FM: Well, phenomenology as a kind of philosophical discipline, I think, implies some very specific ideas about spatiotemporal coordination and three-dimensionality. It implies a kind of separation of the subject and the object. The object comes into view. The object comes into consciousness for a subject as a function of that separation and hopefully what the object does is, in a way, both confirm and also mirror the assumed three-dimensionality of the subject, of the viewer. When we talk about a well-developed character, in a novel or in a play, the complement we like to give such a character is that they are three-dimensional. And I think there’s something to be said, there’s much to be said in praise of two-dimensionality. There’s much to be said that’s in praise of what people ordinarily, I think, misrepresent as flatness. And for me, I would maybe begin, if you have a chance to visit the gallery, by encouraging a stance towards the works, particularly to the wall-based works, to encourage a stance that isn’t, let’s say, full-frontal. Don’t stand up in front of it or stand against it as if it were your object. It’s a really cool thing to walk carefully and respectfully up to the side of it so that if you can imagine not looking at it, but looking with it or almost looking through it. And especially in those big, huge wall paintings, what you see is all this texture. And you see all this richness. And you see all this shape. And you see the intensity with which color doesn’t oppose itself to shape, but folds into shape. And all of a sudden, it turns out that this two-dimensionality, this sort of holographic reality that he’s giving us, is immeasurably and unimaginably rich, which I think allows us to begin to imagine how rich all of the things which we ordinarily would dismiss as two-dimensional must be, right? Including, for instance, let’s say, the generally understood to be two-dimensional lives of, say, Black folks in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1935 or something like that. It makes me want to really, really think hard about the rich, deep, syncretic, two-dimensional richness of Black Tupelo, Mississippi, which must have been the deepest possible flat place that anybody could ever imagine if it turned out to produce both Sam Gilliam and Arthur Jafa within thirty years of one another. That’s a mystery that somebody needs to try to figure out right there.
Sam Gilliam’s Latest
A Roundtable Conversation-Hickey, Martin, Moten
Pace Gallery, recorded on December 16, 2020
