Steve McQueen at the Tate Modern: Cinematics of Touch, Flesh, and Embodiment | Arts.Black

In this essayistic review of Steve McQueen’s mid-career retrospective at the Tate Modern, published on Arts.Black, I think through the artist’s rigorous film-based art practice as articulating a diasporic cinema of ‘touch’, both in the haptic and affective senses of the term.

Excerpt:

“The exhibition, McQueen’s first major institutional survey, is organized non-chronologically and is, by and large, experienced in the dark — a curatorial move that stresses the artist’s consistent deployment of darkness in his work. Akin to Walter Benjamin’s flaneur, who prowls the modern city absorbed by the arresting glow of neon-enhanced advertisements, I was similarly guided through the Tate’s darkened galleries with the aid of off-cast lighting produced by McQueen’s projections. I felt as though my eyes were not supposed to focus on anything else besides the exhibited works, allowing for an experience that was immersive tout court. This sensation of technologically aided sensory absorption formed an embodied thematic connection to Illuminer (2001) in which McQueen films himself lying on a bed in a dark hotel room, his partially nude body faintly illuminated by the glare of an off-screen television. Illuminer, like several other works in McQueen’s practice, places the Black figure (often, the artist’s) front and center, rendering its appearance in a fleshy, palpable manner —sweaty, sticky, present — all the while abstracting it through the mediation of gritty filmstock and compromised lighting.”

Cover Artwork: Static, 2009, Video still

© Steve McQueen. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and Marian Goodman Gallery