Art Review
Summer 2012
Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe
By: Ed Schad
Mickalene Thomas organises her exhibition of new works at the Santa Monica Museum of Art around erotic touchstones of art history, specifically Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World and The Sleepers (both 1866), and Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés (1946–66). These infamous cases of voyeurism in art Thomas resets on her own terms by filtering them through her identity as a gay African American woman.
Entering the museum, the viewer confronts the keyhole of Thomas’s installation Take All the Time You Need (all works 2012). Here is the famous entry of Étant Donnés, only instead of a splayed female body one spies the funky enclave of a 1970s apartment, the type of place Pam Grier might occupy in one of her films. During the opening, a model did occupy Thomas’s space, and viewers could observe her without themselves being observed. The model was joined in the main space by large painted portraits of strong and assertive women, all exquisitely dressed and none of whom seem to suffer fools.
The ghosts of these women move and dwell in the show and charge its spaces with eroticism. The portraits, domestic interiors and landscapes cumulatively become a field of sexual potential, with the female sex, both its interior spaces and external manifestations, being the centre point. This centre is bluntly asserted twice: Courbet’s The Origin of the World is retooled once using Thomas’s own body articulated with black rhinestones, in Origin of the Universe 1, and then again in the last gallery using a white body with brown beads, in Origin of the Universe 2.
Though Origin of the World is the centre, Thomas’s version of The Sleepers, titled Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires, depicts the ultimate objective of the show: two female lovers finally locked together. A massive plane, the work is an assemblage of broken pieces, splintering the pictorial reality of an idyllic scene. Each crack in the surface is highlighted with punchy neon orange that binds the picture in a sort of web. Of similar ambition to Thomas’s breakout commission for MoMA in 2010, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, Thomas’s Sleep is the exhibition’s final statement and the one depiction of consummation.
The conceptual rigour of the show, its linear and simple unfolding, is mimicked in the sharp lines and pristine surfaces of the works: impressive but intimidating rushes of colour, design swatches and attitude. Though the thematic content has the potential to be hot, bothered and open to anything, the paintings themselves are resistant, wearing a fashionable armour not unlike that of the models Thomas favours – women who exist somewhere behind a veneer of combative posturing.
There are no vulnerable access points, no imperfections, no personality clues in this heavily designed space. Even the occasional loose drip of paint on the canvas seems planned. One wonders what such works can really show about these women or the lives they lead. And that locked-down content, which can often seem stilted and stuffy, prevents Thomas from entering the sort of psychological depths that are needed to enrich the proceedings. They, the works and the women, are as inscrutable at the beginning as they are at the end.