“It took me a long time to grow abstraction, to grow painting. And then I put in a photo of the house I was born in. I turned it vertical as opposed to horizontal. And I made copies of the image… I’m really pointing to the origin, for when I discovered that I could use recognizable images. I looked at my birth certificate from Macon, Mississippi… And what happened? The work became immediately more emotional for me. And then I explored further… I really began to trust myself in terms of letting the work speak for itself. Suddenly, it was like, Bingo. This emphasis on recognizable images hit me and it started my climb up the artist ladder.”
A member of the charged New York art scene in the 1970s, McArthur Binion was among a small group of African-American artists that meshed with, but were also marginalized from the greater art world at the time. Within this group, he was part of an even smaller group of black artists—namely, Jack Whitten and Stanley Whitney—that were experimenting with a Black approach to abstraction that differed greatly from the abstract styles that had dominated the city for two decades. Like Whitney, Binion’s work is thoroughly rhythmic, and the artist has spoken at length of the influence of music on his work.
“My work wants to have a visceral response to my viewer, like a composer’s ability to project an emotional state of sound. The bebop musicians introduced improvisation to the New York visual artists who later become Abstract Expressionist painters. My work begins at the intersection of that introduction. Prior to this introduction, the art world establishment had not accepted an African American influence on American visual culture. As the abstraction and improvisation of bebop became standard practice, as the painters absorbed that influence, though still don’t acknowledge it, I believe, it set up the art world for a cultural shift in terms of the parameters of possibilities for many years to come. The difficulty is, once the art historical world accepts the bebop influence, the art world must realign its narrative. I responded to abstract art a generation later because I understood the music it came from, not because the arts spoke to me.”
ART © 2022 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York
At first glance and from a distance, McArthur Binion’s work exudes an air of minimalism. As the viewer changes their proximity, and therefore, physical relationship with his pieces, however, none begins to perceive a multitude of patterned lines or grid-like structure, and Jasper Johns’ crosshatches come to mind. But it is only once one is very near that one sees that there are layers below the grid structures that make his work entirely unique among his generation of abstract painters—the repetition of personal documents and images photocopied by the artist create a patterned background that subverts the traditional concept behind abstraction while still maintaining it. Though there is a break from the style by way of intimate connections with concrete aspects of the artist’s life, the overlaying of a grid makes any underlying text or image illegible or indecipherable. As the artist Judy Pfaff has said in conversation with the artist: “all of this personal information is hidden in or underneath your work. A substratum you call ‘the under-conscious’. And you really have to get up there and get intimate to see anything.” To which Binion replies, “This was one of the questions people want to know: Where my—whatever you call it, my birthright or my brownness or my Blackness—has taken me? That’s how the DNA paintings came up, because everything I am is in there” ( “An Oral History with McArthur Binion” BOMB, online).
