2 weeks Ago By Anny Shaw
Oliver Lee Jackson has always been wary of politics. That is not to say that the artist, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1935, at a time when very few African-American working-class men made their way to art school, has not been involved in political movements virtually his entire career.
In the late 1960s he advised the St. Louis collective of musicians, poets, dancers and artists known as the Black Artists Group, while in 1971 he developed the curriculum for the Pan African department at the California State University in Sacramento, where he taught until 2002. Both bodies were born out of the struggles of racial segregation.
In his art, however, Jackson has largely avoided reference to specific historical or political events, except for a series of paintings he created in the 1970s based on photographs of Anti-Apartheid demonstrators escaping the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 in Johannesburg. Instead, his paintings—which are on show in London for the first time at Lisson Gallery —resist definition: they are spaces for contemplation and multiple interpretation, free from the constraints of language (he never titles his works, preferring to number and mark them in pencil with a copyright symbol) and the false oppositions that seek to divide people. “When you take sides, whether it’s black or white, you got a position.
You’re missing it,” the artist says. “These struggles degrade, and even if you win, it takes a while to come back from that. The battle itself degrades you.
You can become so degraded by the action of relieving yourself of oppression that you yourself become what the United States is a perfect example of: the bully.” Though his painting style draws from Abstract Expressionism, Jackson describes himself as a figurative artist. For him, the figure is the jumping-off point into other worlds—psychological, spiritual, emotional.
In earlier works, bodies appear more solid, more material. In one canvas from 1990, Painting (8.6.
90) , five hunched figures emerge as if carved from lumps of dark brown stone. More recently, Jackson has treated the figure with a lightness and economy of line, drawing in chalk to create bodies that expand and fragment towards the edges of the picture. Since the 1970s, he has worked on canvases placed flat on trestles or on the studio floor, allowing him to move around the surface in 360 degrees without being bound by his own bodily limits.
Rarely are his figures racially specific, which has sometimes prompted questions from viewers. “I had one person ask me why I don’t have black people in my paintings. But that’s how racism works—you wouldn’t ask a white person why they don’t paint white people,” Jackson says.
Nonetheless, references to African-American culture are discernible if you look closely enough: bodies gathered together—“a feature of African-American life”—and brown arms embracing groups of figures. In one new work, Untitled Painting (9.18.
24) , a silver spray-painted African head stencilled in the bottom left corner appears to blow life into the tableaux unfolding above—a possible stand in for the artist himself. Indicators of other societal structures and class struggles are present in subtle ways: a pair of shoes left at the edge of a canvas, as if removed on entering the scene, or an upturned hat beside a seated figure. “By taking off your shoes or your hat you are being subordinate.
You take your shoes off, you acquiesce,” Jackson says. “The aristocracy never took their shoes off when they walked into a peasant’s home. That’s a sign of disrespect.
” These motifs as well as the art historical references that populate his paintings—hints of Goya, Basquiat, Renaissance draughtsmen and African Modernists—are all filtered through what Jackson calls an “African sensibility”. This sensibility has infused many art forms, but is often closely linked to music, particularly styles that have rhythm as a foundation such as jazz and hip hop. Jackson has often cited jazz as an inspiration for the improvisational nature of his mark-making.
As he puts it: “I learned a lot about composing and visual orchestration from my relationships with musicians, how to create an experience for the viewer through intervals and ratios.” It is perhaps also a musical experience he strives for the viewer to have with his art: to receive it unmediated and all at once like an LSD trip, as he puts it. “That’s why it’s powerful, it happens simultaneously.
It’s the kind of communication that moves you deeply. And it’s spiritual only because it’s interior, you get it all. Whether you can handle it all is another question.
” The promotion of an “African sensibility” was key to establishing the Pan African department at the California State University in the wake of the student activism and liberation movements of the 1960s. The aim: to provide students with a sense of belonging, cultural or otherwise. “The game was afoot with these goddam names,” Jackson says.
“The word ‘negro’ does not have anything to do with place, it’s about skin colour. We were trying to teach our people that, no, you’re not lost. Everybody else comes from a place in the world, you come from Africa.
” More than 40 years later, Jackson thinks the US is in a perilous state. Black studies are once again under threat and the needle has hardly moved in the art world, despite the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 dramatically shifting the socio-economic landscape. As events unfolded, museums jostled to assert their solidarity, but their gestures felt meaningless and far too late.
The fact that Jackson is only now gaining recognition outside of the US is a symptom of the art world’s deeply engrained prejudices. Such prejudices have been openly championed by the US president Donald Trump , but Jackson returns to his scepticism of politics. “Trump ain’t no big deal,” he says.
“Trump took advantage of what was there to be taken advantage of. Trump would be a joke if it wasn’t for the rest of the fuckers who put him in there.” For Jackson, humanity is facing a far bigger struggle.
“Right now, human beings are in a desperate spiritual place,” he says. “That’s what I’ve been interested in all along. The one thing our oppression in the United States has made clear is that the spiritual dynamic is very tricky—you can win a political struggle and be so bent up yourself that you lose the centre that makes you a human being.
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