Questions over Jackson art show
Michael Jackson: On the Wall National Portrait Gallery
Critics questioned why an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery devoted to Michael Jackson has neglected to mention the more troubling aspects of the star’s life. Michael Jackson: On The Wall explores the singer’s influence on art, but makes no reference to the allegations of child abuse that dogged Jackson’s life. Peter Saunders, founder of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, said the “grim side to his story” should be recognised.
Nearly a decade on from his death, Michael Jackson remains a hugely controversial figure. For millions around the world, he is an idol, the ultimate personification of glamour. For another, equally substantial constituency, he’s far from heroic: a beautiful African-american man who – while protesting his black pride – denied his identity at every turn, becoming a self-mutilated projection of American showbiz values at their most destructive. Not to mention the allegations of paedophilia that have trailed in his wake, and the abuse he is said to have suffered as a child.
None of which makes him an inappropriate subject for an exhibition. Quite the reverse. Jackson’s basket of tragic contradictions, not to mention the baroque kitsch of his public image – and, oh yeah, his music – are a gift for any artist.
So it’s hardly surprising that he should have become, as this bold and enterprising show at the National Portrait Gallery puts it, “the most widely depicted cultural figure in
‘It’s as though you’ve entered some entrancingly bonkers fairground attraction’
contemporary art”. The show starts spectacularly, with Jackson in his pomp: as renaissance potentate in a full-sized equestrian portrait by Kehinde Wiley, a pastiche of a Rubens painting of Philip II, commissioned by Jackson himself (without apparent irony), shortly before his death in 2009. As you take in a wall-filling video of American artist Susan Smith-pinelo’s cleavage bouncing in time to Jackson’s Workin’ Day and Night, then walk through a gateway formed from Mark Rydon’s artwork for the Dangerous album, it’s as though you’ve entered some entrancingly bonkers fairground attraction – but one that hasn’t got quite as much to do with art as you’d expect or, certainly, hope.
While there’s no shortage of portraits by named artists, from the brilliant (Gary Hume’s circular image of pale skin and hypnotic eyes in household gloss) to the boring (Maggie Hambling, Keith Haring and Grayson Perry all disappoint) – few of them probe beyond the surface of the self-styled King of Pop.
Andy Warhol, that great connoisseur of “iconic” fame, inevitably enters the fray, with black and white snaps of Jackson and his brothers blown up into atmospheric wallpaper, though his Michael Jackson, 1984, three identical images of the smiling young singer in three different colourways is late Warhol at his most blandly generic.
It’s with African-american artists, who have, perhaps, a stronger personal and cultural investment in Jackson’s story, that the exhibition starts to bite.
Rashid Johnson’s The Wiz, formed from a mirrored shelving unit with LP records, spattered with shea butter, black soap and other Africanamerican cosmetic products, gives a visceral sense of Jackson as a constant, gnawing, almost biological presence in black life.
Even closer to the bone, Hank Willis Thomas’s Time Can Be a Villain or a Friend, 2009, is simply an enlarged 1984 image from the African-american magazine Ebony, showing an imagined projection of how Jackson might look in the year 2000. This suave, mustachioed soul man depicted could hardly make a more poignant contrast with how Jackson would actually look. While this show will undoubtedly put a smile on your face, there’s too much art here that nods towards profundity, but doesn’t go much beyond fun.
Certainly the show – which runs until October 21 – misses what, to my mind, is Jackson’s vital role as a prophetic prototype of the way we live now: the neurosis and the infantility, the obsession with body-transformation and gender fluidity that consume young people today were all being lived out by Jackson a good three decades ago.