Binion Drive

Glen Mannisto on McArthur Binion

Watching him not so much drive as slide his broken foreign car south, down Detroit's Woodward Avenue, his lengthy body seeming to be the whole apparatus called car, making it indistinguishable from him, and somehow more a phantom movement than driving. Not so much Negro (as in the Detroit driving posture called "copping a Woodward Avenue lean") but as a kind of omniscient horizontal fall through history, as an act of recapture, renewing and double-checking. After all it was his, this city–he owned it–this is, as Amiri Imamu Baraka said in In Our Terribleness, the terrible truth. This reconnaissance, sometimes night bivouac, sometimes simple daytime grid patrol, was part of a work of history he was "writing" called Modern:Ancient:Brown and it was a big work with muscular gestures that strained under the name of art or painting but had no other recognizable designation. Sliding through the narrowing of Woodward there at Six Mile, a seam that always makes you check what hybrid human is standing at the bus stop, then through Highland Park, tragically abandoned first Ford factory town, all the way down that big angry spoke of Detroit, to probably Lafayette Coney or Nemo's, for the taste. Here was the opposite end of his classical tether at Cranbrook Art Academy where somehow he studied and beneath chestnut and elm of this astonishingly beautiful planned educational community campus, he'd wandered with founder Eliel Saarinen's poetic text, The Search for Form in Art and Architecture, far from his tenant farmer origins in Mississippi. From this Cranbrook time, just before New York, there's a painting of great invention, Circuit.Landscape.No.5 (1972): beneath an eight foot square of unstretched canvas he laid a grid of string and with Dixon Paint Sticks he rubbed and scratched a phantom map-like grid. It is a light and airy painting that glows like a historied washed out bed sheet. It is like all of Binion's paintings an artifact that analogs the collision of Binion's obsessive survey of American culture and his obedience to his inheritance of the imperative of labor. His new works' confident, elemental shapes are like hides of skin that seem to be almost spiritual portraits. Binion's genius is to mock minimalism's reductivist discharge of history with an elegantly but laboriously charged sign that resonates with all of our awful histories.

© Glen Mannisto 2005