Interdisciplinary and polymathic, Terry Adkins (1953–2014) was a conduit for an impressive reservoir of intellectual and political currents. Historical resources include W. E. B. Du Bois, Aaron Douglas, Bessie Smith, and the Harlem Renaissance dance with more contemporary mentors and muses, among them Charles Gaines, Jimi Hendrix, and Martin Puryear. But the artist’s canon of individuals who, he believed, had achieved “super-human feats of singular vision,” overcame adversity, and affected “large bodies of people by these actions” also includes Ludwig van Beethoven and John Brown. Throughout his career, Adkins celebrated these figures through a series of multimedia events he called “recitals.” Incorporating music, performance, and installations, they were pageants recovering and reinvigorating a complex culture of resistance.
The hallmark of Adkins’s projects is an aesthetic framework including improvisation, speed, and a horizon as wide as the sky. Adkins saw the future as recompense for centuries of lost competencies and lost lives. Seeking, as he did, to embody a total human being in full command of his creativity may seem unrealistically optimistic, but Adkins’s art soars as an affirmation of an unfettered potential. His project exudes urgency owing to its recognition of the history of the struggles of previous Black artists and intellectuals. Columbia, 2007, a large black tondo resembling a 78-rpm phonograph record, refers to the label that signed Bessie Smith in 1923. What activates this work is the disclosure that Adkins painted the wooden structure with 160 coats of black enamel, one for each recording she made while she was under contract with Columbia.
But not all of Adkins’s work registers such stories of Black cultural achievement. He said that he wanted to make sculpture as ephemeral as music, music as material and visceral as sculpture. This aesthetic program, oriented toward sensuousness with no pretense toward a specific utility, is an essential component of Adkins’s project. His versatility made his work a serious challenge to identitarian culture. The right to make “meaningless” art, to make work that refuses to explicitly reference the body or advance an ideological position, is just as valid as the demand that art be politically useful or unambiguously socially meaningful. Such latitude, like that of the avant-garde jazz of the 1960s that was central to the artist’s experience of music, represents a reconstruction of human dignity.
Adkins framed his oeuvre as an impassioned statement of totality, implying that the meaning of discrete objects cannot be separated from their context of use, asking of the viewer that all his works be understood as links in a chain without end. Consider Adkins’s sculpture Ames, 2013. The title refers to the Iowa city where George Washington Carver began his career. The work is composed of two substantial lithography stones positioned so as to resemble a tombstone on a horizontal base. One corner of the upright element has suffered a break but remains in place. Inserted into the fissure announcing this insult is a length of silky fabric. It is a memorial to Carver, yet what else could it signify?
If we attend principally to the work’s material contrast between hard and soft materials, for instance, one could say of Ames—as with other works in the exhibition such as Word, 1986, or Shenandoah, 1998—that it is an interlocutor in the conversation initiated by Arte Povera. But to be aware of Adkins’s work as a printmaker, a sculptor, and a guardian of African American history, and to place that knowledge alongside the inevitable tension between the ethos of improvisation and the allusion to the sustained, painstaking labor of printmaking, is to share the artist’s vision of reconciling aestheticism with materialism. Visitors to this exhibition—titled “Disclosure,” after Adkins’s notion of found materials that have potentialities waiting to be revealed—should remain mindful of the fact that imagination has its limits. Adkins certainly was, having constructed an art that honors the happy accident while rarely straying from the conditions of the world that made it possible.
