Six years ago Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art was the first American museum to give a solo exhibition to young British filmmaker Steve McQueen. Now it’s the turn of the Art Institute of Chicago, which gives the United States premiere of a single work by McQueen titled “Nov. 7.”
This degree of attention is not as unusual as it may at first seem. Museum departments of modern and contemporary art have fallen like dominos to “hot” painters and sculptors for just about 30 years. Now is merely the moment for filmmakers and video artists.
On a continuum made up of the work of peers, McQueen’s presentation tends toward the minimal. “Nov. 7” for example, has the projector occupying the same space as viewers and showing but a single image — the top of a shaved, scarred male head — for all of the work’s 22 minutes.
The image accompanies a narrative spoken by a man with a working-class London accent. He recounts the event that took place on the date of the work’s title — the accidental shooting of his brother, for which he was responsible — and its aftermath.
The piece does not identify the man in the image as the narrator or the brother. Similarly, we cannot tell for certain if the man depicted is black or white. Such information comes by way of a brochure available in the gallery.
This brochure also relates that “Nov. 7” is a “documentary piece,” suggesting it conveys an event through a monologue that was not scripted or rehearsed. But was the monologue edited? That, again, we do not know.
I can detect no artistic shaping of the spoken material. It probably means to be of interest because of its content, and because the speaker is working-class and black, such content will be attended to more assiduously by upper middle-class whites who make up most of the art world.
Still, the lack of artistic shaping does not allow the narrative to broaden and say anything more general about fratricide or guilt or grief or even the thin line between self-revelation and bragadoccio. The story of “Nov. 7” remains particular. McQueen seems reluctant to push it toward anything so grand as notions of universal experience.
He is not, however, reluctant to play with a narrative structure common to commercial film, through a fade-in at the beginning, a fade-out at the end and a timetable of showings on the half hour. This suggests he was more willing to shape the project than one might have expected. But such shaping would come clear primarily to viewers who know the continuous-loop structure of his other works. So it’s a kind of play that goes on regardless of content.
I suspect that for McQueen any old content will do. The one in “Nov.7” happens to be overheated but doesn’t much matter. He’s more interested in filmic strategies than work that approaches a humanistic statement. In the words of the institute brochure, “much of his production uses the language of film to examine distilled but coded actions, gestures and performative expressions.”
One’s heart does not exactly leap.
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“FOCUS: Steve McQueen” continues at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., through Aug. 4; gallery talks take place at 1 p.m. June 5 and July 11, and at 6 p.m. July 2.
