The Brooklyn Rail

In Hank Willis Thomas’s LOVERULES—From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, the material is the spectacle of American media itself, and the most commercial parts of it: advertisements, sports, logos, slogans—in this place, the United States, at this time—now, or what passes for now, which in Thomas’s hands includes the last four hundred years.

The Henry’s first rooms are intimate, and the curation focuses on Thomas’s text-based images in two facing rooms. In one, Thomas’s use of lenticular printing (a print of two overlayed images laminated with finely grooved plastic refracting one image or the other, depending on your angle) winks towards kitsch but is not. At first, one image reads ALL LIVES MATTER, but as you move, the V in “lives” fades away. Hence the title All Lies Matter (2019). Across the room, Power becomes Powerless—the “less” hovers, threatens. I saw a few people swaying side to side. On another wall, advertising slogans sit in sublime glittery blackness: It’s long, It’s still. It’s elegant. Thomas frequently removes advertising slogans, leaving the photograph naked, but here he leaves only text, font, and punctuation intact. So, just as if they were on a billboard, you read the words without choosing to, just because they are there. Your eyes move without volition. Thomas’s choreography continues with every subsequent room, and we all move from foot to foot or duck around with a little flashlight, or become still, as if attending a memorial.

Through the next door one sees the austere painting I Am Man (2007). It’s blunt like concrete poetry, black-on-white, sans-serif: I AM MAN. Be A Man and I Am Your Man hang on either side. Presented like this, these common phrases become existentially loaded and imbued with a reflection on the demands, and therefore the impossible binds, that Black men face. The typeface Willis is using is taken from the famous “I AM a man” placards carried in the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike, so we may need to linger to consider its ramifications, as well as the plays on words with which Thomas engages. Only upon entering is I Am 3/5 Man visible. Here the violence becomes specific: the fraction references the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787, which counted any enslaved person as a three-fifths person, denying slaves citizenship while allowing the Southern states to maintain outsized representation in Congress. But you have to step into the gallery to see the painting; you have to join to understand. And the drama in the reveal really does make your heart skip a beat.

One of the funniest effects of Thomas’s work is that the basic function of the advertisements remains. The images still make you want: charisma, cigarettes, sex, babies, personal beauty, or whatever else they originally sold. The smiling (naked?) parents in The Johnson Family (1981/2006), and the couple in Farewell Uncle Tom (1971/2007)—that sublime gaze as she smokes!—are beautiful. Even as the potential of the title dawns on us and lands a gut punch, a little fire of greed alights. For what, though? The solution, the call-to-action—namely, buy this, smoke that, be like this, wear this shoe—is gone. The thing to buy is not on offer. You cannot get what you want. This makes the desire wander around aimlessly; one is left only observing the want, the void.

There is a lot of artwork out there about white women. And without looking away from the specific role of white women in American racism, Thomas’s Unbranded: A Century of White Women is one of the most empathetic I’ve ever seen. For each year from 1915 to 2015, he selected an advertisement, removed the words, and enlarged it. The images, devoid of their phrases, brands, and logos, reveal a devastating conception of what white women are and should be. (Sexually available and pleasing—surprise!) Addiction, masochism, and sadism are all wordlessly encouraged in beauty advertisements, in jokes, in languid postures on chaises longues with Black butlers on hand, in punched eyes over wry cigarette smiles; the racism is overt in earlier years, covert later. None of it is new, but it’s still shocking. It’s eerily familiar to see an ecstatic ice skater lift her leg high enough for a full reveal, a woman lower her parted lips over an erect lipstick, a group of men surround and paw at a bikini-clad model. In fact, every image in the room is familiar, even nostalgic, making it terrifying to see them all together. This is what we wanted you to be. Thomas sifted through thousands of advertisements and researched their relationship to the respective year—and I’d love to know the backstory of each selection, even though it is all already encoded in my own conception of myself. T’is good this room has a couch.

I went with a friend from Seattle, and when I spoke, she’d reply in a whisper—which added to the conceptual-art drama already at work. We were circling Endless Column (2017), a stack of cast basketballs painted with iridescent purple-black auto paint, and I wanted to talk about monumentalism, about the fetish of the basketball player’s body, about height measured in basketballs, etc. And then we shined little flashlights on An All Colored Cast (2019), and I wanted to know if she also felt the immense sadness in these eulogies—lost histories and forgotten luminaries—while also noting the formal critique of modernism. My friend kept whispering back, “Uh-huh.”

I asked if we were allowed to talk. She said Seattleites tend to visit galleries quietly, even in silence.

Seattle is a segregated city, complete with a housing crisis, tent cities, and an ever-widening divide between its tech wealth/Amazon/Adobe/Google people and everyone else. Seattle has its own history, including a genocide of the Indigenous people who still live there. Seattle has a culture that needs, like everywhere else on this continent, to confront its origin. Far from requesting silence in these rooms, I think the artist would want us to be talking and listening, responding and thinking and discussing aloud and moving toward the edges of our individual vantage point. Through all this work, Thomas shows that criticality, anger, and unflinching remembrance are the core of empathy, healing, and escape into a different future.