Torkwase Dyson: Working with the 'under-conscious' started with the drawings?

McArthur Binion: I was dealing with the idea of the under-conscious already, but the drawings came from a need to try to make language for it. I never had much language for it. But what was clear to me was that everything always started with the under-conscious. I explain it like this: I’m not discovering the under-conscious, I’m becoming it. It’s the character just under the surface, close to the skin. It comes from a raw intellect, a raw instinct, not an educated intellect. It’s the stuff you don’t have to think about. It’s the thread that nails the work. And I really never intended to work with the under-conscious this long but the idea resonated so much with me, I stayed close to it.

TD: You created all of these lines, these fissures, these marks, all over, over and over, one up against another, all by hand?

MB: Yeah, I use my left and right hands. That’s where the drawings come from, that’s where the under-conscious comes from—the buildup of my marks.

MB: So you really got up close, you saw the real thing.

TD: I had to. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. I walked in and I was like, “Unh-uh. I need to get in these.” I needed proof that a human being—that’s not Agnes Martin, that’s not working on a grid— has that amount of consistency for that amount of time and that amount of space.

MB: It was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done.

TD: You are also very intentional about your register of politics around abstraction, the history of abstraction, and the way you use that language in terms of your own work, your own identity. Working with your history, your memories, the way in which you lived geographically, and all the choices that you make in your life.

MB: The under-conscious is all about who you really are, it’s in your DNA. I wouldn’t change a day of what happened in my life because that’s the under-conscious. The under-conscious is all about that instinct. It’s as raw as you can go.

READ ON

DNA:WORK, 2019

Binion’s DNA:Work paintings appear to be a minimalist abstract grid composed of interlacing and repetitive lines made in oil-stick, yet beneath the surface lies a highly personal narrative. The foundational layer features facsimiles of the artist's address book, which he used while living in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Addresses and phone numbers for the likes of Jack Whitten, Joanna Pousette-Dart and Stanley Whitney, all written in Binion's scrawl, undergird the work’s form and content. The artist describes the psychological evocations of his address book: "all those names and numbers I've had in one book for over twenty years... working on those I was reliving every day of my life. Every name, every face—it's emotional; you think of things, and you feel things."[iii] Binion's grid pushes back and challenges "attempts to unlink abstraction from questions of location and identity."[iv]

DNA:WORK, 2020

In addition to his address book, McArthur Binion uses other personal photographs and documents to disseminate the intimate details of his identity, relationships and history: the house where he was born (as seen in this painting), his birth certificate, passport photo, and a portrait of his mother are among the other visuals comprising the foundational collage layer in his DNA:Work. Up close, this structured, muted composition reveals tiny images of the two-bedroom farm house in Macon, Mississippi where Binion was born, one of eleven children. The artist credits this circumstance as formative; he relishes the solitude and silence he finds in the studio.

In McArthur Binion’s birth certificate, seen in another DNA:Work painting in the exhibition, one can distinguish the address of this childhood home: “Route One: Box Two,” as well as the explicit designation “colored.” When the artist was four, his family moved from rural Macon, Mississippi to industrial Detroit, Michigan, a biographical detail that speaks to the Great Migration, when 6 million African Americans moved out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West. 

The gestural Under:Conscious Drawings also speak to the artist’s esteem for labor, which he attributes to his own biography—whether agricultural labor in Mississippi or factory labor in industrial Detroit, physical work played a central role in the artist’s upbringing. This regard for work and craftsmanship manifests in the rigorous build-up of material in his painting and drawing practice. Binion has long embraced using both hands to ensure lack of fatigue.

The physicality of his process is evident in the Under:Conscious Drawings. As Dyson observes, “It looks like [creating these drawings] took everything in you. From your toes to the top of your head.”[vii]

ABOUT MCARTHUR BINION

McArthur Binion (b. 1946 Macon, MS; lives and works in Chicago, IL) creates highly personal and labor-intensive works that assert his unique position between minimalism, identity politics, and abstraction. Binion employs elemental materials such as oil stick, ink, and graphite to create a dense interlacing grid on the surface of his paintings. 

This hand-made geometry is applied to a ground layer of neatly tiled images—reproductions of personal photos and documents—that offer glimpses in to the artist’s life: his birth certificate from Mississippi that designates him “colored,” the farm house where he was born, a passport-sized self-portrait, or an address book capturing his formative years in New York among contemporaries Brice Marden, Dan Flavin, and Jack Whitten. Binion’s use of these visuals belie his abstract gridded composition, disseminating intimate details of his personal history, while also staking a firm position within the history of Black Abstraction. Highly influenced by poetry and bebop jazz, McArthur Binion swings between improvisation and order, abstraction and biography. His works refuse easy categorization, continuously shifting between a critique and an acceptance of the minimalist aesthetic, ultimately rooting the works in an individual dedication to the process of painting.