space. Her work begins by ‘transforming waste from people’s work into frenetic three-dimensional collage’ to ‘expose and block the workings of this machine…designed to make us buy.’ (Stallabrass, High Art Lite, p.p.76-7) From such purposes it moves into commercial spaces as mere aesthetic, instead of being informed by the space it exists within, it now has ‘some obscure logic.’ (p.77)

To a certain extent this is a worry that does underpin the presentation of Gates’ work in the White Cube. Like Takahashi’s work, in the commercial gallery space it is essentially uprooted from the contexts it operates within. As an artist that engages with community and urban space, we simply cannot view this exhibition in the same way we would with the rest of his work, for example his simultaneous residency in Hugenot house.

But what is key to this exhibition is perhaps Gates’ awareness of this, as ‘uprootedness’ is a central them of the pieces on display. The tar his father had once covered the roofs of houses with is experimented with in a new context, the archive of Johnson publishing is re-made temporarily into new archive and the cosmetics of yesteryears Ebony magazine re-applied to today’s visitors. It is an intriguing engagement with British audiences but inevitably the blank white walls of a newly built gallery space leave little for this artist to really get his teeth into.