Surface play: rewriting black interiorities through camouflage and abstraction in Mickalene Thomas's oeuvre

Abstract

This essay examines the use of camouflage, artifice, and abstraction – as strategies of surface-play – by Mickalene Thomas, a contemporary painter. Many scholars have focused on Thomas's use of painting materials (e.g. enamel, rhinestones, glitter) that locate her work within discourses of consumer culture and beauty in hip-hop aesthetics. While providing a different orientation to the look through the black queer gaze, the author argues that Thomas's method (e.g. photography, collage-painting, installation) and use of materials signify the surface of her work as a corporeal topography of black interiorities. Camouflage, artifice, and abstraction reveal interiorities hidden in plain sight. The first part of this article examines camouflage and artifice as porous surface-play, while the second part turns to a discussion of abstraction in Thomas's work as a method that pushes the boundaries of representation and abstractionism.

Keywords:

• Mickalene Thomas
• artifice
• camouflage
• photography
• interiority
• surface aesthetics
• abstraction
• surface-play
• painting
• surface-at-play
• surface
• affect
• psychoanalysis

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my colleagues at The Pennsylvania State University who read early incarnations of this article. I am appreciative of the anonymous reviewers with Women & Performance for their engagement and critical reflection on this article.

Note on contributor

Sarah Stefana Smith is an artist and scholar who currently holds the position of Postdoctoral Fellow (2017–18) in the Department of African American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She holds a Ph.D. from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and an M.F.A. from Goddard College. Her research explores the intersections of visuality, queerness, and affect in black diasporic art and culture. She has published in Drain: Journal of Art and Culture and Ruptures: Anti-Colonial and Anti-Racist Feminist Theorizing. She is currently working on her book manuscript, Poetics of Bafflement: Aesthetics of Frustration. For more information, visit sarahstefanasmith.com.

Notes

1 Nicolas Poussin (1595–1665) was a leading painter of the French Baroque style. Favoring the use of line over color, Poussin has been credited with an attention to clarity, order, and measurement.

2 I am referencing considerable debates on blackness and representation, particularly as they pertain to femininity. Many scholars have focused on reconciling negative imagery of blackness, while others have done recovery works to reclaim these representations. Jennifer Nash (2014) provides an astute negotiation of these debates in black feminist scholarship and illuminates the limitations of such a dialectic engagement with black sexuality and pleasure.

3 Even as Muñoz traces Deleuzian and Freudian orthodoxies of thought, he is clear to make the assessment that Deleuze and Freud are not in total opposition. Muñoz's (2009) intention is to argue that we gain the possibility of theorizing interiority more fully without such opposition between schools of thought (125).

4 See Wynter's (1992) “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice” for an extensive discussion on the ethno-class human and reimagining a decolonized aesthetic reading practice.

5 Ann Elias, Ross Harley, and Nicholas Tsoutas identify two overlapping meanings for camouflage that include the history and principles of camouflage as it emerged in the context of modernity. This is juxtaposed against new approaches to camouflage in the age of heightened digital surveillance and technologies (Elias et al. 2015, viii). This distracting role of camouflage – to deceive by minimizing presence of profile – is of course only half the story, as the very same mechanisms of contrived outward appearances also work to attract attention (127).

6 The exhibition to which I am referring took place in the Meyeroff Gallery at the Maryland Institute for the Arts from January to March 2017.

7 Inspiration includes Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, Renee Cox, and LaToya Ruby Frazier.

8 The late nineteenth century saw a shift in Western art away from what was once underpinned by regimes of perspective and the reproduction of reality. The end of the nineteenth century ushered in artists interested in breaking with this approach through a departure from the illusion of reality. This shift also reflected critical changes in technological and scientific innovation of the time.

9 Dabrowski asserts that elemental geometric forms take up different stylistic trajectories in Europe and Russia. For example, in Holland Piet Mondrian's (1872–1944) “Neoplasticism” attempted to expunge all reference to the real world. In Russia it took the form of “Suprematism.” Avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) is known for coining Suprematism, in which he created nonobjective compositions of elemental forms floating in white unstructured space, and strove to achieve “the absolute”: the higher spiritual reality that he called the “fourth dimension” (Dabrowski 2004).

10 Tête de Femme (2014), the exhibition to which I am referring here, took place at Lehmann Maupin Gallery from June to August of 2014.