By RANDY KENNEDY
MARCH 23, 2016
The Los Angeles artist Rodney McMillian has an ambivalent relationship with mass-produced home furnishings. On the one hand, he has rescued several examples from oblivion, like the time-ravaged lounge chair he wrestled into his car on a corner of Sunset Boulevard and later declared an artwork — untouched, stuffing spewing forth. It’s the kind of ready-made that Duchamp might have chosen if he had grown up in a working-class African-American family in Columbia, S.C., as Mr. McMillian did.
But Mr. McMillian, 47, has also subjected seemingly blameless appliances and other pieces of furniture to some pretty serious violence. “Couch,” from 2012, is what its title describes, but the artist has chopped it in half with a Sawzall reciprocating saw and sutured it back together with a gob of rough concrete, making it whole again in a disturbingly dysfunctional way.
The couch is front and center in “Rodney McMillian: Views of Main Street,”an exhibition that opens on Thursday at the Studio Museum in Harlem, one of three East Coast shows of his work that will run concurrently, introducing many viewers to the full sweep of a 15-year career that has delved deeply, and often with haunting beauty, into questions of class, race and American belonging.
At the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, “The Black Show,”which continues through Aug. 14, focuses partly on Mr. McMillian’s video work, which often involves his wandering unrecognizable through urban and rural landscapes like a kind of overgrown Halloween character. (In “Migration Tale,” made in 2014 and 2015, he dresses in a priest’s cassock and silver space-creature mask, making a lonely latter-day Great Migration from South Carolina to Harlem.)
At MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, “Rodney McMillian: Landscape Paintings” opens on April 3, featuring a dozen lush, chaotic, often thickly encrusted paintings made on bedsheets that Mr. McMillian bought at St. Vincent de Paul and other thrift shops in Los Angeles. The show, which originated at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, dovetails at times with the Studio Museum’s, demonstrating the ways Mr. McMillian’s idea of painting is often inseparable from that of sculpture.
It is simply a different transformation of what he calls “post-consumer items” to channel a sense of home, love, loss and bodies, particularly black bodies, for which the line between the personal and the political can be razor-thin. “There’s one piece in our show with the word ‘target’ in the title and another with ‘flag,’” said Anthony Elms, chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art. “There’s a painting that’s a representation of a pair of lungs.” (Visitors probably won’t miss the allusions, particularly to the Eric Garner case.)
Mr. Elms added, “I was prepped by Rodney that it was going to be a pretty dark show, that we were starting with heavy material, and it was probably only going to get heavier.”
In person, Mr. McMillian does not come across as heavy or even particularly topical. He is friendly and slightly shy, given at times to pedagogical lingo that might be expected from someone who has taught during most of his career to make ends meet, now at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is an associate professor of sculpture. While some work in all three shows was made against the backdrop of rising public awareness of police violence toward African-Americans, the Black Lives Matter movement, the debate over mass incarceration and a presidential campaign with increasingly ominous racial overtones, Mr. McMillian said that he rarely made pieces with the impulse of commentary in mind.
“I think there are works that are pretty frontal about the context of race in America, for example, but then there are works that are really going to complicate what you think those other supposedly straightforward ones are actually saying,” he said on a recent break from installing the exhibition at the Studio Museum, dressed warmly against the unaccustomed New York chill, with a scarf wrapped around his neck.
Mr. McMillian’s mother worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a job that could be politically fraught, especially in the South, and his father was a bus driver. He received a degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia and was aiming for a business career. But on Aug. 28, 1999, the date he considers the beginning of his life as an artist, he faxed the business school that had accepted him to say he would not be arriving for orientation; he was headed to art school instead. “It was a really bitter pill to swallow for my parents, but even in a way for me,” he said. “I mean, you usually go to college to try to do better economically than your parents.”
For many years, he added, “I knew I had nothing to lose, and I was just acquiring more and more debt, and that helped me make work that was really honest, only the work I really wanted to make.” (His fortunes have been looking up in recent years; he is represented by two prestigious galleries, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Maccarone in New York. That scavenged chair now resides in a private collection in Berlin, where it is kept in a special climate-controlled environment.)
Naima J. Keith, the curator of the Studio Museum show — which also includes huge, painting-like works made from old wall-to-wall carpets, marked deeply by decades of stains and foot tracks — said that she saw Mr. McMillian’s reliance on domestic objects as a brave and, at times, risky choice. “I think he’s very sensitive, as an African-American artist, about things being read with too much of an autobiographical perspective,” she said, “because it’s much more complicated than that.”
During a walk-through of the Studio Museum show, Mr. McMillian did allow that the couch had once been his, after passing through other living rooms first. And after some coaxing, he acknowledged that a nearby refrigerator had once been his, too. But it’s no longer functional. There’s a raw, gaping hole in the freezer door, which represents, he said, a kind of portal to another dimension, drawing on his interest in science fiction and the possibilities such literature has always presented for parallel worlds and transformation.
“It was on its last legs, and I just sort of took it to the other side,” he said of the fridge, grinning faintly. “With an ax.”
Such work can be seen many ways, though one will inevitably be as a portrait of the fabric of contemporary American society. “It feels like that fabric is very fragile right now,” he said, “and all it would take would be one string to pull it all apart. But maybe that would be a good thing — a time that could lead to some kind of radical change.”
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