Sanford Biggers: the pasts they brought with them

To rend apart the traditions of the canvas support for painting, and obtain instead as a basis antique American quilts, as Sanford Biggers has done in several works on view in the pasts they brought with them, is to reject Modernist idealizations of a wholesome social fabric. Rather than whole, the quilts Biggers takes up as the starting point for paintings function totally and partially all at once—assemblages of fragments that signify, piece/by/piece, multiplicities of histories/prior states/traditions/stories/ homes. These works put pressure on the categorizing mechanisms of dominant regimes such as painting/the formalist grid/blackness/respectable highbrow society/masculinity. What fails to be held in these compartments of art and identity? Biggers wrangles collapse into form, quoting, for instance, the underlying grid structures of quilts and the national population they have served/represented, but in his spray paint overlays, he dislodges segments of parallel lines to drift into disorderly conduct. In DAGU, darker jewel-toned quilts are imbricated with spray painted trompe l’oeil clouds the production of which Biggers describes as a rite of passage among aspiring graffiti painters. In these combined gestures titled after Ethiopian nomadic practices, Biggers refuses any means of reduction that would restrict his traversal across studio/street/domestic/political spaces. One only has to recall Robert Rauschenberg’s 1955 Bed, Al Loving’s stitched together abstractions, or Faith Ringgold’s painted story quilts to note a complex history of combined/collaged painted forms meant to represent complicated identities lived out across the margins of art and social history.

In both bodies of work here presented, Biggers symbolically reenacts the role of the aggressor. Smeared between layers of juicy painting and flamboyant glitter, spots on Hat & Beard have been tarred; a lynching grin floats within the gridded composition as a lynchpin between Biggers’s present aesthetic concerns and tumultuous American histories of racialized brutality. Elsewhere the artist raises a gun, blasting away fragments of sculptural bodies. To tar, to paint, to shoot, to stitch, to cast, to video: Biggers associates violence with his other generative studio processes as an attempt to hold together pasts and presents that diverge into rapturous allure or horrific loss.

BAM (For Sandra) and BAM (For Michael) are iterated in both cast bronze sculpture (with a jet black patina also redolent of tarring) and HD video. For these works, Biggers selected African sculptures from his personal collection, glazed them in wax to soften their features, and subsequently shot them repeatedly at a shooting range where, “We weren’t trying to blow them apart, we were actually just trying to alter them... Chipping a little bit here and there, trying to take off a side of the head.”1 Titled in dedication to Sandra Bland and Michael Brown, each victims of police cruelty and killing, these works give material form to the memories of these and other repeated injustices toward black bodies and broader conditions of state sanctioned violence in America. In the video BAM (For Sandra), footage from the shooting range is played in reverse, so that fragments blow back into frame and attach to the female figure. Here, as in the quilts, is a gesture to incorporate, a reminder that our parts exceed monolithic accounts of self or identity. We carry histories that are partial and compounded, whose irregular edges signal to the unseen strata of our experiences—those interior, spiritual, or theoretical layers underneath.

1 Quoted from an interview with Sanford Biggers at Monique Meloche Gallery on February 10, 2016.