- Artist
- Jeff McMillan born 1968
- Medium
- Oil paint and ink on paper
- Dimensions
- Support: 650 × 485 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Tate Members 2020
- Reference
- T15568
Summary
This is one of a group of works in oil and India ink on Japanese rice paper in Tate’s collection from a wider series entitled Biblio 2019 (see Tate T15562–T15570). McMillan made them using his personal library of books, which he had shipped from America to Britain as part of his move to London in the late 1990s. He would select a book from his collection, wrapping each one in paper and then dipping the wrapped package into ink or oil paint. The paper was then unfolded and laid flat to create each Biblio work. The way in which the paper has been dipped and then unfolded, leaving diagonal creases and x-shaped fold-marks, creates an object with a sculptural quality; where folds were tightly made and then unmade, a landscape of wrinkles and creases appears, over which ink or paint has flowed, pooled and dripped. Though the book itself is removed after the folded paper has been dipped, it is still visually present through the mapping which occurs in the process of making, its outline and form recorded in the dark rectangle at the centre of each work. The books used were largely monographs of influential twentieth-century painters and had personal significance for the artist, who was born in Texas and studied at university in Alabama:
These books were bought in various places, sometimes on my drive back from Alabama to Texas for summer on the Christmas break. I would always stop off to stretch my legs and see an exhibition and often buy books from the museum bookshop. My collection came from Ft Worth Modern, the Dallas Museum of Art, and some from Strand Books in New York. All over really. All those days ago before Amazon, when browsing a good art bookshop was such a thrill.
(Jeff McMillan, quoted in Levy 2019, p7.)
When McMillan moved to London in the 1990s, his first studio was in Shoreditch, in the East End of the city, which at the time was a gritty industrial area. He found himself working next door to a clothing importer called Eker Furs, whose staff would regularly leave the street outside his studio full of detritus after morning deliveries. It was the cardboard boxes McMillan found in this street that led to a series of minimalist box paintings that he began in 2002. Gathering up these boxes, he found that when their planes were dipped into paint, the creases or what he describes as the ‘muscle memory’ of the box were revealed and, when unfolded, they became new objects which spoke of their own material history. In discussing these works, McMillan has referenced the American artist Robert Rauschenberg’s (1925–2008) work in cardboard, agreeing with Rauschenberg’s description of cardboard as ‘a material of softness and waste, something yielding’ (Jeff McMillan in conversation with Tate curator Aïcha Mehrez, September 2019).
In conversation with the critic and writer Darian Leader during McMillan’s exhibition at Peer, London in 2009, the artist described the way in which his move to Britain had altered his practice:
It was a big shift moving here from the US in 1998. I saw it more or less as an opportunity to start over. I wanted to be really reductive and to not begin with a white canvas or have to make a decision about what to paint. I didn’t even want to use a paintbrush. I was thinking of putting an object directly into paint and I remember seeing a box in my street and recognizing that it had potential. Once I splayed out the edges and put it on a wall, it immediately had a sort of elevation about it. Those works hover between painting and sculpture and reference high minimalist work like Donald Judd, yet they’re also very low-fi, a totally inexpensive and a simple way of making a painting … Once I had found a box with the right proportions and not too battered up, I would pour out a pool of house paint and press the box down straight into it then and lift it out as cleanly as I could. This process tends to make an envelope-type X-shape, I think it’s something to do with the viscosity. It’s not too mechanical, but it’s not a signature brush style either, it’s somewhere in between.
(Jeff McMillan, in Peer 2009, accessed 23 November 2019.)
McMillan has long had an interest in making work out of the everyday materials by which he is surrounded. In his native Texas he followed in the footsteps of American folk artists, using soil collected from the nearby cotton fields to make pigment. In an essay in the book published to accompany the Biblio series, Darian Leader suggested that McMillan reduces the most mundane qualities of everyday life to practices which are spare, essential and, ultimately, truthful. Just as McMillan had been transplanted from Texas to the United Kingdom, so too had his books, packed up as portable vehicles of knowledge and experience. The philosopher and theorist Walter Benjamin discussed the feelings elicited by the unpacking of one’s library from boxes onto bookshelves, positing that a collection of books offers a biography of sorts of the owner (Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,’ in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, New York 1978, pp.59–68). Writing specifically about McMillan’s Biblio series, Bill Sherman, Director of the Warburg Institute, described how books ‘record the lives we have used them to live and the work we have used them to do’ (in Levy and Sherman 2019).
McMillan’s selection of books to make his Biblio works reveals a hidden portrait of the artist. The titles of the books or the artists on which they focus are known only to the artist himself and are hidden from view by being wrapped in paper in the process of making the works. Where his earlier cardboard boxes were chosen for visual reasons, the books carry personal associations which are only revealed to the viewer through occasional colour references or the individual cryptic subtitles, such as Met, AR or Shark. As well as providing a portrait of the artist, the vivid drips and blooms of the oil paint and inks used convey the geometric form of the book, the flow of the black ink giving a sense of the object and transforming the literary into the visual. Here the object is not painted; in a sense it paints itself. The book that was once printed now becomes the equivalent of the printing block, each volume creating its dark form at the centre of each work.
Further reading
‘Jeff McMillan in Conversation with Darian Leader’, Peer, London, 4 June 2009, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55095cc2e4b0b6baebd8203a/t/55310b91e4b05dc27c61355b/1429277585036/DL%26JM+pdf+version_logo.pdf, accessed 23 November 2019.
Deborah Levy and Bill Sherman, Biblio, London 2019.
Aïcha Mehrez
November 2019
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