Kreuzberg, Berlin
Marley Freeman
Never Give A Sword To A Man Who Can't Dance
PSMI saw Freeman give a presentation on her work about a year ago. Painting after painting was projected onto the screen, and each time she would announce: “This one is about 12 inches by 17 inches,” or “This one is older, it’s a small painting,” or “This one I just made, it’s maybe 8 inches.” Tension was building over the bluntness and lack of directive around the work. It continued and gained a slightly comedic rhythm. Finally, a professor raised his hand and carefully asked: “Marley, do you feel like you know what your paintings are about?” “No. As soon as I start to know I change it,” she replied. I fantasize about the political identity of these paintings, this practice, and all the objects and gestures that come into it. There is an arrow pointing backwards, to mid-twentieth century gestural abstraction, but with none of the implied isolation or the cliché of grandiosity. Instead, I see a position in these paintings that slyly denounces vanguardism, preferring a feminist ethos of communitarian coexistence with its progenitors. The good manners of painting-as-game, or painting-as-steely-wall-against-interlopers, or as strategic conceptual résumé has been given only the slightest passing glance here. There is a preference for openness and the curious problem of an irregular accumulation of incidents. These are things that simply begin, stop, begin again, stop, begin again, and then occasionally conclude. —Caitlin Keogh