Neue Bilder von Michael Jackson
LONDON — When the world first learned of Michael Jackson’s death, from an overdose in 2009, the news had a whiff of unreality about it. This was partly because for so long it had been hard to remember that he was actually a person. A child prodigy who in adulthood became a Peter Pan — fantastically refusing to grow old — Jackson was always more an idea than a human. Nearly a decade later, his extraordinary image endures as if he never left.
Now, a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, running through October 21, seeks to measure the impact and reach of Jackson as muse and cultural artifact. “Michael Jackson: On the Wall,” curated by Nicholas Cullinan, occupies 14 rooms and brings together the work of 48 artists, from Andy Warhol’s silk- screen prints, to an oil painting by Kehinde Wiley.
An imaginary iteration that Hank Willis Thomas appropriates is one of the show’s more shocking offerings, “Time Can Be a Villain or a Friend (1984/2009).” In this we see a rendition of Jackson with his natural skin tone, a pencil- thin mustache and a puff of hair. Mr. Thomas explains in the catalog that it is simply an artist’s rendering from a 1984 issue of Ebony, a glimpse of what the magazine imagined Jackson would look like in 2000. It is by far “On the Wall’s” most critical work: The image originally so full of pride and hope is now an indictment, and haunts the show like a scathing rebuke.
In this post- post- racial, postObama era of resurgent populism, it really does feel as though it matters whether you are black or white. It does make for a fascinating moment to re- evaluate Jackson’s image as a fundamentally “black” but simultaneously racially transcendent figure, or a monstrous desecration. These different perspectives run through the exhibition.
In the catalog, the critic Margo Jefferson calls Jackson “a postmodern trickster god,” noting “what visceral emotion he stirred (and continues to stir) in us!” She anticipates the novelist and essayist Zadie Smith’s castigating contribution in the next pages. Ms. Smith writes of her mother’s initial preoccupation with the singer: “I think the Jacksons represented the possibility that black might be beautiful, that you might be adored in your blackness — worshiped, even.” But, she adds, “By the time I became aware of Michael — around 1980 or so — my mother was finished with him, for reasons she never articulated, but which became clear soon enough. For me, he very soon became a traumatic figure, shrouded in shame.”
Such criticism makes the mistake of reducing Jackson to the role of tribal ambassador in a society built on oversimplified notions of racial and gender identity that his own art and self-presentation never stopped pushing against. The man who wrote “We Are the World” had an idealistic and expansive view of our common humanity.
One of the most compelling contributions to “On the Wall” is Lorraine O’Grady’s series of four diptychs, “The First and Last of the Modernists (Charles and Michael).” Comprising blown-up found photographs of the 19th- century French poet Charles Baudelaire and Jackson striking similar poses and tinted in a variety of pastel hues, these pieces deal inventively with the theme of mirroring.
“When Michael died, I tried to understand why was I crying like he was a member of my family,” Ms. O’Grady explained in an interview at the show’s opening in June. “I realized the only person I could compare him to was Baudelaire,” she said, listing ambiguous sexuality and a proclivity for wearing makeup as commonalities.
“But more importantly, they both had this exalted idea of the role of the artist,” Ms. O’Grady added. “If Baudelaire thought he tried to explain the new world he was living in to the people around him, Michael had an even more exalted vision: He felt that he was capable of uniting the entire world through his music.”