Julie Mehretu: Story Maps of No Location
Installation view of Julie Mehretu at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2021
Like many New Yorkers, I first became aware of Julie Mehretu’s (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) work while cycling along the West Side bike path. The monumental Mural (2009) at Goldman Sachs’s headquarters, eighty feet long by twenty-three feet high, dominates the company’s lobby. The glass walls of the ground floor make Mural as close to public art as possible while still belonging to the private institution. In his article for The New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins writes that the firm paid five million dollars for Mural, which took the artist two years to make. About eighty percent of the payment went into fabrication costs, which included salaries for multiple assistants. The painting’s theme, according to Mehretu, deals with the history of global capitalism and the movements and dynamics of financial markets; it reflects the artist’s fascination with complex networks and geographical interconnectedness. Mural is not only emblematic of the particular, post-economic-collapse moment in time in which, coincidently, Goldman was simultaneously a victim and a perpetrator, but in 2009 it also signaled the arrival of a new visionary.
Julie Mehretu, Dispersion (Detail), 2002
Mehretu’s first major mid-career retrospective is now open at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It follows the artist’s career from the delicate drawings she made in the nineties after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design and follows the development of her visual vocabulary up until the present with the site-specific Ghosthymn (after the Raft) (2019-21), created for the Whitney’s space on the fifth floor, which looks out onto the Hudson river like the deck of a ship.
Installation view of Julie Mehretu at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2021
According to Mehretu, New York Harbor’s historical significance, as a point of entry for the immigrants who traveled across the Atlantic, was a starting point for this Ghosthymn. Like most of Mehretu’s work, this painting is highly aware of the political landscape of the now. The underpainting for it was created from the blurry photographs of the anti-immigration rallies that took place in recent years in response to the global refugee crisis. There is undeniable violence in Mehretu’s all-over storm of marks. Small fires of orange, red, and blue spray paint erupt across the battlefield of conflicting currents, colliding with black glyphs and strokes. In the interview with the Whitney’s curator, Mehretu maintains, “In the making of that painting I've been really studying Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (1819).” Géricault's large historical painting depicts a tragic shipwreck of the French frigate Medusa that took place near the coast of Senegal in 1816. The horror stories of starvation and cannibalism inspired Géricault and shocked his contemporaries. Mehretu is tracing the contemporary tragedy of sinking rafts full of desperate Libyan refugees to that earlier disaster that French colonizers encountered on their way to Africa.
Installation view of Julie Mehretu at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2021
Just as ravishing and political is Mehretu’s monumental Epigraph, Damascus, from 2016. The work was printed at Borch Editions in Copenhagen, with whom the artist has collaborated since 2015. It consists of six panels that recall Japanese-style multi-paneled silkscreened landscapes. However, Mehretu’s landscape is not bucolic: the basis for this work is a cityscape of the buildings destroyed during the recent civil war in Damascus, Syria. Mehretu superimposed her gestural marks made on large sheets of mylar and completed the composition with aquatint mists. “This process of layering mark over image over the mark,” explains LACMA’s curator Leslie Jones, “requires an astute familiarity with printmaking and here results in an accomplished fusion of dexterous line drawing with fluid and spontaneous mark-making.”
In a recent interview with Director of the Whitney, Adam D. Wineberg, Mehretu described her creative process as mark-making, which goes back to the earliest human expression of individuality. There is a finite number of marks that a person can make, but the combination of them is infinite. A mark, the artist went on, is the signifier of the resistance of individuals to the will of the masses. Her marks – which she at times refers to as “characters” – seem to undergo the simultaneous pull of being absorbed into communities of glyphs and the impulse of personal expression.
Installation view of Julie Mehretu at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2021
For Hineni (E. 3:4) (2018), Mehretu used an upside-down blurred photograph of a recent Californian wildfire as a point of departure. Blurring retained the photograph’s emotional charge while stripping it from the literal representation of the particular event. In Mehretu’s practice, titles are important: they give viewers a clue to the deeper meaning of the work. “Hineni” means “Here I am” in Hebrew. Moses says “here I am” to God, who appears to him as the burning bush. Here, Mehretu is finding in this biblical event parallels to our present-day ecological crisis, asking her audience to be present and bear witness to the moment that we are in.
What happens in Mehretu’s paintings matters. She is dealing with some of the most urgent issues of our time while being connected to the timeless and pre-linguistic space where only art can go. The large scale of the artist’s canvases underlines her subjects’ historic proportions. The subliminal experience of the underlying photography is similar to the way we experience architecture. When walking through the Whitney’s galleries of her show it is impossible not to be absorbed into their panoramic pull. Viewers become participants: they are both all-powerful observers and flying glyphs struggling to resist the pull of invisible forces. Mehretu told Wineberg that she wanted viewing to be turned into dancing. It is not surprising that the sense of presence in the work is palpable – because you are there.
Photo credit: © Irina Sheynfeld
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Julia Bryan-Wilson on Julie Mehretu,” February 1, 2020. https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202002/julie-mehretu-81917.
Hale, Mathew. “Julie Mehretu: The Origin of Work.” Essay. In Julie Mehretu, 270–76. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2019.
Kim, Christine Y. “New Acquisition: Julie Mehretu's ‘Epigraph, Damascus.’” Unframed. Accessed April 6, 2021. https://unframed.lacma.org/2018/04/24/new-acquisition-julie-mehretus-epigraph-damascus.
Tomkins, Calvin. “Big Art, Big Money.” The New Yorker. Accessed April 6, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/29/big-art-big-money.
Walter Annenberg Lecture: Julie Mehretu. Whitney Museum of American Art. Accessed April 7, 2021. https://whitney.org/events/walter-annenberg-lecture-julie-mehretu.