CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/29/2019

In 'Among Others,' Sam Gilliam addresses ontology, the artwork and the body

"10/27/69 (1969) reminds us of what it means to be a living, breathing human body in our world's space and time," Jessica Bell Brown writes in Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art's ambitious and searching 488-page investigation of its own uneven historical relationship with black artists, black audiences and the broader subject of racial blackness. Bell Brown goes on to describe the highly physical process of making this and other draped pieces, while noting that Gilliam's work may also be read in light of tensions around contemporaneous events like the Civil Rights Movement. She concludes that "the achievement of this and other drape paintings is their destabilization of the choreography of the body inside the white-cube gallery. These paintings ask us as viewers to be in them as much as they call out to be seen. In this sense, by forcing viewers to reckon with imposing forms and with their own bodies in actual space, abstractionists such as Gilliam called attention to ongoing debates about the ontological status of the artwork and of the body, and about art's supposed disengagement from urgent political matters of liberation, equality and power."