With no windfall to my account, I was crushed, of course. So comforting my wounded spirit, my dad played on, taking a few dives so I could experience the thrill of victory that my nickel and celebrate with jaw breakers, M&Ms, and jelly beans of my own. Now, you might be tempted to think that this was only fair. What else was a father to do? After all, he would have just had to give me the money anyway. Besides, Wayne was just lucky because it's not like there was any skill involved in his winning https://oncasinogames.com/casino-games/.
But the lesson I learned from that memory was that you need to be better up front so there's no need for kindness and accommodation if you come up short. Of course, we all know expertise at tunk, poker, craps, and other games of chance is largely an illusion, but not totally. So just as the fabled subjective nature of art is mostly myth, the value of things within a culture is determined by their position within established frameworks and structures. If the rules are agreed upon ahead of time, knowledge, skill, and attention to the odds, probability theory, can get you a little bit closer to something like certainly than ignorance of the rules would. So example, the composer John Cage has described the difference between his use of chance and the making of his work and that of Marcel Duchamp. And he describes it this way. He says, I am not interested in any kind of chance Duchamp is interested in, where almost anything can happen. Instead what I try to do is set up a set of conditions wherein the thing that I am looking for is more likely to happen than not. Now back in my gambling youth, as I've said, betting is a big part of my life, my unwillingness to admit to the vicissitudes of dumb luck was hardened when I first learned the rules of Vegas style blackjack. So even short of counting cards, it was clear to me that here was a game in which the decisions you made clearly had an impact on how well you performed. And so this was the game for me. And except for a go at the slot machines for some reckless fun, it is the only game I play when I go to a casino. So I had learned that there was a strategy you could use when you went to the blackjack table and that it had to do with how many people were playing along with you in the game. So I discovered that when you play the game with just yourself and the dealer, which requires an incredible amount of courage, because the losing could be fast, just as the winning could be fast. So that if you are playing a game and it was just you and the dealer, that the odds in the game seemed to shift in favor of the player as opposed to the house. But the more people who came and sat down at the table, the more the odds shifted away from you and they shifted towards the advantages that the house had, because the way the cards were counted the odds were always in the house's favor. So I learned to play at a table where it was just me and the dealer. And you go head to head. And you had more than a 50% chance of coming out on top in an exchange like that. And once two or three people sat down at the table, it was time to get up. If you stay there longer, attrition would eventually wear you down, and you will end up losing almost everything you had. So that approach to gambling and my approach to art have a lot in common. And the odds that I'm trying to negotiate when I making my artwork come from what I understand to be the principles under which these histories of art that we have to read to learn what art is worth are built around. And so the questions end up being, in the same way that John Cage's questions end up being, can I set up conditions in which the thing that I am looking for is more likely to happen than not? And if that is the case, then how do I do that?
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And there are too many to say anything about all of them. And so I'm going to go through some of them fairly rapidly, because I want to give you a sense of the scope of what I think my project as an artist has been. In the beginning, I think I'll say a little bit more about the first set of couplets that come up, because I think it's important to talk about the reasons why things are the way they are. But let me start, since the title of my talk was "As Luck Would Have It," and, of course, as luck would have it, I find myself standing on the stage in the University of Chicago's auditorium trying to make a speech about my work that brought me to this place.
And so the beginning of this talk may seem a little disjointed, but I think this first set of comments is kind of an important way of thinking about how we move through our lives and arrive at places where a reassessment of who we are and what we did seems appropriate. And so I'll just start with this, and I'll go through these things. And at some point I'll start flipping through some of the slides. So the way I'm going to start is this. So time is what I'm going to start with. So time, I'm going to say, is the bane of our existence. At birth we are inaugurated into the regime of time keeping since we have no working concept of the utility of time. But from that moment on, we began to run out of time. But we cannot know how much of it we will have. But still many of us don't make good use of our time until the end of it seems near. Making time doesn't add one minute to the time of a day. Although wasting time, leaves you less of it for completing tasks that must be finished on time, but which all too often are mostly done in the nick of time. So in this year, with a major retrospective of my work finishing its time at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, after being at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and opening here at the MCA in Chicago, this seems to have been my time to shine. So I've just this morning received the third honorary degree of my career from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And now I'm back at the U of C to complete requirements that came with the Rosenberger Medal I received last year at about this time. So the thing is if I did not have art making as an occupation, I probably would have become a professional gambler. Indeed, for anybody who knows me, it would be a gross understatement to say about me that I love winning. But what I love more than winning is I love the game. I love the competition. And winning is all the sweeter when you beat the odds in a game you already know is stacked against you. So what appeals to my sensibility is developing a strategy, testing its efficacy, and measuring the degree to which its implementation succeeds or fails its intended purpose. So it can now be told that I have been gambling for most of my life, just as I have been making pictures for most of my life as well, and that both these interests seem to have merged at the same time and, therefore, have had profound effects, each on the other. My first high stakes play for money was a card game called tunk. Now some people in the audience may know that game. So I learned to play this game at about age 6 or 7. My father had staked the pot with pennies that my brother Wayne and I could win as we played with him. We had nothing to lose, of course, but when Wayne had bench 5 cents, he was done and announced his plan to hit the corner store for some candy. Yes, sorry, sorry. [LAUGHTER] And then-- and we were really glad it was there. [LAUGHTER] And this year, Time magazine included Kerry James Marshall in its listings as one of the 100 most influential people and described his work as follows. Black is his dominant color and his persistent, consistent, and masterful use of it in all its palettes defines, engages, and draws countless viewers to each creation.
He forces people to assess the American experience through the black experience. In so doing, he has established himself, not only among the giants of the black art milieu, but as one of the most influential American artists anywhere. Personally, I'm struck by the enormity of the ambition in Marshall's work, as it details the personal experience of the painter, the particularity of the African-American experience in the context of both local and national communities, while at the same time, through masterful use of paint, composition, and reference to wide swaths of art history, the door is left open to the possibility that painting might be able to speak past the origins of the author. At this moment in which the globe seems to be getting smaller and smaller, Marshall's work insists that wants on its regional particularity and on keeping the lines of communication open between us all. Marshall has a stated mission to populate museums and galleries with representations of people of color throughout the United States and around the world. It seems that he is having much success on that front. And I for one am rooting for him and for all of us, hopeful that we can pull up many chairs to the global table. So I welcome Kerry James Marshall. [APPLAUSE] KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: Well, thank you so much, so much, for such a warm welcome. Everybody came out and made their presentations, and then they went behind stage and left me out here by myself. So well, we got it to spend about an hour or so going over a couple of things. And then Jackie Stewart and I are going to sit up on this stage. And we're going to have a few questions from the audience that she's going to moderate. But I'm going to sit there, I'm going to let Jackie do all the work [LAUGHING] because I'm a little tired. This has been a long day today. I think Jessica mentioned in her opening remarks that I'd just come back from the Art Institute of Chicago's commencement, graduating commencement, where I was given an honorary doctorate degree this afternoon. And I had to make the commencement speech there. [APPLAUSE] So you can get a little talked out after a marathon weekend like the weekend I just had. And so with a little bit of energy I got left, I have some prepared remarks I'm going to read to you. And then I got a lot of pictures to show. And the pictures that I show are designed in some way to kind of set the stage and give a kind of context to the things that drives me, that motivate me, that lead me to do the things I do, and how those things in some way have kind of led me to be here on this stage as the recipient of the Rosenberger Medal to give this presentation. And so that first slide that's on the screen now, I mean, really is the framework in which I operate. It's the context in which almost all the things I do have to be or should be measured against, because my ambition as an artist had always been, in one way or another, to either be a part of the narrative that these kinds of histories represent, but to arrive at the place that these histories codify on terms that I set for myself and to get there without having to compromise my own desire and what I think my own objectives, which are not inconsistent with the objectives that are defined by these histories that we come to know and understand as the primary histories that define the parameters of the world of art that we, who are participating in it, want to be a part of. So I'm going to leave that up there for a while. And when I get to the slides, though, you have to bear with me because I have a lot of them. |
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March 2019
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