About Simplicism

By McArthur Binion

[Text from lecture presented at G. R. N'Namdi Gallery,
Detroit, October 3, 2004.]

Firstly, you should know that this show is dedicated to my mother, Martha Stowers Binion, and my father, Reverend Earl Binion. I lost them both in the last eighteen months. Since I began writing poetry (I was a poet before I was a painter, I wrote because I couldn't speak), they have and even now continue to guide my work, my work ethic and the choices I consider and choose. They gave me simplicism.

Simplicm comes from humble beginnings. Simplicism employs only necessary tools. Simplicism stays focused and works hard because it values focus and work; but also in the service of a larger purpose. Sometimes family, sometimes justice, sometimes money, sometimes abstract art. Simplicism is the evolution of a process I created in New York over twenty years ago called handmade geometry, and of an enterprise I later called modern : ancient : brown. I see simplicism as a world-wide movement.

My family moved to Detroit from Mississippi with hundreds and thousands of other families making their way to northern cities from the south. My father and my uncle (they'd married two sisters) came to Detroit, got work in the Cadillac plant and sent for their families. There were 18 of us in a two-bedroom house at 8 Mile and Monte Vista.

Tenant farmers turned factory workers.

We broke the color line in our neighborhood in 1952.

After the move, my mother raised eleven children and cleaned other folks' houses five days a week.

I was the first black person to graduate from Cranbrook Academy of Art with a Master of Fine Arts degree.

Consistent with earlier work, the simplicism series involves a laborious application process that forms the "under-work" of each piece. Autobiographical preoccupations frame and filter this structure, which relies on color, chance and strength to determine where and how the layering is built up in the finished piece. The intense physicality of this technique owes as much to the action painting tradition as it does to the field labor of sharecroppers–the same hands that bled picking cotton as a child now bleed from the abrasion of colored wax on wood. I am a worker; I come from a family of workers; this is art/work. Simplicism is Mississippi and Cranbrook Academy, Detroit and New York and Chicago: an attempt to align my histories. My field-hand-to-auto-worker ancestry and my classical art education collide, revealing the under-conscious only I know.

Until now.

For me, and I hope for you, what is abstract is not a mystery. It is an acceptance, a welcome, a joint venture. It is a convergence disallowed by language. It is an opportunity to see something not seen before.

My work comes from a place not involved so much with art history as with my own history. And my history is somewhat unusual in the art world and it leads me to take a non-traditional approach to making paintings.

Yes, it's a voice. Yes, it's an expression. Yes, it's an expression of a particular voice, with a particular history. But the particularity is the thing; the depth below the surface is the thing.

If you see, as opposed to look, and like or don't like the particularity, then you are moved to look further. Maybe you choose other work to go to, but you go somewhere.

The artists I look for, the ones I pursue and even revere, are not primarily painters or printmakers. They are musicians and they are sculptors. Two visual artists that I have been close to and who have impressed me with their will to offer something complete and to compose in a new idiom are Judy Pfaff and David Hammons. Judy reinterprets painting and sculpture to produce a unique personal vision. David likes to pick up trash-like things on the street and make them into art, or bounce a charcoal-covered basketball on paper to create drawings. But his visual interests are always about the work ethic and its interaction with the black community.

Fundamentally, the work ethic in my work is the same thing as my work. The materiality I create is the image. The materiality I create is the image. Since 1973, when I left Detroit, I have positioned my work not so much between, but alongside, pure abstraction and figurative imagery. In past work, there has been the grid, the documentary photograph, the map, the root vegetable. The figurative image in this work is me, I am literally the dimensions of the work. This is where my parents come in. The connection, the focus, me–the product.

My paintings, all my paintings, explore modernist iconography while conjuring cultural memory from personal history. Essentially, I hope to evoke the tactile pleasure of all-over abstraction and combine it with the responsibility of representation and association: I want to trigger the viewer to mine the surfaces and posit questions and answers in confronting the canvas, the wood, the paper. I understand the power of painting as a historical document: as an engagement with formal concerns; as a record of what the hand of the artist can and cannot do in the age of mechanical representation; as a struggle with the authority of memory and the media (which is the material) and the media (which is commerce).

This is what I understand, I see it all, and I keep to the work.