Kevin Beasley. View of a Landscape
For his first institutional solo show in New York City, on view at the Whitney Museum from December 15, 2018, Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) has devised a new installation that revolves around a cotton gin motor from Maplesville, Alabama. Triggered by a visit to Virginia for a family reunion that the artist made seven years ago, the work comes to terms with the American South and the history of slavery. In conversation with Anne Ellegood, Beasley discusses the concept and inspiration behind this ambitious project.
“KEVIN BEASLEY. A VIEW OF A LANDSCAPE,” WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK. FROM DECEMBER 15, 2018.
ANNE ELLEGOOD: I thought we could start by talking about your interest in the cotton gin, and the visit you made to Virginia for your family reunion in 2011 that triggered this entire project.
KEVIN BEASLEY: Experiencing the cotton field for the first time on family property switched what I understood historically and socially about American history and slavery. Experiencing the field up front placed it in a personal space where I felt like I had to develop language and realized I hadn’t reconciled this history. I’d encountered transgressions in the past, and I was aware of the political ramifications of my life, civil rights, and racism in general, but I think that seeing the cotton field materialized it. It located it geographically and inside me personally, in a way that was less familiar.
I’m picturing you coming across the cotton fields and having an acute awareness of that materiality. It sounds like it was quite a visceral reaction for you, like you felt it in your body more than in your brain.
Exactly. It felt like I didn’t have control over it, so that made it very potent. Maybe that allowed me to feel that I had a way of processing it, because I think so much about the body and use my body in so many ways, so it’s something that’s already on my mind.
Do you believe that historical violence can be captured in the body and passed down through our DNA?
I think trauma is carried down in one form or another and is felt in the way you respond to certain conditions or circumstances. It’s hard for me to articulate, but when I saw the cotton field, I had a sense that I already knew something. And then it took control in a way that was almost spiritual.
Did you know in that moment that you would return to pick the cotton, or that this experience would lead to a project like the one you’re doing at the Whitney?
No, it wasn’t an immediate thing. A conversation with my Mom that followed made me realize I needed to reconcile this. I knew that I had to get where she was, like I had to get to a point where I could understand this complexity and not always have a heavy, visceral response. That led to my decision to revisit the farm – except this time alone, which I had never done. The family reunion was in August, and because I was in school, it was toward the end of December during winter break that I went back down.
And did you make work at that time?
I took a lot of photographs. I made some videos, and a lot of sound recordings. I knew that going back down to Virginia would yield food for thought, and I came back to New Haven with bags of cotton I had picked.
Did you have a sense of what you were going to do with the cotton?
I had no idea! I was kind of baffled that I was having this response to this plant. You know, I wear cotton t-shirts all the time. It’s like my uniform for every occasion. So all these questions were coming up: “Who’s picking cotton now? Where is it grown?” I was thinking about how to process it in two ways: How do I physically process it? And how am I processing the experience and the economics around it?
What’s your understanding of the role the cotton gin played in the mechanization of farming?
Well, from what I know, the cotton gin permitted bigger production of cotton, and a kind of economic dominance that ushered in the industrial revolution because the machine was placed within the production process. One major impact it had was on slavery. There was this idea that it would actually diminish the need for slaves, but in fact what it did was just the opposite. It increased the need for slavery by increasing the capacity for growing cotton and thus the need for more bodies in the field to pick that cotton.
Your installation at the Whitney will feature a cotton gin motor. How did you acquire this motor?
I was thinking about the cotton plant, all the violence that surrounds it, and the process of turning it into some kind of object. I began to search for a cotton gin that I could acquire, perhaps an old tabletop machine, and I came across this really heavy motor on eBay. So, to make a long story short, in February 2012, I drove down to Maplesville, Alabama.
And Maplesville is close to Selma?
It’s about 30 miles outside.
So, you’re deep in history now.
Very deep. I was with my friend Leon, who was also in the graduate program at Yale, and we made a commitment to
really be present for the trip. We felt that driving was going to yield something very special. And it did. It operated as its own artwork, its own way of engaging…
So, you go meet Bobby who sells you the cotton gin motor. Tell us about Bobby.
Bobby was not what I was expecting. But he was everything I had hoped for. He was as generous as anyone could be. He asked us to meet at his house, and it was a nice house in the middle of a big field. He drove up on this Bush Hog ATV all-terrain vehicle and came around to the driver’s side of our car. I rolled down the window, and we’re eyeing each other, and he says, “You didn’t think it’d be that cold down here now, did you?” I was kind of stunned. And then, that was it. He showed us his house, and he’s got moonshine, and a new home theater, and a gym that he put inside his bomb shelter. He was retired, had closed all his businesses, and had a lot of stories to share. Our visit felt like a treat. When the time came to see the motor, it was epic, because it was the last part of the tour.
It was the final piece of the narrative.
Exactly. We were standing there staring at it, and he said, “I still remember the way it sounds,” and I asked him what it sounds like and he said, “I can’t really tell you. I don’t really have the words. It’s like a hum.’’ He had that sound so sharply in his head because he grew up around it. He was 66 at the time, and the motor operated on that farm from 1940 to 1973. So he’d listened to that thing run every day, all day. But he couldn’t really describe it. It felt like there was a silence. There were no words. There was something about that exchange that really stuck with me and informed the work to come.
So, you eventually drive the motor to New Haven. Let’s talk about Eli Whitney, who was the inventor of the cotton gin. The prototype he made for the original cotton gin is so beautiful. It looks like an instrument. What was his relationship to Yale?
He grew up in Massachusetts, and he went to Yale for his formal education. And today the Eli Whitney Museum is in New Haven. He was a thinker, an engineer, an inventor. He was the primary advocate for the idea of interchangeable parts in weapons manufacturing. The idea that you could have an assembly line and easily replace parts greatly accelerated the industrial revolution.
We should also note that Eli Whitney has family ties to the husband of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney – the founder of the Whitney Museum – so staging your project there is a kind of strange alignment of fate and history.
It’s a loose link but it does reaffirm the importance of geography and ancestry. I’m hoping to further extend an awareness of context. It’s almost like an appropriation of site, where an illumination can occur.
Let’s turn to the installation you are planning for the Whitney, which will take place in two separate but adjacent galleries. Can you discuss your decision to present the cotton gin motor in a large soundproof glass vitrine?
After my conversation with Bobby about its sound, the only way I could imagine doing it was to put the motor in a glass chamber. I needed people to see it, but for it to be soundproof. I needed the vitrine to be an object in its own right, but it also had to allow people to have
a clear image of the motor itself. And that meant it had to be glass, on a particular scale, and it needed to be made really well. I was also thinking historically about art and looking at works like On Kawara’s One Million Years (1969).
So you were thinking about compressing a vast amount of time into an artwork?
I was thinking about how I was making this big gesture by putting an object in a glass box in a museum, and I was asking myself, “Who else has done that?” and “What do I not want to do?” and “What approach would be best so the reading of the work doesn’t get lost?” The case builders became an essential part of that. The company we worked with, Goppion, is based in Milan, and they make premiere glass cases around the world – exquisite cases for objects, artifacts, even quantum computers. They did the cases for the Mona Lisa and the crown jewels!
And then in the adjacent gallery you can hear the motor but not see it. You’re using a variety of microphones and positioning them near different parts of the motor to capture the range of sounds it makes.
It was important to create this soundproof environment and then extract all the sound and spit it out into another space. The approach to setting up the microphones is a marriage of different miking techniques and different kinds of microphones, whether they’re contact or Lavalier models. The question is how do I want to take the sound of this motor in its raw state and have it come out on the other side?
And these decisions are going to have a big impact on the experience of sound in the next gallery.
Right, so at this point, I get to come back into the project to make aesthetic choices. That becomes the generative part for me, because it gets into affect, into being able to relate to a moment of expression and things you wouldn’t necessarily associate with a project that is so technologically driven. It’s where the slippages can happen, where the residue starts to build up, where this thing starts to live and have another life of its own.
And the processing of the sound is a big part of that as well?
Yes, the processing will be with a modular synth. I’ve worked with synthesizers before, but I’m building my own modular synthesis for the first time. I’m looking for things that may have a certain texture or quality that I really like or can work well with this application, because the motor is like a drone, it’s a constant sound.
You are also making three sculptures that are architectural in scale and will function like walls or barriers.
These sculptures are sites for narrative content related to the experience of acquiring the motor, of seeing the cotton fields for the first time, and of the research that went into this project. They are a way to disseminate and materialize information. What do these experiences look like, what shape do they take, and what are their textures and qualities?
These structures are double-sided, with pure unprocessed cotton on one side that is remarkably textured and beautiful. On the other side, you have created imagery by tearing and arranging clothing to evoke places, like the cotton fields, or moments in time. This is an important gesture because it connects the project to your past interest in using particular materials that have history and politics embedded within them. You’ve been using cotton for many years in your sculptures — whether a hoody or t-shirt or bandana — but in these earlier sculptures, the original shape of that clothing remains recognizable. In these new works, instead, the garments are broken apart and reconstituted into something almost like a painting because of their pictorial quality. What are the different scenes you are depicting in these pieces?
One is called Reunion and it’s a landscape that references the field in Virginia.
In reference to the family reunion that took you to Virginia and turned out to be the catalyst for the project?
Yes, the reunion was the start of the whole thing, and it’s rooted in ancestry and what gets passed down. I want to work pictorially but in a very visceral and tactile way. These works are heavy. When confronting this field of cotton you can’t just turn away. I didn’t want them to go neatly on a wall. The physical presence must be understood as significant, and they must occupy space. The show is titled “A view of the landscape,” so it’s about the idea of landscape and geography. It’s about the way people use land and the implications of that. I’m thinking historically about black bodies and land and this property that has been in my family since the 1910s. The second one is titled The Acquisition, and it’s the moment when Leon and I are in Bobby’s tractor shop. In this work, I’m thinking about the relationship between the working space, labor, and bodies. Sites of production that are also sites of inquiry. It has the closest relationship to the studio, a place of contemplation. It depicts the moment when I actually acquired the motor, so I’m thinking about the production and the exchanges that happen in these workspaces and in the studio. This is like my
Matisse’s red studio, where I can reimage other works. I can take works that I’ve made and embed them inside. It allows me to depict the interior of the studio and to think about the items that are found there that I am constantly using. I’m thinking about bringing the labor of farming and the labor of the studio into the context of the museum. Both of those systems of labor result in the production of something. The experience of the work then becomes one of acknowledgment of those systems, which we tend not to acknowledge once a work is in the context of the museum. Once a work is done, we kind of forget how it was made. It just becomes a finished object. And then the third piece is The Campus. I’m thinking about research and education, the dissemination of information, and how that holds an important role in this entire project for me. This informs the way we understand these objects, and the history and the context that they come out of. And I realize that there’s also a lot of trauma in those spaces, and in those experiences and narratives. Being at Yale, I would sometimes think, “Oh, it’s just by chance that I’m even here.”
That reminds me of when you told me that there are buildings on campus named after slave owners. There’s a continuous presence of our traumatic past in our daily lives. Of course, the presence of historical monuments that refer to these violent acts and traumas, and their perpetrators, are being debated widely in our country right now. Whether they should remain or be taken down. It seems worth noting, too, that we’re talking today about your experience at Yale about an hour after Brett Kavanaugh, a Yale alumnus, was confirmed to the Supreme Court. It’s fascinating that this project was generated both from your trips to the South and from the privileged context of an Ivy League university, as you’re digging deeply into American history and all of the traumas that we have yet to fully process and reconcile. Your work will be on view at the Whitney during an incredible period of reckoning in our country, one that has resulted in some successes and many devastating failures, which can make us feel at times that these histories are too ingrained to overcome. And your project may be an invitation to a certain kind of reckoning as well.
Anne Ellegood is Senior Curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.