What do Julie Mehretu, Marilyn Monroe, and Megan Hilty Have in Common?
Marilyn, Megan, Mehretu. Abstractionism in practice is the only way to know ourselves truly: the parts that are real, fake, and somewhere in between.
In 2019, designer Gareth Wrighton sent a model down the runway for London Fashion Week in a t-shirt that read: “lamps in video games use real electricity.” The collection was a part of a triptych critique on post-post-modern culture in the distinctions of past, present, and future. This final collection for the Autumn / Winter season of 2020 was the ‘future’ section of the trio and part of a dialogue with its previous iterations. Wrighton referenced his own work and borrowed elements from previous shows, including found materials like makeup wipes and dental floss. The reference to fake lamps using real electricity was a singular piece serving to highlight our patterns of consumption, but it felt like a postmodern thought exercise, in the vein of Magritte’s infamous pipe. Ceci n’est pas une vrai lampe.
This spring, I saw Julie Mehretu’s new exhibition at the Whitney Museum and heard her speak about the exhibit a few days later to Whitney members (over Zoom, which is to say, in abstract). The Whitney’s website notes her career-long exploration of painting as an art form, and how her subject matter looks through the lenses of migration, capitalism, and climate change. She “creates new forms and finds unexpected resonances by drawing from the histories of art and human civilization—from Babylonian stelae to architectural sketches, from European history painting to the sites and symbols of African liberation movements,” resulting in expansive and layered works. Mehretu’s process includes sketching out architectural diagrams, covering them with silica, sanding that down, and painting in layers and layers over it.
Her work is best seen up-close to note each piece's intricacies. When you walk through the gallery, the canvases seem to approach you, extending omnidirectionally like the spray of a fresh bouquet, alive in color. Several of the paintings are over 10’ tall, the images drifting over you like dreamscapes. Myself and so many others tried to get as close as possible: the gallery attendants shooed away patrons who stepped over the black lines on the floor in more instances than I could count. The museum positioned couches in front of some of the works to better allow for a tête-à-tête with the works themselves. These impending layers felt as if they moved when I did. The art is kinetic, like an orchestra swell, like rush hour on the 7 train, like a Calder mobile. Even the more somber themes feel inviting: the discomfiting sense prompts analysis rather than repulsion. The introduction to the exhibit notes that: “some of Mehretu’s imagery and titles hint at their representational origins, but her work remains steadfastly abstract.” Mehretu’s origins vary, she said: other paintings from modern and postmodern artists, faded photographs, adolescence spent between America and Ethiopia, movement patterns both personal and political. During her talk, she recounted the first piece of art that she remembers moving her: the Sacrifice of Isaac, a dark, tense painting, so too layered with meaning and motion but literal in depiction, unlike her own work. I thought about how static lines create movement when layered like this, in the right way. The works themselves are sacrificial in nature: the result of erasure and friction. They cannot truly be seen layer by layer but must be viewed as a whole, something in a state of being. This is what makes them entirely emblematic of the abstract expressionist movement.
Julie Mehretu, Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation, 2001. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 101 1/2 × 208 1/2 in. (257.81 × 529.59 cm). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas 2013.28. Photograph by Edward C. Robinson, III. © Julie Mehretu
William C. Seitz, an American artist, and art historian sums up abstractionism by saying: “Abstract Expressionists value the organism over the static whole, becoming over being, expression over perfection, vitality over finish, fluctuation over repose, feeling over formulation, the unknown over the known, the veiled over the clear, the individual over society and the inner over the outer.” So today we may all be abstractionists; constantly in fluctuation with others and ourselves. This seemed to be a philosophic statement as much as an explication of an artistic endeavor, some new age turn of the tongue, another post-postmodern way of reframing ourselves to maximize and optimize our existences. Other mediums of art seem to play into this mentality and to expose a greater truth about humanity. I couldn’t help but turn over Mehretu’s art pieces through the lens of a show I was binge-watching: Smash.
I started watching when Megan Hilty tweeted about the nine-year anniversary of the pilot that “changed [her] life," and I realized Anjelica Houston and Debra Messing were in it and I’d saved some of the music from the show already on Spotify through various algorithmically inspired Patti Lupone streaming playlists. I thought it had a bunch of seasons (and it’s criminal that it doesn’t. We let Nashville and Glee have 6 apiece? Where is the justice?), and watched the entirety of the first season in essentially a single sitting before realizing I had to ration the remaining episodes in careful and deliberate doses. The show is immediately engrossing and has a great structure that exists, too, in dialogue with Broadway as a concept and Acting-At-Large. It almost felt real, which is to say, like a docuseries or a behind-the-scenes of an actual musical. There are inside jokes for musical theatre performers and audiences that hook you into the show. It’s a nudge in the ribs. It’s by actors, for actors: you can only see as much as you already understand.
In Smash, the story follows the writers, producers, and actors during the production of a fictional musical called “Bombshell”, about the life of Marilyn Monroe. The central conceit of the show is that there are actors pretending to be actors who either get or do not get roles. There’s something endlessly fascinating about this strange synecdochic structure; about a fake lamp using real electricity. A real actor getting a fake role playing a real person who was an invented character in a canceled TV show from a decade ago. Marilyn Monroe was a character played by Norma Jeane Mortenson, wasn’t she? This is abstractionism, isn’t it? This is the canvas over which one can paint many layers, many meanings. Is Bombshell the musical a real musical or a fake one? The show positions Megan Hilty against Katharine McPhee: a blonde against a brunette, an actor versus a singer, someone who had worked on Broadway in real-life opposite someone who had made it very far on American Idol. This tension is carried into the show but it’s difficult to tell if the show is in on its own joke. And does it matter if it is?
It can be easier to see some of the friction between the actors and their characters years down the line. This role solidified Megan Hilty as a TV actress, though she’d been working for years, and likely opened the door wider to other opportunities. She’s the experienced one in the show, the one who understands realistically how the industry works without being too jaded by it. Katherine McPhee had just been on reality TV and was finally acting-acting, which had been her childhood dream separate from her voice-teacher slash momager’s dream. Watching old clips of American Idol, McPhee hadn’t yet found her footing: she appears lanky and demure, and though ultimately likable, out of place. She misses moments of choreo and thinks through her movements onstage, distractingly. She is remembered for forgetting some of her lyrics. On Smash, she is less likable but more polished: lithe and lean. There’s the strain of McPhee perhaps trying to prove herself, as her character is, they exist at the same time as two separate things. Hilty, too, is the Broadway veteran she plays: the better singer, the more nuanced actor, the one audiences both in the scenes and on the couch recognize as better inclined to play Marilyn.
If you were to paint these performances, they would look like Mehretu’s work. The architectural diagram of wanting fame and working to get it under layers of epoxy, career diversions, high notes in red. The fake musical from inside the real show went on tour in real life, like the base layer of a canvas washed and repurposed, sketched lines evident. The feeling of infinite space that the canvas brings and the history fo reaching into those that were here before us: ancestors and silver screen actresses alike. There are the starting points of the younger actresses’ careers as perpendicular lines to the more established lines of Messing and Houston. There’s direction provided in bright blocks of color. There’s conflict and derision and above all, movement, like dance, like song.
And why care about it at all? Abstractionism, Smash, different lamps in liminal spaces? Well, the unexamined life is not worth living, of course. Mehretu’s geopolitical analysis can be brought down to the level of introspection. Where the dispute between land and communities can be seen in Mehretu’s work, we can see the feud between the different identities that live within the landscape of our varied selves in Smash. There are different things beneath the surface of our consciousness that inform the way we move in the world. Every day or year or minute is another layer, a smattering of paint, a line forward. This framework helps to piece together the fragments and compressions we experience. We exist as a whole, as becoming over being, as wanting more for ourselves, as having it. Only by knowing the structure upon which we stand can we live our lives aware of ourselves—the multiplicities we contain, and the sum of experiences that color our views. We live in the milieu of identity, lines extending outward from the center. From knowing this, we can liberate ourselves, our identities, our communities, and truly know ourselves. The question lies in which lines we choose to follow that will inform what our future holds.
