His work, contrasting memory and history, will soon be on view at Art Basel

Kristian Vistrup Madsen

From Manet paintings to Zidane photographs, artist Lyle Ashton Harris samples images to create a language of his own

In 2005,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/20279/Lyle-Ashton-Harris">Lyle Ashton Harris</a> was invited to teach at New York University’s campus in Accra, Ghana. ‘I fell in love with the people there, the culture,’ says the New York-based artist. ‘And one semester turned into seven years.’ During that time he had an artistic epiphany. ‘I was on vacation in southern Ghana by myself,’ he says. ‘I came across a good dozen fisherman who were using this tarp made out of flour sacks as a shield from the sun. You just have this frisson where something sparks – I saw a readymade. It had salt in it, the texture of the earth and the sea, and it was symptomatic of a lot of my experiences in Ghana, a mixture of high and low. So I bought it from them.’

The patchwork of flour sacks, measuring 430 x 750 cm, appears as the base of the painting Blow Up (Verso) at this year’s Art Basel Unlimited. Completed in 2019, the piece had been a work in progress for years. It began in Ghana in 2007 as Untitled (Blow Up IV Sign Painting) when the sign painter&nbsp;Nicholas Wayo&nbsp;used the tarp as a canvas for a one-to-one painted reproduction of Harris’ wall collage Blow Up IV (Sevilla) from the year before. When it was shown at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona in 2008, it hung in the middle of the room, so both the front and back sides were visible. In 2010, Harris began to manipulate the work to obscure the front and now presents Blow Up (Verso), showing Wayo’s painting of Blow Up IV from the back, the colors having bled through the fabric. In the new work, the slippage of detail already visible between the collage and Untitled has been further blurred. ‘There’s almost an erasure of legibility, but within that illegibility one can still grasp the representational. It’s that tension that I’m interested in,’ Harris says.

Harris’ original montage was a composition of hundreds of photographs and newspaper clippings, many of them sourced from his 2001 photographic essay on racism in Italian soccer for The New York Times Magazine (Harris previously worked as a magazine photographer), interspersed with pictures of the artist’s own earlier works and artworks from the canon, such as Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866). Between underwear ads, a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6731/Jean-Michel-Basquiat">Basquiat&nbsp;</a>painting, and a McDonald’s french fries container, these elements are joined mostly in incongruity, though seen through Harris’ eye for gendered and racial subtexts: how everyone in a stadium audience is white, for instance, and if soccer resembles bullfighting, with the players more bulls than matadors.The dense network of content is organized around a striking centerpiece: an Adidas ad showing a young Black man giving French soccer player Zinedine Zidane a pedicure. Harris had come across this picture in another experience of frisson a few years earlier, when he recognized in it an uncanny resemblance to Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia (1863) of a Black female servant receding into the background of a portrait of a naked white woman. The ad contains the same element of fetishization, though here of white masculinity, accompanied by an unthinking exhibition of racial disparity. In Harris’ Ready-Made (2001) and several other works this image is punctuated with yellow jets of dried semen – always emphasizing and complicating the tensions of racial difference and sexual sameness barely disguised in the original.&nbsp;

When Harris bought the tarp from the fishermen, a different Manet was on his mind: The Bullfight (1864), a work in which the barrier between the audience and the arena forms a kind of grid, reminiscent of both the stitched-together flour sacks and the structure of Blow Up IV. That’s when he had the idea to reenvision the sprawling montage work of cutouts on a unified surface as a painting. The power of Blow Up IV as a sign painting, its ‘incendiary quality,’ Harris says, comes from how the referents are obstructed but their meaning somehow remains. We no longer recognize Zidane, or Michael Jackson as portrayed by Andy Warhol, or Olympia, but can understand the fragmentary images almost completely independently of their original sources. In Blow Up (Verso) the play between the now faceless characters and colors becomes at once static and dynamic. The motif is literally reversed, but the tables have not turned.The new painting also ties the Blow Up series, which evolved through biennials from São Paulo to Seville, to the specific experience Harris had living in Ghana. ‘Sign painting is a long and rich tradition in Ghana, which came to an end around 2010,’says the artist. ‘I was interested in having my work engage that history and simultaneously capture the closure of a chapter of my life. It is a monument on multiple fronts, a historical painting that alludes to shifts in culture that anticipated where we are today’ – both in terms of the relationship between technology and craftsmanship, and the themes evident in the picture, such as the renewed discourse on racism – ‘but also a memento mori of my time in Ghana.’&nbsp;

Blow Up (Verso) engages dynamics that are always at play in Harris’ work: those between public and private, memory and history. His method of collaging is an expression of individuality through gathering collective fragments. ‘Collage and mark-making have always been there in my practice, it’s in my blood,’ he says, citing artists such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7514/Robert-Rauschenberg">Robert Rauschenberg</a> and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/21143/Hannah-H%C3%B6ch">Hannah Höch</a> (Harris’ grandfather Albert Johnson also documented everyday life in about 10,000 Kodak Ektachrome slides over his lifetime, perhaps grounding Harris’ image-making approach). ‘But it’s also very primal. Look at anyone’s childhood bedroom. It’s how we imagine ourselves and how we create our own fantasy.’ His ‘Ektachrome Archive’– approximately 3,500 slides and countless hours of films collected from his own life in the 1980s and early 1990s – is private insofar as it depicts intimate moments, but it has also become a historical document of what are now considered landmark events. ‘I have the sole documentation of the dinner after the Black Male exhibition [curated by Thelma Golden at the Whitney Museum in 1994], for instance. The people who were there. The energy.’ The bank of images was turned into a multi-channel installation for the Whitney Biennial in 2017, which reads as an immersive, temporal collage in the style of the Blow Up series but operates rather differently: ‘There is an allegorical lyricism to the “Ektachrome Archive” that makes it feels almost like a lullaby. In the Blow Ups there’s a rupture, a cut, an erotic charge, something getting worked through. For me, they represent the violent nature of having to find something out through the act of making.’

How images circulate has changed radically between Blow Up IV in 2006 and its reincarnation in Blow Up (Verso) in 2019, and so has the political culture around them. On social media, images are considered a form of behavior or warrant trigger warnings. ‘The only trigger warning that I need,’ Harris tells me, ‘is against thirst traps’ – pictures that are vehicles for desire more than carriers of meaning. ‘I don’t want my images to be thirst traps. My work is meant to quench one’s thirst. Much of what we see online promises so much but in a way that is just a gesture.’When Harris processes his moments of frisson by cutting them up, re-photographing them, or having them rendered by a sign painter, he slows pictures down to demand another kind of attention from the viewer. The issues of race and queerness so present in his works are too enduring to rely on the whims of desire or risk becoming trends. ‘I want images to be able to make people accountable,’ he says. He’s found a way to do it.&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/20279/Lyle-Ashton-Harris">Lyle Ashton Harris</a>&nbsp;is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1263/Salon-94">Salon 94</a>&nbsp;(New York City). In September, he presents Blow Up (Verso) in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel in Basel.Kristian Vistrup Madsen is a writer, art critic, and curator based in Berlin. His work has been published in magazines such as Artforum, frieze, Mousse, and The White Review. His book Doing Time: Essays on Using People (2021) is published by Floating Opera Press.&nbsp;All photos of Lyle Ashton Harris by Peyton Fulford for Art Basel.

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