Noah Davis’ paintings have been rightly celebrated for their beautiful depiction of the Black quotidian, but his works take on a deeper significance in light of his battle with cancer. Bringing her own personal encounter with cancer, Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou reflects on the impact illness has on Davis’ visual language.
Cancer does strange things to words. Language ostensibly innocent is stripped to its offensive core. There is the term ‘aspiration’, which, prior to diagnosis, sparks notions of light and unreachable horizons, flight and the wealth of nations, but after suggests needles and blood, the swollen analgesic weight of a body too heavy to fly or dream beyond its own rest. There is also the noun ‘observation’, intrinsic to these very words, to essays, to art and to the making of the world, yet in hospital it moves from implicit passivity to explicit aggression; to prodding and probing, to the pushing of bodily limits and proximities without recourse to look away. Cancer turns polite observing into violent observance. Then there is the lexicon the sufferer inherits from the disease itself: carcinoma, sarcoma, lymphoma, ossification, calcification, corrosion, detection, infection, dissection, deterioration, histological investigation, radiation, isolation – mostly fricative terms that sound taunting and insistent on the tongue, whilst their science haunts tissue and bone long after they’ve been said. I never thought these words would be uttered out loud, let alone settle like shrapnel in my head. I never thought their ulterior sides and edges would cut deep into my flesh.
Wandering around the Noah Davis retrospective, I am temporarily empty of these words but sticky with the residue they have left behind. Davis dealt with painted images and he wasn’t so confident about actual words, but throughout the exhibition the strangeness of language – visual, titular, aural – is everywhere implied. Though the line, style and intentionality of his work is pure and exact, there is an ambiguity of meaning at play. A unicorn and a rider move through a field of midnight black: are they escaping or returning, is the rider a man or a child, is the all-encompassing black background indicative of the two riding into or away from a destiny of potentiality or scarcity, hope or fear, safety or trouble? A hunched male figure stares into a star-lit abyss, a diminutive lantern by his side, a craterous mass pressing in: is he on the edge of oblivion or liberation? Is he on the precipice of a new beginning or an interminable end? Is he walking away from us or are we retreating from him?
Painted images like these confound neat readings and the canonistic categories, genres and rules to which a visual vocabulary is expected to adhere. Situated in the strange and estranging, Davis’ poetic language paradoxically becomes familiar to me. As someone suspended in the estrangement of language, in the duplicity of words, and the estranging and duplicitous complexities of illness, Davis’ inherently uncanny artistic vocabulary is both all too real and a comfort at this time in my life. Though the figures appear salient, steady, singular, there is a slipperiness to them in the painted plane in which they are ground. They are at once one thing but also another: a man and a child, the rider and the carrier, a horse and a unicorn, an engulfing void and an expanding eternity; the innocence and offence that all language, written or visual, embodies. Davis knew this; he knew that the language of the mark, much like that of the letter, carried contradiction; the problem and solution at once. Opening up unplumbed depths whilst erecting new bounds, posing questions where only answers want to be found, his work provides space for disparate bodies, experiences, views, interpretations and feelings to meet. His paintings allow me to feel that the joint cruelty and care of words, of art, of life, can be observed, and if observed, endured – and if endured, overcome?
This half-state, where words and images reveal ulterior meanings in the midst of conveying another, can be seen in his work before he, too, was diagnosed with cancer. The first painting briefly described above, 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007), which is also the opening work of the Barbican’s retrospective, was painted before the reality of cancer entered his life – though the knowledge of his death prophetically draws from this near-mystical work an alternative reading from that with which we initially started. Works subsequent to his diagnosis and treatment not only retained this characteristic language of ambiguity and poetry, of double-vision and redoubled feeling, but refined it. Situated in this multiplicity, where, as curators Helen Molesworth and Eleanor Nairne have observed, the marvellous wells up in the mundane, the remarkable in the unremarkable, Davis’ works created during his battle with cancer assume so many of the feelings and attitudes (physical and mental) I have encountered during my experience of the illness. His paintings and collages reveal the physical incapacity as well as creative capacity and imaginative realities that disability opens up. In this retrospective reading of his work, I in no way want to diminish or omit his commitment to the ‘normality’ and beauty of everyday Black life – or to superimpose my experiences onto his. Rather, here, in this narrative of cancer and creativity, care and community, I want to demonstrate how contemplating the issue of cancer broadens and expands this commitment; I want to show that his sublime realisations of the Black quotidian encompass illness and disability, and extend the ill body, both its limits and limitlessness, to the wider Black communal corps. In her exhibition essay, Tina Campt talks of the ‘Black frequencies’ made audible in his works: the noises and sounds of Black children playing, Black teachers speaking, Black men and women going about their day; the acoustics of paint on canvas, of figures on ground, of marks on paper, of thought on the body of work. In line with this – and with the ambiguity that cancer exposes in rhetorical and visual language – can we attune our ears to hear Davis’ life at this time, to hear the words he, too, may have heard in the hospital bed, as well as the studio. Can we listen to what the works have to say, in all their beautiful grief and sorrowful hope, about illness and the everyday? Adjoining a little of my own experience of cancer, I want to consider the language of Davis’ paintings in regards to his own relationship with this disease. I want to dwell in the contradictions cancer invites as captured in the audible words expressed by his own pictures.
Diagnostic terminology closes up language as much as it cracks it open. Hearing my biopsy results for the first time, new words entered my vocabulary, but with them a new sense of unspeakable isolation. Walking down the steep slope of a hill in London, my mother wrapped in anger to the side of me, the coldness of these diagnostic words, their new meanings, the realities they were about to assume, closed over me. ‘Abnormality’, ‘advance’, ‘tumour’, ‘spread’, ‘scans’, ‘operations’, ‘therapies’, ‘medication’ pricked and poked a sense of safety in myself, alerting me to the fact that I was no longer my own. It was a bright spring day, but the air, the trees, the pavement, the streets seemed stiff and locked in frost. Loneliness does not seep in the moment you are diagnosed with a life-threatening illness; for me, the cancer had been slowly spreading under skin, vein and nerve, chronically sapping me of energy for years, confining me to smaller and smaller spaces, taking the joy out of what gave it to me the most, incrementally subtracting reserves whilst gradually expanding outwards through lymph and node and gland. Anger would continue to bloom in loved ones – and eventually it would bubble inside and burst out of me too – but all I felt was the cool isolation of illness, an impasse of coldness, a severance of tender relation, withholding me from the warmth supposedly enjoyed by everything and everyone else. From waiting and operating rooms to hospital wards and isolation units, the words uttered by doctors pronounced a destabilising isolation in which I had to somehow contrive stability. As sharp as the implements that would cut into my neck, isolation was a silent but cruel letting, a draining away of all that kept me relative to those around me. Sitting with friends months later, I would still feel the cool blood of this fact run.
40 Acres and a Unicorn is an early work that is not about the isolating experience of illness, but it could be and in the shadow of Davis’ death echoes this frightening loneliness. Journeying forward and backwards, the rider, both a boy and a man, a child and an adult, is a cosmic traveller, untethered to time and place. He is neither here nor there, suspended in a simultaneous regression and progression of being, carried towards and away, traversing into and departing from past and future at once. Alone, except for the mule-cum-unicorn, Davis’ figure is caught in the transitional; and though he comes to stand on the cusp of what could be ‘more’ or ‘less’, the rider appears painfully solitary in it all – not to mention dwarfed by the enormity of this truth. Illness flips you into contradictory positions: you are alive, but closer to death; you are ill but longing to be well; you are mentally alone but guided by your animal body; your horizons have shrunk but your imagination has grown gargantuan; you know you are stuck but are venturing into increasingly unknown territory. Witnessing Davis’ rider, a premonition of a work that almost apocalyptically rides into our midst off the canvas, the loneliness of his plight and his journeying – whether historical, literal or metaphorical – appeals to me and reminds us of how we all crest the dark wave of mortality alone, unknowing of when and where it will end.
Despite the overwhelming sense of open-endedness to the painting, a specific moment of desolation in US history is still alluded to in its title. Towards the end of the American Civil War, a Special Field Order (No.15) was decreed to bequeath land (40 acres) to freed African Americans along the southern coast. Some land was claimed legally, but successive powers during the reconstruction era sought to revoke the order, virtually forcing African American workers into poorly paid labour (sharecropping, indentured work) akin to that before the war, during enslavement. Eventually all of the land allotted to Black individuals was given to white people. Davis’ clever reclamation and subversion of the famous phrase, ‘40 acres and a mule’ (a byword for betrayal and oppression), is both a dig at the empty promises of a white supremacist system and a call to recognise the potential of Black individuals to make something out of nothing, quite miraculously, even at the most oppressive and unjust of times. By substituting a mythical creature for a real one, a speculative fantasy for a material actuality, Davis both imaginatively raises a fist and rhetorically punches back at the cruelty of this reality. But the mule (a living farm apparatus as well as a racist trope about miscegenation) as unicorn performs a brilliant transformation, invoking at once humility and power, perseverance and reverence, resilience and resistance, the desire to dream of more when you’re persistently perceived of and treated as less. Emerging with his rider from the dark background, the mule-cum-unicorn speaks of promise beyond white-washed laws and logic; stark against the striking obsidian black, the white steed proceeds into new possibilities, subversively superseding the burden of an old legacy to head, horn first, towards a new, lighter inheritance, cantering through unhallowed ground into pastures freshly harrowed.
Still the subversive language of the image, much like the title, is unsteady. Traditionally biased encodings of black and white are cancelled out, seeing Davis imbue new meanings in the shades. The black backdrop here conjures various conflicting connotations: a funerary melancholy as well as a clarion-call to power; an immense expanse yet none in which to exist in; ground and groundlessness, state and statelessness at once; clarity and obscurity; struggle and liberty; death and life riding an untraceable tract together. Juxtaposing the shades in a striking counter-balance, Davis creates an ominous harmony between the two, with neither colour overpowering the other. And still, I can’t help but see the rider moving through this sea of interpretation and juxtaposition and denotation alone. Whether summoning Black cowboys and the early frontiers, recalling the formerly enslaved African Americans liberating themselves and their rights to the land through their own “magical” means, or espying the young Black artist finding his footing through a white washed art world, the rider rides solo – one with his faithful hoofed companion perhaps – but solitary, braving it all on his own, left to his own devices and journeying to who knows where.
Far from wanting to overlay my own experience of illness and the isolation it imparts onto Davis’ work, I want to join this reality to paintings that already exude a similar sense of loneliness – loneliness Davis himself would have sensed in the subjects of his photographs and would have had some sense of himself, as his cancer treatment failed and his prognosis became increasingly bleak. 40 Acres and a Unicorn echoes throughout the many subsequent solitary figures Davis painted – of men deep in contemplation crouched under trees, of men lost in thought pacing broad sidewalks – especially towards the end of his life. Like whistling in the wind or a singing in a forest, the painting solemnly speaks of unspeakable desolation, of a story unheard, a life always silenced. Yet you can still hear the slow, determined tread of hoofs, the pull of hands on reigns, the light-strewn spell of transitioning into another state, another plane, under cover of dark, abandoning meagre acres for an ever-expanding, eternal space of rest to call your own.
*
It wasn’t the clipped tread of hoofs or the tightening of reins heard in hospital, but the scuffle of a nurse’s crocs. Beeps from machines, the nocturnal buzz of overhead lights never to be switched off, the opening and closing of metal cupboards and doors, the raised voices of night staff gossiping into sunrise, the subdued murmurs of patients slackening on morphine, the sounds of the ward on nauseous repeat. Every day ushered in unrehearsed dramas, along with a choreographed procession of consultants, nurses, cleaners, caterers, pharmacists, physios and visitors. This cacophony of corporate care ironically brought some sense of euphonious rhythm to my day, which began around 5am with observations and medication, and ended at 2am with the last of these intrusive inspections. Too sick to leave my bed, I would curl up with this symphony of institutional activity rushing over and around me, conscious that my unconscious was replacing the surrounding sights and sounds with its own distorted versions. One tries to create a home out of the unhomely bay, with books and clothes and objects from outside, but the hospital was its own country, with its own rules, time zones and climate. Nothing coming from without could ever augment or ameliorate what was occurring within.
For weeks, I couldn’t read or write, sit up or stay alert. The post-surgical infection and medication turned me into a small, sick thing – here, no rider on a unicorn moving heroically and stoically through the dim passage of time, but a mollusc-like entity, diminishing and clinging to the lightless base of a watery pit. Life emptying out backwards even as the day clip-clopped audaciously forwards. That was sickness. That was cancer. Dramatically reductive in metaphor but grandiose in verbs. A noun that originally meant ‘crab’, so that, as a disease, ‘canker’, it walked language sideways, clawing at former definitions of words, cutting and dividing cells to the body’s detriment, leaving the bruised soft part but never the strengthened whole.
How Davis, during chemotherapy, made art from his hospital bed, I will never know. I remember attempting to read a story by Jamaica Kincaid whilst hospitalised, my eyes retracing the same sentence about a winged woman hiding amongst trees for hours on end, my brain stuttering over the words as if they were foreign to my tongue or unpronounceable ancient cuneiform, each letter as cryptic as Coptic script, the image of a feathered female unfurling into symbols; an ink black flight. Scraps of language, scribbles of words, fluttering over pages, leaving me hallucinating figures and letters in the harsh glare of night. After ‘seeing’ a woman attempt to break in through the window (I was on the 6th Floor of a high-rise tower), doctors put me on more meds.
Crab-legs tripping underneath him, Davis still painted in the thick of cancer. Using card and paper and paint, re-found and repurposed materials, his eyes adjusted to fragments of visual language also. Creating these luminescent and ludic collages, many of which he sold to support his family and continue his creative practise, 70 Works voices Davis’ resolve to live through the painting and making of art despite being bed-bound and extremely ill. That his characteristically large canvas paintings shrink to smaller A4 paper-based works – miniature masterpieces that make me smile and marvel and tear up – conveys cancer’s ability to contract space, creative space included, to curb the body to its rapid multiplication whilst halting action the most innate and intimate to human individuals. 70 Works is resistant art, protest art, art that loves and laughs at the prohibitive nature of illness. Smallness here is largeness of spirit, grandness of play; little need not translate as less – only a few words are needed to make a phrase, a sentence, a diagnostic label, a life-altering pronouncement after all. And it could be said that Davis discovers a new lightness and play in these works, rapidly matching photographs and magazine cuttings with bold paint. Paper bodies as arrant as his own.
Crab-like, these images migrate, moving modernist sculptural imagery into bold blocks or brash brushstrokes of colour, jazzily juxtaposing random bits with more solid forms. Splicing body parts and bodies of people – crowds of suited and booted Black men, military corps, young and old faces alike – the human form is reconstituted; the disabled body recaptured, remade, remapped and revivified on the page. Cancer’s bounds are broken here, as each diminutive work generates another and another, seeing Davis extend his own artistic body beyond the confines of the hospital bed and bay, thereby redefining what a studio looks like, where it can be and who gets to make art in the first place. This extension from the institutional and institutionalised into the communal domain and wider community in general was central to Davis’ vision and practise, as seen in his founding of the Underground Museum, a gallery space he created with his artist wife, Karon Davis. Bringing art to the marginalised Black and Latinx communities of LA, Davis endeavoured to give access to what was ordinarily institutionally inaccessible; in hospital, during the making of 70 Works, he repeats this gesture, but this time he gifts it back to himself, a man suffering from a rare form of cancer whose usual space and practise of art is denied him.
Like a free-style, Davis’ Black modernist aesthetic improvises and improves upon the rules of where and how to paint and curate the language of images. These works also rather musically capture Campt’s theory of Black frequencies too. Laughter and tears are audible on the pages, with a smiling face here and a crying figure there, but it’s the collaborative score of sounds made by those who helped Davis during his time in hospital that is perceptible, if we pause to listen. The sounds of loving hands bringing paper, pens and paint, replacing cups dry of water and washing plates perhaps used as palettes; the possible noises of catheters emptied, drips removed, sheets folded, pillows fluffed, the crust of unwanted hospital food scraped into bins; the closing of curtains when syringes are present, when dressings are removed and thermometers are seen to make machines buzz in alarm; the comforting tones of loved ones hushed by the halting speech of doctors feeling for the right words in the darkening light of day. Across 70 Works, an aural collage brings us to Davis and the realities of cancer, medical and familial care, the community within and without the hospital walls, the Black artistic communal to which these delicate and determined collages connect.
I have no idea if 70s Works were forged across 70 days. If each piece marks a lucid interval for realising a new image, another day in which to contain the effects of chemotherapy on skin, hair, tissue and mind. What I do know is that these are survivor pieces as well as surviving pieces of Davis’ wider legacy; they were stepping stones to recovery, however brief, expressions of a sick artist that both suggest the actualities of sickness whilst triumphantly surpassing it.
I’m gathering all the parts of myself, even those which have been cut away. I’m trying to find the lost pieces, trying to reassemble what I am, trying to make sense of old from new, and reassess my place in the world – or the world as it is placed and present in me. Collagic in process, the ridiculous and the sublime converge, and I understand that photographic logic is not a logic of care at all. Like Davis, I know the real meanings of things are ambiguous, exist in multiples and arise from fruitful contradictions. Or, they come into view limping sideways, crab-like, sharply surprising us when we’re certain we have it all figured out. Unlike Davis, I have some time and I wait to know what lies ahead and whether its darkness or light, a crab or a unicorn that accompanies me on my next journey.
As charged by her husband before he died, Karon Davis brought together all the pieces, all the ‘babies’, as he affectionately called them, all of the quintessential works. Compared to the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, by Davis, Karon has retrieved the lost paintings of her Osiris, faithfully placing hand by hand, and limb by limb until the life of these works revivifies. And though it won’t return the man to us – Osiris became the god of the underworld, the custodian of death, once reconstituted by his loyal wife – the artist shines out. In the tender portrait of a mother and daughter sleeping side-by-side w espy him; the gentle impress of their bodies against cream upholstery, the tentative contact of their backs, one against the other, whispers intimacy into the quiet gallery spaces, tells us of the great care Davis took with his work right up until the end. He returns, again, in the desert funerary scene, the ushers and undertakers standing solemn and proud, the casket unceremoniously slipping out of sight, as Davis always was one to deny the spectacular, even if the image exuded the speculative. And he is heard, again, in the solitary male figures: the walkers, the conductor, the diver, the child, the older man stepping with his back to us into the infinite, a lantern not a paintbrush to hand, a light to guide him – and us – into the vast unknown.
Written by Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
