Henry Taylor: B Side
at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles (through 30 April 2023)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
Ages ago when there were LP records and 45s, the B side of a popular single made allowances for experimentation and could be counted on as an alternative vision to the more mainstream and compulsory hit single. B sides were not the reason you bought the album, but they were perhaps a more authentic representation of the artist’s vision, and every so often a great B side would feel akin to unearthing gold. Henry Taylor’s thirty-year retrospective at MOCA Grand pays homage to the unexpected, the visceral, and the odd man out, and like any successful B side, you want to keep listening.
Henry Taylor, Warning shots not required, 2011. (75¼ x 262¼ in)
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition and Collection Committee. Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Brian Forrest.
Featuring more than 150 works that include paintings, drawings, sculptures, and painted objects like cereal boxes and beer crates, this survey represents a vision forged in fire yet tempered with tremendous sensitivity, compassion, and humor. Taylor’s work can trigger tears yet have you chuckling as well in the same moment. In Taylor’s world, images of friends, loved ones, and complete strangers comingle and cohabitate, and sometimes they connect in violent and unexpected ways.
Like the work of Noah Davis or Kerry James Marshall, Taylor explores his own heritage and the broader experience of living and working as a black artist in America. But don’t be fooled, Taylor isn’t simply a portrait artist, as many critics have described him. More significantly, he embodies a fluidity of spirit, time and place which allows him to move effortlessly from one medium to the next. Works like the sculptural assemblage Untitled (2021) conflate the history of the slave trade as represented in the whitewashed ship balancing precariously atop a box, which itself sits atop an upside-down dresser perched on four basketballs.
Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Ken Adlard.
Untitled (2021) is an indictment against the history of violence toward African Americans, as the small black and white photo, submerged in a sea of whiteness beneath the ship, brings this interminable cycle of hate full circle. But the work is also an exploration into perceived and accepted stereotypes, i.e., that black men are particularly good at basketball. While this may seem to be an innocuous stereotype, Taylor makes the subtle argument that this kind of pigeonholing does not allow for curiosity or intellectualism as it relates to the history of black men in America. Rather, the assemblage suggests an even further reduction, and a continuing one, one where the black male is codified by athleticism to the exclusion, if not negation of actually being seen for the wisdoms inherent in the diverse expressions of a myriad individual selves. As objects, the basketballs are also unreliable in that they cannot “hold up” or sustain any real or verifiable weight, i.e., the legacy of human violence as it relates to black Americans in this country.
Taylor’s world may contain elements of violence, but it is by no means defined by it, and more importantly, works like the hauntingly poignant I’m not dangerous (2015), which shows a young black boy holding a rifle and gazing seemingly beyond the viewer into some unknown future, emphasize the fear and bewilderment of young black boys coming of age in this country. The expression on this boy’s face conveys no sense of wonder but an incremental, near-palpable dread of some approaching unknown, an impending, and the gun is seen not so much as a weapon of defiance but of ill-considered defense – a seemingly necessary though wholly inappropriate (and terrifying!) “tool” in the ultimate quest for manhood. With the irony here being the attainment of any kind of manhood whatsoever, for the endgame is the ghost which clatteringly haunts this painting’s unvoiced narrative.
Yet Taylor’s great gift as an artist is to convey meaning in mulitple ways, and so equally inherent in this same painting, I’m not dangerous, is the tremendous imaginative power, grace, and dignity communicated through the expression of this same shotgun-wielding child, though admittedly the gun stands in sharp contrast to this – a counterbalancing element that at once ramps up the tension in this painting’s otherwise spare, one could even say simplistic depiction.
Perhaps the greatest sadness of this small yet powerful painting is the suggestion that this boy is perhaps trapped in an endless cycle of violence, not of his own making, and only through imagination, i.e., the ability to imagine himself out of the scene and into another more supportable reality, one of beauty, strength, and opportunity, can this cycle finally be broken.
I’m not dangerous (2015) at right.
Grief is a palpable theme throughout the exhibition and is articulated in various ways. Many of the paintings are luminous in their poignancy, as is the case with Where Thoughts provoke, getting deep in the shallow water (2015), where the body of a man sits slumped in a bathtub. The body is rendered more like a shadow than a living man, an effigy of longing, wherein the features are obliterated, forcing us as viewers to focus almost entirely on the gesture and movement of the body as it slumps down into shallow water. The metaphor of shallow water further suggests that this figure is trapped in his own history, unable to affect change, yet despite this, he is beautiful.
Language also becomes its own character in Taylor’s visual passion plays. For example, in the painting entitled I left the jungle and found Jung (2011), Taylor equates escaping from difficult economic circumstances with the pursuit of ideas, privileging a life of the mind. Carl Jung developed concepts related to the collective unconscious, and his work has been particularly influential in the study of literature and art, so perhaps what Taylor is suggesting here is that the “jungle” exists as much in our minds as it does on the hard and harrowing urban streets of the city, and it is up to each of us as individuals to forge our own means of escape.
Family and friends find their way into many of Taylor’s paintings, but these are not nostalgic reminiscences or images of times long since passed, but more activated encounters wherein the past is a living testament that defines the present moment. Even the singular still life in the exhibition, entitled Cora, (cornbread), 2008, is less honorific than it is vibrant and vital, as though Cora’s legendary cornbread will live on in the annals of Taylor’s personal history and could, given the right circumstances, transform lives. It, the cornbread, is that sacred, that necessary. Each of Taylor’s sculptures and paintings appear as a kind of sacred offering, a deliberate means of translating the artist’s lived experience into a balm of personal courage. One has the feeling looking at these images that the making of them is an act of salvation, not in the religious sense but in the way that all lived experiences, whether positive or negative, have the power to transform both our hearts and minds.
Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
More importantly, Taylor is hungry – for experience, for life, for art, for suggestion, for integrity, for cornbread and love – for everything under the sun that gives scope and breadth to human existence. This hunger is a shared and lived experience. Probably the most obvious example of this is a grouping of drawings made while Taylor attended the California Institute of the Arts and worked as a technician at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. These images are sometimes hard to look at as they depict inmates at the hospital, many of whom suffered greatly. They are provocative and unsettling in their underlying content, yet ultimately these are works of empathy that display a generosity of spirit and a rare sensitivity. They are as much portraits of the artist himself as they are the people who populate these images. Suffused with humanity, they exist on the border between reality and imagination, and it feels as though Taylor understands that imagination is a necessary panacea in the struggle to be human. Art makes life bearable, and for Taylor it is a saving grace, one he extends out like an olive branch to each of us.
♦
Eve Wood is Los Angeles Art Critic for Riot Material Magazine. Ms. Wood’s poetry and art criticism have appeared in many magazines and journals including Artillery, Whitehot, Art & Cake, The New Republic, The Denver Quarterly, Triquarterly, Flash Art, Angelino Magazine, New York Arts, The Atlantic Monthly, Artnet.com, Artillery, Tema Celeste, Art Papers, ArtUS, Art Review, and LatinArt.com. She is the author of five books of poetry. Also an artist, her work has been exhibited at Susanne Vielmetter and Western Project and Tiger Strikes Asteroid in New York. Wood is currently represented by Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles.
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