#charlesmcgill

#NotOnView: Charles McGill’s Arthur Negro II

Currently traveling and on view at Front Line, Back Nine at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Charles McGill’s Arthur Negro II is a life size, three dimensional, mixed media sculpture. Take a closer look--you could get lost for hours. 

Charles McGill began his investigation of the golf bag in the late 1990s when he created the pseudonym, Arthur Negro aka Art Negro and created a manifesto of Club Negro. He understood that he loved and participated in two worlds, art and golf, that were and are white on white.

When I was growing up, during the summer I played golf at my parents’ white country club. There was an African American who worked there named Leroy Peterson. Often late in the afternoon, he would play some holes (everybody had left and the course was empty) with me and my friend. We were pretty decent players, but Leroy would play against our best ball score. He always beat us and he played with only a five iron for every shot. Leroy was about the best player I ever saw. He could shoot under par with that 5 iron, no problem. If he was white, he would have been a pro for sure. Leroy cleaned golf clubs in the golf bag room in the basement of the clubhouse his whole adult life.

I have always believed that golf is a metaphor for life, and unfortunately that holds for racial relationships in America. McGill uses the material of the golf bag  flaying, tearing, stretching, and constructing to bring his objects to life. In “"Horse Run Afoul”

McGill has made an object that combines the dynamic movement of the Italian Futurist, Umberto Boccioni

With the gestural ease of John Chamberlain

I'll repeat something I said at the time of McGill’s last show at Zoubok:  McGill’s art is as much about golf as Chamberlain’s is about cars. Both utilize their materials to further their creative endeavors.

McGill never loses sight of the significance of art history in his work. In his tondo series, he employs a form that originates in the Renaissance and was so essential in the development of modernism in the work of Picasso and Braque. 

One particular tondo of McGill struck me as particularly pertinent, Target Tondo 1964

Surely the reference is to the great target series of Jasper Johns 

But what struck me was the reference to 1964, the year that the Civil Rights Bill was enacted. Fifty years later and yet it seems that hardly a day goes by without another incidence involving white police and black young men.

McGill fills his work with subtle references to history, yet after all the works are made from golf bags. So could they actually refer to the KKK?

Remember the powerful series by Andreas Serrano?

For McGill there is also the symbolism of hope in his pieces. His ability to display his work in a major gallery is in itself a sign of how far the art world has come, but also a recognition of how much territory remains to be covered. As of the writing of this post, there is a report of an African American University of Virginia honor student bloodied and beaten in an arrest by white police. 

For me this piece reflects both the hope and fear underlying McGill’s work. It seem so give a nod to Philip Guston who, in his late work, expressed the hope and anxiety of a late 20th century world.