Long before he became an Oscar-winning film director, Steve McQueen’s visual art career was always intertwined with cinema. Often working directly with video projection and short film formats, he drew early inspiration from the French New Wave, Andy Warhol and Buster Keaton.
So it seems perfectly fitting that the 53-year-old director of Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), 12 Years A Slave (2013), Widows (2018) and the much-feted TV drama series Small Axe (2020) is here at Rotterdam film festival this week to unveil his latest artwork, Sunshine State. McQueen’s giant two-channel video installation was originally commissioned by IFFR for the festival’s 50th anniversary last year, only to be postponed by the pandemic. It has now become the first work to fill the cavernous fifth-floor exhibition space in the city’s magnificent new art palace, Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, a towering bowl-shaped edifice clothed in mirrors.
Sunshine State is another of McQueen’s cinematic homages, only this time the artist is explicitly drawing parallels between real-life racism and Hollywood’s troubled history of racist imagery. The main visual material is drawn from the landmark 1927 musical The Jazz Singer, widely considered the first “talkie”, which has become increasingly contentious due to Al Jolson’s use of blackface make-up and minstrel performance. But McQueen cleverly manipulates, tweaks and reverses clips from the film so that Jolson’s darkened face becomes totally transparent during these scenes.
“I just liked this idea of erasure,” McQueen explains at the Rotterdam launch event. “What I didn’t want was to present any references to blackface, because what he’s doing is erasing. There’s never any evidence or appearance of traditional blackface, he is either erasing himself or making himself appear.”
Sunshine State is arguably McQueen’s most personal work to date. It may reference The Jazz Singer as inspiration, but the narration is its emotional core. In it, the artist himself shares a long-buried memory that his Trinidadian father only revealed on his deathbed, about how he almost lost his life in a dramatic racist incident in 1950s Florida. Retold in multiple iterations, it ends with a moving poetic flourish from McQueen: “Sometimes it felt like my father was holding me back. After he told me that story, I realised he was holding me tight.”
McQueen says the family story behind Sunshine State is both singular and universal, pointing to endless daily news reports of violence against people of colour, including the horrific police murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. “It’s a very personal story but at the same time it’s not, unfortunately,” he nods. “This is kind of common.”
McQueen also confesses he is not sure his late father would have encouraged his career as an artist. “I think he would much rather I had become a mechanic or a builder or a carpenter, because these are skills that are essential, these are jobs no-one can take away from you,” he says. “These are not worlds dominated by white people’s judgement about if you are good or not. Like the art world, where they can pull the carpet from under you any time they want.”
Rotterdam is almost home turf for McQueen, who lives in nearby Amsterdam with his wife, the cultural critic and film-maker Bianca Stigter. The Netherlands has a reputation as one of Europe’s most liberal nations, but it is not immune to racism. During his festival appearance, McQueen recalls how he and Stigter once successfully lobbied their daughter’s kindergarten to drop the ancient but divisive Dutch blackface tradition of of Zwarte Piet, aka “Black Pete”.
“Blackface is in our DNA”, McQueen argues, pointing not just to obviously problematic films like The Jazz Singer but also to ostensibly benign cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. “Disney don’t want to admit it but that’s where the white gloves come from,” he says. “We have to remember our popular culture has been very shaped by that.”